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I know many people disagree with me on this one, but I would go big and get it fixed once and for all. The problem is only going to be worse when you get more content on the website.

Good luck with the work!

Well. It's a lot of work and entails some risk to redirect many files. That being said, I have redirected thousands of URLs over the last couple of years and have yet to see it fail.

While it is a lot of work to change many URLs, I really appreciate consistency on a website, and prefer all URLs to follow the same structure. So I would probably redirect all the URLs.

I suppose you are working with the Bruel & Kjær website - and I can see there are several types of URLs now - no hyphens and with space as a separator. Adding yet another type of URLs will be at least somewhat confusing.

Well the guide is still very good. However, one might add some sharing buttons for Twitter/Facebook, as these seem to be important rankingfactors nowadays.

Hi there

There won't be any first order SEO difference. But there are some second order benefits to the hyphened URLs. As they are more readable by humans, they tend to be clicked more often in SERPs and gain more natural links.

Best,

Thomas

Wait a minute. Wordpress offers to redirect your blog. You just have to pay them 100 dollars for the effort: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/offsite-redirect/

Yes, the name of the sitelinks are most often (or maybe always!?) based on anchor text, so go hunt for Anchor Text to find the error.

You can generate a list of links to the url (internal and external) from GWT or Open Site Explorer.

Hi Rick,

I just needed the same kind of data for a book I wrote, so I know a few resources that can help you, although I'm a bit uncertain if they meet all your needs.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish (update - forgot this one - Rand usually has tona of data in his slidedecks, so if you bother clicking a lot, I'm sure you can find interesting stuff in these ones too)

Hope they can help you a little.

Best,

Thomas

Right on, Keri.

We are located in Denmark, but she can travel to the US if necessary. I know she is considering SMX East in the fall. But we don't know if that's the best one around?

Thanks!

Hi Mozzers,

We have an inhouse PPC marketer who is experienced in AdWords and PPC, but want to go to some good training once or twice a year.

Which seminar or conference would be the best to go to?

Thanks!

Thomas

The website is not severely penalized as it still ranks for its domain name - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1239&bih=869&q=discoverhookah&aq=f&aqi=g-s1g-v1g-sv4&aql=&oq=

It wouldn't do that, if it had a filter penalty or was deindexed.

The home page doesn't have any text on it besides text link. The sub pages are super poorly optimized. So no, I don't think it has a penalty. It just needs some SEO love.

Hi there,

I am afraid there is no way of not working with a script, when using rel=canonical. Either you have to develop a script that generates the canonical URL by itself, or you have to insert the meta tag with the right URL manually.

I would strongly discourage NOT spending any time on rel canonical, as it can mess you up site's rankings completely. Read this post by Dr. Pete if you need to convince yourself to spend some our doing the proper development: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

Best,

Thomas

Hi mozzers,

As dissussed last friday at the London Linkbuilding seminar, badges are still working like a charm.

I am having some of my designers work on some now (have been in the pipeline for months, but conferences are so good at shifting priorities) and are looking for some examples on good badges.

The badges will be an award for other websites.

Thanks,

Thomas

Has anyone noticed any changes since the Farm Update from Google allegedly affected 11.8% of all US queries?

Seems like we got some extra long tail traffic from the US - but its too early to tell if that is a coincidence or a more permanent change.

I guess its one of those days where its good not to be a content farm

I would definitely check out other CMS solutions such as Drupal, Joomla and MODx.

I love Wordpress for small sites (less than 1000 pages), but I think the CMS has some problems in terms of scalability - especially if you require lots of different templates - or even worse - multilingual variations.

If you have lots of developers, you obviously have the muscle for massive customizations, which makes it more likely to succeed.

Another criteria to keep in mind is the tech savyness of the journalists. If you aren't too comfortable with IT, Wordpress might be your best bet.

In sum, Wordpress will probably favor the journalists, while Drupal / Joomla / MODx will favor the tech team. Don't know who you want to help out the most

I don't attribute too much value to page-rank sculpting. It's based on such a flawed understanding of SEO - that SEO is about sending PageRank to a few but important pages that will then rank. Good SEO is about making the website easy accessible for users and crawlers. And internal linking is great for this.

Internal linking is a great way of doing SEO, whenever it's done with a user perspective in mind. I'd be thrilled to work with internal linking on news websites, as it is possible to do so much relevant inter linking.

So I guess my advice would be, that all links should be based on relevancy, not PageRank sculpting. That does NOT mean, however, that you cannot optimize the anchor text on the links, or place them strategically (e.g. links to most important pages in the top of the page; lower priority in the bottom).

To be honest, I only read SEOmoz regularly. Besides that, my reading effort is spread out wide and primarily influenced by twitter. So instead of following blogs, I prefer following Twitter people - especially those who don't just link to their own blog. My top 3 there would be:

@crazyegg

@KISSinsights

@dr_pete

Yes, a limited amount of internal links with optimized anchor text works well for both users and search engines.

The trick is to make the part automized, so Page A is connected to Keyword A; Page B to Keyword B etc. The develop a script (or find a CMS plugin) that inserts the links itself, whenever the keyword appears on another page.

but DON'T have too many keywords. I usually recommend 3 optimized internal anchors per page. At this rate, it's helpful rather than harmful for the users and crawlers.

Four votes for canoicalize. This is the text book example of what the tag was made for.

Good luck persuading dev team

Thank you all for the answers - Incredible helpful!

And yes, this open q&a is great - I am sure it will dominate serious SEO discussions by the end of this year

Thank you, Dejan.

Correct me if I am wrong - bur Majestic has a pretty deep crawl of the web right? We are examining websites with potential very few ingoing links.