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Sorry Pete, that was a typo where I meant to say 'internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage' (I've amended my reply).

Depends on the tool you are using but duplicate page title would have to be an exact match on the page title I would expect...

Where are you seeing this error appear?

And no, it's unlikely that if all your page titles are being appended with your company name that this would flag duplicate page titles.

If your website is dynamic, it is likely that your page titles are being rewritten but something is delaying the time it takes to rewrite them so any bot/crawler is just detecting them as duplicates... Possibly.

It took over four months for authorship markup to work for our blog. It seems Google are rolling our rich snippet inclusion into the search results very gradually, and their could even be a domain queue based on authority - either way, I doubt the utilisation of the Google+ network will do you any harm at all whilst you're waiting.

Firstly, the first thing to do is try to keep all advertising below the fold (that means below the visible section of your page when you first land on your website).

If you're already offering advertising in the side menu and header, is there really a need for Adsense within the content body as well... twice? If you wanted to utilise both an independent ad network as well as Adsense, I would extend your onpage content, ensure the non advertising content is of a much larger ratio than your ads.

Typically, ads are seen a mile off and won't be clicked on that much these days, you may find that switching to image ads rather than text ads within Adsense delivers a higher clickthrough from your visitors - at least these aren't as obvious as the Adsense text ads.

Subtlety is the key here, play around with colours, layouts and formats until you find an approach that works best with your website content and your target audience. Never try and trick your readers either (by disguising ads).

There is no right or wrong way when it comes to website advertising but don't expect it to generate a large revenue stream overnight, you need to keep content extremely on topic and relevant to maximise the relevancy of displayed ads from the ad network(s).

What makes you think you have too many on page links? Internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage, linking just dilutes the authority from the page (amongst other crawlability and usability factors), but if it's internal linkage, at least the authority is kept on your domain.

Simple, effective and easy to use navigation is critical to website usability and will have an affect on performance in search engines. In your example, I wouldn't expect any negative ranking affects to occur as a result of the style of navigation menu your website utilises. If that is deemed most useful for your customers, then that's the best approach.

Use a tool such as SEOmoz' Crawl Test or Xenu's Link Sleuth to determine any crawling issues. There are a number of free online tools for this too.

Hi Peter,

In addition to topic (sometimes), what I mean is the nature of the content can affect the costs - for example: press releases, blog posts, landing page / sales copy, website info pages etc.

For a 1,000 word article, we would likely charge around £75 mark.

Thanks

That doesn't even make any sense...?

Obviously there is a line between creating mediocre copy yourself and hiring an experienced professional writer that understands human reading behaviour, website usability, targeting different mindsets and implementing the necessary to maximise the potential of said content being found.

Specifically requested was "the best quality".

It's relatively simple to check if content that has been created for you has been copied from elsewhere online (which is what I presume you mean by "duplicate").

What type of content is it? This could essentially affect the costs.

We provide copywriting / content creation services and for high quality copy, hourly rate would be about £25 or quote can be provided on scale of project. There are hundreds of low end, low quality article writing services of course that are from as little as $5 per 1000 words but as with everything, you get what you pay for...

I appreciate that doesn't directly answer your question but as a provider, though it might be useful to chime in.

What are we looking at? I can see Adsense ads on your website so how are they not displaying as you're expecting?

Personally, I would say your website contains too many ads too. This will likely affect your rankings in search engines but also lower the value of your pages plus deter visitors.

Almost any domain's link profile I look at contains a collection of backlinks such as these, I've noticed many in our site's link profile before - they come and go though and mostly these are just auto generated via various scrapers, bots and other automated systems to try and manipulate engines and/or mass produce content at other domains.

How many link's are we talking here, if they account for a good 25% - 30% of your overall link profile, then I would agree there is a chance that a drop in rankings could be related to these since the Penguin update. If its only a few links, then I wouldn't say these would be having much of an affect on your rankings.

The drop in rankings could be due to any number of reasons so it's not practical to start exploring these without first establishing exactly what has been done on your website in the past week (or even few days depending on how frequently your domain gets crawled) and diving into your web analytics to establish any unusual onsite behaviour or changes to metrics in the lead up to today.

Could well be the affects of an algorithm update. Could be something entirely different.

Does it rank for anything worthwhile?

Does it have any legitimate / valueable links pointing to it?

If the answer is no to both of those questions, just delete the page and recreate it at a new URL and request a removal of the old URL from Google's index (and obviously don't 301 redirect it).

Another recommendation for this would be Xenu's Link Sleuth too.

It's a free application that will crawl your entire domain and report titles, metadata, broken links, header response codes amongst a load of other relevant metrics and will allow you to sort by any data along with display a report too.

Many websites have incorporated the necessary development that allows query parameters from their internal website search to be indexed by search engines - with the view of essentially driving more traffic - however untargeted it is likely to be - it also builds many thousands more indexed pages from their domain in the search engines.

A common way of doing this is by monitoring incoming search term referral traffic and then adding a widget on page to contain these search queries linking to the same search query processed via their internal search, hence how so many of these pages can be indexed for a particular domain.

It's very common with torrent / file sharing websites.

You unfortunately can't control what methods another website is using but it sounds like there is more to it in the sense of what they have done if they are outranking for a completely unrelated term to their domain yet have identified that your domain is authoritative for this same terms.

Without knowing the specifics, it's hard to elaborate further on this... Happy to look if you wanted PM domain/keyword.

Any tools that are worth their weight in gold will be those that typically balance out the elements of optimising a page and reflect this in the grade it offers. Such as SEOmoz for example, their tools aren't going to advise to optimise everything as much as possible to the extent it is over-done, if this looks the case, then the grade is highly unlikely to be an A.

I think the term over-optimisation is largely misperceived. Delivering a well structured, compliant and semantically coded, unique website which provides original content, caters for its intended audience and takes into consideration usability measured via onsite behavior is naturally going to perform well anyhow. There are hundreds of factors granted, but generally only need to be addressed once (such as templating, internal linkage structure, URL formatting and content hierarchy) (with the website elements that is) - after this, as long as content is researched, offers value and is what people want to see, then the grade of any given page will be pretty good whilst not 'over-optimised'.

Any cheap and basic web based tool that basically just gives a grade based on title, metadata, keyword frequency, blog, social profiles is close to useless (take Hubspots free website grader for example) anyhow and wouldn't contain a formula to distinguish between whether (for example) a page has more than 500 words on a page or whether the same keyword appears 450 times within that same 500 words.

If you can rely on any set of tools online that are in touch with the latest algorithm updates from Google then SEOmoz is the safest bet.