Typically, no, Javascript links won't be indexed and therefore won't pass value. Google has frequently claimed to be improving their parsing of JS, but i certainly wouldn't rely on it. Conversely, it's probably best not to assume they can't either (eg using JS to cloak spammy links etc.).
Posts made by ThompsonPaul
-
RE: Do links script tags pass value?
-
RE: Blogs & CMS setup and integration
Are you still looking for feedback on this question, Christopher? Just checking as you mention you had a meeting set with your SEO folks the day after this question went up. How did it go?
Paul
-
RE: How to setup campaign
Since you say you have no other subdomains on the site you want to include in the campaign, you will want to specify the www version.
The non-www version could be showing different stats for a number of reasons. Perhaps the SEOMoz crawler first crawled it before the redirect was put in place? Those kinds of updates aren't' instantaneous and not really anything to worry about. You'll likely find they eventually even out.
Just make certain that the htaccess redirect is working as expected and is using a 301 not a 302. (use a header checker to be certain)
Paul
-
RE: Page Title
Glad that helped, Aidan, but you also really need to get that code problem creating double title tags on all your pages fixed.
The meta-title is one of the most significant on-page ranking factors and until you get rid of that second in your source code, the search engines will see a duplicate title for every page on your site (very bad for rankings), and the search results pages will continue to make up their own page titles rather than use the ones you've crafted.
Let me know if you need more background.
P.
-
RE: What should I put in the image ALT and title text for blogger?
Nope, just use spaces between words like natural language text.
It gets indexed just like the regular text on the page, unlike file names and URLs which do need the dashes.
-
RE: What should I put in the image ALT and title text for blogger?
Sorry, missed your question about having 10 backpack images on one page...
In that case, you'll want alt text that describes each in a way that clearly differentiates it from the others on the page. You can also use the opportunity to work in some synonyms and closely related terms to help introduce some variety to your keyword use. (Too much use of the same keyword even in alt text is still seen by SEs as keyword stuffing.)
So...
Lightweight blue backpack ideal for traveling.
Expedition pack for mountain climbing.
Knapsack for women hikers.
Comfortable computer daypack for students.
etc....Make sense?
P.
-
RE: What should I put in the image ALT and title text for blogger?
The primary purpose of alt text (alternative text) is for usability. It is designed to provide an alternative description of the photo for users who either can't or choose not to view images - blind users using screen readers for example.
If you do it right, you'll also get a little SEO benefit as well. Like all good SEO - do what is best for your reader and you'll get rewarded by the search engines as well.
Specifically, alt text should be a natural language description of the photo. Keep it to one sentence long, and my preference is to keep it under 10 words - usually 5 or 6. Since the photo should be relevant to the page, describing it will naturally include the page's keywords. If possible, try to get the keywords towards the beginning of the description, but don't make it unnatural in order to do this, as the benefit just isn't that great.
DO NOT artificially stuff unrelated keywords into the photo's description. That'll defeat the whole purpose, and the search engines will recognize it and ignore it.
Title text is a little different - it's designed to be the text that shows up in the tooltip as you hover over an image. The reason it gets confusing is good old Microsoft. In IE, if an image has alt text but no title text, the hover text will show the alt text. In other browsers, if there's no title text, there will be no hover text.
So best practice is to include both alt and title. NOTE! Title text is pretty well considered NOT to contribute to SEO. It can be used to describe the photo (you can just duplicate the alt text) but more importantly it can be used to create a call to action or instructions that will show when the photo is hovered over.
So... using your example of the backpack photo:
alt text: Lightweight blue backpack perfect for traveling.
title text: Click for more lightweight backpack ideas for travelersOr for the second example...
alt text: Miniature TV fits in a backpack
title text: See more miniature backpacking TVsThere's no reason not to mention the second item in the photo, assuming it's related to the content of the page.
Don't use generic file names for your images! Before you upload them, give them a sensible file name that includes their keyword. So instead of uploading _DSC459083748.jpg, rename the file to lightweight-blue-backpack.jpg. Sensible means a couple of words long max, and separate words with a dash - not spaces or underscores. (This goes for any file you upload to the web.) Again, search engines assume the file name likely relates to the file contents, so that's another slight ranking signal.
To get the greatest benefit out of your posted images, it's also a good idea to include a caption for the photo that includes a slightly more thorough description of the photo as well. This can be in actual caption code, or just text entered right under or beside the image. Search engines assume text close to the image is about the image (since they can't understand the content of the image on their own).
There's a whole separate area of SEO dedicated to getting images to rank specifically in photo searches, but the above will serve you well to optimize them to help your page rank for your chosen keywords.
Paul
-
RE: What are your thoughts on Twylah and SEO?
I've long had a gripe with how Twylah is claiming SEO benefits for their branded pages.
- Twylah pages exists at a subdomain which means that, for ranking purposes, it is a completely separate site and so must try to rank on its own
- Few are likely to spend any effort building links to that subdomain, so it will probably never rank well (especially considering it's on-page issues like dupe content and dupe titles)
- Even if it starts to gain a small amount of authority, there are so many links on each page (as the crawl pointed out) that any links back to your main site will pass so little "juice" as to be essentially worthless.
- I've seen lots of people get excited about how many pages of their Twylah subdomain get indexed, but nobody's talking about those pages getting or sending any actual traffic (aside from those who use a "supertweet" occasionally)
Twylah pages can be useful for a number of things - in my opinion SEO isn't one of them. Twylah folks should stop touting it for that.
-
RE: Redirecting a Parked Domain
I'm vote with SCW - no value whatsoever. Risk would be that the Search Engines might decide the totally unrelated domain name pointing to his site looks spammy. Assuming the parked domain is even indexed, given it likely has no inbound links.
Given that there is absolutely no value to redirecting it, I certainly wouldn't take the chance if it were mine.
-
RE: Page Title
You actually have two issues, Aidan, but the one the SEOMoz crawl is reporting here is not what folks have mentioned so far.
The warning is telling you that the code of your webpage contains two instances of the meta-title tag. The meta title is found between the <title>tags and only shows in the code, not the rendered version of your page. In your case, there's a version of the meta-title tag on line 84, and another on line 97 in the header section near the top of your page. All of your pages have this double-title problem.</p> <p>If you have two title tags, the search engines won't know which one to use. As a result of this confusion, the search engine is actually discarding your page titles and making up one of its own based on navigation - never as good as trying to get it to display the ones you've actually designed.</p> <p>On closer inspection, your pages have a significant configuration problem because they actually have two (nested) <head> sections. Something is adding a second <head> section that contains the extra unwanted title tag. Perhaps there's a plugin doing this? (See attached image of source code - the circled area is code that should not be there)</p> <p>The second problem, as shiftins and Joel point out , is that if you have multiple pages targeting such similar terms, the search engines will likely be unable to tell which is the most important (authoritative) page. They will essentially split the ranking power for those terms between the two pages, making each rank lower than one would by itself.</p> <p>Paul</p> <br> <br> <a download="6vwja" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://imgur.com/6vwja" target="_blank">6vwja</a></title>
-
RE: Spammy Industry Keyword Research
Hey Aaron:
First thing to realize is that you've basically decided to get into running and chosen the Olympic Marathon as your first race. The "work from home" category is probably one of the 4 or 5 toughest categories to compete in due to the massive, usually spammy/black hat competition.
I'm sorry that sounds like such a downer, but It wouldn't be fair to try to answer this question without first making sure you're aware of the incredibly steep challenge and learning curve ahead of you. Are you certain you want your first foray into SEM to be in such a difficult market vertical? I don't ask that to be discouraging, just to ensure that you've got a realistic view of what's ahead.
That said, if you still want to dive in to this specific market... You're clearly wanting to target legit approaches to home-based business. My suggestion would be to initially go after some very specific niches that will help you get away from most of the crap you've already mentioned as your biggest obstacle.
The good news is - I think you've already identified a couple. Why not start with specifics like your "how to start a store on Ebay" and "how to start a part-time store on Etsy"? You could focus your keyword research on just these kinds of specific activities, and even get right down to a couple of specific interests (say golf and crafting) that you're already knowledgeable about. They would lend themselves to a lot of really obvious content building, both in text and video. (These wouldn't have to be separate sites, just different categories on the same site) You could even aim to organize by interest, rather than by business opportunity e.g. home-based business ideas for golfers.
This is called "going after the long tail" - specific topics that will have far less volume of interest than the primaries like "home-based business" but with far less competition and a much more defined target audience. Develop and hone your skills with these more accessible targets, then use what you learn to move up the chain of competition. (Or simply spread wider in the long tail with more highly niche targets!)
Start with just a couple of these concepts, and as you build them out and start seeing success, find another to add. Don't spread yourself too thin at the beginning. Once you've built up a bunch of these categories of content on your site, you'll naturally be moving toward becoming an authority site on home-based business in general.
Because of the spammy nature of the niche, building trust and authority are going to be very challenging but critical to long-term success. You'll most definitely need to build social media networking into your plan also, since done well it can be very effective at building that trust/authority that is much tougher with just a website. Let your passion for helping people come through as much as your specific business expertise.
Bottom line, you're going to need to have a clear strategy that's do-able given your current skills and resources, before you start considering how to do the actual keyword research. You're already part way there having figured out that you're up against a very messy category. My recommendation - carve yourself a very, very specific niche and build from there.
-
RE: Feedburner email service
Something else to be aware of - the process of importing your current subscribers is VERY iffy. In fact I've never found anyone - or reports of anyone - who actually accomplished it successfully.
There are anecdotal reports online that you can send Feedburner (Google) a CSV file of your subscribers to have manually added to your Feedburner account, but nobody's actually reported accomplishing this.
You likely already know how Google is with custom support for their free products - I sure wouldn't count on being able to make this happen.
If you've already got the subscribers in an ESP, use a template that will run off an RSS feed and automate it that way as Rojish recommends.
You'll need the full ESP (email service provider) functionality to market to them effectively to turn at least some of them into customers.
If you don't care about turning them into customers of some sort, you could just require them all to resubscribe through Feedburner and not worry about the large percentage that would drop off your list as a result. (But then, why build up the list if not to try to get some business advantage from it?)
-
RE: Roger keeps telling me my canonical pages are duplicates
Valery, you're definitely going to want to normalize your URLs to lowercase. This is a quirk of IIS that it actually respects case in URLs and will consider different case URLs as different pages.
In addition to the search engine problems it creates, it's also a major problem for usabilty - yours and your users. For example, a user who is trying to type in a direct URL can get a 404 error depending on what case they use.
More importantly, your Google Analytics will report on each of those version as separate pages, unless you write a normalizing filter into your GA profiles. Better to do that normalization for the actual site, not just your analytics
While rel=canonical can resolve a number of issues, I've always found it vastly better to correct the actual problem at its root, rather than rely on canonicalization as a catch-all. Anecdotally, I've found correcting issues like this with rewrites seems to allow affected pages to rank better than when just corrected with canonicalization. WIsh I could find time to do an actual case-study on that

Managing rewrites on IIS servers will require a plugin like asapi-rewrite as IIS doesn't handle it natively.
P.S. IIS will also allow and respect spaces in URLs. Users in Internet Explorer will see them as normal with spaces but browsers like Firefox will insert the html entity for a space (%20) into each necessary spot in the URL. This is again a mess for usability, so much better to force rewrite of all URLs to replace spaces with dashes when creating new pages. Many CMSs have plugins for this or you can also use sitewide rewrites to do it after the fact.
-
RE: Does a hashtag link pass the same amount of link juice as a link without a hashtag?
Links that include named anchors (the #something-inside-page part) behave the same way as URLs with other types of URL parameters (e.g. domain.com?variable=whatever)
So short answer is yes, they'll pass link juice as usual.
BUT these kinds of links are prone to creating duplicate content issues. Search engines will see each as a different URL containing the same content when the links get indexed.. At the very least, make sure you've got rel=canonical implemented on the destination page. That way the SEs will know that the page similarities are intentional and will know to give the link authority to to the real URL without the variables.
Note - this is the same issue we run into when putting links with Google Analytics tracking variables out in the wild (e.g.domain.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=whatever) so the same precautions need to be taken.
-
RE: Does commenting on relevant articles positively impact our seo?
My opinion - if you're posting on blogs/articles purely for SEO value, you're wasting your time.
- most comment sections provide only "nofollow" links
- most good comment sections have so many comments that even if the link is "dofollow" the share of influence passed will be negligible
However! If you're posting good, useful comments on blogs that are relevant to your business, you are contributing to the process of making yourself a subject matter expert/influential. Others will see your helpful contribution and perhaps follow you back to your own site/blog. If you're lucky, you may even be able to generate some interaction with the blog owner, resulting in new promotional opportunities (guest posting?) or social media interaction.
The one SEO side benefit that you do get from good blog commenting is your backlink profile will be more natural with quality nofollow backlinks to go with all your dofollow links. As we've just seen with the Penguin update, the best backlinks aren't just the ones made to "look" natural, but that actually "are" natural!
So - focusing your commenting efforts on a smaller number of relevant blogs and designed to help build your reputation (rather than a huge "spray and pray" approach) will be a better use of your time.
Paul
-
RE: How Many Characters in an H1?
There's no technical limitation to the length of heading tags (h1, h2 etc) as they're not displayed anywhere other than on the content page. (Unlike the meta-title attribute, for example, that gets truncated on the Search Results page if it's too long.)
Make it just long enough and no longer

What I mean by that is - write it as a heading that clearly communicates the nature of the page it's introducing, but don't waste words. The more words in the header, the less your targeted words will stand out - both to search engines and to users. So cut down on stop words (the, and, if, because etc) and try to get your primary words close to the beginning of the heading if possible.
But as Stefan says - make sure it makes the visitor want to keep reading - otherwise your SEO efforts have been wasted.
-
RE: Internal links in blog posts?
As far as SEO is concerned, the reason for linking to other pages is to help pass the "Google juice" or ranking influence of each page along to other related pages on your website. Using keyword-appropriate anchor text in those links helps the search engines understand what those other pages are valuable for. So don't repeatedly link with "click here".
But don't always link to a page with the same anchor text either. As the latest Penguin update has shown, anchor text that is always the same is unlikely to have occurred naturally and will look spammy.
The reason you don't need to link to the homepage in the body of a post is simple math - your homepage likely already has the most incoming links anyway - it's the other pages that need all the help they can get. (Plus as others have mentioned and you confirmed, you already have a link to that home page in your page's navigation.)
But here's the real kicker - the reason for putting links in the body of your posts should be to provide value to the reader, first and foremost. If you keep this in mind, you'll probably take care of the SEO needs automatically - and naturally! As theBrewRoom says, link to things that would help the reader of the current post better understand what you're talking about, and use anchor text that will let the reader know what to expect when he gets there.
Last thing to think about - ideally you want a page to have as few links as will get the job done effectively. The more links on a page, the less ranking influence each one can pass along. So don't flood your pages with links thinking that will help even more other pages rank better.
And there again - what's best for the user is also good SEO - a page jammed with links will just confuse a user and look cluttered, while not helping your SEO. Think "user first" and you'll almost never go wrong.
Good luck & have fun figuring out what good pages to link to!
Paul
-
RE: What are tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 keywords (pages)?
In addition to Vahe's suggestion, it's possible the terms being used refer to what is also frequently referred to as "the long tail" of search.
Tier 1 or "head" terms are search terms with both extremely high search volume and very high competition Tier 2 or "body" terms have lower search volume and competition, and tier 3 or "long tail" terms are those which are so specific they are searched much less frequently, but also there are considerably fewer sites competing for their traffic.
Example:
tier 1 head term - "SEO"
tier 2 body term - "ecommerce SEO specialist"
tier 3 long tail term - "SEO specialist for WordPress in Seattle"Note it's not just the # of words in the term that determine it's tier, though usually longer terms will be located farther down. It's more the search volume and amount of competition that determines the classification.
There's lots of info on the long tail of search here at SEOMoz and the web in general if you want to get a deeper understanding of it's value.
Paul