Ask Ur SEO Q's 2011
- Started
- Last post
- 86 Responses
- trooperbill0
@ukit a year ago i'd have said yes, but i think its more important that you link deep nowerdays so go for it, just make sure your sitewides are sorted (see prev post)
- numbers0
What about the fact that Google themselves has come out and said there is no actual penalty for duplicate content?
I found the article above's explanation more believable, that it would not kill you to have duplicate content but not help you either. Think about hundreds of news organizations all reprinting the same article from AP for example
- trooperbill0
@hektor911 The problem you're going to have is that by limiting yourself to a region you're going to come up against Google Places listings and a host of spammy sites all SEOing for that local term. (google places is a bitch because it takes over the above the fold listings and theres no hard and fast way to manipulate the results - my best advice here is to copy the profile of the #2 listing and get lots of reviews) so organic listings for these terms is worthless.
I'd go into the Google Adwords keyword tool and look for some bigger traffic non geographic keywords that have reasonable traffic and lower competition. and formulate the site around those.
I wouldnt buy a keyword rich domain name as yes at the moment its a shortcut to high serps but Matt Cutts has already publically posted that theyre aware this is a problem and theyre looking for a solution. so go with something branded.
as for links, sticl with photography resources and at least links from within the creative industry. the google adwords tool will show you in the let hand menu what industries your terms relate to.
design wise, dont have a splash screen
get around 300-500 words of unique content on each page and if possible make sure that theres in text links to deep pages throughout your site (look how wikipedia does it)
check your site through with the screamingfrog web crawler which will show you any issues with your site.
For your photography subject matter - this is great - you can seo each f those pages for the subject/location etc which might bring in additional custom
- trooperbill0
@spot13 its just a rule of thumb i use for new sites... the serps response will tell you how hard and fast you can go so after a few months you will see if you can ramp up/down any particular technique.
- trooperbill0
@numbers that was the whole point of PANDA (an update rolled out over Feb - now) it devalues entire sites for having duplicate and/or low volumes of text on a page.
the issue was with scraper sites ripping content off other sites and outranking the originators. PANDA seeks to fix this imbalance. if you read up on it you will see lots of people crying because they hadnt spent enough time making good quality content and simply duplicated the same stuff off other sites.
- trooperbill0
@numbers google has to pick a source and does so by picking the one thats indexed forst or that has the most citations... so in short yes google does devalue content republished. tryit you'll see
- That's pretty much what I said - I was just disputing the idea that there's a huge scary penalty that gets slapped on younumbers
- Seems like a common misconception that's out therenumbers
- yeah not a penalty but given the choice why not just make new contenttrooperbill
- nosaj0
You're a good man TrooperBill. I have a page title question. If I was to create a rule to automate Page titles in a CMS would this example be strong or poor - too many uses of "Plumbing"?
Rule:
Toronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | [Page]Actual Titles
Toronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | 24 Hour Emergency PlumbingToronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | About Us
Toronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | Locations
- My suggestion is to be more specific regarding the actual terms people will be searching for...spot13
- The closer the match the better your results. For example, instead of just 24 Hour Emergency Plumbing add residential, bathroom, etcspot13
- residential, bathroom, etc. And take out the repetitive stuff completely.spot13
- numbers0
^ Right, but the link you posted is talking about duplicate content within a single site. For instance if you have three differently titled pages with identical content.
I'm more skeptical that Google is able to enforce a "no duplicate content" rule across the entire internet, or would even want to.
Think about all the republished articles and copy and pasted quotations out there. Even if they don't promote identical content, they couldn't possibly slap a huge penalty on you for it.
- trooperbill0
@nosaj yes this is a great idea but you must treat them as independent sites and put in thr work... theyre a link that your competitors cant replicate so its best to make them super powerful ones.
- trooperbill0
@mydo nope i wouldnt do that. the drum gets indexed more frequently than your site... best to write about your post and link to the active post on the drum.
- omg0
There's still a such thing as SEO? Didn't that die when social networks became popular like Facebook? I thought the new term was GEO.(Google engine optimizer)
- trooperbill0
@Akiraprise you only have 59 chars in the title and you dont need to repeat keywords as the prominience is set by the closeness to the begining of the string.
I'd suggest something along the lines of (for your home page)
Ibiza 2011 - Club Line Up, Opening & Closing Parties
32 chars you have room for more keywords here and Always start the home page with your brandId target each deep page at a different keyword, they shouldnt compete.
yes every title should be unique
- trooperbill0
@jadrian_uk you will have to register the site thats inside the iframe - you can do sub-folders! unfortunately the domain is worthless while its iframing a separate site.
- trooperbill0
@omg lolz... we're called a lot of things... take your pick lol
- Can I call you al?ian
- boo boup bup bup,
do doo doo doup..mikotondria3
- spot130
Here are my comments on your site trooper:
1. Don't put special characters in your page titles as it will reduce the relevance to the search string.
2. Look at your site with CSS turned off (which is close to how crawlers see it). It looks like a list of random articles and has no prominence structure or purpose. I would add an umbrella statement with the site's purpose and goal, even if it's not prominent when CSS is on.
3. Use heading tags H1, H2 H3 to highlight content priority, not just a single heading in H2.
4. Your date display is not legible to search engines. They see it as random numbers instead of a date which is why when you search for "Mark Rushworth May 1" your May 1 posting doesn't come up: http://twe.ly/zwlb
5. You can use deep directory levels (or parameters), and it WILL HELP dramatically, but it all needs to be relevant. For exampe, shop/shirts/men/sweater/ would work, blog/stuff/anything/sweater will not work as it communicates nothing.
6. On your landing page you list the term "SEO" appears 65 times but Search Engine Optimization only once and it is miss-spelled. This gets back to writing proper content and what search queries are you answering with this content?The content is the most critical piece and the inbound links to the content tell Google how important the content is. While there are things you can do to "optimize" a site for specific words or phrases, your best bet is to grow your content base carefully and strategically and work on improving your prominence in your respective industry.
For the most part SEO companies will tell you a lot of bull shit ideas that usually require months of ongoing "work" to revise and rework HTML (because most SEO people don't know programming) and what they actually do is use an inbound link network to artificially boost your page rank for the time period that you pay them to do so.
- thanks for the feedback, im sue ill get around to sorting out things eventuallytrooperbill
- very interesting.mydo
- nosaj0
Is there a way for a small company to leverage owning multiple domain names? Specific keyword focused micro-sites on separate serves linking back to the main domain maybe? Or is this more work then it's worth?
- antagonista0
I developed these amazing pills that make your johnson huge. It's amazing. I emailed about 50 million people, but nobody bought any.
How can I use SEO to get my results to the top of Gogle so people around the world can enjoy a better love life with my amazing product?
- trooperbill0
bump for lunch time ;)
- dbloc0
having trouble getting the rel"author" the bring up the author photo in a google search.. any help is appreciated.
- mydo0
so i write a blog for www.thedrum.co.uk i'm guessing posting my articles on my own site would be good for both of us?