Welcome to the Q&A Forum

First, can I ask if you received any message from Google in Webmaster tools?  I'm wondering whether you got an unnatural links warning.

At first glance, I think you may have received a Penguin/Over-optimisation penalty. Looking at the anchor text diversity in your link profile (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.tilers-dublin.com) and (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.painterdublin.com) the vast majority of your links come from anchor text heavy terms, like "painting dublin" and "tilers dublin".

Furthermore, it looks as though the majority of these links are coming from the footer from your group of websites and are site-wide.  After the Penguin update, this quickly became a big red flag.

My recommendations would be first to check what message you've received from Google.  After that, I would remove all of the footer links on your sites. I think you would be OK replacing these with a single link, on the homepage, to your websites - provided that you mark it as "nofollow".

Once that is done, I would file a reconsideration request.  I haven't checked many of your other backlinks, so it might be the case that you would need to remove any other spammy links you can find there.

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.

A really good one to start off with is LinkDetox.

You can pay for a full crawl of your site's backlinks with a single tweet.

It will break your backlinks into three categories: toxic, suspicious and healthy.  Healthy are obviously A-OK.  Toxic are links from sites that have been deindexed - these are clear-cut "bad badlinks".

The suspicious links come in a variety of categories themselves, indicating why the tool thinks they are suspicious.  Some links might be bad, but some might be OK.  It's important, therefore, to read through the tool's reasoning for making it suspicious and see if you agree, as well as cross referencing it with some SEOMoz metrics such as PA/DA.

Hope you have fun with the tool - for the price of one tweet, I'd say it's definitely worth it.

This is a fascinating question.

Regarding your question about 404 pages getting a 200 status. So obviously, Google doesn't index 404 pages, and de-indexed pages do not pass on link juice.  However, like you say, some people and sites link to 404 pages and so, were these ever to go live, you'd imagine it would have some sort of strength/authority.

But how could you practically accomplish this? If you make the 404 page a 200 page, you've now got no 404 page for your website, which could be very bad indeed. So, you'd probably want to substitute that page with a new, fresh 404 page. But if that sits as the 404 page and gets marked as a 404, wouldn't the links become void again?

If you then moved the old 404 to a new page, it loses the links once pointing to it.

The hongkiat webpage is a really clever idea as it takes all those pages and makes a shareable hub, which of course then gets all the links and strength.

Yes, most social media profiles and pages work in the same way.

If you were to earn healthy links to your page, you could theoretically rank higher for certain terms.  Whether there's an upper limit for Facebook in Google I'm not sure.

Great advice here from Marcus.

To expand on his point on hosting, you should see if Vidahost can provide what you need - I've found them to be very reliable and affordable for some blogs. Good customer service as well.

Woops, so it does. Must have mis-typed when Ctrl+F'ing

Well, first of all the meta description is only a suggestion to Google of what to put in the text underneath your SERP. It's by no means an order.

Second, if you jump into the source on the Engadget homepage, it doesn't actually have any meta description code.  So there's nothing there to suggest to Google what to have show up in the SERPs.

So, how does Google work out what to whack in there? Well, in the same way that sometimes Google decides what would be the best title tag for the user, it can work out what would be the best thing to display.

Currently, I'm seeing this description:

"Nokia's Q4 2012. From somewhere atop a Finnish mountain, Stephen Elop is both bellowing and whispering Nokia's fourth quarter and full-year financials."

This is the combination of the third article's image alt tag and the first line of the article on the page.  With it being the third article, it is probably the last time Google crawled the page and updated it's SERP display accordingly.  So, Google is pulling the alt text of the image and the first sentence of the article it has seen.

Now it's worked out nicely in this case, but it may not be so smooth for other articles. I imagine Engadget have this in mind when producing them.

If anything, shows you how useful alt text can be for images.  It's not a solution for everyone and unsure what the SEO ramifications would be (wouldn't be anything too major, I'd suspect).  But very interesting to see, thanks for pointing it out!

Article directories have been heavily devalued with the big Google updates.  While they were once quite powerful, that time has now gone.

Definitely won't say they won't pass any value at all, because they will, but put it this way - for every 1 article you submit to a general article submission site, you could probably find 100 better websites, blogs or more to post it to.

It shouldn't but I'd consider a more specific approach.

Would it be possible to redirect URLs to more specific (and appropriate) landing pages? It might limit any interruption to the user journey.

Also, how many URLs are we talking about here? If we're talking hundreds of thousands (seen it happen with some CMS), redirecting them all via .htaccess might slow down the speed of your site, slightly.  Google does take site speed into account for SEO, so be wary of this - although this will only be a problem if you're redirecting an absolute truckload of URLs.

Other than that, it's generally good practice to 301 404s, so I'd go ahead with it.

Hi there

You could also try these websites:

PostJoint

GuesBlogIt

Guestr

BlogSynergy

Also, I'd really recommend using this Google doc spreadsheet found here - you can insert a single keyword and it will use a whole bunch of Google queries to pull up guest blogging opportunities directly on blogs.

Hi Philipp

I think you can remove the comma separation in excel for your worksheet. Try this guide out (lifted from here)

Open the worksheet that contains the data from which you want to remove trailing commas.

Right-click the header of the column directly to the right of the data column that you want to clean. Click "Insert" in the menu to insert a new function column.

Type the following in the cell in the formula column adjacent to the first data cell:

=IF(RIGHT(A1,1)=",",LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-1),A1)

Substitute the cell address of your first data cell in place of all instances of "A1" in the above example.

Press "Enter." Excel first determines whether the rightmost value in the data cell is a comma. If so, it determines the number of characters in the cell using the "Len" function and then returns only the leftmost N minus 1 characters, thus omitting the comma. If no comma is detected at the end of the string, then Excel returns the original cell value.

Right-click the formula cell and click "Copy." Paste the formula into the cell directly to the right of all cells from which you want to clean the commas. Excel will perform the comma-trimming function on all cells and return the update value in the formula column.

Highlight all formula cells, then right-click the array and choose "Copy."

Highlight the original data cells, then right-click the array and choose "Paste Special." Click the radio button next to "Values," then click the "OK" button. Excel will copy the output strings from the comma-less formula cells into your original data cells as static character strings.

Highlight the formula column, then right-click the array and click "Delete" from the menu. This will delete the formula column now that a permanent copy of the formula output has been saved in the original data column.

Not sure if this will help you, but here's hoping.

If you actually find someone marketing themselves as an "SEO Guru", I'd advise to stay well, well away.

It's a horrible term, generally used by egotistical con-artists.

It's a reasonable assumption to make and I'd say if you can get those .co.uk links, then by all means pursue them.

However, it can be argued that Google does recognise .com as a global domain name, not just US specific.  So if you were to get links from a .com, while not .co.uk, it wouldn't be as far behind in value as, say, a .pl or .in.

Ultimately, where and how you're getting the link will matter more on your link profile than the referring domain extension.  It would look out of place if a .co.uk had an 80% incoming link profile from .ro domains for sure, but if there's a healthy mix and even a non .co.uk extension being the majority of incoming links, you could still rank highly - provided that the links are on relevant site and come along with content that is beneficial for the user.

In closing, if you can get those links then go for them - but what will have a more defining impact is how you're getting the links. If it's done in an above-board, white-hat way, then you shouldn't need to worry too much about what domain extension it comes from.

This is a really good question, Lenia. Really, really good, in fact.

Let's break this down into a number of factors:

Having localised URLs (by that I mean URLs, written in the country's language) -  From an SEO perspective, I do believe there is some correlation that having localised URLs helps to rank higher, in the same way that having a keyword in the URL may help - having this keyword in the country's language would, by default, work the same way.  However, the SEO benefit of doing so isn't that big, I'd see it as only a little boost, so I wouldn't let the SEO side weigh too heavily on your decision.

Now, having localised URLs for a user perspective is something that I think is very useful. I'd see it as a bigger plus for a user than I would for SEO purposes.  I think having localised URLs shows the user that you're a part of that country, not just a larger corporation with an international presence but no real interest in the country for example.  I think it helps users recognise and anticipate what the URLs would be for their user journey as well.  Also, (I don't know how relative this might be for you) but having localised URLs can definitely help for offline campaigns and promotion.  Say you were running some newspaper or billboard ads and you wanted to track how many people were then visiting your site as a result, you might want to setup a custom URL or search term for the campaign.  So, you're newspaper advert would have "Visit www.domain.com/customURLhere/" on it.  This would look infinitely better if it was written in the localised language (although I suppose you could always setup a 301 redirect for the URL).

Ultimately, however, I think you're decision should largely be influenced on the technical implications.  The SEO value would be slight, but not that significant whichever method you choose.  I would go with whatever solution would be easiest for you technically - it sounds like it would be easier to accommodate user and SEO factors, rather than having to accommodate technical factors for a slight SEO gain.

Just my input on the issue, and so I'd love to hear more from others on it - as I think it's a great question which could do with the input of some of the talented folk here.

Teehee, being a bounce board sounds fun. I think you're right to err on the side of caution with regards to confessing and repenting to Google as well, but that's just me being a sceptic.

Your options are pretty limited, I'm afraid.

If you don't want to implement canonicals, then you're only alternative is to not have duplicate content.  In which case, you and your retailers will need to rewrite and be unique.

To be honest, I would be pushing all your retailers to do this anyway.  Not only will having their unique content help each subdomain rank easier, it should be remembered that the canonical tag is a suggestion to Google, not a directive/order.  A very strong suggestion, it's worth noting, but not a 100% proof solution.

Unique content, on the other hand, is.

Think you've weighed up the options quite well, Brian.

Those low spammy directory links - how likely is it that you would get them removed? You may find that some of them have simply been abandoned after the big Google updates and so it will be like whacking your head against the wall trying to get them removed.

How much link "strength" (PA/DA etc) does your current domain have? What are the traffic numbers? From this, you may be able to work out whether it would be worth redirecting if you could get all those bad links removed - which, as you said, may take a long time.

I'd be tempted to start afresh on the new domain and do not redirect the original site to it, therefore foregoing any link removal.  If you have a lot of brand terms coming in to your site via organic search (you can check this with Analytics), you could place a notice on the homepage of your old website saying you've rebranded, with the URL written underneath (but obviously not linked to your new site) - this would somewhat consolidate any interrupted user journey.

That's my recommendation, but would be keen to hear others' as well, as it's a very good question.  Hope this helps, Brian!

I think separate domains would be the preferred choice in a perfect world, but of course we live in a far-from-perfect one!

You're quite right to flag a potential duplicate content issue. Two separate domains may help you to rank in two different search engines, but this would require you to have completely unique content for both sites.  Navigation and layout can obviously be the same, but the content within your pages will need to be unique, which, depending on your industry, may simply not be possible (there are only so-many times you can reinvent the wheel, or re-write it as it were).

With a localised site on a .com domain (you would be fine with either subdomain or subfolder, but if pushed, I'd pick a subfolder - www.domain.com/uk/page1.html for example) you may not need to rewrite as much content - as you can informational pages and other similar style pages sitting on the .com domain for all local subfolders to use, for example.  However, you will still need to rewrite other pages that would have similar content, such as products or services.

If you have the time and resource, I'd go for two separate domains.  There's definitely a lot of data and results to support that a .co.uk domain will have an easier time ranking higher in Google UK over a .com (although not essential), which can help get you going.  It will require a lot of writing and re-writing, but if you get it right now, at the first stage, it would save any headaches in the future.

Good stuff Steve, hope it all goes well. Just give me a shout if you have any problems.