SEO Question & Answer Thread

Aaron, I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for the advice you gave two weeks ago, after making the changes you suggested my site is back at the top 10 SERPs for my keywords, thanks again.

Hey Aaron, just like Guillermo.. I'd also like to thank you for your efforts here on SEOBook.com! One quick question...

I run a fairly small AdSense website that does very well in the SERPs and draws quite a bit of traffic and revenue, but only about 4-5 pages of the site get the traffic. I run a blog on this site and have about 20 or so blog entries and my analytics show that no one visits or reads the blogs. I'm afraid the blog is just adding to the "noise" of the site and that I should contain my PR to those 4-5 pages that draw all the traffic.

Would it harm anything if I were to test out blocking the entire blog section of this website using the robots.txt exclusion? Most of my indexed pages are the blog posts, but like I said.. no one goes to them and they don't rank well at all.. so they are essentially useless. I just don't want to do anything drastic that could set off a flag for my site in google and mess up rankings. If I do block the blog section and it doesn't work.. can I simply unblock it later on without any harm?

Any thoughts or suggestions you may have would greatly be appreciated. Thanks so much for your help and time. A big fan here!

Everything looks great... You might want to draw more attention to the fact that you need to create an account. The last few times I visited I assumed that you closed comments. Only after you had asked for comments on this post did I realize that I needed to create an account.

Great news Guillermo.

Thanks Hawaii SEO. I will look to highlight that a bit more in-line with the comments area.

Hi Todd Short term, you may want to noindex meta tag in your blog pages, but allow their link equity flow through to the other parts of your site.

If a bunch of your link equity pointing into your blog from other sites then I would not even do the above.

Also remember that long-term blogs are about building momentum and aggregating an audience. If you can find ways to make blog posts that are appealing to others (appealing enough to get linked at or cause them to subscribe to your blog) then over time those will lift the overall authority of your site. If you just close your blog off and do not have any way to lift your site's authority, then eventually as others keep gaining authority some of them will likely pass you up in the search results.

Aaron,

The drupal registration process is pretty user friendly and the site is clean and easy on the eyes, so no recommended changes from my side. I'm interested in your response to Todd's question. This seems to be related to Rand Fishkin's interview of Matt Cutt's regarding webmasters using no follow to control page rank of a site. Looking forward to your hearing your thoughts.

I did just notice the time stamp appears to be off if you are based in the US. It's 10:19pm EST as I'm making this post now. The posts above me show 1:57am so that would put you somewhere in Europe if the time stamp is correct?

Aaron, working on a redesign for an ecommerce site. The redesign will contain more seo-friendly urls as well as cleaner page code. The existing site has pretty solid rankings, but I know these can be improved with the design improvements we will be launching.

Do you have any advice while we prepare to roll out the redesign? After testing, we were going to make sure we 301 all old urls to their new url target to maintain the link authority of each page. Anything else you can recommend to us so that we do out best to maintain and build on established rankings?

Thanks for keeping it real!

As was previously suggested add some sort of a "Rep point" system. Other members can probably rep each other. It's not the best system and not without its faults, but it will keep the quality of the comments higher in my opinion.

I understand people spam to get links and search love but why not have the links show up when the member is logged in? I often wondered what the sites of the people who are commenting here looked like and how well they're doing.

Hi Rajasekharan
Setting up the links to work properly and link to profile pages was a goal from yesterday, but so many issues with hosting and stuff delayed that feature.

Hi Shawn
Get baselines of how you are doing now, and track how well each page or section is performing if you can. I also like to try to ensure I fix broken links and clean up the site's structure to place more emphasis on key pages. If some sectors of the site underperform others I may depreciate those.

Hi cmswebsiteservices
If a site is really clean I suppose there is nothing wrong with using nofollow on unimportant pages to flow PageRank toward keypages. But if you start ranking well and are doing anything aggressive the use of nofollow on internal links says "I know SEO", and if you were doing something borderline shady that might also be attribuatable to ignorance, the use of nofollow says "I am guilty and please ban my site". Hand editing is much more common on smaller websites than on corporate sites.

Hey Aaron,

When will your membership packages become available? http://www.seobook.com/taxonomy/term/3

I'm sure you are aware, but just in case you will want to block out all the nodes, taxonomy, etc.. urls to prevent duplicate indexing in the search engines. Haha, I guess that's about like giving golf tips to Tiger Woods, but you never know, even Tiger has a caddy that provides a useful tip every now and then.

Regarding no follow, it would be on pages like the drupal registration page and the taxonomy type urls listed above that would just be categories with little content.

Hey Aaron..

long story short, you inadvertently turned me into an SEO domainer/SEOmainer (and for that I thank you)..But now I need content creation, but cheapish content creation. You have any suggestions on where to go to get the best/cheapest content written?

-peter @ DomainersGazette.com

Hey Aaron,

I work on a site that has both non-secure & secure pages (http & https). Since the site navigation was coded with "relative" links (ie. ../directory/filename.html) you can sometimes get the exact same page with an http prefix as well as with an https prefix (depending upon where you came from on the site). Is this a serious dupe content danger? Is PR being diluted by this?

Not sure how the engines treat a page that has duplicate versions in both http & https.

Thanks.

Hi cmswebsiteservices. I was testing having multiple products. Not sure if I will offer a membership thing for sure...you can see by the screwy prices (corporate membership being cheaper than regular membership) that if I were to launch something like that it would not be a tomorrow item.

Hi Domainersgazette
I like to hire freelance writers from sites like Craigslist. There are markov generators and synonym replacement software programs available for only a few hundred dollars if you are looking to create sites with automated content that you do not mind getting burned.

Hi Garrett
I would suggest using absolute URLs if possible, and even on the secured section of the site I would recommend linking to non secured URLs for the parts of the site that do not need to be secured. If Google is indexing both versions of your site then you are indeed diluting PageRank and causing indexing issues. For larger sites like Amazon.com http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:https://www.amazon.com/&hl=en&rls=GG... they ensure that the links on secured pages point to the non-secured version of their site.

Hi All,

I am starting a new blog… What is the best structure for permalinks? and does it really matter that much?

I think matt cutts is using:
/%postname%

Aaron you seem to be using the default...

What would you suggest for a brand new blog?

Thanks for any input..

Hi wwinger. I like either "name-of-post" or "/2007/09/name-of-post"

A content question.. I see you have seobook and the fattyweightloss site... I am sure you have several other blogs as well..

Do you create all the content for these sites? if not how do you get the content.
Also,
is blogging your favorite way to rank in the search engines?

I was on your affiliate page, http://www.seobook.com/rf/, and I tried to hit the home link in the breadcrumbs and it just keeps you on the affiliate page. I don't know if this is what you intended or not, but thought I would mention it.

Aaron, Your book is good, for the last 6 month a was reading different books to get my own idea about SEO, but these one is the best. I have a question, how many links need rank a web page in PR5. Is only an idea. Let me know

Hi Aaron,your site looks fine.I have a question,I want to sell an e-book about something....well this is the problem:i am not great at anything so i will research day and night about something,but what do you think i should research ...I mean:I want a profitable niche ,also not much competition and it must be something i can learn ( don't tell me to research about c++ programming)

I was thinking seriously about creating a guide that shows how to get rich creating and publishing e-books.a guide that shows every step...how to research,write it,publish it write a good sales letter ..a very detailed guide.I was thinking to sell it using keywords like "make money,make money online,free money"(for first maybe using google adwords

so do you think my idea has potential?
and if not give me a good idea please

Thank you very much

Hi Aaron,

I'd like to make some comments on the site structure etc.

1) The more full posts you have (as opposed to 'Continue reading ...') the better. It takes time to open up new tabs - it's ten times easier to skim down one long page of full posts and then go to the comments if I feel strongly about something.

2) Posting in blocks (nothing for three or four days, then a whole load of stuff) is obviously valid as you have a busy life but means that somedays there's four or five posts plus their links to wade through and notes to write up in my 'library' first thing which can easily take an hour or more and throws me out of synch. If I don't read them I never catch up - and basically I only read your blog plus occasionally SEL so God knows how other people manage.

3) Your links to other sites are usually interesting, but not always (obviously). I do get fed up of non-descriptive links that only hint at things - yet more tabs (or Clueviewer) and more time spent. Can you make your links descriptive for readers, please - or have a descriptive phrase in bracket after them? Someone on a forum for a common blog platform once responded to a plea for help with a reply along the lines of, 'What do you expect us to do? Predigest it all for you?' To which the reply should have been, and is, Yes please, anything to make life easier so that I can be more productive and not waste time.

4) No rep points, please - Nooo! One of the strengths of this blog is its informality. I fled forums long ago. One reason is the status points / reputation points, whatever you want to call them. It changes the whole atmosphere. I hate regimentation. At it's most extreme you end up being surrounded by 'experts' subtly fighting each other to be 'experts'. 'Experts' can be extremely off-putting to some posters (like me). Sure, if this was a PHP forum it would be an easy short-cut to figuring out who knows what, but what I'm getting out of this blog is the Art of marketing as well as the science and Art doesn't need those sort of 'experts', it needs people who are willing to take risks and do dumb things and question everything and look stupid.

5)Membership ...ooh. That makes me think of WMW and all those dumb results at the top of the SERPS that went to a 'Join us' page. Sorry - in the context of SEO it just does. It makes me think of Rand's membership - nice bloke etc., but another firewall, an exclusion zone. If you've got something that's working, don't break it. It's not the numbers you have to worry about - the numbers will look good, at least for a while. It's the corrosive attitude change underneath, the Us and Them, the interpolation of Money between you and your readers (Us), that will change You, and change the readers you attract.
Steve Pavlina (off-track, a bit) used to have comments on his posts. Then he tried to funnel his users into forums. Bang! I was out of there. The informality, the focus that he'd created had changed. I see membership in the same light. I'll pay I suppose, because your blog's so good, but something negative will have been introduced.

Anyhow Aaron, can you explain this to me? If pages aren't being indexed, where do they get their link equity from?

P.S What happened to my line breaks?

P.P.S What happened to my quote?

And how can I edit my comments?

Greetings Aaron! I've provide seo services, and I actually have a website, and a blog. Do you recommend just working off a blog where content is always being updated, and forget the website all together?

I have a link on my blog point to me website for seo services, and my website has been published since 2006, so I hate to just let it go to waste and not keep it active.

Any thoughts on this delimma?

Are site-wide text links pointing into one site from many respectable domains (clients) good or bad? All the text links use the same anchor text with a relatively long and descriptive title tag. The sites are off topic. (i'm worried it could affect the site the links are on rather than the one that's being pointed at too)

Hey Aaron,

Thanks for the great content you provide - it's totally inspiring - even for a goose such as myself. Since I consider you to be one of the top SEO (and all that goes with it) authorities on the web - I was wondering if you have a resource (other than your SEO book which I have) where you list guys,gals,blogs,sites,etc. that you consider to be authorities in the areas of seo and directly related? I try to keep up with your authority references from your blog and sort of keep a 'running log' of those.

Thanks,

Ed

Hi Aaron,

I have a question i've been turning over in my head a bit lately. It is part strategy, part seo so of course I expect you'll just talk about the SEO side of things.

When I started the website I work on (a charity fundraising shopping and search site) I chose a somewhat long but brandable domain name, which has been active since late 2002. It did pretty well with 1,000s of UVs and a pr of 5-6 with a few academic links to boot. However in late 2004 the domain was banned with a hand job - i was never quite sure why as I hadn't done anything *that* naughty. Reinclusion requests were pretty much ignored or just pointed me to the guidelines when i felt the site was already clean.

Anyway, I re-launched the website under a new name in June 2005 - a shorter domain but i've come to realise unmemorable and far from ideal. However due to getting a grant from an NGO for publicity PR got me featured on BBC uk and World, as well as some other authority sites like CNET. It has remained on that domain until now, when I've noticed the old domain is no longer PR 0 but PR 5 once more, still holds many backlinks and of course has a couple years more age than the current one.

I'm now torn as to which direction I should 301 the domains. One has had media coverage, a certain amount of link pop but to be honest the name probably isn't all that memorable, the other has a better name, age and good backlinks but has been banned once before so may carry some bad mojo too. Currently the old domain has nothing but a holding page on it and I believe I could benefit from combining the strengths of the two domains. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

Aaron

Are you therefore saying that copious usage of the no-follow tag might do a site long term damage?

+30 position google filter/penalty

You mentioned some time ago about the google +30 filter
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/9302

Whats your take on the issue now, what have caused the problem and how would you suggest getting around the problem.

Is the filter/penalty algoritmically activated or a handjob?

Is there any other way to escape the filter without a manula reinclusion request?

What would be your suggested strategy for escaping the issue?

/P

The new site is ***much*** slower for me. All the other sites I just tried load virtually instantaneously, but this post, for instance, took almost 30 seconds to even start loading.

Hi Aaron,

An SEO Question:

If Site A links to a page on Site B and that page on Site B is excluded from being indexed by search engines by a noindex directive in robots.txt or by an on-page 'nonindex' meta tag, does site B receive any benefit in terms of link authority/search rankings in Google from that link?

(The new site is loading a bit slow for me right now.)

Thanks

Aaron,

I love the blog and the site.

A suggestion would be to start a discussion forum on a subdomain.

What I would really like is to be able to post questions (like on this thread) and get you as well as others in the community to chime in with advice.

Also, although I am an SEO Book affiliate, I gave you a free PR4 link on my directory due to the fact that you let people show their links in their posts here. I appreciate that.

Thanks!

What about sites that use no follow incorrectly? Put them on pages to stop pagerank leaking or to use content from others and then no-follow the bio? Does Google punish them or are we to lose out on pagerank because of it.

I just thought of a question...

Does canonicalization affect page rank?

For example I have a website that has 663 sites with 2800 links linking to http://fervorsingles.com and 198 sites with 9680 links to http://fervorsingles.com (no www). Does this affect my page rank negatively by dilluting it when all could be going to www.fervorsingles.com etc..?

Thanks!

Another nice feature would be to be able to go back and edit your posts! I made a mistake in my previous post - I forgot to add the www to the first URL.

Hey Aaron, do you think that in the future it will be viable to be a one man SEO?

In the offline world, you don't see many one man marketing teams. Now it seems that things like the number of links required to get into competitive industries, the need for social media accounts, and the amount of noise on the Internet are making it harder for one person to stand out.

As the SERPs get more competitive, will it take teams to do successful SEO, or will the Internet and computer-aid continue to act as a multiplier to people's effort allowing individuals to continue to make a living online?

Hi Aaron,
thanks for sharing all this infos, great work, etc, etc...

A question here: I'm SEO working for as small site in Portuguese, and got some links from pages with good PR, good contextual relevance, but they're in other languages, like English and Italian. Does it help me or not at all??

Thank you!

Might I suggest a private bulletin board that is run a decent and fair manner - and NOT free.

Years and years ago I ponied up the $$$$s to "join" a private SEO Bulletin Board that was an add on to a general public BB - I'm sure the BB needs no mention here - (now that TW has gone ;) ) we'll leave him alone.

Basically a pleasant place for us folks to meet and learn with out a$$hole moderators taking the piSS out of every post...

A BB would be a welcome addition here - I'd cough up the dosh as I'm sure many would.

David
Charlotte NC via Torquay, UK

Hope the new CMS is working out for you. It seems pretty clean, but is a tad slow.

Cygnus

Please include Next/Back links for your posts.

I think a private bb is a good idea. Considering you can find some "not a$$hole" moderators for it.

Hi Aaron,

I recently started (3 weeks old) site for a popular TV show. My website is indexed by Google and it appears in search results for certain terms as first page in SERP but for my main term, it is listed on the second page. I am wondering what strategy should I adapt to move it to the first page.

My site:
Some keyword for which my site ranks well:

1. results voice of india
2. Harshit star voice of india
3. toshi star voice of india

The main keyword for which I want to do better is:
star voice of india

If you see SERP for any searches related to my niche, you will find that starvoi.com does very well even though it has zero backlinks. Also, amulstarvoiceofindia.blogspot.com and aspisdrift . com does well even though they don't always have ideal results for the search query. [For example, 'Harshit voice of india' search shows aspisdrift.com page but it doesn't really have that much detail about the person Harshit.] I have created a site wide link from my PR5 blog and I still can't see Google showing those backlinks using link: operator. You can see those backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer though.

I get a feeling that Google ranks blogs hosted on blogspot higher than those independently hosted blogs. Is that true?

Any tips/advice is highly appreciated.

J
P.S.: If you could remove the actual URLs from my comment, it will be great.

Aaron,
Thanks for this awesome blog, I love reading it. Very creative and thoughtful content.

This whole paid link debate is driving me crazy. I've got a very legitimate site that sells a real service that real businesses use. No affiliate / adsense / advertising etc on the site. So I'm not too worried about a hand edit. (Maybe this is foolish). What I am worried about is getting some sort of algorithmic penalty from buying links. I have about 1500 organic links to my site (mostly to a blog I write that has tutorials and tools). I have about another 1000 paid links (payperpost + textlinkads + reviewme marketplace). I try to mix up the anchor text as much as possible. At this point I've stopped buying new links because I'm scared of getting a penalty. Do you think it's safe to buy more links right now from sources like those? I have no idea how to get enough links with the right anchor text organically. I'm hoping I can buy more links with targeted anchor text.

Question 2 if you have time: I just bought a site in my niche that has about 900 links / PR4 / 8 years old. Is 301 redirecting it to my home page the right way to use it? Or will that be wasting the authority?

Thanks Aaron for taking time to reply. I will work on getting more organic links.

Thanks Aaron for the answer.I have some more questions for you

First how many books are you selling a month?

And if I want to create and sell an ebook do you know what i would need to make it legal? what rights do I need?

And also do you know any trusted source that shows a top of best selling ebooks that teach you something?
Beacause I could use it to find a profitable thing to write about

Thank you very much

Hi Xmage
I wouldn't disclose my sales volumes because I don't have much to gain in doing so, plus it changes a lot from month to month.

I offer free tips on creating an information product here. There is nothing needed to make it legal. There are some steps you can look at to increase distribution if needed, but in most cases you do not even need to get an ISBN unless you want one.

I am not sure how substantial and useful the information is inside each of these ebooks, but Clickbank lists top selling items (here are top sellers for the keyword ebook), and Amazon lists top selling regular books.

Another option for finding out what will work well for you is to start a personal blog and keep track of what you write about frequently.

Hi - I'm a bit of a newbie, so sorry if you've written about this elsewhere on your blog.

I'm wondering about strategies for choosing which domain name to develop.

I'm working on a modest informational website about a health care topic. I've bought several relevant domains (both .com and .org). They all receive some traffic, but one is the clear leader for type-in traffic.

My question is would it be best to develop on this domain (a .com) that has the most traffic currently - or perhaps to develop on a .org (one that I think has a better longterm name) and redirect all traffic from the other urls to this one?

Also - are there SEO/pagerank implications for doing this (pointing traffic from one domain to another)?

Thanks - this blog is invaluable for someone starting out - I think this particular discussion thread (both its tenor and content) is a great new feature ...

Hi Locomo
I tend to favor going on the strong .org over a weaker .com. If you build a brand you increase the value of the .com matching your brand, but unless you have a boatload of cash something has to give off the start.

Traffic and PageRank are not one and the same. Unless a site you are redirecting has inbound link equity you do not have to worry about any PageRank related issues. Either way the best way to redirect is usually a 301 redirect.

thanks Aaron!

hey aaron. this may seem like a nooby question but everytime I publish a new post on my blog it seems to rank very well in google. I even get some good traffic from the new post. Then within 2 days the post is nowhere to be seen in google's SERP. Do you have any idea what is going on? This seems to happen with all of my posts.

Thanks a lot!
Shaun

Hi Shaun
There is a variety factors that could lead to this:

• now content may receive a bonus, but that should not affect you in only 2 days
• another factor is that as sites age the freshness bonus falls off and the page gets less PageRank than it does when it is on your homepage, but that should not affect you in only 2 days
• if you use Feedburner or another site for feed management and publish full feeds they might get credit for your posts, especially if your site has little inbound link equity.
• if your search traffic drops to near 0 then someone might be scraping your content and getting credit for it. you can detect this by searching for "unique chunk of text from one of your posts that no longer ranks wrapped in quotes"

Hi Aaaron,

It's Enrico from Italy. I've read your Seobook and applyed your link build tips...my site is increasing -Now I'm top 20

Have a look:
Sicily tours

Sicily holidays

Sicily hotels

But i have some question:

1) What do you think of the website and the blog ?

2) To gain more rank for the query above I'd like to use directories and "tool building + PR" is it worth, I've noted it's diffucult and time consuming to contact directly the webmaster of the websites that link to my competitor

3) If you look some websies on the serp above, why there are ranked in the top positions poor websites?

4) I've read the last guide of seomoz about web 2.0 etc...I've found that for specific destinations, market them by travel 2.0 and web 2.0 is diffcult...what do you think about?

Thank you
Enrico

1) What do you think of the website and the blog ?

I did not read the content. But two obvious glaring issues are that the designs between the two are inconsistent, and that you have AdSense above your content on your home page. I can't think of many authoritative sites that get away with that type of ad placement unless they are really old authorities.

for 2 and 4, the fact that something is difficult should not deter you if you want to be successful.

3) If you look some websies on the serp above, why there are ranked in the top positions poor websites?

You are the one who needs to research that. Then duplicate their best bits and do some stuff that they haven't thought of yet.

Ok Aaron thank you ;-)

Enrico

I'd like to see seobook adopt this seomoz functionality: when you are logged in you can decide whether to see full posts on the blog homepage or the excerpt - when available.

HI Arron,
I find the site really useful and I've learned a lot so far.
As a recent beginner in SEO, I'm finding that sites like this and forums such as Digital Point are proving invaluable when it comes to learning these topics.

However, I recently applied for and came close to getting a permanent SEO position. the reason stated for me not being successful was that my server side skills (particularly scripting) weren't up to scratch.

After searching about, server side SEO scripting, it's not a topic that seems to be that well documented.
Can you point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
Craig