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They might be reporting that the keyword doesn't appear in the URL after the domain and TLD.  What I mean is, it may be saying that because the keyword isn't appearing like this: "http://www.domain.com/internet-marketing", the platform may not think it's appearing.

Whatever the technical reason is, I wouldn't worry about it much for two reasons.  First of all because, as you say, the keyword is there in the domain.  Second because having the keyword in the URL is a pretty insignificant ranking factor.  This report is a little dated now, but the SearchMetrics ranking factors show little correlation between the keyword appearing in the URL and the pages visibility in the SERPs.  I'm not one to optimise based on correlation factors, nor do I take everything in that report as gospel, but I am inclined to agree that, while having your keyword in the URL might provide a slight benefit, it's certainly not a definitive factor.

That's why I wouldn't worry too much, in your case, and move on.  Hope this helps!

Hi Eoin

Searchmetrics can help you do this.  The free version will reveal some keywords for you, and the €69/month option reveals all of the data.

If it's in your budget, it's a great tool.  Gives SEO and PPC data for your site and any other site as well, so you can use it to analyse competitors as well.

Hope this helps.

The syntax for that is absolutely spot-on.  Sounds like a great solution to insert the code if querystrings are present.  A canonical tag would also give Google a firm suggestion not to count the dynamic URLs, but this very definitive. Hope the code is reliable!

You could ask 50 SEOs this question and get 50 different answers - simply because Penguin case studies and definitive guides are pretty much non-existent.

Is it a cop-out to say: "You need to both?"

Part of me thinks: if you're under an algorithmic penalty - so long as the algorithm sees those bad links in your profile you will always have the algorithm's effect on the site.  So by that logic, you'd want to remove all the bad links.

But then we need to remember - this is an algorithm.  Has it seen some of the bad links but not classed them as "spammy/bad"? Those blog comments for instance, has the algorithm taken them into account? Or even registered them?

The point is that if you remove or disavow these spammy links, you could see your ranking decrease further, as they could be powering up your site still.  With your traffic and keywords recovering somewhat, this might not be a thing you want to do.

If a gun was put to my head - I'd go on the notion that removing or disavowing all of the bad links would be the most definitive way of removing the algorithmic penalty completely from your site.  However, all of those links would need to be replaced and I'm also living in a "perfect world" scenario.  Many people are sceptical over whether a completely recovery is even possible and if using the disavow tool is pretty much like opening up to crimes before Google.

It's just so hard to judge.  Looking at what's happening right now - I'd continue with the route of adding high quality and authoritative links to your site and monitor keyword and traffic progression.  If it keeps recovering - great.  If, eventually. the progression halts for a few months and won't improve no matter what you do - and you are not at a traffic or keyword level that you would be happy with - I'd then maybe look at the remaining bad links and say "you know what - you're holding us back now more than you (potentially) may be benefiting us. We're gonna get rid of you." Be completely thorough at this stage.

You'll probably see a rankings dip, but hopefully by resuming the healthy link building process you can reach new heights, which would hopefully vindicate the decision.

Hope this helps!

Hi Victoria

Seeing as you're now on Wordpress, there's a couple of plugins you may find useful.

First is Link Juice Keeper - this will redirect any 404s that are caused by any external sites linking to you. The links are redirected to the root domain to ensure any strength is passed.

Another is Broken Link Checker - as you may have guessed, this will notify you if you have any internal broken links.

Link Juice Keeper might sound appealing, but I don't think you can redirect certain pages to specific locations, I think it all just goes to the root domain (but I could be wrong).

Screaming Frog is another great tool that would let you find broken links.

Hope these help

Hi

I'm pretty sure that it cuts out from the 801st onwards from your list - so 1-800 will be processed, the rest will be ommitted.

As you say, uploading a list will get round it.  Alternatively, just bring up the URL in Chrome, duplicate the page 3 or 4 times, insert a line break in your list on line 800, 1600, 2400 etc and just upload the blocks in the different tabs and run.

There's nothing wrong with having it on every page of your site - you won't be penalised for overusing it, as it were.

One thing to remember is that Google will only display 1 author markup per domain in each search result.  So, if your website has 2 results in the top 10 for instance, Google will only display your picture next to one.

This could be important, as you may want to direct users to one URL over the other.  In this case, it would be wise to only use the markup on the landing page that you want to ensure that Google chooses it.

Google won't have a problem with you using a personal author markup for a business - but do consider the user experience implications of it.  If you've got a company targeting certain keywords that require a professional or B2B outlook, having an author profile appear may not suit your target audience.

Some food for thought, but in terms of using it on every page of your site from an SEO/Google point of view, there's no problem.

Hope this helps!

Hi David

The principle of the algorithm is the same, but some updates or tweaks may be further behind, as you mention.  I highly recommend talking to Daniel Ezquerro about this - this is his twitter link and this is his blog.

He'll definitely be able to guide you in the right direction.

Hi there

First impressions - I quite like it.  It's clean, the navigation looks good, I think the images could be utlilised a bit better, they're a bit small and you can't read the call to action in one of them (which, given your keyword, is a bit of a sin)

Nice use of H1s, H2s, H3s. Nothing looks stuffed/unnatural which is great.  Looks like you've got nice interlinking throughout the site, too.

I think you could benefit from a bit more text content. It's a bit thin when you look at it through Google's eyes.

There's something though that I caught when the page was loading. That is, it was a bit slow to load.

Here's a GTmetrix report of the page. This looks at the speed of the page and improvements you could make to it.  You'll see here that one of the biggest recommendations is to use browser caching.  There's a guide on GTMetrix to help you do that.

But I do like the page - it's not flashy for flashy's sake and it's got a solid base from an SEO perspective.  Maybe you could also include a portfolio of some of your design work or a few testimonials from previous clients over the work that you did. Might add a little extra trust to your brand and would also give you a chance to really wow a client with some past designs.

Hi Astrid

I've made the assumption here that the site you are talking about is the one in your Moz Profile, where you're a business owner.  I won't post it here just in case, and please correct me if I'm wrong.

I've been looking at the backlinks that have been built to that site and I'm sorry to say that it is not good news.  The links they have been building are pretty awful.  They all seem to be autoblog spam on websites with hundreds of outbound links per page, linking to all different kinds of sites, with no contextual relevance to your business at all.

I'm not surprised that what they've been doing so far hasn't been working because, frankly, what they've done is crap.

I'd look to terminate your service with them ASAP and move on.

Hey there

I've seen this before and in almost all cases the rankings were returned to their previous state, give or take maybe 1 or 2 places (which would be normal SERP flux).

Unfortunately, I've found that this can often take weeks and there's no real sure-fire way of getting Google to update it quicker.  Theoretically, to speed things up you want to get the crawler revisiting the URLs more and more often.  Fresh backlinks would do this, but obviously you can't game that sort of thing for web spam reasons.  You could also try pinging devices, such as GooglePing, but I'm not convinced by their effectiveness.

The most frequently crawled domain on the web is Twitter.  If you could legitimately get your key URLs tweeted, either by yourselves or others, this may encourage the Google crawler to revisit the URLs, and consequently reindex them.  There won't be any harm SEO wise in sending tweets with your URLs, it's a quick and free method and so may be worth giving it a shot.

Hope this helps you - I've often found you can't control these things but hopefully some of these theories might work.  In the long-run, however, the rankings will return and so for normal SEO purposes, create content and links as per usual.

No experience with any of the companies you've listed, but HitReach offer white label SEO and are some of the best in the business, in my opinion.

Here are their White Label Agreements

Presuming that you're going to be linking to your website in the comment, I'd probably keep it limited to your own niche, but there's definitely room for a few comments from other industries.

If your comments are engaging, provide value to that blog's community and are not on blogs that are spammed to death, then you won't be doing any harm.  The key is to comment something of worth and to integrate yourself into the community.

I always think of blog commenting as a way of establishing a community presence and to raise unaided brand awareness.  Any subsequent link of page strength is an after-thought for me.

First thing's first:

Is the current city page getting any traffic?

If yes - don't change a winning formula.

If not - let's weigh up the options.

By going with a separate domain, you're making the assumption that you'll be able to target the site specifically for the region + product/service and that users might be more likely to convert on a domain that contains the city (which may or may not be true).

By adding to the existing site, you're helping to reinforce the site's brand and you're collecting link equity in one place.  If you have a solid on-site SEO structure, that link equity can be efficiently passed around to rank other pages on your site.  Potentially, you'll get a stronger link equity with this method than you would with a dedicated city site, as you have several cities and products all with the potential to win links.

The citynamehomesforsale.com (unless it has historical links) is unlikely to have any SEO equity itself, meaning you'll be starting from scratch?  Is that really worthwhile, or would you be better off building up your existing web property and brand, utilising the strength it may already have, and attempt to rank your city keywords that way?

I'd be more inclined to look at that method, unless the site is under a form of algorithmic penalty.

Hope this helps

Hey there

The only way to find out is to test, I'm afraid.  I've seen Penguin and other algorithmic penalties be page-specific and some that are domain-wide.  I've actually used a similar test to find out which it is myself in the past.

But that test will show you whether the algorithmic penalty is page-specific or domain specific.  Don't forget, however, that just because the manual penalty was removed, you could still have a residual penalty on your site that will expire and be lifted over time, so that might be in play.

I'd go ahead with your test for sure.

I do like using bit.ly because of its built in analytics.

Example, if you take this URL: bit.ly/SEOcorrelations  and simply add a "+" at the end of it, so it becomes bit.ly/SEOcorrelations+  you can see some analytics that track number of clicks, what time, where from, what platform and so on.  Pretty nifty.

The analytics are pretty basic for sure, but does the job for me so far.  I'm with Rand in thinking we can get a lot more from them in the future.

Hi Amelia

I can't help directly with the Mozbar issue, but I can provide an alternative in the meantime:

http://www.impersonal.me

That site lets you carry out non-personalised, geo-specific searches for your keywords.  There's a UK setting on there by default (plus others).

One of my top tools and has been on my favourites bar for years now.

Hope it helps

Yeah, that's the general consensus around blogs, subfolder >subdomain.  Reinforced in this Moz guide.

However, I recall someone dispelling this myth with backup from Google or Matt Cutts that they are treated no differently from each other. There's also this post that concludes that there isn't a difference. Aaron Wall, well respected in the industry, thinks subdomains are arbitrary and aren't treated as a separate case.

My preference is to remain with a subfolder - I genuinely think it looks a bit neater.  Consensus is somewhat split over the whole "which is better for SEO", I'd stick with a subfolder if it's easy for you to implement and you're not too bothered about presentation in the URL.

I can only go on my experiences I'm afraid, based on what I've seen and what I assume to be the right SEO practices.

I'd put a lot of money on this being the case - but hey, you could always ask Matt yourself!

Hi Stacey

Depending on your industry, I know that PRNewswire has good reach and gets into a lot of Italian publications, so could be worth giving them a call.  Contact them on their US site and they'll be able to run it through with you.