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@JustDucky We recently migrated to a data center and the average loading time dropped from ~4 seconds to ~0.9. I to noticed only 1-2% drop in bounce rate. It seems only that many people were turned off by the loading times. Then again 1-2% can be anything.

@John O'Haver I would invest the time simply because ~3.4 is the average value. This means that sometimes it goes up to 10 or even more. Take a look at your analytics account and see the performance per country. Also, I've been benchmarking analytics with remote monitoring solutions and I find a discrepancy of about 30% (probably due to limited sample date from analytics). I don't want to advertise any available solutions, but trying one won't hurt. You may find your times to be better (I hope).

One thing I see and might be the reason is that you have

rel="canonical" href="http://appetise.com/"

but domain redirects to

http://www.appetise.com/.

So you have set the canonical version to appetise.com and then a 301 redirect to www.appetise.com. What I suggest is you do is alter the canonical link element to:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.appetise.com/"

I have some pretty strong links from relevant sources linking to the homepage of a site I deal with.

The links are usually from a PR3-5 pages and display specific result about the linking site. Sometimes they come from badges. We offer several services, so sometimes the page is about one service and next time about the other. Currently all of my pages link to the homepage. Would it not be better to link to the specific product page related to the page I have? Also I can do a canonical to the service pages?

Which would be best?

IA few years back I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools returns 404s from regular text containing a URL, but no anchor tag. I came accross this again today. Is it worthwhile to create those URLs and 301 redirect them to proper pages.

Hi Derek,

I deal with a site which has a lot of low quality links. The owner decided it is a good idea at some point and got a bunch of links despite their quality. What I notice is that this works while the site is still small. Correct me if I'm wrong on this one. Not all sites are treated the same way and it definitely depends on the local Google version we are using. You will be surprised what still works on Google.bg. Things that would never get a site off the ground on google.com or google.co.uk.

Regards,

Svet

Including but not limited to "pages which are hosted on web servers located in Australia". While hosting is an important factor Google are aware that a lot of the times webmasters might get better deals and service from host in different geographical areas. Let me put it this way. If I have a site hosted in the US, but my site is in german, my backlinks are from german sites, the local address on the site is in Germany and I have a german phone number, it si likely Google will take the hint that I'm more relevant to people in Germany.

IMOHO, under "Pages from Australia" Google brings back sites firmly associated with the australian market.

I will have to disagree. While this helps for a page/website to be associated with the market it is not always the case. The for example http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com/ - showing under Pafes from Australia. It is not a .com.au and it is hosted in Canada.

Hi Diane,

3 things come to me. Before goind to the points below it is good to know where your statistics are souced from. More importantly - how you receive your traffic.

1. Lower possitions on google due to:
   • sudden drop in rakings because of a competitor is performing better
   • google penalty (your platform is 1.5 and there are a couple of versions after it. With Joomla I will always check for security risks. You should be able to check is that is the case on google webmaster tools.
2. Probably a reffering site ceased sending traffic
3. There is some seasonal effect. Many people take their holidays in August. It depends on where your traffic is comming from.

I hope that helps!

Svet

I'm still puzzled about what caused the page to rank better. One thing you probably thought of is to try and link from your blog page to your static one and see how this goes. Also you might consider the rel=author option when linking to your static page. At 3AM, I'm mostly writing down what pops up in my head. If your static pages goes up, then you at least will be sure that the blog page is performing better and not your static page being pushed down due to some external or internal issues.

Ok, so this might sound strange. You have a few facebook shares and tweets on the blogs post. There is also one external link, unlike the webpage. Could that be such a factor now? I understand 100-200 tweets can do miracles, but I wasn't thinking a few could go that far.

Do you have any server logs? Those can give you the information you need.

Google Webmaster Tools keep errors from a couple of year back. At least the ones not yet fixed. It might be that you are also lworking on the internal link structure, improving the crawling and you might have recently submitted a more up to date sitemap, which surfaced old errors.

How do you currently track the errors?

It got me wondering. Can you PM me the URL? I have two ideas why that might be.

1. You have a lot of recent tweets/other social signals to your blog post.
2. You webpage/site is not properly associated with the market.

Cheers,

Svet

Whatever you do don't memorize the content in your efforts to alter it in each variatio. Leave your desk/laptop and have a cup of coffee/tea. Write down the content in your own words. That doen't always work for me, but I am able to get good variations when it does. Another thing I rarely do, but find amusing is I getting a cup of coffee and going where my colleagues go for a smoke. While eavesdropping on their conversation, I try to replace the subject of their discussion with the subject the page I'm stuck on. It is often bizarre but I get a few good expressions and synonyms.

Like EGOL said, this looks like a job for a magician.

Can you craft infographics? Those are pretty cool and go a long way on Stumble. Also some video tutorials on the topic might help.

There was also this one approach of selecting a couple of images and creating a screensaver with some app. These can be submitted to software catalog sites. I haven't used that one for a couple of years so I don't know if it would work.

Also, being inspired by Devin's idea on web design galleries, I can suggest the opposite. If the site looks somewhat ugly (no offense) you can build up a cosmo type of list - 20 Of The Ugliest (your niche -optional) Websites.

It is only a couple of pages, so if they can write it in html5 with css3, adding something cool, you can submit is as a example of the new capabilities of the technology. It can also give you a good reason to comment on similar articles and get links back.

*About the infographics idea. You don't need to be very familiar with graphic editor. If you can take a decent picture and put some nice looking boxes with pieces of data here and on specific elements of the topic related picture, then you should be good to go.

I've been there too. There is an upside to doing suggestions. I find it that it is sometimes better to work with other peoples' content because you have a fresh look on it.

I try to build a community of people who have already used the service. We email clients about the page and try to reel in only the most interested people. What one would really find out is what is the value of having people on facebook and what you can do for them when they are on your page. A part from providing support trying to give them a forum to connect, I have little to offer on facebook. You can say we try to buid loyalty.

Like button on the product pages of the site is what sends people back from facebook to register for my products.

If you have a great way to engage facebook fans, again, go with promoting the facebook page, through your site.

I did the opposite. I decided to have each os my products have the "Like"buttom, sharing that particular URL to facebook walls. Where I had multiple pages - info page, application form, faq and a post registration (thank you) page, I implemented the code in a way that each time people click like, they share the info page. It has proven to be better on conversion (in my case). I also use the Recommend button. It looks a bit better on a B2C site.

My main motivation to do so I because I got what I was after - people visitng my site from facebook and registering for my products. I felt a good boost in registrations over the last 7 months.

My short answer is - Like button shares your website link on facebook. Just don't make all your pages share the homepage.

I hope that helps a bit :)!

Tihs one is interesing. I work with a currency exchange/transfer site where I have 20000+ pages in english only. What I did is pretty basic, but it worked. I did one sitemap for all the main pages - service pages, homepage and pages which won't change until the next redesign. I did one more XML sitemap file, where I had my first set of money transfer pairs grouped - country to country. My 3rd and largest XML file is where I had 16512 currency combinations listed, by each combo being a webpage. For my english version I have 16058 out of them indexed. The pages are quite similar by content, but also by function. I have 4 variables which seems to do the trick. WIth other language targetings my success ranges from 3000-12000 indexed pages from this particular sitemap.

I guess it depends on the market you are targeting. If the pages have similar content it won't hurt doing some alterations to provide custom information if possible.

Hope that helps!

As I see it, Google needs to take no action on paid links. Well, no action different than devaluating them. While the market for paid links grows, the overall value and quality of each purchased link is deemed to go down. At one point people will stop bying them at all.

No, I haven't. Thanks for sharing, David! I guess I'm doing it first thing tomorrow.