Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Ronald,

When did you make these changes.  When you change something, it doesn't immediately take effect.  It takes a while and the time varies.  Be patient and wait.

Hope you will see the changes soon.

Hello All Mozers,

Quick question on URL.  I know URL is important and should include keywords and all that but my question is does including numbers (not date or page numbers but numbers for internal use) in the URL affect SEO? For example, www.domain.com/screw-driver,12,1,23345.htm  Is that any better or worse than www.domain.com/screw-driver.htm?

I understand that this is not user friendly but in SEO stand point does it hurt ranking?  What's your opinion on this?

Thank you!

Hi Scott,

Glad you getting into SEO.

Yes, you are correct that submitting articles to other sites is a great way to build links back to your site.  HOWEVER, those are strategies and tactics people used probably 3 years ago.  Google see that people are doing that instead of building quality/natural links, they rolled out Penguin and Panda to prevent people from doing that.  By doing so, you are creating something called Duplicate content and that will either harm your website ranking or your website may not show up in the search results because the website where you submitted the article has better ranking than you.  Therefore, they are showing the other website instead.

It is best to write new articles and post it in the blog under your website's domain.  Such as blog.website.com or website.com/blog.  This will give your website more benefits of freshness and more content to crawl and possibly backlinks and social signal for your blog/website.  Thus increases your chance of appearing in SERP with more content and higher ranking due to backlinks to your website.

Hope this helps.

Hi Philip,

It is strange that top rate SEO consultants are doing so.  In the video that I've attached, Matt Cutts also mentioned that some people use ALL H1 headers and used CSS to make it look like it is not and got a lot of compliants.  I believe Google is able to catch that so thats why I'm saying it is strange for top rate SEO consultants are doing that.

Hello Again Erin,

1. 301s are used for 2 purposes.  One way is to tell or direct bots to crawl the other page and it will send linkjuices to the new page.  The second way is to redirect visitors to a new page.  If you are bulk redirecting all pages to the home page, it is kind of a waste.  Visitors want to visit a specific page but then you redirect them to the home page?  They will be frustated since it is not what they are looking for and may leave your page.  Bad user experience.  Furthermore, sending link juices to the home page might also be a waste.

The best practice will be redirecting specific pages to a new specific page.  For example, Page A on old domain is about bikes, you want to redirect it to Page A on the new domain about bikes.  One, it will transfer all the old linkjuice on bikes to the new one and visitors are redirected to a page where they want.

2. The canonical tag is for bots to know that you want one version to be crawled over the ones.  301 is kind of for visitors as well and redirecing linkjucies.  Depending on whether you want your visitors to visit only one version, then you might want to use the 301.  Furthermore, if different versions of your page is getting backlinks, maybe use 301 to send the linkjuice back to the canonical page.

Hope this helps.

Hi Erin,

1. I believe using the Geo Tag and the ref="lang" tag for the subdirectory will be enough to tell Google that it is a page that targets people in UK.  I believe that will avoid having duplicate content or keyword cannibalization even if it is the same.  However, since you are targeting UK, the spelling may be different or the terms may be used differently.  So keep that in mind and see if you can change the Title tag, H1 anc content a bit.  For example, in US, we spell Optimization and in UK I believe they spell it Optimisation.  Both have the same meaning but spelled differently in different locations.

2) I have asked a similar question before and the answer I got is that purchasing the UK ccTLD and then redirecting it to your .com page will have no benefits.  The ccTLD won't rank in Google.uk.  Mind as well just optimize the UK subdirectory and have it appear in the UK search engine.

Hope this helps Erin!

Hi Philip,

Having multiple H1 header doesn't affect page rank.  It is ok to have multiple H1 header for each section.  However, don't over do it.  Don't use H1 for the whole page because Google will see that and will take that into consideration in the algorithm.  The attached video from Google Webmaster's Youtube page explains that.

Hpoe this helps Phil.

watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

Hi Gary,

You can use Google's URL shortener to manage your campaigns and then set up Custom Segment and view it in the report in Google Analytics.  I know this works for Social Media and Email campaigns but not sure about offline campaigns.  http://www.mktdojo.com/how-to-track-email-and-social-media-campaigns-with-google-analytics

Another way I guess is to use bit.ly, when you shorten a link, they provide stats to track the number of people clicking on the link.  Once again, I know it works for Social Media campaigns but not sure about offline.

Finally, you can try using QR codes.  QR Codes are widely used in off line campaigns or events.  Readers don't have to memorize the link and enter it in the url, they can simply scan it with their phone.  Furthermore, you can use either method mentioned above and create a QR code with it so that you can track the number of visits.

Why create a custom link and use it for the QR Code instead of your original link?  If you are using the custom link for the QR code, then you know that if you have visits via the custom link, they are definitely from scanning the QR code.

Hope this helps!

I don't have much knowledge in Local Search (that should be my next plan. Thank you) but I believe you simply have to fill out all the information on each of your local listings.  Furthermore, like getting backlinks for website is important, it is also important for local search.  When people link to your website, it is important for them to include a location within the anchor text or around the link for co-citation.  Witht that, it should help with local search.

Well, I believe having subdomains or folders will be better because you will probably have more backlinks than creating 2 separate site.  As i mentioned above, backlinks also plays a role in Local Search.

You are spot on on the question.

I was thinking along the same line as your answer.  So now you just confirmed it.

Thank you very much!

Hi Zac,

Since your initial website has mainly content on Dallas, i find it hard to incorporate Austin in there unless you change up all your content.  If you have  a generic website, I would recommend either using subdomain or folders to sepearte each location.  Such as dallas.copplaw.com austin.copplaw.com or copplaw.com/dalls and etc.  But that doesn't seems to work.

Since you are moving and having another location, I might create a 2nd website.  This option is definitely not the best approach since you will have to spend more time optimizing both websites and build links for both website.  Basically more website = more work.

If possible, you can rework the content on the main website to make it more generic instead of simply targetting one location.  Then use location subdomain or folder.  I find this to be the best approach.

Hi Mike,

Commenting is definitely a good way to build relationship and share your expertise.  As long as you are staying away from spammy sites and posting sales pitch on other people's blot, I believe everything should be fine.

When you comment or participate, you don't necessarily need to post informative content but it would be nice and useful for building relationship.  I would say just not to post sales pitches.

To answer your question, links in comments are usually nofollow so it won't give you any linkjuice.  However, with Commentluv, it is nice to help your blog get more exposure and possibly traffic IF your comment was informative and etc., people might be interseted and view your blog.

Hope this helps.

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for replying.  So you are saying I should create a new Page A and have it list under Category B and use the canonical tag on the one I want to be indexed.  So in the end I will have 1 Page A in Google's eye and 2 Page A in users' eye.

Hi,

I have never done this before and havent read about anyone doing this before.  However, I know that Apple has an international website and they are well optimized.  Therefore, I took a look and it seems like they do it this way:

US: www.apple.com/hotnews = www.domain.com/blog

HK: www.apple.com/hk/hotnews = www.domain.com/hk/blog

UK: www.apple.com/uk/hotnews = www.domain.com/uk/blog

I am sure there are different ways to do it and it is based on your budget and preferences.  Whichever you can do with your budget and easier to manage.

Hope this helps

Hi,

I believe Bing and Google have pretty much the same algorithm but they might just weight each factors differently.  Such as Google weight backlinks heavily while Bing weight Page Authority heavily.

Other than that, I don't believe there is anything out there that really differentiate Google and Bing.

Hi Mark,

Google only spends a certain amount of time to crawl and there is no way to tell them to crawl more or faster.  If you have a lot of pages, it might take longer.

One way to make them crawl faster may be optimize your internal linking.  If you have links pointing to other pages in your website, it makes it easier to crawl.

Other than work arounds, there are no ways to tell Google to crawl faster or more pages.  They have their own speed.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34439

Hi SEOmozers,

I have another question.  =]  Thanks in  advance.

First question: How important is the breadcrumb for SEO? I know that breadcrumb makes better UX because it shows how the visitor landed on this page and the breadcrumb may show up in the search engine.  But other than that, how important is it?

Second Question:

If I have a page that can be found via 2 locations, how should I handle this in regards to breadcrumb?

For example, I have page A.  You can access page A via Category A and Category B.  Therefore, what I did was list Page A under Category A and when someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it will redirect to the page A that was found via Category A.

The problem is on page A, the breadcrumb is Home > Category A > Page A.  So if someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it redirects and the breadcrumb shows Home > Category A > Page A.

What should I do with the breadcrumb for Category B > Page A?

Should I create another page A and just use canonical on it?

Should I create another page A but do not index it?

or leave it as is? 1 Page A, can be access via 2 categories.

Please advise.

Thank you!

Hi,

As irving mentioned in his answer, Google does crawl the whole page.  However, from a HTML5 course I took, Google reads the HTML from top to bottom.  Meaning if you have 1. Head > Body >Right Sidebar > Footer, Google will read your head first, then the body, then the right side bar and finally footer.  If you have 2. Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer, they will read Header first.  You get the point.

Therefore, it is suggested to have your more important content on the top of the HTML.  But overall, Google will crawl the whole page.

Hi Adam,

This is my first time hearing about this approach.  In my opinion, it seems like your client is trying to game the search engine by creating 2 sites and hoping one of them will rank better.  I believe search engines will not like it since your client is trying to game the system.  I don't think search engines will favor anyone gaming the system.

Why don't your client spend the time and money creating and ranking the new site on the old site?

They can use those time and money to build more quality links and producing more contents then they will definitely rank higher instead of start a new website and doing everything from scratch.

my 2 cents.  Hope this helps.