Q & A Open Thread

Hi Aaron,

I've been having loads of problems with Google properly ranking one of my older sites since it was basically created. The domain was put into use July of 2004 and has a thriving Blog and Forum on it. The forum is pretty big, 26k threads, 414k posts and active. The blog has had articles featured on Digg's main page (in fact have one on there right this second) and Propeller through it's life. All the content was highly related to the topic, Ford Mustangs. It seems like no matter what I do nothing improves my rankings. My Google webmaster area says I rank 380th for Mustang, 96 for Mustang Forums and doesn't even list many of the other popular keywords that a Mustang site should rank for.

I've filed for a reconsideration but honestly have no idea what to tell them. I don't use spam techniques and all the content is on target. Webmaster tools says I have 50k links to my main page and many blog posts with 200+ links from the Diggs. I've even been featured on popular blogs like Autoblog more times than I can account. It's very discouraging to see Google treat us the way they have.

You can see screen shots here: http://www.brent-wilson.com/archives/3/. I have also talked to others who have authority sites such as Kathy from Hystersisters.com who has been having lots of problems with Google lately.

I'm not sure what to do right now as I am losing lots of traffic because of this. It's very discouraging. I hope this doesn't break any of your rules and I have hesitated to try to ask personal questions but I've got to the point where it's just getting discouraging to know that nothing I am doing or will ever do, it seems, will help me improve in Google.

Hi Brent
If you want to move yourself up the value chain then a large part of that is perception, and AdSense top and to the left on the homepage is no good. Without even having any idea of your revenues I think AdSense top and to the left on the homepage scares off more users than it makes in revenues. And that ad placement might be hurting your ability for Google to consider your site a quality site. If you were ever hand penalized that penalty will likely stay as long as the site has that aggressive ad placement.

The homepage should be an advertisement for the site. Look at the SEO Book homepage. See how it guides people around the site? You want to do that. Sell the site.

After you get enough authority to rank you where you want to then you might want to get more aggressive with the ad placement, but not right now if you are trying to gain authority and rank for the shorter phrases.

There are only so many quality links you can buy / rent / get, and that nasty ad placement is probably costing you many of the in community links that you would need to compete better for the core shorter phrases.

Are you still ranking well for the longer keywords? Compete.com shows 51 keywords for your site, which seems low given that it is a large forum. And your site is not ranking for many of the terms it was ranking for on the last crawl by SEO Digger.

On internal pages I have to scroll an entire page before I get to any content, which to me seems like overkill with the ad placement. If you want ads top and to the left try some of the 160 by 600 adsense ads and float the forum right of them.

BTW...if you are a forum you need to compete against the other forums before you can beat out everyone for the broadest industry terms. My plan would require short term pain before getting rewards, but I would look at my Google traffic trends and crawling patterns and try to figure out if I was penalized or just lack authority. From there, if you were penalized I would...

• redesign the homepage to feature the site
• kill the aggressive AdSense ad placement, kill the paid links, and request a site review at Google Webmaster central
• put forums in my business name (at least temporarily) to be able to get anchor text with Mustang Forums in it when building links
• make it obvious where people are in the site...make the blog part look like a blog
• build links with the hope to rank for Mustang forums or Mustang forum or Mustang community, etc. in 3 to 6 months
• go from there

Thanks for the feedback Aaron. I'll see what I can do to dig into whether I have been penalized or not. I'd really hate to give up my ad location for the chance that it was Google who hand penalized me for it as the ads perform really well. I get 12-20 google referrals a day so even the really long search terms aren't doing anything for me.

Hello Aaron,

Would love to hear your thoughts on marketing a 300 Acre Tennessee Mountain Retreat - http://www.sugarhollowretreat.com is the link. The company targets large groups such as corporate retreats, church retreats, family reunions, weddings, etc...

We are redesigning the site, so any recommendations would be great to include in the redesign and later promotion of the site.

A natural mountain retreat does not pull me in. I think if you are a retreat you really have to stand for something. Like give me more about natural mountain or give me another angle.

The two column design confuses me. The link colors do not pop. In fact, it makes it look like there are no links in the content.

Pull up the section about who the retreats are for. Look at where most of your business comes from. Aim to depreciate some of the lower value ones while actively speaking to your top market or top few markets on your homepage. Compare how your homepage calls out to people to how well Dan Thies does it here. Your site should be more aesthetically pleasing than his (you are selling a getaway, etc.) but you should still call out to your core markets.

Also use some bulleted lists, subheaders, and other formatting elements to help break up your content.

Hi Aaron,
I'm just wondering if there is much SEO value in the Yahoo Directory (still recommended by Google I think?)and Business.com listings anymore? I get no traffic from them, although I do rank no. 1 on Yahoo for my main keyword - skiing holidays - although I get little traffic from Yahoo.
My site chalet1802.co.uk has around 6000 links mainly from directories with some press release, articles and social bookmarking thrown into the mix.
Are the Business.com and Yahoo Directory links worth it just for the trust/authority alone - ie. 2 trusted links enable me to acquire 1000/2000 weaker links - or would I be better off spending the money ($500 a year?) elsewhere?

Hi Aaron

I'm glad you had an open session this morning. A subdomain on our site seems to have been hit by a Google penalty. About 3 weeks ago, Google referrals to the site dropped off almost completely where previously it had been the primary source of traffic for us.

I can't understand the reason for this. We've had no problems or penalties in the past, and I don't think we've violated any webmaster guidelines. The subdomain is music.unrealitytv.co.uk.

Any feedback gratefully received!!!

Aaron,

Since you've made the move to adding videos to your website as part of your long term marketing strategy I was wondering what Video software you use to create your videos and if you'd recommend using it.

Hi GerryBot
Not sure if this is everything, but it is a start.

You have lots of duplicate content related issues with your site. Duplicate page titles, date based archives, author archives, tag archives, category archives, etc. getting indexed.

You should get category pages indexed, but you probably do not want to get all the date based archives indexed. Also, if you have a category page named concerts then you don't need a tags page by the same name...or the other way around...either way is fine, but pick one.

Amongst those issues, you also have a canonical URL issue with Google indexing some of the contents at www. yoursubdoman . yourdomain .com and yoursubodmain.yourdomainname.com.

Thanks Aaron

On duplicate content, would you recommend removing the date based archives (for instance), or leaving them there and using robots.txt to do a noindex on those types of page?

Also, presumably a bit of .htaccess magic will sort out the canonical url issue?

On the duplicate content issue stuff I would recommend using robots.txt to block it from getting indexed or using link nofollows to not pass it much link equity. Caution: please do not accidentally just block all URLs with dates in them if you have dates as part of all of your blog URLs.

Also look at things where you have page# too. There is probably a workaround to that issue by like adding more posts to each page to create less of the urls that are like page/2/ page/3/ and whatnot.

Yup... .htaccess should work, but make sure you save your current file before editing it.

I'm relatively new to AdWords, and I have one account. From that account, I am running campaigns for several clients.

If more than one client bids on the same keyword (columbus ohio new homes) then wouldn't the best approach to be to have an separate account for each of them?

Hi Aaron,

I am trying my first attempt at a blog (Wordpress) and with SEO. I installed the SEO All in One plugin. Do you think it is a helpful plugin and how would you recommend to configure the titles? I have each title (post, page, category, archive, etc..) with the title | Blog name currently

I still need to do proper keyword research (your tools section is awesome BTW!) and initially I just took a stab in the dark at a few keywords. I've been doing keyword searches in google for the individual posts and I'm starting to see my posts in the top 100 for the main keywords (slowly making progress). I also want to focus on overall SEO and main keywords.

Also, when you write a post do you have specific keywords in mind that you are writing the post for? I'm trying to do that as well to reach a larger audience with some specific long tail keywords.

Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions! My blog is http://lastminutecaribbeandeals.com

John

Hey Aaron,

I am building alot of sites (100+) using the same site architecture and design. The sites target similar, but unrelated users (think one type of career compared to another - so like laywers, doctors, teachers, etc.) I didn't go with 1 site because of the value of the sites individual domains to brand the sites, and, in reality the users of 1 site will not care about content on any other sites.

The sites will not contain duplicate content except for the underlying page design and site architecture. And the sites will NOT link together (so they are not a link network).

What possible problems (if any) do you foresee with these in terms of how the search engines may rank the sites for their individual target keywords?

Thanks a bunch!

Hi Aaron,
I am creating a new site with randomly selected images for the home page. This means that the image names will be changing for each visitor. What are the SEO implications for do this.

Thank you.
S Benjamin

Hi Araon,

Great website and blog contents!

Quick question: I found uncoverthenet.com is listed in your SEO book (the latest version) as a directory to submit websites. As far as I know, that site was "penalized" by Google recently. Can you comment on that as well as the "penalized directories" in general?

Thanks!

Hi Aaron,

I recently purchased a domain which is in 1st position in google for a fishing related phrase. It gets about 6000+ unique visitors each month. Although the website is in 1st position, its name is very low quality (a generic name which has already been closely copied by the competition) and the website construction itself is low quality.

I’ve therefore decided that the best idea is to buy a new domain and build a completely new website. But what should I do with the old domain?

Option 1) Leave the old website live. Put links on it to my new website/domain.

Option 2) Put the new website on the old domain for a few months and then do a 301 site wide redirect to the new site/domain.

Any advice or tips for me?

Thanks for this opportunity - I really appreciate it.

Sam

Hi Aaron,
Thanks so much for bringing up the algorithmic value of the exact match domain. I have tried this twice and it worked well.
But now I am facing bit of a problem acquring the exact match .com domain. These days domainers are pretty aggressive about picking up every conceivable keyword domain. (For instance, try even a difficult one -
methicillinresistantstaphylococcusaureus -and you won't get this with .com)
1) Do you think .org might be a good idea if one can choose from .net and .org ?
2) Any problem with .org if you are not a bonafide organization? (Problems like a need for some proof in the future or domain taken away for lack of it)
Thanks.

Aaron,

How do I block all spiders not just Google from accessing my trackback pages on my WordPress blog?

Here is my current txt file on RentVine.com:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver/1.6
Disallow: /

# Anc, WordPress, Admin, Map
User-agent: *
Disallow: /anc/privacy.cfm
Disallow: /vacancy/privacy.cfm
Disallow: /anc/termsofuse.cfm
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/feed/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/page/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/2006/
Disallow: /blog/index.php/2007/
Disallow: /admincrud/
Disallow: /map/privacy.cfm
Disallow: /map/termsofuse.cfm
Disallow: /map/admincrud/
Disallow: /map/mapvine-core.cfm
Disallow: /map/mapvine-core-lg.cfm

# To validate leave blank line below

Hey Aaron

My site www.fotoviva.co.uk has slowly built a decent ranking with google uk for our keywords (can't seem to get on page 1 for our most competitive 'canvas art' yet tho!) - but we're getting no traffic from yahoo or msn.

Is there something we could focus on to help improve that without denting the google rankings?

The site is nearly a year old but has only been seo'd around 9 months. Maybe it will just take more time?

Thanks

Hi Aaron

Thanks for this free for all session.

We've had a '.com' site for a number of years for a UK business. Do you think that a '.co.uk' would achieve any improvement in ranking on the UK version of Google?

Search engine's lust to provide local results, but might the '.com' create a small smokescreen as the country of origin?

Best wishes

Dave

Hi Aaron

I've really enjoyed reading your SEOBook, and have linked back to it from my Blog.

I have a question with regard to duplicate content. I have several domain names that all point to one of my web hosting business sites. The domain names don't relate to the site itself, they're just parked on top of it where the domain owner just wants e-mail access and so I pick up any traffic to thier web address.

Is this bad duplicate content from Google's point of view? I'm concerned now that Google will see several identical sites just because I have a bunch of domain names all pointing at the same physical site. They're all currently in Google's index.

What do you suggest?

Kind regards,
Tim Skipper

Hi Aaron and blog friends,

My site is dedicated to raising money for children's charities using affiliate links and adwords as the source of revenue generation. Even though affiliate sites were pounded a while back, Google (seems) to not hate my site, as the rankings for keywords are improving, and traffic is improving.

My dilemna is that people are not "converting". As I work on the site at night as a volunteer (after putting my own children in bed!) I have limited time to make significant immediate improvements, but am lost as to how to make this model work. I know igive.com is working, and they take a nice cut for themselves. Why would the public not use a site that gives everything to charity? Is the alphabetical listing model (with the donation amounts for each purchase made) a terrible approach, or should I start from scratch with a page for each merchant, product, etc..like I've been reading to target the niches?

With the holiday season here, any advice, help, guidance, etc. from you, your collegues, and post members is truly apprecated.

Hi Aaron,

I'm a little confused with one of my sites I redesigned - www.nicerink.com - we used to rank #1 for "backyard ice rinks" and now we're somewhere buried on pg. 8. The home page still gets a PR of 6 from the Google Toolbar. Just wondering if you notice anything glaringly wrong with the page that would cause it to get dinged so bad.

Thanks in advance,
-Kevin

PS - Great books...I just got it last week and am starting to work my way through it! :)

Can you tell us what do you think about paid links? What about text-link-ads.com, reviewme.com, payperpost.com. Do you consider them as good value comparing to other time consuming and expensive ways of link building?

Is it too risky to rely on paid link building?

Thanks for answer.

Hi Aaron,

First off. I find your blog/book super helpful. Okay, so now my background and question.

I am a student at Purdue but I manage the online marketing for my Martial Arts school up in Minnesota. I will be re-doing the website once I graduate here in December since I actually made it in a night before I went to study abroad. The website is at Kuk Sool Won of St Paul, and I also write the Wordpress blog at Kuk Sool Blog. I actually did an Internship at TopRank with Lee Odden this last summer which got me really interested in this stuff. I actually rank really well for all the keywords I am targeting like "Martial Arts st paul" and "Martial arts twin cities" but I barely get any traffic. I just need a lot more local search traffic and what I am doing is not producing enough. I feel getting Local traffic is really tough.

So my two questions are:

1. What should I do Local SEO and SEM wise to get more local traffic to my site? Should I find new keywords to optimize for? I just need more traffic to our site from the Twin Cities Area in MN.

2. I will be redesigning the site here this coming January and December and what specifics should I keep in mind when designing the site SEO wise to rank higher and get more visitors. * The site looks pretty bad right now, it will look 200 times better as I did this site when I was a sophomore and now I am graduating. I have my portfolio here maxkpage.com

Thanks Aaron!

Hi Aaron

Thank you for starting this thread and giving your time to answering these questions. Here is mine.

We manage a country specific Hotel/Accommodation/Travel portal. There are 3 major players/websites in this market that have been going since 1999 and about 10 slightly smaller ones that have also been around for a number of years. Here's the thing... there are about 400 new sites that entered the market in the last 18 months, all of which are making inroads into the rankings with varying success.

My question is this: We are all advertising almost the same hotels/accommodation providers. (I estimate from what I am seeing online that 80% of the hotels are all trying out the bulk of these new sites, especialy the "free" ones i.e. free for the first x number of months!).

We are quite specific with our site on how we lay out the texts and details but 9 times out of 10, the hotels insist that the text they provide be displayed as they have given it to us (and are giving to hundreds of other sites!!). We have an advantage obviously in that we have been around for 8 years so have built up trust with the SE's and our domain is well aged. BUT ... how do Google etc view these texts that appear on 400 sites? And these sites are also going to "age" and develop trust, so in the long term, where will that leave us?

Just to mention that we do change things a bit, mix it up, add our own headings, do grammar and spell checks (yes they sumbit some awfully written texts!) and generally improve the texts so they "flow" better for the reader. So our texts do differ slightly from the rest, but the gist of it is the same.

What is your opinion on how the search engines deal with this and what would you do if you were faced with the same situation?

I think this question may apply to other industries and certainly does apply to hotel and travel sites world wide so I have left out website and country details to keep it as a general interest question.

PS: This "duplication" of texts does not appear to have hurt us as yet, but you never know when things will change, which is why I worry about it and why I am asking you now, so that I can start to take some precautionary action.

Thanks again for your time.

Aaron,

You answered me when I emailed about this. However since I had such a hard time finding the answer before I emailed you, I want to get this question indexed :)

I have a Yahoo store. When you have a yahoo store you have a bit of a problem because if you want to add a lot of content, or use a blog you have to use their hosting, which can only live on a sub-domain.

So the store lives on example.com, and the blog lives on site.example.com/blog.

I think that you can also make the store live on a sub-domain, and have the blog be the main page.

What would be the best approach when crating a yahoo store?

Options are:

a) Blog on site.example.com/blog and store on example.com

b) Blog on example.com and store on store.example.com

c) Both blog and store on sub-domains, with a page on example.com to link to both.

Thanks for the input!!

~NickB

Since I bought/downloaded SEO Book a...LONG time ago. (Printed off the 100 or so pages I always use) Well wasn't sure where I stored it, and couldn't remember what I used for a user and password. I re-registered, and updated my profile. But the "new" password doesn't seem to work with the e-mail link to the "updates". Ideas?
Thanks
Denny

Hi Aaron,

Are you going to fix the "Competition Finder" tool that retrieves the InTitle & InAhchor numbers?

If you do fix it or rebuild it, is it possible to export the results to Excel somehow?

If you have no plans on fixing the tool, can you post some links to other tools that do about the same thing?

Thanks,
Dave.

Your thoughts on Google penalties:

1) How can someone recover from the -950 a penalty

2) If a site ranks well for everything but pages in a specific /subdirectory/ of that site... what's the deal??? The pages in this specific /subfolder/ use to rank very well and are well written articles... no duplicate content. Is this a 30 day penalty for link building?? Something else??? Have you seen this???

3) Did the sandbox effect go away or I'm I getting better at the SEO game??? It seems like I can get some *new* sites to rank a lot faster than 2005 & 2006.

4) Your discussion with Matt C. was over a Google penalty... can you share any general information that might be helpful to others???

5) Does having too many adsense ads put up a red flag for Google??? Does it trip a spam filter??? If so what's a good number of adsense ads???

Thanks,

Stuart

Hi Aaron,
How do you decide what goes in your SEO Book, and what should be blogged about to the public?

Hey Aaron:

Thanks for the opportunity.

Where would you suggest a person market a blog or website for sale? I know of several reputable sites selling domain names but none for entire sites, etc. Also, where would you advise someone to look for site/blog valuation.

Thanks again,

Ed

Hello Aaron,

I read your site quite frequently as it has great information!

My question is regarding traffic. I FEEL like I am doing a lot to try and generate traffic to both my site and my blog, but it doesn't seem to be getting me very far. Here are the links to my sites:
http://womensdietandfitness.com and http://womensdietandfitness.com/WDF

I don't seem to get any traffic from yahoo, but google seems to bring in some for me. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Aaron,

This is a unique entry and generous offer. I hope you are not winded by now. :)

I make custom maps are have been had a site up for about 1 yr. I just started thinking about SEO and I believe I have done all of the major steps, but am frustrated at <30 hits a day, even though I spent ~$15 day on Google ads.

My holy-grail keyphrase is "custom mapping" and my site is www.geointel.com

Its unranked :(

Any tips? Thank you so much, Chris

Any chance you'd provide a list of domains that you feel have the strongest ability to rank for UGC profiles or pages. I'd love to hear which sites you think are valuable for reputation management.

Hi Aaron

Thanks for taking the time to share your valuable knowledge.

I'm in the process of building a new site and have a question regarding link building. How fast should I build inbound links? Should it be five a day, 100 a day, or even more? What is the threshold before I get put in the Google Sandbox?

I would like to simulate an organic growth curve, but have no idea about the numbers.

Thanks Again,

Dave

Hi Dave
The rate of change and the quality of the links probably matter more than just the sheer number. Ideally your link growth rate should be at least flat or have an upward slope to it. New sites rarely start off getting 100 links a day.

Always enjoy your posts... and gosh what a heck of an offer.

Background...
Over the last couple years I have been able to get my keywords to the front page of google. Typically I enjoy one of the top five spots for my targeted keywords.

I started with the approach of long tail words and then systematically built my site up to more industry and/or generic keywords. (I think I picked up from you.... :)

This approach has worked... but -

I am wondering how I can increase my traffic even more. Where do I go next and still stay in my niche? I know that my number one competitor is approximately 1.5 to 2 times bigger than me.

I just feel that I missing something big from a keyword standpoint in order for him to have that much more traffic than me.

So to make this more generic -
'How does one find the differentiator between two competing sites that would make a two fold difference in traffic? Any ideas? Wordtracker, yahoo search marketing, and your tools seem to point me to the same keywords that I am optimizing (or already optimized) for...

Thanks,
Michael
g r e e k f o r m e (dot) c o m

Hi Aaron,

do you have an idea where I could find SEO-friendly website templates? some that are not using frames or anything else that's bad for SEO purposes design-wise?

thanks

Hi Patrick
If you are using flat file HTML some of the stuff at OSWD should be able to help you. If you are using a content management system then search for "your CMS name" + words like templates, or themes, or etc.

Also with some CMS systems such as Wordpress there are SEO friendly plugins that you can find by searching for stuff like Wordpress SEO plugin.

thanks Ill try OSWD for now.

thanks Ill try OSWD for now.

Aaron,
I fear I may not have the time to go back through the book and search for the answer to this question.

I will search for the answer for myself, but I thought it would be nice to have some pointers on "emergency" SEO. If indeed this question is of the "emergency" kind.

Anyway, I tested my URL in your "Website Health Check". It says I have tons of duplicate links. Is this bad? If so where should I start in my research?

-DealerISM

Hi DealerISM
That tool shows the URLs that have the issues, so you just have to go to them and look at why you have duplicate content and work on fixing it...be it templating issues, content management issues, or anything else.

Aaron,

Loved the book and appreciate a chance to ask these questions.

I am having a blog based website built with Movable Type 4.0. The site will have a static home page and several other information pages. The blog will be located here www.domain.com/blog

1. What duplicate content issues should I be aware of when using Movable Type to serve up my blog pages? How do I fix them? There is not alot written about Movable Type 4.0 and SEO. I think the pages of Movable Type are actually created instead of served up as Wordpress does, but not sure.

2. I am trying to rank for two keywords of the same type (Cash Flows) but uniquely independent of each other,(ex. Annuities & Structured Settlements)(not the actually KW's). I plan to write about the 2 keywords on the home page as well as have one a static page further describing each of my buying propositions for the particular keyword. I will write blog entries on subjects related to these keywords. When I create my page titles and Meta Descriptions for the static pages where do I put the focus for each keyword? The home page or their individual static pages? And how do I tie in the blog posts I created for the keyword content?

Thanks in Advance!

Thanks Aaron for the opp to ask questions.

I have a client that is a criminal defense law firm. We have had excellent success generating leads through their website by optimizing for the keyphrases 'minnesota DUI attorney,' 'mn dwi attorney,' etc. My client can only market in MN and WI, so localization is key. We sometimes get leads from outsite MN and WI, and can do nothing with them.

When we originally did a wordtracker keyword search for those keyphrases, a number of localized terms surfaced ('minnesota DUI attorney,' 'mn dwi attorney,'. However, we are now expanding oour effots to optimize more pages for other practice areas. My wordtracker keyword research for terms like 'sex crimes' drug crimes, etc turned up many phrases but none of them localized with 'mn'.

Any suggestions? Will our localization setup in Google Webmaster tools help keep our searches limited to MN and WI? Or it here something else i can do.

Thanks you for your time. I'm a big fan..love your videos.

Hi Dave
I have not used MT4 so I can't tell you what duplicate content issues to look out for. One helpful tip would be to look for duplicate junk getting indexed by Google once your site starts getting indexed. My Website Health Check tool should help you do that.

Another tip is to place more emphasis on the category based archives than the date based archives.

I don't think it hurts you to target each phrase using one independent page and target them both on the homepage.

Aaron first of all I wanted to thank you again, I initially had some trouble getting to download your book, I sent you a quick note, and was quite impressed with your turn-around in addressing my concern.Thanks..
I have two questions:
1) I am looking at building a site using Joomla. Is there any problems in applying SEO methods to this type of site (the entire site will be developed using Joomla.)
2) Looking to develop a marketing mix that will incorporate the use of affiliates. (Tickets to a family related exhibition promoting outdoor recreation Ticket price will be priced @ 10.00 per adult and kids will be less). What software source do you recommend, and is their a definitive source of information on the subject and who might that be? I would have loved to enclose the site but not built yet. Thanks I appreciate your candor and honesty. R_Northerner

Hi Aaron,
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. I appreciate it and your blog.

Question 1:
Most of my sites rank very well in Google and MSN/Live, but they do very poorly in Yahoo!. What is the trick to ranking well in Yahoo!?

Question 2:
You've written many times about how Google likes old web sites and old links. Will it benefit me to buy a domain name that had a site on it for a few years earlier this decade but hasn't had a site on it in for at least the last two years? There are also no known back links pointing to the domain.

Thanks so much.

Hi Aaron,
Thanks for your reply to my earlier question. I hope I am not putting undue load on your time resources by placing another question. So I will try to make it precise.

One of my site ranked well in Google for an exact match domain within 4 days. It's a single page site and still ranking well for its core keywords.

My question is -
1) Is it OK to have a single page site with good quality content instead of making another 10-20 pages stuffed with low quality junk just for the heck of adding them?
2) Or having a single page site may itself be be taken as a sign of low quality by Google?
3) If it is really necessary that you have certain minimum number of pages in a site, what that number possibly could be?

Aaron, Thanks again for this great resource.

Hi

My question is about similar content on sites that provide state by state directories. I'm pursuing a private pilot license and started a flight school directory when I had a hard time finding testimonials about specific flight schools.

Am I getting penalized by Google because most of the pages on my site are so similar? Would it be better to use robots.txt to avoid having these pages indexed?

Also, my hope for the site is that pilots would start leaving feedback about specific flight schools so that prospective students could have some candid info when selecting a flight school (an expensive endeavor). But I'm finding that very few visitors to the site actually leave comments.

I know this is coming at the end of a long day - thanks so much if you still can get to this!!

Hi aaron,
I have been a regular reader of your blog(although I was not a member & I thought to become a member this time only because I thought none can be better than you to solve my problem)
My site is www.thereliableinfo.com .It was set up around 2years back.I used to update it frequently in the begining but then I stopped updating it.My SERP fell down drastically.So I decided to update it automatically with new pages created from rss feeds.The rankings went up for sometime but then again started falling back.All the new pages were being in the supplemental results.So I thought that I should create new content rich pages so that google does not supplement them and removed those bad pages filled with rss feeds.But this time too all my new original pages were also put in the supplemental results.I have a good in-site linking to those new pages(even from the homepage) but they are still in the supplemental results.Even some pages which were having a pr3 were put into supplemental.My link campaign is quite good in comparision to others and I have a bit of good links from related sites also.The primary keyword is "hyip" and I am in the 4th page whereas other sites who are have less seo and backlinks rank higher.I think that my site is being targeted by google as a bad site and hence even original content is sent to the supplemental & am not able to rank higher.What do I do?I am desperate and am thinking to start up a new website.Can you please comment on this situation and help me how not to get my original content as supplement.

Hi Piyush
Well perception becomes reality, and with your ad placement being so aggressive, I think that makes your site a likely candidate for doing poorly if it came under editorial review. And I also think the ad placement being so aggressive prevents you from getting some of the organic links you might have been able to get in the past.

Once you put ads above the content (top and to the left in the content area) on the homepage it is a quick race downward toward irrelevancy.

Thanx for the fast reply.I will definitely think about replacing my ads.But do you think that I should do something else also or just reducing my ads.

Hi Aaron,

First thanks for opening the forum for questions!

My site, www.palaestratraining.com has been up for about 8 months or so now, and our biggest challenge is knowing if what we're doing is right (from an SEO perspective) and building links. Based on our industry, IT Certification and Training videos, it's challenging to identify places to get links from, since it seems the majority of sites within this vertical would be competitors and not interested in linking to us.

We make use of video (that's what we do) but we have free videos on the site, some of our YouTube videos have gotten over 20,000 views in that 6 months, etc., so we're generating some definite interest but I know we can be doing things a lot better.

We're definitely up for some outside of the box thinking, and would really like to get a fresh opinion on things. Thanks again, I've been reading your blog (and posting occasionally) for quite some time.. keep up the great work!

Christopher Rees
www.palaestratraining.com

Hi Aaron,

I used to be pulling in a good amount of traffic with my sites about a month ago. At that time I decided to merge the user database from some of my sites (5 or 6 sites). Everything from this appeared to create no problems. I then added a module onto these sites (I'm using Drupal) that enabled users to log in from any one of my domains and stay logged in no matter what site they visit. Now here's the problem:

Unfortunately, a few days ago I found out that this module was 302ing every page to my master domain that held all the user data. So I had about 5 sites all redirecting every page (about 2k - 5k pages per site) to my main master site. For the past month Google (as well as Yahoo and MSN) have been dropping pages and I highly suspect this is why.

I have since nuked this module completely. Now that my pages are returning the correct 200 response my site should be good for Google again, but it hasn't started crawling my site again (according to G webmaster tools). I've given it about a week or so and was wondering what your advice would be. Most of these sites are around 6 months old and have around 1k - 4k links. Before this 302 problem happened all of them were doing extremely well Google-wise.

Thanks Aaron,
Quinton

Hi Quinton
I would probably do little to shock those sites any further with drastic onsite changes. I might try building a few authoritative links for each site, but I would probably check where they were in a month after another Google deep crawl to see if the indexing trends have picked up again. If the sites were clean and after another deep crawl they still seem hosed I would probably try contacting Google.

Appreciate the reply Aaron :)!

Hi Aaron --

I have a question regarding a competitor in a very competitive market real estate. Over the last 6 months they have begun to be in the top key words in this market. They have a number of domains on different Class C IPs. On their main domain they have 1,000s of back links (none ranking high). These links are basically reciprocal links, but they link to these sites and others via a sub domain that is on another Class C ip.

To the uninitiated (the reciprocal linkers) this 'looks' like just part of their main web. This sub domain is broken down by geographical locations and then further by regions. Each of these pages has census data about the areas.

Complete.com says they get low five figures of visitors to the main site. My question to you is that being that this 'network' consist of no more than five domains and in a specific region in a competitive industry would google or other se consider this spam? How would you compete with this besides providing better content -- they did spend a lot of money developing their web sites? If it is spam, would you wait until our site has been upgraded before filling out a spam report?

Thanks for your info and expertise. (Oh yes, these sites and ours are not blogs per se).

I enjoyed reading your book.

Hi Runner2009
I don't think you beat what you consider to be spam by cloning them. If you consider their techniques shady then maybe try it away from your main domain, but don't do it to your main domain.

As far as "how would you compete besides providing better content" that really is not a way I approach any project. If I want to pick up marketshare and momentum from current leaders I try to beat them every way I possibly can, starting with as many of the following advantages I can

• domain name - buy an old one or a strong exact match one
• site design - sometimes looking good makes links easier to attain
• site usability - increases conversion rates
• link building - boosts rankings
• content quality - increases conversion rates AND filters bad prospects
• brand development - allows you to charge what you are worth
• building social relationships - that is what builds the organic links
• better business model - fatter profit margins means you can reinvest more into growth

You can't predict which one will help you, but if you beat them 3 or 4 different ways eventually the search relevancy algorithms notice.

Hi Aaron

:( everybody after me got replies, except me. What did I do wrong?

Here you go
http://www.seobook.com/q-open-thread#comment-26148

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the opportunity to ask you questions. I have several:

1. What are the effects of changing some links (in my case - example searches) on the front page for every request? Does Google see that as a frequently updated site or a spam site?

2. Is there a benefit in splitting up content into subdomains? For example, having subdomains for every state eg NY.example.com, assuming the subdomain keyword is often what users are looking for. Or does it cause individual subdomains to be ranked lower than if they were on example.com/NY (assuming they only have links from example.com)

3. I own a site that Google now considers to be a misspelling. My traffic dropped significantly since, and I'm on the verge of switching to another domain. Can anything else be done?

Thanks!

Hi Aaron,

First, thanks for taking the time out to help everyone and second your book was worth every penny. It helped me a a lot.

I've put a lot of time into my site in regards to making sure I have relevant content, my meta tags, description and text all contain my main key words. I've also paid for some listings in certain directories you recommended (yahoo, business.com, botw, gimpsy) as well as a few other high pr directories.

For my main key words (reggae cds, reggae dvds, jamaican dvds) I used to fall on the second page of google rankings and would flirt with the last two spots of the first page. I'm always in the top spots on yahoo and msn. Google was my week point (most orders came from yahoo organic clicks).

Recently I decided to go the route of paying for links and submitting my site to 1000 directories. That seemed to make my page rank 3 with google and now has me on the first page for my keywords on a regular basis. Even top 5 for one of them.

What can I do to move to the top three spots on google. My competitors sites look like terrible and really have no content, but they are always in the top 3, some with multiple links.

I'm not sure if they are ranked so high from the age of their domain or if I'm missing something here. Or they are doing something shady.

Is it a bad idea to pay go the route of submitting your site to endless directories or paying for permanent links?

I don't like being shady so I'm trying to figure out what else I can do. I think my site is pretty user friendly. However, there are some things I want to do change in the future (menu and check out process).

Sorry for the long post would appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Thank you.

http://www.reggaeplanet.com

@Dexterity:

I would advise you completely against using shady techniques. Normally I wouldnt say this, because I dont think its all that bad, but youve obviously put a lot of work in your site and it's your business..so taking the risk of having your site banned over using shady techniques isnt a good idea.

Plus if you're already in the top10 on doing mostly directory submissions (which hardly have any value anymore), I think it should be perfectly possible to move up the SERPs by getting natural links from other reggae & music sites.

I might be wrong, but I think in your niche that could be easier than in most niches, because people who listen to reggae music (and have websites about it) are usually fairly nice people who are probably not as opposed to linking out to a valuable site as people in other fields.

There are a few reggae artists I listen to every now and then and I remember once contacting kashief lindo on myspace who gave me a quick reply. What I'd do is try to get some reggae artists (who are not *that* popular, yet but have a fanbase already) to do an interview with me. If you place it on your homepage (for a while..maybe sort of like a blog) they shouldn't mind doing it b/c it'd might help them sell more records/increase their mindshare (among your site's visitors)...and you could tell people who have websites on those artists about the interview you recently did with them (hoping some of them will link to that interview).

Not sure, if this would work well in your average field, but i think it could work out well in the niche of reggae, b/c many of the people are rather nice and helpful.

What do you think of that idea, Aaron?

Hi Aaron,

Nice initiative to answer all your readers questions! This is so helpful for me today as I have an important question for which i can't find an answer

ITerating.com (http://iterating.com) has a page rank of seven and pages across the website have rankings from 2 to 6. For software tools the URL is ../product/product_name and for software classes /productclass/class_name. Do you think it's worth the effort to change all the URLs into ../product_name and ../product_class? For sure we'll loose page rank across the pages but will we loose the page rank for home page as well?

I'll surely appreciate an advice,

Alina

Hi Aaron

I've been reading your posts for a while now. I really aught to invest in your book and lock myself into a room and then read and understand your advice, as to be honest I struggle with a lot of the SEO stuff.

My main question is this:

Our company has a number of websites, but I have been concentrating on one website over the last six months http://www.conservatorytv.com

We invested in Membergate software to build the website. We've also invested in two members of staff to develop the website - one to create the content, and another to film, edit and produce videos about the products we sell (windows, doors and conservatories in the UK) to add to the website. They're all hosted on YouTube.

I believe the website is now starting to have better content than competing websites, but we are still only getting about 50 unique visitors per day. We started the website about 6 months ago.

I would appreciate your advice on how we progress with getting the right kind of customers to our website. Do we:

1. Just keep adding good content and eventually Google will notice us.

2. Pay an SEO company to optimise and build links.

3. Use Pay Per Click

4. Or, lock myself in a room and read your book!

I really would appreciate your advice on how we should proceed.

Thanks

Hi Aaron,

If I was to 301 redirect a site that has been previoulsy banned or heavily penalized by Google to another site, is it possible the penalty could hit the new domain?

Thanks

Aaron,

I will try to make this as broad of a question as possible even though I would like to be able to consider your suggestions with regard to a couple of specific sites.

I wonder Aaron, do you often get approached for consulting by the large e-commerce websites for major corporations? And if you do, is there a trend of mistakes that they may make in common? Or a single most overlooked mistake?

I have an interview soon with a big company hiring in-house seo and while I have done my due-diligence and know what I'm going to recomend (site architecture audit, social media - positive user generated content, corporate blog, articles and educational newsletters, target long tail key phrases, deep linking to optimized landing pages) I am constantly wondering if the master might have suggestions that I have overlooked. Or perhaps a more appropriate question would be what resources or methodology would you use in performing a strong site review?

I almost would even say that I wish you had a $200 charity case consulting package for broke seo's who have been working for SEO Tyrants making peanuts for the last few years but who now have a better opportunity in front of them. My check would be in the mail!

Thanks for all you do Aaron,

Eric

Hi Aaron -
a) Thanks for the tools and the book - much appreciated by us all.

The thing that worries me most is too much reliance on Google for our traffic - be it organic or paid and willingness to bend to their sometimes out of whack rules (paid linking, quality score, etc). Besides concentrating on MSN and Yahoo what other places would you suggest using for targeted traffic (I'm thinking domaining, social marketing)?

Cheers
Ari

Hi Aaron:

Sorry to jump in late. I hope it is not too late.

I have been doing some part-time web work for a friend in the professionals.

I have been approached by a directory that claims to have a way to generate improved SERP through links.

The difference is that the links they are offering - at a substantial cost - are accessed by visitors to the directory page only by going to the bottom of the page and clicking on a mouse-type "web marketing" link. The link takes the visitor to a page with about a dozen links to other similar professionals.

Question: While not "spam" as I know it, (ie. not invisible type) this comes close since it is not obvious enough to the site visitor to be consider "helpful" and, therefor appears to exist only to build links.

Moreover, since one must pay substantially each month to be in the link list, it clearly qualifies as "buying a link" to my way of thinking. I understand Google has been policing links actively to downgrade the value of paid links.

I've advised my friend not to put any money into this.

Is my advice valid or am I missing a good way to build links to his site? Thanks for your insight.

Hello,
Do search engines still see white text as spam? Seems like more and more 2.0 designs are more colorful and include white or light text. And, is there a difference between white or light colored text? Thanks!!
Chris

Hi Aaron, I love your stuff!!!

Thanks for this page.

Any idea how long Google penalties last? I made a site 24 June this year, the index page does not get into the Google SERPS for its keywords yet subpages (there are 3 subpages) are on the first page of Googles SERPS for terms on their pages.

I don't know if I'm waiting for 3 months for G forgiveness or 1 year.

OK to make it interesting I SEO'd the site as much as 2 of my other sites which live at 2 or 3 in Google for their keywords.

I'd love to see you do something like Google answers used to be, i.e. I/we send you SEO questions - requests, and how much we'd pay for a reply/answer/solution. You could look through the questions, answer those you like and get paid.

Thanks Aaron and anyone else who reads/answers.

Tony

Hi Aaron,
If I wanted a page on my site to rank well for the following search:

keywords.com

what would be the best filename for that page?

keywords-com.htm
keywordscom.htm
???

Thanks, and you da man.

Quick question:

When is it necessary to do a 301 re-direct? If i start changing a handful of URLs on a site, is it necessary?

For a site that is already ranking well, but i want to expand, add pages, re-organize, add new URLs, is it necessary, or can i simply resubmit a site map?

hard to find a definitive answer on this topic, so thought i would ask you.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Scott
Your old URLs have some amount of trust, history, and link reputation built up. If you 301 redirect those URLs you pass that on to the newer pages. If you have a large site and are redirecting a few pages that have no inbound links from other sites then you may not need to redirect them, but if the page has any incoming links make sure you map out where the links come from and what the anchor text is in those links so you can redirect it to the most relevant page.

You do not need to map out the anchor text provided by spammy MFA type sites, just the anchor text of the real quality links.

Aaron,

I have a question, how can you be successful in SEO/SEM but not interested in creating "quality content".

I've been working at the SEO/SEM game for a couple of years now. I've learned that I am interested in the SEO techniques but not necessarily the "quality content". Don't get me wrong I am not looking for a shortcut but I don't believe "quality content" trumps all.

What strategies can you recommend; outsource all my content, focus on PPC or consult for clients?

Also, how do you do it? You often write about your successes with the sites you own. Some are probably outside of the seo world. If so do these sites have lots of quality content or are you having success with your seo knowledge?

Hi,

I would like to know if there is there is any *real* money to be made in affiliate marketing?

I'm beginning to suspect that the big dollars can only be made selling your own products or services.

Regards
Peter

Hi Aaron,
Can you please give me some tips on the best internal linking strategy for SEO purposes?

This tactic used to scare me until Matt Cutts said several months ago that sculpting PR within your website is okay with Google. Now, I'd like to be sure I'm using it to it's best advantage. Any advice? Thanks

If it can take up to three months to see results from applying SEO to a site, how/when do you know that you have done enough, and you're ready to move on to a new site?

Hi Aaron,

I really like this thread you're running here. Something just came to my mind:

I remember your saying that some of your low-competition niches in which you had sites only had say 200 links or so that were all easy to duplicate except for a dozen or so.

What Im wondering is: If youre trying to compete with a site that ranks on say 200 links out of which 190 are low quality links (directory submissions, etc.) and only 10 or so are high quality links..wouldnt it make sense to simply try to get 20 high quality links?:-)

Im trying to understand whether there really is hardly any value in low quality links or if they have the value of making your 10 high quality links look more natural (as theyre embedded in a natural link pattern) and thus still are pretty helpful (but only in combination with high quality links).

Thanks!

My new sites two main keywords exist in two different categories of the directories I submit to, what is the best approach when submitting to a free or paid directory if it is not keyword niche specific? Will it hurt my SEO to submit to two different categories on sites like yahoo directory, BOTW, business.com? Not even sure if this is possible.

Thanks in Advance!!

Hey Aaron,

Regarding Wordpress....

I have a blog in that is ranked fairly high for a pretty competitive keyword in the beauty/fashion industry. The blog is hosted on my own domain.

I am currently showing the past 15 posts on the front page of the blog, and am ranked #1-3 in Google for various keywords. The problem is that my main page file size is well over 100k.

Will Google (and Yahoo!) lower my ranking if I only show the past 2 or 3 posts on the front page?

I am worried that if I only show the past 2 or 3 posts, that my "keyword density" might drop dramatically. I am not keyword stuffing my pages at all, I just use the same keyword in each of my posts once or twice.

Edit: The majority of my backlinks point to the home page. I have very few backlings pointing to my posts. Got some good .edu links as well as links from other trusted sources to back me up. I would rate the quality of my backlinks as "great".

Thanks,

Thelma

thx for the reply, Aaron. I'd like to ask you another quick question:

Would you suggest placing the navigation links on the right side or on the left side of the page (in addition to creating possible sections of the website at the top)?

I was thinking for right-handers such as myself having the navigation to the right side would be more natural - but on the other hand navigation to the left is probably what internet users have become used to and thus the way to go(?)

Do you know of any sites that get more than approx 10k googlebot requests per hour?

Do you place any unique identifier hooks on all your pages.
Example:

Then find, search, replace with new word.

I can do a global CTRL H, then change this using Frontpage and more or less modify all pages, therefore I am showing as a new page in the search or this is my theory. Database sites are more of a problem. However we are developing static pages also, then a PHP push.
Andy of HoboTraveler.com --- Free Hotel WebPages

Hi Andy
I don't do anything like that at this moment.

does the older domain names have an advantage of better rankings in the Search Engines over the new domain name.

Hi Aaron,

I need to target the same website for 5 different languages. I heard I have to buy 5 different country-related domains (.com, .it, .es)...There's no way to have a good position in the SERP of Google.com, Google.it, Google.es etc...with a unique, multilangual website?

Thank you!

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your reply above.

I hear Google is shutting down adsense accounts which use arbitrage - getting traffic from Adwords and making a few cents when a visitor clicks out on an Adsense ad on the landing page.

Do you know if we can safely use 7searchDOTcom or others to get traffic without Google knowing or considering that we are doing arbitrage?

I'm quite happy to give health information away if I get a few Adsense clicks and prefer this method to less people having my info if only a few people click on a $10 buy link.

Thanks again,

Tony

Hi Aaron,

I'm finally posting a question. I have been looking at domains for sale to have the advantage of having an site that has been indexed by google for at least a year and possibly already have some links. I have searched on sites like afternik and have found names I like. How do I check the age? I go to acrchive.org and nothing comes up. Nearly all of them are parked (I believe thats what it's called) and the only content they have are one page of paid links. Have these domains never been developed or indexed by google? If not, there isn't any age value. How would you go about finding an aged site or knowing if a domain has ever been indexed?

Thanks,
Debbie

Hi Aaron,

Been reading your blog for a very long time now and have sold a few of your books using your referral centre - glad I could pass on your brilliant work.

I have been running a small SEO & Viral based news blog for a while now and I have been achieving good results for many keywords. I have not been targeting it aggressively, it has been a side project for me. I have recently posted an article detailing my results for the keywords I have targeted, and I suspect google has gave me a -950 penalty :(

The page in question is: http://www.kevstrong.com/news/SEO/My-own-long-tail-keyword-rank-review/ and looking at it now I think I was fairly stupid to write that page up as it would appear to be content stuffed if manually checked (although that was not the intention).

Would you tend to agree that this is the reason why I have gone from 32 for Web Design Newcastle to at least 683? Also as a side question, how would you go about showing those kind of results? I think I may do it as a downloadable, nofollow, noindex pdf file in the future.
Many thanks for your time.

Hi Aaron...

This page is probably going to have to be included in the next version of your eBook as an appendix. Or, at the very least, tidied up and made into a FAQ as an appendix. This page is excellent...

Anyway, a quick question about your Drupal setup. I'm just curious as to what modules/plugins (I'm new to Drupal) you have installed to help with SEO.

In particular, I'm curious about the URL structure. The last module I installed was a pain, as it only "beautified" the URL once it had been visited...

Oh, and a comment on AuntThelma's questions: Don't forget about enabling gzip compression. It can help cut down the size of the page quite dramatically, if you need to. I had to try and figure out other ways to lower my bandwidth usage due to limits on my hosting account...

thanks again,
James

I definitely have found this page to be chock full of very useful information. One of my new favorite methods for a company that has just put up their website and optimized it but has no inbound links or rankings yet is to purchase a few hundred deep link directory submissions combined with a good press release or two over the next couple of months. This combination offers the links you need to rank for your optimized keywords, and then a strong link with tons of traffic from your press release. Either way, it is a good way to spoil your self after just setting up a new website.

Thanks for all the help Aaron, I love the blog!

Great thread, learned a lot from reading all of the above!

A long time ago Gray Wolf posted about controlling the top 10.

Does that trick still work? And what kind of URLs should I target if I'm targeting a keyword phrase (i.e. squidoo.com/super-excellent-seo-book or squidoo.com/superexcellentseobook)?

Thanks,
Jesper

I have a new site that I thought I had done on page SEO fairly well. Plus I chose good keywords with low competition. However I cannot seem to get my high kei keywords to appear in the top 10 of G. I can't figure it out. Can you do a quick glance and see if there are any glaring problems? onemanknifefight.net

Aaron, what is the top-3 techniques that you recommend for getting quality links for a new site, even if you don't have much money?

Hello Aaron,

nice work and nice career, well done.

I'm just trying to copy you in your hard-working manner and wanted to ask you if you could share your stats about the seo book sales.

How many did you sell? When did you start selling? And if possible a monthly statistic if you have such.

I would be intrested about the process of the book writing. Did you sit down and wrote it all and then made corrections or did you rearrange your blogposts into a book? How many days did it take you to write it?

Thank you very much for all your sharings,
I've learned a lot from you.

Greets,
Nex

I've been working on our site recently trying to get it somewhere for our main keyword phrase. I made a mininet last week using main and secondary keyword phrase as backlinks. I got us up to 12 for the main phrase and then when I checked today, nowhere to be found. It dropped nearly 10k in the results!
One problem is that our site is horrid www.carbase.com. We are redoing it, but for now the targeted phrase of 'dealer websites' is not on the main page. I'm trying to do link building so that when the new site does go live it will already have targeted backlinks.
What do you think caused the gigantic drop for the targeted phrase?

Hey Aaron,

I'm a frequent reader of your blog and also bought your book through the company I work for. I learned a lot from both sources, although I am having one major problem: I am a poker affiliate.

Even though I am hardcore white hat, doing business can be quite rough sometimes. For example, getting (quality) one way links is a lot harder in this field.

Anyway, my question is about PCC. I decided to try something completely different, so I created a landingpage for a PPC campaign (http://cdpoker.pokerkudos.com).

The thing is, there aren't many programs accepting gambling related ads. So I ended up requesting information in various forums and ended up getting a lot of people sending me their tracking codes :(

Well, I decided to give Adbrite and Bidvertiser a try, but the results were horrible! I have also set up a campaign for Yahoo targeting the UK (yes they do allow gambling ads), but my ads are still pending for review).

Finally my question, and let me start by saying that I appreciate it a lot if you are willing to give me an honest answer.

Can you come up with a few tips to do PPC in the gambling branche? I.e., I like to hear some recommendations about PPC programs if you happen to know it.

Thanks!

Best regards,

Giorgio

Hi Aaron. My question involves local search marketing. For the last 6 months or so I have been buying a lot of local related domain for my industry (construction). I want to put those domains to work, build sites around them that is helpful and related to the domain’s I’ve bought. I have a main site that I want everyone to end up at, that involves must of my time, and all of my energy. (If they go to the main site or not, I really don’t care. They can contact me from the mini site, or I simply get an impression of my logo in their head….SCORE.) I am looking at hosting for the websites, and was wondering if I got an unlimited hosting account if I should link them all together. With an unlimited hosting account either the b or c block range would be the same for each site. Would it be unwise to link all of these sites together?
Would it be wise to link all of these sites to my main site? Each site I will spend time working on in the future, but for now they would be getting most traffic from organic, local search.(My domains I bought are also some of my best keywords.) The other thing….I use Google analytics, I was wondering if I have that code in each one of the sites, is that putting me on Google’s radar? Or should I use separate software instead of Google Analytics? (the mini sites will consist of about 500-1000, of which 20 of those will be further developed, the rest will do whatever, I really just wanted the domains.) The other sites will not be like what Marchex did. There may not be a ton of information on them, but they will contain helpful, useful, and very targeted information. I have read some stuff by Bruce Clay about mini sites, and others, but their whole conversation was about….should a person spend time building mini sites or should that content and energy be spent on a single domain? I’m not confused about any of that. I know my answer. So, let me know what you think. Sorry about the late post, and I’ve really enjoyed your blog. Very addicting

Aaron,
New Blog for my Fiancee' http://usedcarqueen.com has excellent Google results and decent MSN/live.com results.

After hundreds of Google hits, there isn't a single Yahoo hit yet!

Yahoo's Crawling it:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?ei=UTF-8&p=http://usedca...

Can it be: Google ad sense + New URL = ban?

thnx,
Joe

Does the 950 penalty exist and how do you get out of it?

Starting a blog (no comments on how long it took), and want to make sure that I "do it right the first time" from an SEO perspective. If you could point me in the right direction (no need to outline everything; links to posts covering this are fine), I would greatly appreciate it. Remember, beginner when it comes to this.

Thanks in advance,

Dan

Aaron:

I was wondering if you could look over www.riderstv.com and give some suggestions on how to promote the site.

Jim

I am generally ranked number one on Google for one of our major terms in every English language country except Nigeria.... any suggestions on getting that last country... does Nigeria use a different algo?

Any special reason why edu sites rank so well for pharmaceutical search terms and why might the Google spam fighters aren't wielding their mighty powers on a problem which is clearly resulting in a lesser user experience?

Aaron-

Thanks for this site, it is fantastic information.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on Affiliate Elite?

It isnt exactly free, but definitely not as much as the others that are out there.

My need is to be able to enter my competitors domain and find all the ads and keywords they are bidding on.

Thanks,
Peter

Hi Aaron,

Is there a current problem with your Google rank checker? I'm getting a 0 result on everything now. My actual Google rank is still the same.
Examples:
#1 spot for brangelina.net on "brangelina" search

#20 spot for eyeclops.blogspot.com on "eyeclops" search

#51 to #57 spot for studentloanadvice.blogspot.com on "sallie mae" search

Thanks,
David

Hey there,
Well my web site is in a category with very little competition, and I rank fairly well on a few keywords, but I dont understand why I am not higher ranked!

Anyway, the web site is http://www.theshrimpfarm.com/

The keywords I want to rank higher on are:

Cherry Shrimp (now #4, but should be #1)
Dwarf Shrimp (now #9 should be 1 or 2)

Thank you in advance for what ever assistance you can offer!

Hello,

When choosing a host does location matter? Meaning, if I were intending on putting up a site for a UK audience, and hosted that site in Virginia, would there be any real negative effects in doing so? I understand that server maintentance may become an issue in terms of affecting traffic during peak uptimes but how about SEO and ranking in different search engines such as Google UK?

First I just want to say your SEOBook is a great, I have created a hard copy version so I can refer to it regularly.

My question is to do with page titles.
Right now my page titles for each page look like this:

"Broad Keyword Phrase | Topic Name"

I wanted to change the "Broad Keyword Phrase" to be our website name now that we are more recognized kind of like wikipedia does.

The new page titles look like this:

"DomainName.com | Topic Name"

Does it hurt to have your domain name on every page title? Also, I have heard that putting the keyword first is beneficial. Would it make any difference if the page title was:

"Topic Name | DomainName.com"

Most importantly, each topic on our website has different parts. I haven't bothered changing the page titles for those pages except by adding (2) for Part 2 and (3) for Part 3:

"DomainName.com | Topic Name"
"DomainName.com | Topic Name (2)"
"DomainName.com | Topic Name (3)"
etc.

Is this hurting anything by having repeating page titles? Should I be more creative with my page titles so they are different for each page of a specific topic?

Any thoughts would be great. Thanks again!

Hi Aaron,

What a huge amount of useful advice you have provided herein!

My question is a follow-up on other questions that have addressed the use of nofollow of monthly archive pages. I currently have an archive page that allows followed linking to categories and tags (Wordpress, with none of the tags duplicating the categories) and that has nofollow coding for the monthly archives and author links. An example nofollow of the monthly linking is as follows:

November 2007

Is this going to ultimately screw me all the way around given that my site titles have a date in them, with an example being

http://www.keenerliving.com/2007/11/19/my-reinstallation-of-leopard/

Note that I have not used my robots.txt file for any nofollows. This is strictly via a separate, crawlable page (an "archives" page) on my site.

Much thanks.

Aaron,

Is a domain name that has been black-listed by Wikipedia worthless or shall I rather ignore WP because one never got traffic from it anyway? Some WP SPAM Cops are going way overboard and suddenly you are on the monthly SPAM archive ....! Just wondering.

Chris

Aaron,

Thank you much for the good advice. I'll nofollow the social links and add more to the sidebar. Much appreciated,
Bruce
Keener Living

Hi Aaron,

I am excited and thankful that you will take the time to look at a website and give advice.

On http://www.spiralhaircase.com have had a PR6 for years and have recently moved down to a PR4. Could this be because I have recently implemented a database for my products and consequently have 7000 more pages indexed in google? I haven't noticed that I've lost any backlinks so that is the only thing I can come up with. Any other ideas?

Thanks so much for your awesome site and I wanted to let you know that I absolutely love the google toolbar SEO buttons I found on here!

:)Sherri

I have had a google penalty applied on my website and i lost nearly all of my income. I was earning around $1000 a day from all my phrases and now zilch.

Is there a specific way to figure out what i have done to trip the switch.

my site contains the following:

1) landing pages designed to rank for certain terms. with only a little content but designed to convert traffic and make money. This is a small percent of the site maybe 1%.

2) i have bought a ton of links. Not from any networks. From messageboard posts and from contacting webmasters directly. I have a diverse anchor text variety. IE not all same anchor.

3) I still rank for my site name.

4) i am 100% certain this isnt an algo change. I was getting over 70k daily uniques from google and have 400kbacklinks according to google.

5) i still maintain the same pagerank and have even more pages indexed on the site compared to before. But they are not ranking... but previously i was getting top 10 for everything i chose.

6) This was 22 days ago. Could i be caught up in a swirl and return? or does some kind of filter / penalty seemed to be tripped. I would say the site is over optimized with power indexing strategies and perfect onpage for google. h1, titles etc. + the combination of tons of links. Most on homepage but a good % deep links.

Google ruined my business. Is there anyway to get it back. Where do i start?

If i am allowed a second question i want to ask you the following. Do you think google care 1 bit about the adult industry?

If you detail backlink lookup the top 10 sites for porn, free porn and other huge adult terms. They are all paid links. and im not talking about a few paid links. Im talking about blatently obvious tens / hundreds of thousands of dollars buying links.

Same goes for pharma, gambling, poker and a few more.

I got to get on to making more posts, so I have to close this post for now.