Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Right, sure. Yeah all of this is helpful.

Dude you are delivering today!

So would you recommend going by entirely different nicknames altogether? I think of SEO nicknames that have stuck in my mind for some reason: Graywolf, Stuntdubl, Copyblogger, Randfish, Yoast, The Oatmeal, NotSleepy, etc.

For that matter, should I go by entirely different pseudonyms and conceal my real name while writing or executing in certain industries?

Thanks Vinnie.

Right, that makes sense.

I read a lot on SEO, but I read way more on another unrelated subject matter (and have way more to say). Should I split my Twitter account into two distinct accounts (one for each subject matter)?

Do you keep a private, personal Twitter for screwing around with your friends and/or getting the word out on social issues pertaining only to your social circle? Or do you just use your professional account for this? Or do you somehow manage to not "waste time" on purely personal social networking?

[UPDATE: To abstract my question a bit: should I cultivate distinctly branded personal nicknames for different spaces that I am interested in? I have gone by "Loudogg" all my life but I am now afraid that as I grow professionally in different unrelated sectors that I will dilute my personal brand by Tweeting (and doing other activities) along too many different subjects as "Loudogg". To complicate matters, I am actually involved in more than 2 fields, and would like to grow in at least 3. Should I develop multiple personalities entirely? It just feels wrong.]

Thanks David; that makes sense. Do you keep an SEO or other company blog? What benefit do you get out of it?

On one hand it seems like having my cake and eating it too: blogging about SEO using my clients as case studies in order to give them a couple backlinks. On the other hand it seems like asking for it from Google or from competitors. Got any advice?

And what of mentioning actual domains and brand names when asking questions here in the forum? One one hand it seems like I'd get more specific advice, on the other hand, once again, it seems like it comes with some amount of risk. Any advice?

Thanks!

I see. Have you considered putting it behind an htpasswd?

I do not think it is still entirely true that sites who sell links will not themselves be penalized (cf. Forbes). On the other hand I recently saw Graywolf joke about how the paid links from this high PR site pass PageRank. I would be curious to know whether anyone out there could demonstrate that paid link penalties for either the linking site or the site being linked to were algorithmic. And if they're not, we should expect them to be sporadic and inconsistent. In which case, if you are trying to be squeaky clean, it seems you should nofollow the links, and it seems that such would necessarily put you at a disadvantage to your competitors who are not. However, some of them, if successful enough, could get hand penalized by Google.

I would consider either excluding the PDFs from the index with your robots.txt in conjunction with resubmitting your sitemap (which you're all over), or placing a text link at the bottom of each PDF pointing back to the HTML version of that page (which, all things being equal, should cause the HTML version of the page to rank instead). I am not sure about serving 404 headers to Google instead of the PDFs that are currently in the index. Why not 301 to the HTML version of each PDF? Obviously that can't be a permanent solution, as you will eventually want to restore the functionality to users, right? But it will tell Googlebot that the content of each PDF is to be found from here on out at the URL containing the HTML version. This is a case where it would be handy to serve one thing to the bots and another to the human viewers, but I am afraid that doing so could get you into trouble.

I am interested in your case though—let us know what, if anything besides the 404s and sitemap resubmittal, you end up trying and what happens with it. I'm also curious to know what other mozzers suggest.

Does bounce rate affect your rankings? Here's an oldie but goodie: http://me-in-seo.blogspot.com/2009/02/does-bounce-rate-affect-sites-google.html

How can you lower your bounce rate: http://searchengineland.com/two-simple-rules-for-fixing-high-bounce-rate-pages-35125

What happened with Google's Panda update? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

Note that Chrome collects direct user feedback on bounces. After you hit "back" from a SERP result it lets you block that site. No doubt doing so signals spam to the algo.

Do you need to control access to the site beyond the SERPS? I would not rely on robots.txt to shield any sensitive data.

For a breakdown of robots.txt and robots meta-tags checkout: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-meta.html/, and for a great post on using these standards in SEO check out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions

I am also concerned that you are unable to control your robots.txt! If your CMS doesn't let you do that and overwrites it when you change it manually, you have some major control problems on your hands that you should remedy.

Have you tried PRLeap, PRWeb, and Vocus? I've seen tons of articles get picked up by Google news and displayed at the top of the SERPS without too much work using PRWeb, and Vocus can help you find journalists responsible for syndicating content in all kinds of big name channels. You can also try googling creatively with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them. I would also consider becoming a syndicator of content yourself. Google has guidelines to follow to get yourself recognized as a source for Google news (you have to apply), and it may behoove you to set yourself up to syndicate other people's content (and your own). It would give you tons of control, the opportunity to crowd-source content on your own site, etc.

We recently moved from HootSuite to http://dlvr.it/ because it offers us control over more details.

"Does Google update often?"

Google unrolls minor algo updates roughly every two weeks.

"Is a jump from a PR of 0 to 3 reasonable?"

Maybe this will help you conceptualize what PageRank is and how it behaves: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

"If my site does go to a PR of 3, will I see a noticeable change in my keyword rankings?"

Since PR is only one value in the overall ranking algo, the answer to this question depends on how strong your other signals of authority and relevance are in comparison to those competing for the same keywords.

Basically www. is just a subdomain that people used to use to host their web-facing content, as domain names were not used for hosting web-facing websites by default. They were used for tons of other junk. Now almost every domain name has web-facing content, and people host it randomly at either the www subdomain or on the root domain. For marketing purposes a lot of people intentionally redirect to the www subdomain because people are used to seeing it.

It makes no difference for SEO, though it is a best practice to redirect either the WWW version or the non-WWW version to the other one, to keep things clean. You can do this with a mod rewrite in your htaccess, and in your Google Webmasters account.