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Of course John. You can make your title whatever you wish.

Your title should be descriptive and a compelling call to action.  Yes, there is a bit of benefit in having your main keywords in the title (using Apple and Pears would be fine for this on your domain, if it was your keyword), but most of all you want your title to be a big selling point.

Think about it, it's the first thing that users see.  A good title tag can steal away clicks from elsewhere - for example including "free shipping" if you're an ecommerce store is a fine idea.

Hope this helps.

There's a few solutions here.  If we rule out any chance of deleting these pages (would deleting them effect your ability to create products from those manufacturers in the future? Not sure what system you're going with here), you can take steps to limit any adverse effect this could have.

First, you could add the following code to the head tag of your HTML:

This can be easy to implement, but robots and crawlers have been known to ignore this directive.

Alternatively, you can add text to your Robots.txt file, telling crawlers to ignore certain pages.  In this case, you might want to add:

User-Agent: * Allow: /
Disallow: */littermaid-manufacturer

You'd want to do this for all of those empty pages, but this could take time and can get quite messy if there's dozens of these pages you want to block.

I'd highly recommend implementing a rel=canonical system onto your site (I would even if you didn't have this problem).  This schema language can help to reduce any negative duplicate content effect.  SEOMoz provides a detailed canonical guide here, which I recommend reading through.

Finally, as you've mentioned, adding content to these pages would also be a good idea, regardless if they're in use.  If you had a detailed description, say roughly 300+ words (very broad figure, go as detailed as you can), it would dilute any duplicate content elements on the pages.  In addition, it will be useful to have on your page if and when products are eventually added to them, which can be very useful if you wish to optimise the page itself.  Put it in the first paragraph under your topnav for now and you can always move it later.

Hope this helps - to summarise, I'd recommend implementing rel=canonical on your site, adding content to those pages and, if you want them blocked from crawlers completely, add the pages to your robots.txt.

Hi Chris

To answer your first question, SharedCount.com will give you a list of all of the key metrics for a URL.

If you want to get the data by bulk, there's this terrific guide on Monchito on how you can setup an excel sheet to check thousands of URLs really quickly.

Hope this helps!

To be brief:

You get people and other brands paying and bidding on Adwords to appear next to a competitor when people search for that competitor.

I don't see why SEO should be any different (ethically).

Whether it's feasible and worth your time optimise, however, that's different.

Hey Rafael

Quite a timely question, as Matt Cutts actually answered this today in his video post:

Here's the video

Generally it's OK so long as the sites are related to one another and it is not done excessively. 50 or more would be seen as excessive.

Here's a summary of the post on Search Engine Land

Hope this helps.

Regarding the syndicated content, not only do I think response would be even lower for those editors, but I don't think a link from a non-original, syndicated source would offer much SEO value.

I would approach the editor or author via social media initially, thanking them for the mention.  If you strike up a conversation, you can ask to contact them regarding a change in the article - which can then be the time to ask for a link.

That's one route to go down, but I don't think you'd have much success.  The outreach is rather forced/artificial, which usually results in poor response.  Get to know the editor/author over a series of communications, however, and opportunities may open up.  Then the next time they tweet for a few sources on your topic, hey presto - you've got content for them and a legitimate request to ask for a link if used.

It's worth noting as well that many newspaper editors I've spoken with have a simple directive not to link to external websites on their articles full-stop.

Furthermore, I don't think you should be too disheartened at all by the lack of a link.  The branding and PR effect of the mention will be very strong and you can also throw in a co-citation and lexical co-occurrence element into the mix.

There is a school of thought that Google is getting much better at making the connection between your brand and keywords should they be mentioned together on high authority sites - regardless if a link is present or not.  Should this prove to be more of a factor over the year(s), this mention will be very handy.

Here's some further viewing and reading on the theories, courtesy of (beardless) Rand and IAcquire:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday

http://www.iacquire.com/blog/its-not-co-citation-but-its-still-awesome/

Hope this helps.

Google should recognise these links as the same page, so you shouldn't be penalised for duplicate content.

However, a problem may arise with Google preferring one version of the URL over the other.  I'm presuming you'd want Google to rank and prioritise http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post/ over http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post#more-0001.

With URLs like these (and with query strings, such as '-post?query3') it is important to implement a self-referring canonical - ie a canonical tag that points to itself, without the query.  This will tell Google that this is the URL string you would prefer it to rank highest.

You can check out more on canonicals with the SEOMoz guide on them.

Hi Sunita

That shouldn't be a problem, as authorship works on a page by page basis, rather than the whole domain.  That means any verified G+ profile can post on any page on the web.  Social signals are attributed to the domain and not the author, so again there's no problem there.

Remember, you can always add extra users to both a G+ business page and an analytics or webmasters account, so if you want to give other people access, you can.  You can also control how much access they have.

Hope this helps.

I think if the links are broken and Google has been made aware of such, ie it has recrawled and cached the page (simply add "cache:" in front of the URL for the last cache copy - if the URL itself is broken, check if it is still indexed in Google), then it would know that the link has been broken and shouldn't count it.

If that's the case, I don't think the disavow would have any benefit, unless of course if the link were to return, which could be a possibility.

If the page is cached and that cached version has got the broken version = no worries.

If the URL is broken and the page is no longer indexed = no worries.

If the URL is broken and still indexed = check to see if any other links point to that URL (including the URLs site navigation and/or sitemap, if applicable.  If not, should deindex soon.  If there are links, I'd disavow.

Just my two pennies, hope it helps!

Hi Ben

Before developing the website itself, a good question to ask would be if the client is ever likely to run offline campaigns, such as print advertisements.

The reason being is that quite often it is hard to measure the impact and reach print advertisements have, along with calculating return of investment.

However, if you had a new domain, you could direct all your offline traffic (and only offline traffic) to this new domain. Therefore, whoever finds it you can be fairly certain that it is a result of your offline advertising.  I suppose the downside of this is that it can detract from building the 44-16 brand itself.

Another option would be to develop the new domain as a free, all-encompossing learning resource for film and production editors.  Develop a set of tutorials and best practice, but then invite other industry people to submit their own user generated content for use.  Maintain a level of impartiality, but by no means hide the 44-16 ownership.  You could even throw in a forum, should there be a demand for one.

To me, I think it would be quite valuable as a business to say that not only do we have a film and production company, but we're also the gatekeepers to one of the largest film and production communities in the UK, partnering professionals together around the country.

Those are just a couple ideas - the main SEO consideration needs to be that the additional website could function as a website in its own right.  It has its own content, its own approach, almost its own primary focus, with the secondary of course to help 44 16.  If it looks too much like a feeder site that's just linking in to the main domain for SEO benefit, it could be dangerous.

Hope this helps.

PS - Awesome cat.

I'd probably go with the larger area, like Atlanta, unless keyword research told me different.

For that, I'd jump into any existing analytics data your company might have and look at incoming search terms and see if there are any searches coming in for locations within a metro area.

Similarly, I'd go onto the Google Keyword Research Tool to get some rough idea of search volume.  So, I'd have a look at "Day Care in Metro Atlanta" and look at the search volume, then sub out "Atlanta" for one of the locations, for example: "Day Care in Metro Marietta" and so on.  If there's any decent local search volumes, I'd be tempted to optimise for that area specifically.

Hi David

This is quite easy to set up, so let's run through it:

First, go to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets and create a new widget.

On the next screen, click on the "search" tab.  From there, you'll be able to see that you can enter a hashtag or any other search query, so pop in #commercialproperty there.

When done, press "create widget".

When the page refreshes, you should see some code appear below the preview box.  You'll end up with something like this:

Tweets about "#commercialproperty"

Add that code to your HTML and hey presto! You now have the feed showing.

And remember, the search field in twitter lets you use normal search parameters just like Google, such as AND or OR commands, or even -from:usernamehere if you want to remove a certain someone from the feed.

For instance, you may want to show tweets containing #commercialproperty or the words "commercial property" together.  In this case, you'd enter this search term:

(#commercialproperty) OR (Commercial AND Property)

Here's the code for that widget:

Tweets about "(#commercialproperty) OR (Commercial AND Property)"

Hope this helps!

Hi Matthew

You'll probably be interested to see what Matt Cutts has to say about the issue: http://youtu.be/x0-jw_PfwtY

In short, a small number of sites that are related are fine to link to each other and won't flag quality guidelines.  It sounds like your websites fall under this, so you should be fine.

A problem may occur if there is a gratuitous amount of links or websites all passing PageRank.

If you want to be ultra-safe, you can make the links between the sites nofollow - which will you'll out any chance of a penalty due to interlinking.  But I think you'll be fine without this if done sparingly.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Actually yes, this is intentional.  It is a new ad extension that you can take advantage of.

You can find some more relevant info in this SEL article, as well as this one.

You won't be charged for a click if someone clicks a recommendation and you can find more examples in the wild by searching for "forex" among others.

Hope this helps!

I agree with you Neil.  Design the navigation for the user, not a search engine.  It makes more sense to have simply "pricing" then to try and chase the algorithm and include some keywords like "web design pricing".  Furthermore, the added benefit of using a navigation like that really would be negligible.

Internal links can help your site, but I think it would be better to use the text around the site as you say, rather than the navigation, in order to utilise these.  The navigation is more for the user than the Google crawler and thus should be designed for the user.

Just my 2p!

Hi Sara

The method I've used without fail on a whole host of sites is this:

Make sure you have the URL in the "links" section on the About tab in your Google+ business page.

Once it's there, simply add this bit of code anywhere in the code:

That's all you need to do.  Google will verify the code and the Google+ page fairly quickly after that.  The code only needs to be present on the homepage for the profile to verify, but you won't be harmed if it appears on all the pages on your site, if you have a bit of code that adds it automatically.

Ensure that the code is in the section of your homepage.  Hope this helps!

I'd definitely make that point you made in bold.

If you're a paid contributor, it's a matter of does the income outweigh the drawbacks? It's pretty hard to put a tangible figure on that, but there are definite upsides and downsides.  Arguably it adds to Moneywise's branding to be seen on Yahoo, but you can't track that. What you can track are clicks through to the site.

And of course it all depends on what the goal of Yahoo inclusion is.  If it is just a money-spinner and a worthwhile one at that, don't even put the same content on your site.  It's not worth running the risk of duplication penalties and/or link penalties, depending on how Google sees it.

If it is being done to raise brand awareness then (personally) I think it cannibalises your online visibility more than it promotes it - while still presenting SEO problems.

Outside looking in here, but I hope it helps. I'm with you - it's quite a predicament and a delicate situation, so I hope it works out for you.  At the very least, my SEO advice can be seen as impartial and without an agenda, which may be useful to bring to a discussion among people with the company's interests, plus their teams'/

I'm not sure where they're getting that information, but it's pretty ill-advised.

Now, there is some evidence to suggest that there is a correlation between having your keyword in the URL and higher rankings, see this searchmetrics study for more details.

The influence, however, is barely noticeable and having the keyword twice will very likely add no benefit at all. If anything, it may result in your URL looking spammy to a user, or even over-optimised to Google, which is a bad thing.

Include it once if you can, don't worry if you can't. Forcing to include it twice is definite overkill.

Hope this helps.

Hi Kadel

The Moz report looks at the number of FB shares for that website, not the associated Facebook page.

If I were to choose which one to share, I'd definitely gow with the URL of the website.  It means shares and clicks go straight through to your website.  In addition, if there is any SEO benefit to having social signals, you'll want to share your website URL so that it can benefit from them.

This Moz post from Tuesday may be of interest to you: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations

Hope this helps.

Hi there Itamar

If I am reading this correctly, are the (now removed) URLs appearing on your own site?

If so, in order to tell Google that these pages are well and truly gone, I would serve a 410 response on those pages, rather than a 404.  This is a response code that tells Google the page has gone permanently, and so it will encourage the crawler not to try to revisit the URL in the future.

That means that any external links pointing to that page will become obsolete and shouldn't be counted in your link profile.  That's the theory, anyway.  For that reason, I would hold off on disavowing those links for the time being.  I'd make a note of it, but if everything goes OK with the 410 response, Google probably won't count those external links towards your site anyway.  Just in case, make sure you get all of the external links and save them in an excel sheet, so if you do need to disavow them in the future, you have them to hand.

I've double checked the onssi.com site in the safe browsing tool (see for yourself here) and it looks as though Google thinks the site is safe - ie it doesn't think it's hacked, which is great.  In any case, you may want to run the site through the malware review process just to be absolutely sure.

Hope this helps.