Open Q&A Thread for Internet Marketing Questions

I've seen how tagging can really help something like wordpress, but I wonder it would help an ecommerce site. People could tag items like "beginner" or "cheap" etc.

We are looking into doing this for a customer.

Do you think it's a good idea?

Why don't the pages created by tag incur a content duplication penalty?

Aaron,

Do you have any tips for obtaining backlinks from Dutch websites?
Quick and easy to obtain backlinks?

Any resources (lists) of places where you can submit your link to?
Dutch directories?
Dutch article directories?

If you had a Brand New site w/ a new domain, what five Internet Marketing things would you do right away to set yourself above the competition?

Aaron,

I moved my web domain from a standard http://www using a 301 redirect and removed the www so it just reads http://

All my backlinks are pointing to the original. Is this going to be an issue regarding organic optimization

Do you think Google is discounting links from blogs that are not using nofollow?

And, do you think that site owners that disable nofollow are completely killing their sites from an SEO perspective?

Hi Aaron,

I have a question on your thoughts about the future of 301's for ranking purposes. I wanted to know what you think about setting up sites for the purpose of building links naturally (where maybe you couldn't for a corporate site), then redirecting further down the road. How effective do you think this is today, and how effective do you think this will be in the future?

I know you had some troubles in the past with 301's but just wanted to know your thoughts on effectiveness not only today, but in the future.

Thanks in advance!

I've been thinking about getting into PPC again. I started over a year ago, was doing fine, then got screwed with that whole quality score thing, got frustrated, and gave up...etc.

Anyway, I understand that it's all about testing and tweaking, I'm fine with that. My question is, how do you determine when it's time to give up on a campaign?

I've heard people say things like, "Trash it if it doesn't convert in 100 clicks, $100, or X amount of days..." But that doesn't seem realistic when you're working with micro-niches, and long-tail keywords that don't get a ton of searches quickly.

I would hate to give up on something prematurely, but I understand that the whole point is the ROI... Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks Aaron!

Aaron,
I've got a customer that has a regional business centered around selling in approx. 20 small cities. For his on-site SEO, I've built the onsite tags for 4 of the 1st level topic pages (ie...Contact Page, Testimonial page, Home page and Photo page, etc...) around long tail phrases (ie...Grand Prairie kitchen remodeling, Dallas kitchen remodeling, etc...) and kept the same theme from the Title tag, dow through descriptive tag, keyword tag and finally ALT Image Tags. I "still" have remaining "city-based" long tail phrases remaining to insert into the SEO of the site. How would you continue the SEO addition of the current unincluded "city-based" long tail phrases? Add more pages? I'm looking to see if I'm on the right track with the approach I'm using ...or... I should be doing this project some other way? A lot of theme-based cities I'm trying to get ranked for!

Thanbks, in advance for your time & thoughts!

Hello Aaron...great job presenting at Pubcon.

My question references my recent Pubcon blog post:

http://www.semportland.com/announcements/matt-cutts-told-me-to-post-this...

Matt says Google will reset the links on expired domains.

1)Do you agree that this is massively bad news for domainers?
2)Isn't it illogical to reset links on expired domains and not on sold domains (since the net result of having a totally different site that didn't earn the existing links is the same)?
3)Why is this story seemingly flying under almost everyone's radar?
4)Any other comments?

Thanks,

Todd

1) Are reciprocal links--such as typically occur in blog carnivals, meme writing projects, etc--a signal of spamminess in the eyes of SEs? How do you avoid giving this signal without completely refusing to participate in legit link-building opportunities?

2) Is PR distributed evenly amongst a page's outbound links? Or do off-domain links contain a bigger boost than in-domain links?

In your opinion is Google's Webmaster Tools internal link report a valid tool to assess internal linking issues?

I have a 1 year old industry site containing a directory, blog, job searches etc. It has approximately 13,000 pages indexed which is about 75%.

When viewing the pages "that have links pointing to them from other internal pages" I only see 9 pages. My home page, my blog home, a popular blog post, 2 metro pages and a couple of directory listings.

The 2 metro pages showing are both from the same subject. These are the 1st and 7th link in the subject "tree" of my site navigation.

Also a search for site:domain [metro] [subject] has most metro pages in 5th below home page, blog page and 2 directory listings. However, the 2 metro pages showing in the internal linking report show in 2nd place under my home page for the same query type.

External linking doesn't appear to be a factor as one of those only has six local.yahoo.com links which I don't believe carry any weight as other pages that list strangely have 100s. Also the listing pages showing above the term don't have any external links.

If needed here is the structure of my internal linking:

The directory portion of the site is broken into 2 subjects and 25 metro areas within each subject. The site's main navigation (shown on every page) contains links to each metro area for each subject. So that's 50 links along with a few other site nav links. The anchor text in the format of [metro][subject].

Also each listing page links to it's own metro's page and other listings in the same metro area (in addition to the main nav).

I hope that wasn't too long winded. Any input or opinion would be greatly appreciated.

Aaron,
I had another question without taking up too much of your time? As in my earlier question, I am optimizing sites using long tail phrases. the sites have each been around over a year and all are indexed. I have been ranked on page 1 for Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK. Recently "ASK" has been "dropping" the ranking it had for the Home Page on each of the "keyword phrases" on Just the "Home Page"? ASK took each of the keyword phrases from Page 1/Position 2 to (-) de-listed? Again, this is ONLY happening on ASK? Any ideas?

Thanks!

Hi Aaron

I've been doing affiliate marketing for about two years. With my first domain name I did reciprocal links to a lot of low-quality sites, plugged in some product feeds and ended up in Google oblivion. I was filterd to hell and decided to try again from scratch.

I 301 re-directed that domain to a new one, bought your book and invested a lot in quality directory submissions like botw, yahoo, joeant etc. I also bought a few on-topic links here and there. Overall, I was very pleased with the results. All was going perfectly till I added a feed from one particular guided tours company. I then got 950'ed straight away. I removed the feed and got back to the first SERP pages quickly. About two weeks ago I added a much cut down version of the feed (just the product titles, not the product description this time) merged it in with lots of my own original content and got 950'ed again - where I am right now aka Google hell.

Ive noticed that sites with high PR don't get 950'ed - G. just seems to pick on the little guy. I'm not a spammer, I produce tons of orginal, high quality articles that I use to pre-sell the merchants products but still I get 950'ed when I add even a whisker of the feed. I understand G. doesn't want dupe content in their index but sheesh sometimes they throw out the babies with the bathwater. Do you have any tips on avoiding and getting out of the 950 penalty?

Aaron

You define a niche to write about. If a large percentage of people are coming to your blog because of a post that represents a sub-niche should you accept and re-focus creating new content around that sub-niche? Should that be a short-term strategy and try to slowly expand from there? Or should you create content that defines broader boundaries and explains much of what happens in the sub-niche? (is this clear?)

Thanks

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for giving us this opportunity to get direct answer from you.

Can you please suggest me a good action plan or daily activity calender which will help me get maximum results from my Internet Marketing Venture.

I want specific help in terms of what activity I should do first how much I should allocate for Traffic Generation, How much time in a day I should allocate for Copywriting and How much time should I allocate for List Buildinge etc..

I would also appreciate if you can share with us which one you give most important?

List Building,
Copy Writing
Traffic Generation.

I wanted to get some expert advise rom you on this which will help me in a long way.

Looking forward to hear back from you.

best Regards,
-Gaj
http://www.listbuildiingsuperstars.com

Hi Gaj
I don't think there is a singular relevant answer here. Like I do well mostly with blogging, answering email, but never put much effort into "list building". Others do it another way.

Where you should spend your time depends on where you feel you can add the most value, where you feel you can extract the most value, and what you enjoy doing.

Hi Aaron,

I read your review of SEO Elite at http://www.seobook.com/archives/000869.shtml, where you recommended against the tool.

What is your opinion of this breed of tool in general, like Web Position Gold, IBP, SEO Studio? What do they do well, where do they fall down and what could they do better? What would a perfect tool be, in your opinion?

Regards,

-Lukas Rathswohl

Hi Aaron,

What are your thoughts re: the value of domain names with a country-specific domain extension (e.g. Australia / .au). Specifically, I"m thinking about 2 separate scenarios .... where the keywords in the domain name:

1. have specific relevance to that country, and

2. do NOT have specific relevance to that country.

Given .com domains are hard to come by these days, do you consider domains with a country extension something worth looking at as a mid to long-term domaining strategy ?

Thanks as always.

Chris G.

Aaron,
Great website, your blogs are great to read, did a good job presenting at Pubcon, I think you are one of the smartest on the topic and seeing Rand agree as well is nice to get pats on the back.

Anyways, got a question for you. Started a website for the company I work for to sell there obsolete/excess products online (manufacturing company). We sell fireplaces/space heaters so its hard to linkbait with this topic much but here are some things we are doing and have done.

- Rank very well for alot of our keywords organically.
- 200 tips section with LifeTips
- Social bookmarking on major social sites
- Got a couple articles on propeller frontpage
- PPC for good converting keywords
- Analyze everything with google analytics
- SEO'ed all pages to as good as we fell
- Setup nofollow tags to funnel link juice
- 30 second videos of our products in use (fireplaces burning to show the flames)
- Send out promotional coupons/specials via email marketing monthly

This is a brief overview of all of the things we have done to promote our site and we receive about 2k (1k are organic) hits a day and make about $1.5 million a year from this site, when my boss asks how can we increase sales do you have any good input to do anything other then this? I have thought about doing advertisements on other sites but its hard to find ones related to fireplaces that we feel we could make an ROI. Sorry if this is an off the wall question but we have done everything I know and just curious if you had any more suggestions for us to help promote our site or specific products online. Thanks so much!

I have an e-commerce site and on the home page I have some articles that are pertinent to my industry. When I click on the article, I see a long string up in the address bar. It includes http://www.mysite name/article. Would this long string in the address bar prevent the article from being indexed or could it be that I do not have enough links to the article?

Aaron,

Which is the most reliable keyword research tool, free or paid that provides keyword research data over the last 12 months?

Thanks,

James

Hi Aaron,

In your experience does a .net exact keyword match domain carry as much weight as a .com exact match domain?

I found a .net domain for sale that's perfect for my needs, but I'd think twice about buying it if it does not carry the exact match boost.

Thanks,

Anton

Hi Hpotamus
I can't guarantee it will stay that way forever but generally yes it carries the same weight is the answer for Google right now.

Hi Aaron,

I'm currently working on a project that involves developing lead generation real estate website(s).

I have two options I'm considering:

a) Build several websites, each site on a keyword rich domain, and each with content optimized to target specific, well-defined geographic areas

b) Build one website on a branded domain name and focus on optimizing that one site for all the geographic areas being targeted

From an SEO perspective, which would be a more effective strategy?

Thanks,
-Diego

Hi Diego
It depends on how big your public relations budget it, how remarkable your idea is, and a variety of other factors.

Short term the keyword rich URLs will have better return. In the long term they might still have better return if they are well done. If you go big you have to compete with some of the already big established players head to head. It is better to be in the top 3 in a small market than it is to consistently rank #30 for everything. And to beat them with a new site you are really going to have to out market them!

But if you have a big budget and a game changer idea you might want to launch the big one.

Even if you do launch a big one and turn it into a real brand owning the smaller ones probably will not hurt you. Just look at how many thin affiliate looking and near identical sites companies like Monster and Bankrate own.

Aaron,

My site is RentVine.com and most all my pages are index and cached within Google, but for some reason my About Us page is cached by not in the index: http://www.rentvine.com/anc/about.cfm.

I have not blocked it from the search engines in anyway. I can tell it is not indexed because it has no page rank and when you do a search for "RentVine About" in Google it does not appear.

Since it is so close to the root I am confused. Not that is page matter much, I am just curious and baffled.

Hi Aaron,
To what do extent do you think that Google/Yahoo's results are affected by hand edits.

Also, how important do you think it is to be integrated/linked in your topical community? Will off-topic linkbaits and links from general authority sites be enough to rank most sites?

Hey Aaron,

I own an ecommerce website in a particular niche. I recently bought a non-commercial blog in the same niche that gets 10 times as many visitors as my ecommerce site.

The blog was a labor of love for the previous owner. I want to take over the site and maintain the same level of editorial integrity. In other words, I don't want to flood it with ads for my ecommerce site, which would be easiest and laziest thing to do.

My dilemma is: How do I build value for users of the blog while still finding a way to benefit the ecommerce website.

While I want to maintain the editorial integrity of the blog, the fact is that I wouldn't have bought it unless I saw the synergy between it and my commercial site.

The most important part is that I've made myself part of the "conversation." But how do I capitalize on the "markets are conversations" idea without being too spammy. In other words, how do I go about sneaking in, "btw, we have some great [keyword] over at [domain name of ecommerce site]"?

Thanks.

Hi Aaron,

Does the nofollow attribute pass link juice?

Also, just a thought -
I was just wondering how long google will see 'tags' as a form of keyword stuffing? The reason I ask is because Google seems to want to counteract any trendy SEO strategies.

Hi Aaron. Just wondering which paid seo/marketing tools you recommend for common tasks. Particularly site analysis, competitive research, and ppc management. I have the opportunity to get whatever software I want now and I'm rooting through pages of bs software reviews looking for useful tools.

Hi Aaron,

For some reason, Google Webmaster Central still shows it's finding 3,000 URLs that haven't existed on my site in over 4 years. The files are long gone. The old directory structure is blocked in robots.txt. What can I do to bury these once and for all? Should I 301 in htaccess each one to the most relevant page today, after all this time, in case there are links to them out there that I can't seem to find? Google must be finding them somewhere. Or do a removal request on each one, even though they don't exist?

It just really bugs me to see the error list over and over again (and then have to weed through it). Thanks!

Hi Adam
Did you check the server header code for those pages as Googlebot?

Thanks Aaron, much appreciated.

Hi Aaron,

I have a site retailing consumer goods. I want to add a blog about a closely related subject to attract quality links to the blog which I hope will increase the SERPS of our retail site. I also hope it will attract additional traffic to the retail site.

Looking around, Wordpress is my software of choice, but my web master can't host it because he hasn't the right software on his server. I've suggeated moving the site to a server which has the right software, but he tells me this would be very expensive because it would cost a great deal of money to port the code.

He wants me to have it hosted by Wordpress and have an alias from my site pointing to it such as www.xxxxxx.co.uk/blog --> blog.xxxxxxx.co.uk

But I have read that for my retailing site to get the full benefit of the links the blog will attract I maust have the blog as part of my site domain on the same server i.e.www.xxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/blog. Is this correct?

What would you advise?

Hi Aaron,

Thanks again for this opportunity.

I have a site which will be trading in both France and England. I was hoping to automatically change the content of the homepage to reflect the visitors language. I would achieve this by checking the visitors IP address (to determine location) and then pulling the relevant content/language out of the database.

Is this likely to cause me any problems with search engines?

I'm not doing this for seo/black hat purposes. Its only to give users a better experience.

Thanks,

Sam

Hi Sam
You really should just put the secondary language on a subdomain and then conditionally redirect them to that subdomain if their browser has that language setting. I am not a programmer, but I think it is not that tough to do something like this.

Keeping the different languages on different URLs is important because you want the english pages to rank in one area and the french in another. Mix both languages on one URL and you are going to be missing out on sending visitors to the wrong spots and search engines not ranking you optimally in both locations, etc.

Hey Aaron...these open Q&A posts are really cool :)

I posted a question but it turns out the previous comment pretty much answered it.

But where are a few good places on the web to learn about how dynamic pages are indexed/crawled?

ps. I wanted to search you blog for stuff about dynamic web pages, but I didn't find a search box. I would love for you to add one.

Hi Aaron,
Just wondering if you can offer some advice on SEO for small, local businesses. I have many webdesign clients that also want to achieve front page listings, and I perform all of the normal on-page stuff, such as unique title tags, alt tags on all images, title tags on all links etc...

Could you offer any advice for link building campaigns for these sites? They generally do a lot of recipricol linking, but everything normally goes from a links page - is this okay?

For bigger, affiliate sites I run myself, social networking and link baiting usually are enough to get all the links I need, but with small business sites, there is nothing unique about the content. How would you go about getting links for these kind of small, 4/5 page local sites?

Thanks Aaron - Love the open Q&A's.

DR

Hi Aaron,

what is your stance on blocking image directory from robots? Some sites suggest that you should block Google Imagebot from an e-commerce site due to bandwidth usage etc. What is your recommendation?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the advice Aaron. What comes to the suggested script, it has some usability issues as it disallows the other right-click features such as back, print etc. so in my opinion it'd be better e.g. to post linking code below.

Aaron, Do you think domaining is STILL worth trying?

I market a site for a client (www.caplanlaw.com) using above board SEO techniques..add lots of relevant content, building backlinks using PR syndication, adwords, etc. For some reason, two competitors seem to consistently outrank us, yet their sites are awful...not new content ever, no resources, zilch. We compete for keyphrases like mn dui attorney, mn criminal lawyer, etc.

any thoughts?

Hi Aaron,

BTW...love this Q&A stuff, you're a saint.

For the site i mentioned in the previous post, i have submitted about 4-5 press releases to prleap.com for my client. Yet when I check my google webmaster tools for this site, i never see any additional external links showing up for the site. The site gets crawled at least once a week.

Before i post the press realese to prleap, i always post it on our site first, then wait a least a week for Google to index it.

Is this the proper procedure? And why don't my external links show up?

Hi Aaron,

Great to have this Q&A session again. Truely unique stuff.

I am wondering if the adwords quality scores and guidelines have some implications for organic SEO as well.

For instance it is often suggested to have things like- Privacy policy, About us, Contact us and Resource pages. Currently they do seem to count towards the adwords quality score.

Do you think these factors might make a difference in organic SERPs as well?

In the same way, Google recently implied that the 'lead generation' sites may not be treated favorably for Adwords.

Currently I have some sites that consist of only a single page. Do you think it might hurt if I put an opt-in box on that page? I was wondering about this because that way it would resemble a squeeze page even if I load it with good content.

Another option would be to entice the prospects for a free report on the main page and take them to another page dedicated for the opt-in process. To me it seems that it may also avoid the footprint (same opt-in GetResponse or Aweber ID on multiple sites) by using meta noindex nofollow on this dedicated opt-in page.

I would appreciate your thoughts about this issue. Thanks.

Hi Aaron,

My apologies if this question, or a similar question, has already been addressed above - there's a lot of them!

I'm in the very early stages of starting a Internet Marketing business with two colleagues of mine. We've settled on a name, logo and have started writing copy for the web site (which is not yet live). Our target live date is January 15th, 2008.

My question: if you were in my situation, and you had roughly 8-10 hours per week and about $500 per month to put towards promotion/advertising, what do you think would be your order of action for the first two months? In such a saturated online space, where do you think you'd look to make in-roads and gain visibility?

I understand this is a question that could require a very long response, so feel free to be as brief as you like or point me in the direction of other resources.

I appreciate it!

-Mike Tekula

You mentioned thin pages and not diluting link equity. I have a small organic local real estate site with only ~100 pages indexed and was going to add a ~300 page fresh content glossary to bring up the page count and create more onsite anchor text links.

I had read something that suggested doing this as each new page was 'born' with a sliver of PR. Reading your comments about link equity and thin pages I am wondering if I am doing the right thing here. I am 250 pages into this project but haven't indexed anything yet, HELP! :)

Aaron,

I am with a software company that promotes mainly one software product.

If we decided to run a blog, then from a PageRank etc point of view, is it better to host a blog on our own domain on the same server where the corporate website is, or is it better to just use another service and just promote and post links back to our main website from there?

Can a blog post be an effective landing page, or is it better to build separate sites for landing pages? I run one blog but would rather create a post (or page) to serve as a landing page for a product and then link to it from the main page, than have to build several new sites from scratch.

Hi Aaron. In a reply to a question above you said:

"While you as an end user may not realize it, this page you are reading is dynamic content, but the .htaccess file was modified to make the URLs appear clean and as though it is not dynamic."

How is it that you do this? (Or, if it's easier for you, do you have a link to somebody else's explanation of how to do it?)

Edit: Nvm. Found the answer on an earlier post from your site.

Hi Aaron,

great to see you running such a thread again.

This would be my question, hopefully you can answer it:

If you had a brand new site (say it's not in a super-competitive niche) what would you do in order to overcome the first mover advantage that other sites have (age + links attracting more links)?

What would you do to get noticed in the beginning?

Would this be the approach you'd take:

1. Submit to a few trusted directories and to as many(?) niche directories as possible.

2. Be present on many forums in the niche.

3. Create one really great and unique piece of content that adds value to many other sites in the niche. Then send personalized e-mail requests to as many webmasters as possible telling them about that piece of content and how it would add value to their sites and where exactly on their site it would make sense to link out to it?

Is that what you would do? basically creating a great piece of content and then push-marketing the hell out of it by being aggressive and smooth with e-mail requests?

Or would you do it differently?

Aaron - Seasons Greetings to you and your wife.

I need someone to build a threaded WP blog with all the add ins - similar to yours which is nice.

I am not competing with you even though I am a practicing SEO I have a niche I want to target

So I'm looking for a nice WP designer

Thanks

David

Hi David
ShoeMoney recently recommended these guys.

Hi Aaron!

Question: is it wise to open a blog on a portal-like website, which has already many sections and subpages? Is forum a better idea in this case? Or is the website self-sufficient, when being of the portal type, not needing a blog to promote itself?

Thanks and Merry Xmas! Lots of love, health and money in 2008!