Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As Jeffrey said, dont try to reinvent the wheel, check out the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool.

Otherwise you can look at these parameters:

• What is the current rank of the keyword?
• Number of hits at Google?
• Competition on Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS)
• Compare the onpage with the competitors
• Compare incoming links with the competitors

Combine all of these parameters to get an idea of the difficulty.

Good luck!

I can recommend you to read Wil Reynolds latest presentation from Linklove London, 2012:

http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/wilreynolds/stalking-for-links

He is a very smart guy, enjoy reading!

I would recommend you to make contact with your web agency and see if they can fix this for you. The best solution is to get one single unique URL for the index page.

Quite often, the web agencies can fix it, I´ve worked with a lot of customers having the same issue.

Good luck!

Add a canonical URL that points to the URL that you want to use.

or

Some reading:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Hi Andre!

This is a common problem and I know several people that have met it.

Tips for fixing this problem:

1. Make sure that your prefered landing page are relevant for the keyword, title, H1 and content.

2. Use the power of internal links, if you mention the keyword on other pages, make a link to the prefered page with that keyword (naturally sometimes, not always). It will give Google a signal on what page you want to rank for the targeted keyword.

3. Check incoming links in OSE, if you find "good" links that are pointing to the wrong url, make contact and ask them to update the URL.

4. Make more signals by using social media-links (G+, Facebook and Twitter) to preferred URL.

Hope this will help you!

Hi Suren!

Here is Googles SEO guide:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Hi Pete!

Take a look in Googles SEO guide on page 26, http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Good luck!

Good answer, measure the results!

If he choose option C he will loose the traffic as well, visitors will just come to a dead end.

If you put the visitor in the front seat, I would suggest redirecting the old subpage to a corresponding page on the new site, and if you dont have any as he mention, I would suggest option A.

Hi Andre!

I would suggest option A. If you cant find a corresponding url on the new site, then you should redirect it to the new start page. Then you will take care of the visitors that might find the old pages and send them to your new site + get the most of the old subpage PR.

Recommendations from Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105

Good luck!

Hi Nancy!

One reason Google is saying that is because you have a large amount of links compared to the amount of regular text. That will make them suspicious.

You have ~100 links on the three subpages you´ve listed which is no problem, but, when it is compared to the amount of plain text this might happen.

See Matt Cutts blog post about this: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

Hi Malte!

We have to see this as two different things, link between sites and link between Google Analytics accounts. If you make a link-weel between your sites Google may react, but I cant see any problem by creating connections between different sites GA, it has nothing to do with the SEO, it´s just the way you choose to manage GA..

One account with many profiles

Easy to manage, but, this will stop you in the future if you want to link GA to your Adwords-account. To make that connection to work you need separate accounts for each site.

One account for each site

I would prefer this option, one unique account for each site. Then you can add one login as administrator on all other accounts to make it easy to manage.

Hope this will help you, good luck!

Here is a great video from SEOmoz Whiteboard friday:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-we-increased-our-twitter-followers-by-250-whiteboard-friday

Hi Daniel!

Nofollow links are often used for comments in blog posts, to minimize the amount of "spam-comments-to-get-links".

But sometimes you can get a recommendation or an award for something, maybe you have a cooperation with someone, then the nofollow link might come from a high quality site. These types of links will give positive signals to Google and in a long term affect ranking, even if the link has nofollow.

Do a good job and recieve recommendations, make contacts and you will get valuable links.

Hi Jason!

Alex has a good point there, spanish anchor text inside english text will just look spammy.

One thing to remember is that Google recognize synonyms and other languages as well. If you want to build links for the spanish word "perder peso" and find it very tough to make it effective, links from english sites with the english anchor text "weight loss" will help you as well (the effect might not be as good as with spanish, but it will help).

Google will understand that "perder peso" equals "weight loss". But the recommendation is to work with links for the goal language, it´s most relevant for the users and in the eyes of Google.

I see, you need to add both the www and non-www version in GWT + verify them both, then you can choose the preferred setting.

Hi!

First of all, think of the adress that you want to promote, www.footballboots.co.uk or footballboots.co.uk ? Maybe you are using the www-version in offline marketing, it is important that you choose one and always use that one wherever you show yourself.

When you have decided which one to use we come to the technical part, lets say you choose the www-version.

If someone goes to footballboots.co.uk they should be sent to www.footballboots.co.uk by a redirect 301. This redirect will forward the majority of the link juice from non-www to the www-version. The main thing is to have one unique url that displays unique content.

You can also log into Google Webmaster Tools and tell Google what you prefer, non-www or the www-version, it will fix the address in SERP.

Then continue the great work, building links to the url of your choice (www-version in my example).

I hope this will help you!

I would also recommend you to be active in social media like Facebook and Twitter.

The social activity is positive in many ways,

1. Creates a buzz around your business, gives Google positive signals about popularity.

2. You will spread your information to friends, customers and others in your industry, it will help you build the brand.