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Hi Joanne,

Another possible reason is that some of the so-called poor quality backlinks are actually the reason why you were ranked on the first page.  However, after Disavowing these links could have caused you to drop in ranking.  For that reason, many people don't recommend using Disavow tool outright but try to remove the links manually first.

In addition to the above suggestions, maybe try the following:

• Add separators in the title tag to separate keywords
• Image Weight - you can either use Google's Tool or WebPageTest to check out the speed of your site and what needs to improve

Hi,

In SEO sense, I don't think it matters whether it is tags or category as long as Google is able to crawl your content and you removed or noindex all your duplicate content/pages.  By using SEO by Yoast, category and tags are not different. You can noindex/nofollow both and you can create custom SEO titles and descriptions for both.

However, for the purpose of restructuring your site and adding customized headers,

Hope this helps!

Hi,

I'm not sure whether Google will know if it's Google translated but the golden rule is usually be as humanly as possible.  Do everything for human eyes; therefore, i would suggest translating your text by a human.  By using Google Translate, it might not make sense to your customers and sometimes a word might have 2 or 3 different meaning depending on the context; therefore, a "local" human translator would be the best bet since they'll be aware of any local interpretation and etc.

Regarding to Penalty, i don't think Google will penalize you for using Google Translate, but if your translations don't make sense, you will definitely get a lot of bounce rate which will affect traffic and thus affect your SEO work.  I guess that's a penalty.

My 2 cents

Hi,

1)By simply linking B to A with an anchor text won't impact B's ranking as you are only interlinking.

2)Internal linking B to A will help visitors explore more of your content and does help search engine find page A.  However,  in order to increase it's ranking, you should generate more backlinks to increase its ranking

4)If Page A is not harming your site and is not causing any duplicate content, i don't think you should noindex/nofollow it.

I think there is a bit of confusion.  First of all, is page A and B duplicate?  If they are, interlinking wouldn't solve the problem and I think you are talking about using the Canonical tag to tell search engines which page to rank.  If that's the case, it will answer most of your questions, if you tell Search Engines to crawl B over A, then you should definitely improve page B and vice versa.

Hope this answers your question.

Hi,

As Alex mentioned, as long as you use 301 redirect from old content to new content, that will pass on most of the link juice and Google will know to crawl your new site.

However, keep in mind that while doing 301 redirect, you should redirect to content on the new site that is similar or same as content on the old site.  For example: www.example.de's Content A to www.example.com/de's Content A

Thank you Dana!

Hi,

In addition to what was mentioned, i would suggest the following:

• Add more keywords (long tail) in the title tag.  I see that you have xyz keyword | hobby.  I suggest using a primary and secondary keyword for each page instead of always using a generic term like "Hobby" at the end.
• Add more text for each product.  Having more unique text with keywords will help Google crawl and learn more about your page.
• Over all, the page is too crowded.  A redesign to free up some space will definitely provide better user experience which in the end help with ranking and conversion.

Hope this helps.

Hi,

I have to agree with Devanur-Rafi.  If both of the sites are serving the exact content, although Google have the power to do whatever they want, they'll most likely take the rel=canonical into consideration and display the page the tag is pointing to over the second site.

So, yes it is a dream to display both site with the same content in the search result and by using the canonical tag, Google won't penalize both sites and display the preferred site.

That's my 2 cents.

Thank you!

Hi Felip,

I really like this page: http://whichtestwon.com/ - it shows different A/B testing people have conducted and results.  You can get some ideas from this.

When I first started, I also read this blog post from Optimizely.

Other tricks I did was to visit competitor websites and see what they are doing to get ideas for my own A/B test.

Hi,

As everyone had mentioned, I would also suggest using Yoast. With this plugin, you can simply go to SEO >>> Tags & Metas >>> Click on either Post Types / Taxonomies / Others and check the box to noindex/nofollow tags, pages and etc.  By doing so, it will help you avoid having duplicate content in a lot of ways.

Another way to avoid duplicate content is go to Appearance >>> Editor >>> Go to both Category and Tag php and search for the_content and change it to the_excerpt.  This will make all the articles in your category into excerpts instead of showing the whole article.  This might be a little advance so be careful when editing the code as it can mess up your whole website.

Now as for recommendations, I would suggest the following:

• Remove the meta widget on the right
• Remove the Menu widget on the right and add it to the top navigation.  As it will help visitors navigating the website.
• I would optimize the title tag.  I would include primary and secondary keywords in the title tag.
• I would also use descriptive text for the image alt

Hi Bryan,

Does those blogs have a contact us page or any Social Media network they are participating in?  You can fill out the contact us page or reach them via social media.

Another way I see this is that might your competitor be the owner of those free blogs and simply linking back to himself?  I've seen people creating free blogs and linking to themselves as a link building tactic.  I am not sure if it works and I am planning on testing it.

HI Jennifer,

I don't see bounce rate as a bad metric in this case.  As long as you're generating revenue and getting quality visitors after clicking through, i think that is fine.  I wouldn't waste time and money creating a new landing page and risk running into any issues on Google's side or diluting the traffic and possibly backlinks.

Maybe you can try getting more quality backlinks so that the traffic you get from those sites will click through and thus lower bounce rate.  Furthermore, instead of wasting time on creating a new landing page, you can work on optimizing the current landing page so that those who usually bounce will click through.

Hope this helps.

Thank you!

Hi Gregory,

I would combine both page since it is technically the same product. By combining these 2 pages, you would be able to focus mainly on just 1 page to build links and not split backlink efforts into 2 if you have 2 pages.

Hi,

As of now, Google didn't say anything about having too many ads on a webpage will affect your SEO.  However, based on the new search update in 2012, if you have a lot of ads at the top of your page and it takes a while to scroll down to your content, then that will definitely affect your SEO and domain authority.

In the future, having a lot of ads "Might" affect your domain authority and SEO.  Just to be safe from future updates, I suggest having a balance between content and ads on your website.

http://www.mktdojo.com/another-google-seo-factor-page-layout-algorithm

http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/223486

Hi Mark,

Agreed, you should definitely change the contents for the duplicate websites; however, you don't have to remove the duplicate contents from those sites as it might've generated a few links, authority or bookmarked.  I would suggest using 301 redirect from the duplicate site to the Main site's content.  Make sure content A of duplicate site redirects to content A of Main site.  Another method is to use cross site canonical to tell engines that the content on the Main site is the original.

Good luck creating new contents!

Hi Tim,

Since Disavow Link Tool is Google's Tool, it wouldn't look strange to them if you used it.  However, are you sure those links casued your ranking to drop or there are other reasons.  Many people always think that their ranks dropped is because of some bad links.  Sometimes there may be other reasons such as competitors doing better SEO, getting more quality backlinks, Google didn't find your contents helpful to search, you don't update frequently and etc.  Those are only examples.

Before using the Disavow Link Tool, you should make sure the links are the cause.  Furthermore, did you or the webmaster receive an unnatural link email from Google?  Did you get any notification from Webmasters Tool?  Note that if you removed the wrong links, it might further affect your ranking.  Disavow tool shouldn't be used lightly.

Hope this give you an idea whether you should use the disavow tool.  Maybe publish more useful contents targeting keywords or update more frequently?  Build more quality links?  These should get you back on the SERP.

Hope this helps.

Hi,

Ranking YouTube videos and ranking articles are pretty much similar.  To name a few, you might want to optimize the following:

• Video Title - similar to an article title, you should include keywords and make it attractive since this is what visitors see in search
• Description - Keywords and any text in the description box will also take into consideration when ranking
• Tags - I would include Mercedes Buffalo NY instead of Buffalo since I don't think your content is relevant is someone is actually searching for videos about  the animal.  Relevant is key in SEO.
• Length plays an indirect role.  Search engine won't necessarily rank based on how long or a short a video is but they take how much of the video a user watched into consideration.  Views, attention span and retention plays a role.  Most viewers won't spend more than 3 minute on a video unless it is something like tv shows and etc.
• Thumbs up and thumbs down give search engine an idea the quality of the video which will help.
• Like everything in SEO, inbound link to the video plays a role.
• Add transcript to your video to the description as well since it adds more content to your video and also keywords

Hope this helps.

Thank you!

Hi Matei,

I believe both ways work as both tell Google that the tags should not be crawled/index.  I personally would go with making tags noindex/follow since it is a simple check box in Yoast where as canonical tags need to be placed in all your tag setting.

Hi,

Following up on Martijin's reply, you should definitely not sink to that level and get spammy links to your site.  However, did you check whether your competitors also have other back links from authoritative sites?  They might have gotten a few spammy links but they could have also gotten a lot of quality back links and did other optimization efforts to get them rank better than you.

The few spammy link doesn't really explain much why they rank better.  Are they optimizing on-page better?  Are they getting more social mention?  More and better quality back links? There are so much more to ranking.

Don't feel frustrated now