Improve your rankings, traffic, and profits today. The SEO Book training program offers you:

• Over 100 training modules, covering topics like: keyword research, link building, site architecture, website monetization, pay per click ads, tracking results, and more.
• An exclusive interactive community forum
• Members only videos and tools
• Additional bonuses - like data spreadsheets, and money saving tips
• Every order comes risk free, and with the best selling SEO Book as a free bonus

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I was just fixing up our Robots.txt tutorial today, and figured that I should blog this as well. From Eric Enge's interview of Matt Cutts I created the following chart. Please note that Matt did not say they are more likely to ban you for using rel=nofollow, but they have on multiple occasions stated that they treat issues differently if they think it was an accident done by an ignorant person or a malicious attempt to spam their search engine by a known SEO (in language that is more rosy than what I just wrote).

	Crawled by Googlebot?	Appears in Index?	Consumes PageRank	Risks? Waste?
robots.txt	no	If document is linked to, it may appear URL only, or with data from links or trusted third party data sources like the ODP	yes	People can look at your robots.txt file to see what content you do not want indexed. Many new launches are discovered by people watching for changes in a robots.txt file. Using wildcards incorrectly can be expensive!
robots meta noindex tag	yes	no	yes, but can pass on much of its PageRank by linking to other pages	Links on a noindex page are still crawled by search spiders even if the page does not appear in the search results (unless they are used in conjunction with nofollow on that page). Page using robots meta nofollow (1 row below) in conjunction with noindex do accumulate PageRank, but do not pass it on to other pages.
robots meta nofollow tag	destination page only crawled if linked to from other documents	destination page only appears if linked to from other documents	no, PageRank not passed to destination	If you are pushing significant PageRank into a page and do not allow PageRank to flow out from that page you may waste significant link equity.
link rel=nofollow	destination page only crawled if linked to from other documents	destination page only appears if linked to from other documents	no, PageRank not passed to destination	If you are doing something borderline spammy and are using nofollow on internal links to sculpt PageRank then you look more like an SEO and are more likely to be penalized by a Google engineer for "search spam"

If you want to download the chart as an image here you go http://www.seobook.com/images/robotstxtgrid.png

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Question: How do I determine how I am best utilizing my PageRank? How do I know if my navigation is successful?

Answer:

• Google Webmaster Tools shows your internal link counts to different pages. You can use that to show which pages are being emphasized on a crude level.
• Optispider ($129) shows on site link structure and compares link text to page titles
• SEO4Fun has a free PageRankBot tool which shows internal link flow. I think it is a bit complex to set up, but is cool when you get it set up.
• If you have pages of limited importance but link to them frequently (like sitewide links to your privacy policy, shipping, or about us page) consider using nofollow on those links.
• Track a few pages of your site with a tool like CrazyEgg to see what links users are clicking on and if you are drawing enough attention to the most important assets on your site.
• Use data from your web analytics tools to focus more link equity on your most important (highest traffic and best converting) pages

A few more advanced ideas

• If your site is large and you keep producing new content, use Google's date based filters to look for new pages that are of low quality / noisy (like a page dedicated to a photo but with no text on it, or other common duplicate content issues)
• Use analytics to track how many pages (and which pages) are pulling in traffic. Compare those pages with all the pages on your site to see if you can free up some dead weight, or if you have a valuable section of your site that is not well linked to. You can use Xenu Link Sleuth, a sitemap generator, or data from Google Webmaster Tools to see what pages are linked to (and perhaps getting indexed).
• If a particular page works well for you consider adding more content to that page to pick up a broader basket of related keywords. If a particular query works well for you consider creating a second page to target that query.
• If you have a high authority page that links out to many other websites consider adding more internal links to that page to keep more of the link flow internal.

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Question: How long does it take to rank a website? How many hour of work do I have to do each day to compete and rank my website at the top of the search results?

Answer: I get this question almost every day, and it is one of my least favorite questions to answer. So I figured I would answer it as best I can once here, then point people to this page when I get asked again. To compete in competitive marketplaces you have to out-think the competition or invest more than they do. When you start from how little or how quickly you have the wrong mindset. Ask not what your search results can do for you, but what you can do for your search results. :)

Keep launching quality original content, keep working at brand building, keep making social connections, and watch the traction build. When you are new, can you predict what one idea is going to make the difference? For most people I don't think so. Some types of success are deliberate, but for most independent webmasters, I think they accidentally step into success by working hard, being ignored, and then watching something blossom that they did not realize the importance of when they first launched it.

After you have some success then you can engineer further success, but for many it starts out as an accident or a byproduct of constant motion.

How long does it take to rank?

If the search results are uncompetitive (use SEO for Firefox to survey the competitive landscape) you might be able to rank in a month even if your site is brand new.

Is your site brand new? If so, how old are the top ranked competing sites. If they are a number of years old then it is probably going to take at least a year to catch up unless they are bad at marketing and link building or you have a great marketing idea that will help you build many organic links. If the companies that are ranking are multi-billion dollar corporations then you can't outrank them with a one man website unless your site is integrated into the conversation of that marketplace and/or your site offers valuable tools and/or original linkworthy content.

If your site is brand new, you probably want to develop links over time in a fairly consistent manner. If you grow x links this month then you want to create x or more the next month. And that number sets the baseline for the following month. Months where you have no viral marketing ideas try to list your site in a few quality directories, join trade organizations, and get other clean links.

If you are sitting on an older site you may be able to grow links a bit more aggressively, and you may be able to get away with being a bit more aggressive with the anchor text you use in the inbound links.

In many regional search markets outside of the US the competition is much less fierce than it is in the US, and it is easy to rank for some fairly competitive keywords.

An exact match domain name may also provide ranking benefits in some search relevancy algorithms, which allows you to rank quicker without needing to build up as much link authority.

How many hours of work will it take?
I have ranked sites on 5 hours of work, and I have put hundreds of hours of work into sites that do not rank as well as I want them to.

• How hard are your competitors working? If you are unsure track their current link count and their link growth. Also look for signs of public relation and the quality level of their inbound links.
• How big is their head start?
• How much are they investing?
• Are there ideas they forgot to focus on?
• Is your brand more focused than their brand?
• How much risk are you willing to take?
• Are competitors weighed down by bureaucracy?
• Are you more passionate about your topic than the leading websites? Eventually people will discover that, especially if you are not afraid to market yourself.

Ask not what your search results can do for you, but what you can do for your search results. :)

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Question: We were thinking of mirroring our website by giving affiliates subdomains with our content like xyz.oursite.com. Is this a good idea or a duplicate content nightmare?

Answer: Giving affiliates the same set of data is indeed a duplicate content nightmare, and it makes it hard for the affiliates to push their sites into the core organic parts of the web. If they have a product database and the same reviews and content that exist as the core branded site there is nothing remarkable about what they are doing. You can look back to this post on leaked human review documents to see how Google views affiliate sites.

Instead of cloning all your content and giving affiliates access to that, I recommend encouraging affiliates write personal journals on their own subdomain. I would encourage them to promote your products and blog about topics other than your products. This will allow some of them to work their sites into the organic parts of the web while encouraging them to write content interesting enough for people to want to subscribe to it. Sure some of the affiliates will not get much traction, but enough of them try it a few will, and they will boost your brand whenever people visit their sites.

You can include a bunch of Wordpress themes and extensions with their blogs, create a free guide to blogging, create an affiliate directory, and other offers that make it easy to get affiliates into sharing information. Maybe even install a Vbulletin forum and write a blog just for your affiliates. Bonuses to further entice a sense of community might be highlighting daily or monthly top posts, offering free design services to top affiliates, giving away prizes like link building, and interviewing some of your better affiliates in a monthly community newsletter.

Creating a platform for sharing passion is a much better affiliate strategy than duplicating content is.

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Let me know if you have any questions about SEO or internet marketing stuff. I will try to reply to your comment right below it in less than a day, often within minutes, for as long as this thread is open.

Please ask do not ask for in depth site reviews or questions that would be applicable to just one website.

Update: thread closed... I have to start working on a big project. Thanks for the questions everyone.

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Feel free to ask any SEO or internet marketing related questions and I will try to answer them below.

I prefer to answer broader industry questions than site specific questions. It can take a day to do a strong site review, and I could miss a lot of things that are wrong if I give your site a 5 minute once over.

Questions like "I have a new site and want to know where to start with link building" are better than comments "please review everything about my site". Also I can't guarantee that I can do anything to get your site unpenalized by Google if you were recently penalized.

[Update: I just closed this thread after a few hundred comments, so I have time to write more new posts.]

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Question: I am new to the market and have a product I am going to launch soon at a similar price-point to SEO Book. I am wondering if I should launch with an affiliate program, and if it will provide a substantial return prior to

Answer: I would say off the start don't enable an affiliate program until you have a better feel for the amount of effort required per purchaser and have brand awareness. I like launching without an affiliate program because it makes citations appear more natural. If you are launching a MLM hype program then a multi tiered affiliate program is a must, but if not the best option is to wait until you better learn your market and are well integrated into your market.

Why it is Best to Launch Without an Affiliate Program

• If you test your marketing first you are going to be able to achieve a higher customer value and attract better affiliates.

• If you are uncertain as to how to best sell your product and you have a new brand then it is going to be pretty tough for affiliates to sell it for you.
• The best marketing looks organic. With a new product it is best to get reviewed by top editorial channels and earn a few organic citations to help others see your product as more than just hype. If a product is primarily or only hyped by affiliates off the start that can undermine your brand.
• Some of my customers who did not sign up as affiliates have read my book and misquoted me to make me sound dumber than I am, and have misquoted to make me sound much smarter than I am. If others have profit incentive behind describing who you are or what you offer many will take the low road and use empty hype. Repositioning a brand after others have positioned it incorrectly is tougher than positioning it correctly off the start.
• Another advantage of waiting on establishing an affiliate program is that by the time you launch it you have built enough trust that people will be willing to sign up with you directly.

The Dangers of a Loose Affiliate Program

If you start off with an affiliate program I think your best best is to make the affiliate program invite only off the start to ensure your brand is not dragged through the mud before you were able to build brand equity. Some of my affiliates have done things like

• stealing content from my friends and wrapping it in banners for my site

• mass email spamming (while signing my name to it)
• a list of other dirty things I will not mention ;)

Because affiliates are hard to control, it is best to have a direct affiliate program rather than going through a third party website. This takes more time to manage, but enables you to

• immediately warn affiliates and/or remove the profit incentive if they are doing things that are illegal and/or undermine your brand value

• altert affiliates in advance of price changes, special promotions, or other changes to your offerings
• keep in contact with your affiliates, protecting you from drastic cost increases seen at third party affiliate management firms like MyAffiliateProgram
• more easily track historical trends
• create your own dirty affiliate sites without risking your main brand

Some affiliate software also tracks referrals, which enables you to learn the difference between what sorts of traffic streams and marketing sell and which do not.

Corporations have sued other corporations based on ad targeting. Even if the lawsuits are bogus they still eat up time and valuable resources. Affiliate control is useful for mitigating some such conflicts.

A few years back a well known SEO said that I was deplorable for bidding on a broad basket of keywords including their name. One of their affiliates was bidding on my name, amongst others. Once questioned about the hypocrisy, this person eventually admitted that they were too lazy to police their own affiliates, which showed their complaint had no validity. If their complaint had validity they would have better been able to claim it by hosting their own affiliate program and holding their own affiliates to the same expectations they try to hold others to.

Affiliate Software Options

• Some of the larger affiliate networks (like CJ) have a wide array of affiliates, but typically the best affiliates will hunt out the best affiliate programs wherever they are (instead of staying inside third party networks), so it might be just as easy to attract the best affiliates by ranking well for your keywords + affiliate program.

• Google offers cost per action based referral ads, but they don't have much inventory, and most of the best affiliates do not like using Javascript or sharing their business model with Google.
• Some of the smaller affiliate networks (like shareasale.com, as an example) have pitched me as a merchant for rates far below their published rates, but after seeing what happened with MyAffiliateProgram it does not make sense for me to pay a third party to place a roadblock between me and my affiliates.
• ClickBank does not cost much to set up, but I have found that I get an extraordinary return rate there when compared with Paypal. Paypal does not have affiliate features baked into it, but does work with many affiliate software programs.
• I use Idevaffiliate on Seo Book. Fully featured it costs $300.
• As ShoeMoney recently highlighted, BOTW has a custom affiliate program which even tracks direct links to any page on their site. Creating such a program would probably only cost about $1,000 at most. And that link for BOTW may have been an affiliate link, and Google has no way of knowing.

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Question: I am reading your book. On page 53 you mention using different search engine optimization strategies for small websites and big websites. How do you classify a site as small or large?

Answer: There are two big things that sort the classification of a site as large or small

• whether your optimization is manual or algorithmically driven

• whether search engines consider your site as spam when it ranks

Within those two ideas I think there are 4 big things that separate a small and large website

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Question: I have recently launched a new site and got it a few authoritative links. For my search queries related to my brand Google is ranking an internal page instead of the home page. Why?

Answer: When a site is new and has few inbound links the PageRank computations tend to be rough estimations. It is common for a page linked to sitewide, like an about us page, to outrank the homepage until they better understand the internal site structure and PageRank flow.

What if My Site is Older?

Filtered Page

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Question: You recently mentioned 301 redirecting one of your sites. How do you tell if 301 redirects count?

Answer: This is very similar to testing if a link pointing at your website is passing link juice. Before 301 redirecting your site, find at least one navigational type search query that can be created out of the inbound anchor text of the site you are redirecting, which you would still expect to rank for even if you had no page content.

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Question: How do you determine how much value there is in the head of a keyword space compared to the tail of the same marketplace?

Answer: The best way to know is to have an authoritative site that ranks across a wide swath of related keywords in your marketplace and track conversions. Of course, it is expensive to create a lot of high quality content, so there are are shortcuts you can take to understanding the depth and breadth of a keyword market.

Search Auto-Completion &amp: Related Searches

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Question: I have a client that frequently ranks at the top of the search results then sharply drops. His website's Google rankings keep bouncing back and forth. Why do they fluctuate so much?

Answer: Via using spammy links, leveraging the internal link structure of a high authority site, or cross site scripting exploits just about anyone can rank for a day, but it is harder to stay there day in and day out until you build massive domain authority.

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Question: I have been buying many links but it is hard to know which ones count and which ones do not. Is there any way to test if a link is clean and passes link authority?

Answer: If you are in a small market you can build links slowly and check your rankings as you build links, but there are two big problems with this:

• testing is slow, search algorithms frequently change, and ranking changes may occur outside of the effect of any individual link

• any market worth being in typically requires many links or at least a few high quality links that are hard to obtain

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Question: About a year ago I bought a bunch of links to help build my link popularity and get my site more exposure. Many of these links expired a few months back and yet my Google rankings did not drop. Why?

Answer: I accidentally blocked a search engine from indexing some of my pages with many in-links and the entire site quickly suffered, so odds are the links that you lost were not your most authoritative inbound links, or your site has built other signs of trust and quality.

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SEO Question: I am considering moving my site to another domain name. Do I have anything to fear in moving it? What is the proper way to move a website to a new URL?

Answer: The best way to permanently move a site is to 301 redirect it. If you have a small site you will likely see few small changes with your rankings. The bigger your site is the longer it takes to move and the more drastically the shakeup will be.

301 Redirecting a Small Site Versus a Large Site

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Question: We have a multi-week turnaround on our content which makes it hard for us to write about fresh news. Is there an easy way to get past compliance, legal, and information only formatting requirements?

Answer: This is in no way legal advice, but here are a few ideas that might work...

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SEO Question: Do domain names play a role in SEO? Do search engines understand that the words are in the URL even if they are ran together without hyphens in between them? What techniques are best for registering a domain name that search engines like Google will like?

Answer: Over time the role of the domain name as an SEO tool has changed, but currently I think they carry a lot of weight for the associated exact match search. Depending on how they are leveraged going forward they may or may not continue to be a strong signal of quality to search engines.

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Michael Gray recently asked what people thought of using article syndication as an SEO technique. While it may have some upside if the articles get picked up and syndicated outside the article databases, the article databases themselves carry little weight.

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Question: How do I track the progress of competing sites over time? How do I know what keywords my competitors are ranking for, and which ones they are improving on?

Answer: There are a way variety of means to track competing sites.

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Question: A client of mine wanted to target high traffic terms in his industry. His industry was not very competitive, and some of the target terms were competing trademarks. We rank top 5 for them in Google, and now legal troubles are occurring. We removed all references to the competing trademark on our site, but still have some rogue inbound links that we can't get removed that have the anchor text which targets the competing mark. What should we do?

Answer: There are four options which can help get you out of this situation.

Work With the Competition

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Question: I have a .biz website that ranks well in some of the major search engines for a few keywords, but does not rank as well as I would like for many other keywords. Should I consider switching to a .com domain name?

Answer: In the long run I think it is worth moving away from .biz if you are creating a real long-term business. The web was created to share information, and businesses are generally viewed less admirably than the individuals that work in them. As long as relevancy algorithms are based largely on links, then a .biz extension could hurt your exposure in most fields.

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SEO Question: My site is focused on a small niche and I can't find any related keywords to write content about. How do I optimize my content? What should I do?

Answer: Track what you are ranking for and look for meaningful patterns and descriptive related keywords in that data.

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SEO Question: When I did a related search on Google it said that my site was related to some gambling sites. How do I help my site no longer be related to these sites?

Answer: It sounds like you may have a spammy link profile that needs cleaned.

Site Content Cleanliness Check:

Do a site:mysite.com search in Google for your domain, while also searching for a few offensive words to ensure nobody has added spammy pages and / or spammy outbound links to your site.

Outbound Link Profile:

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SEO Question: Some prospective customers have offered to pay me on a performance basis. Should I consider providing search engine marketing services for these types of clients?

Answer: There are many ways to structure these sorts of deals, but generally I would probably avoid most of the offers because a lack of willingness to pay until results are achieved is often an indication of a lack of trust.

Trust and Toxic Customers:

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SEO Question: I am trying to do keyword research for a client, and he is focused on a niche phrase that does not show up on any of the major keyword research tools. I was wondering if there was an accurate way to estimate search volume for these long tail keywords.

Answer: In this case, almost any sampling method you can think of is going to be wildly inaccurate.

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Question: I recently purchased a website at mydomain.somecompany.com as a store to sell somecompany.com's products and was wondering if the site had any value, and how I could do SEO on the site if I couldn't change the content?

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SEO Question: Can you recommend a product/service that will enable me to get my site listed with all the search engines? I have the site hosted with GoDadddy, they have a service for $30 that supposedly gets you registered with multiple search engines. Does this sound like a good idea? Is there a better way to do this?

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Blog Indexing Question: My ranking for my core keyword went up, but most of my site was recently put in Google's Supplemental Index, and I saw my income and traffic drop sharply. I have not built any links recently or made any changes to my site. How can I fix this and get my site top rankings again?

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SEO Question: When writing content for our websites what is the optimal copy length? Is page length important for search engine optimization?

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SEO Question: I have been submitting my articles to article directories and submitting my site to directory after directory, but I am not getting anywhere in the search results. What should I do to promote my SEO site and services?

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SEO Question: What is a reasonable price to pay for professional SEO services?

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SEO Question: Our site has an about us section which links to press coverage of our site. We are worried about bleeding PageRank, and are wondering if we should use nofollow on our links.

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SEO Question: A top ranked competitor of mine has a few good links, and many low quality links. I don't think they should be ranking, but they are. Should I duplicate what they are doing?

SEO Answer: As an SEO I think you can learn more from seeing top ranked results that should not be ranking where they are than from sites you expect to rank, but far too many people desire to emulate those rankings without building the necessary criteria to rank.

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SEO Question: Is a Yahoo! Directory registration worth it? How do I know what directories are worthwhile? What directories should I submit to? Do you have any good site submission tips?

SEO Answer: If you have a business, and are serious about SEO, I generally would recommend submitting your site to the Yahoo! Directory. There are a lot of criteria to consider.

Your Site Name:

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SEO Question: I rank #3 in Google for one of my core keywords and yet I am nowhere in it for Yahoo!. Why?

SEO Answer: Just because Google is viewed as the hardest search engine to manipulate, that does not mean that if you rank there you will also rank elsewhere. Each search engine has their own relevancy algorithm which determines how results are ordered. Over time those relevancy algorithms for each engine change, and they are never going to be the exact same at different engines.

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SEO Question: I recently set up a local search site, and was wondering if it made sense to use SEO to market it?

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SEO Question: We are considering shifting our site from offering free content to a paid only model which just offers a brief introduction into each area. How long will it take for Google and other engines to rank our site worse for changing our business model?

SEO Answer: Many sites flip from legitimate quality content sites to lead generation forms and continue to rank well for years. How long your site will survive on its current authority largely depends on

• how authoritative your site and brand are,

• how competitive your marketplace is, and
  

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SEO Question: I have traded hundreds (maybe thousands) of links. I am ranking great on MSN, but am nowhere on Google. What gives?

SEO Answer: Your site is associated with sites of similar link profiles. If most of your inbound links and/or outbound links are of low quality that may preclude your ability to rank. As your reinforce the identity of your site as being associated with low quality sites you are digging a bigger and bigger hole.

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SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

Answer: PPC ads go through redirects, so they do not count toward your link popularity, but there are other ways to tie together PPC ads and organic search placement. Search engines claim there is no direct linkage between buying ads and ranking, but they only talk in ideals because it helps reinforce their worldview and help them make more money.

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Question: I wanted to link to your book from my site using an affiliate link, but will not be able to put affiliate links on my site, how do I link to pages on my site and have them jump to affiliate links?

Answer: Many affiliates link to theirdomain.com/recommended/product-name/ and then redirect that location either using .htaccess or a PHP jump script. Some affiliates also block the directory of affiliate links using a robots.txt file.

The advantages of doing this are:

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SEO Question: Many people tell me to get authoritative links. How do I find authoritative links?

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SEO Question: I have the same content as a top ranked competing site. Are they outranking me because of their domain age? What can I do to outrank them?

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SEO Question: I have a 100,000+ page website. Is there any easy way to ensure all major search engines completely index my website?

SEO Answer: Search engines are constantly changing their crawl priorities. Crawl too deeply and get many low quality pages while increasing indexing time and costs. Crawl too shallow and you don't get down to the relevant pages. Crawl depth is a balancing act.

There is no way to ensure all pages get and stay indexed...they change their crawl priorities constantly. Having said that, you can set your site up to make it as crawler friendly as possible.

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SEO Question: Where would you begin with a client that markets exceptionally niche products? Or would you simply pass on the opportunity and just work with clients with more mainstream products/services?

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SEO Question:

I am using Overture, Wordtracker, and KeywordDiscovery to do keyword research, but I want to know why the search volume numbers vary so much, and which numbers I should trust. How do I do keyword research?

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SEO Question: What's the best way to determine whether Google has history of a domain - and considers it an old domain?

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SEO Question: Many people say write naturally for SEO, but what does that mean?

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SEO Question: So here is my question. I have followed a good deal of your advice and am thankful for it as I see myself sitting pretty for some of my keyword phrases.

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SEO Question: My main keywords for my site are e-book and ebook. Should I sprinkle both versions of the word on every page?

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SEO Question:

My site already ranks number 1 in Google. How do I get Google to post a mini site map in the search results?

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SEO Question:

Are you aware of a tool or a service that can provide reliable search volume history for certain keywords? Like how many searches there were for "keyword phrase" in each month of 2005.

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SEO Question: What is the best way to determine what resources should be put into pay per click marketing versus organic SEO?

SEO Answers: There are a near endless number of factors in determining how you should spend your marketing money online. The good thing about search is the implied intent while people are searching - which can lead to quick feedback on efficient accounts, but there are certain businesses that are hard to sell via search.

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SEO Question: I am new to pay per click marketing. Should I have Google and Yahoo! set up my pay per click account?

SEO Answer: Indeed Google and Yahoo! both are willing to set up your PPC accounts for you, but I would not recommend Google AdWords Jumpstart or Yahoo! Search Marketing Fast Start.

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SEO Question: I was recently threatened by a competitor about them pointing bad links at my site. Can I be penalized based on who links to my site?

SEO Answer: For most people it is unlikely that a competitor is going to go to such lengths to try to sabotage your business, and it is probably not worth being too paranoid over. The whole reason SEO works well is that few people actively practice it.

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SEO Question: I believe link popularity is the #1 criteria to rank in most search algorithms. Is it possible to gain links too quickly?

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SEO Question: Much of my website is in Google's Supplemental index? What is their supplemental index? How does it work?

SEO Answer: What a timely question...where to start...well if the supplemental problem has only hit your site recently (as compared to the date of this post) it may be a Google specific problem that has caused them to dump thousands of sites recently.

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SEO Question: I have noticed many more content heavy websites in Google's search results over the last year or two. Why does it seem it is getting harder for commercial sites to rank?

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SEO question: How do I do SEO for a small commercial website? Adding more pages will make it look more unprofessional, and so not something I really want to do?

SEO Answer: Sometimes small sites can be easier to do SEO for than big sites.

Faults of big commercial sites:

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SEO Question: I am interested in a topic, but am not sure if I should create a niche site within that topic or create a site about that topic?

SEO Answer: As long as there is a functional business model there it is almost always worth niching down a site. Having said that sometimes it makes sense to create a second site slightly broader nature as it will teach you more about how your niche fits into the broader category.

For a while a gave the advice that it might be a good idea to create a directory site one level above your category. For example:

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SEO Question: I'm researching poison or forbidden words and I've only found a few vague or older posts from 2000 in a few SEO forums. Supposedly if a site uses poison words in the title etc. it is pushed way down in the SERPs. Any idea if this is fact or fiction? I'd love a complete list of poison words, although right now I'm specifically trying to find out if sale, best, about, contact us, website, or free shipping are poison because I have a retail product site with those words in the home page title, description, and body text.

SEO Answer:

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SEO Question: Will rss feeds help my web site rankings, due to automatic updates?

SEO Answer: Some search engines may like frequently updated content, but you also want to have people link at your site or actively read the new information. Without those just adding a feed will not do much for most webmasters.

RSS in and of itself is just a tool.

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SEO Question: Some of my clients sites have different customer types. I am afraid of pigeonholing the prospects. Should I make pages for the different customer types?

SEO Answer: If the services offered and price ranges are drastically different or people buy your products for exceptionally different reasons then it makes sense to create pages for different demographic groups.

Here are some of the advantages of creating different pages based on different demographics:

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SEO Question: I am accustomed to left navigation down the left side of the page. Is their any reason your blog has navigation on the right side?

SEO Answer: The original reason this site had navigation on the right hand side was that I liked the default template that had right hand navigation. The site is a slightly hacked up version of an old default MovableType template (I will post a how to hack MT post soon).

I think that for sites selling products it probably does not matter a whole bunch if they use right or left hand navigation.

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SEO Question: I was thinking about buying a link exchange software product. I was looking at ___________ and ___________ and wanted to know what one is the best?

SEO Answer: I think Arelis can be decent for harvesting email information, but many sloppy webmasters screw that up by using too much automation. You really need to try to connect to a webmaster, and since each site and each person has different motives anything that is automated or generated is crap.

For example, I recently got this gem of an email:

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SEO Question: Your mention of blogs got me thinking. Do you know of a reliable "paid to post" service that will not spam blogs but will find related/relevant blogs to post notices about the site I'm launching simultaneous with the launch?

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SEO Question: I have a little personal side project going -- selling an info product (completely unrelated to SEO; it has to do with _____ and local markets) and I loved the simpleness of your delivery of your ebook. It was straight forward and easy to follow. I want to mimic your process -- I will be using Paypal too.

Any advice or pitfalls you encountered along the way? Techinical or otherwise? Just thought I'd ask someone who has been there before. Maybe save me some time / mistakes.

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SEO Question: I have been considering joining a link exchange network to boost my Google PageRank. Is it a good idea?

SEO Answer: You have to know your goals before you can set a plan of attack.

Option #1:
Are your sites automated rubbish and junk content that can't get any legitimate linkage data? Are you just looking to spam MSN and Yahoo! for a few quick bucks of profit per site?

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SEO Question: I am new to the seo world..however I am veteran the ________ digital marketing space. There is a ton of opprotunity in the ________ space in regrads to PPC. I want to start a consulting firm for ___ sellers and help them shift their ad bugets to PPC. I would like you're advice on starting a company like this.

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SEO Question: Is it safe to check a sites backlinks daily or would you recommend once a week, my understanding is that using API's for the same site to often a no no as the search engines can easily track this.

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SEO Question: How do I promote my art site via SEO and search? I want to drive traffic to my site from Google.

SEO Answer: I have been asked this question in various formats more times than I can count.

How I would Have Marketed Art Years Ago:
A few years ago when I was far greener to marketing I would say get links with the anchor text you want to rank for. Make sure those words are also in your page title and page content. Then mix in a few quality links by submitting to the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and vertical authority sites that are related to your field.

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SEO Question: Can you explain what the Deep Link Percentage is, I ran a few sites and was surprised to see numbers as low as 7% with some very well respected SEO and large brick and mortar store websites.

My basic understanding is your deep link percentage is the number of internal pages which are linked to by highly relevant incoming links from highly relevant established pages. So for example if you had a ten page site and had one incoming indexed link pointing to each page from a site with proper anchor text your DLP would be 100%?

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SEO Question: Lets say I have a web service company (sales) site and a blog about proper web design at domain.com/proper-web-design/ Then lets say I have a blog about hot design sites at domain.com/hot-sites/

If the blogs becomes successful would it help domain.com in Google serp rankings?

SEO Answer: In a word, yes.

Quality links to any part of your site make it easier for the rest of your site to rank well. So long as you use good internal navigation your link popularity flows throughout your site.

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SEO Question: Are you aware of an SEO ranking (by revenue) list anywhere?

SEO Answer: There are two ways to take that question. I will try to answer both of them :)

What SEO companies have the most value?
Very few SEO companies are public. Those that are public are rolled into larger corporations with other businesses as well. I also absolutely do not think that bigger equates to better.

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SEO Question: As a long time SEO myself, there is one thing that has me mystified. If you do a search in Google under "chocolate", Godiva comes up #1, Hershey comes up #2. Yet, if you look at their home pages, they have almost no text there. In fact, Godiva has no real text at all. Yes, they have PR6, but still, how is it that these "big boys" come up on top with a home page devoid of any SEO or real text? Is it all links?

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SEO Question: I read your book and it said you could get links from charities. Do you have a list of the best charity websites to get on or ones you have gotten on? It feels kind of awkward to ask a charity if they will give you a link back if you pay money, that's why I want to contact ones you have already contacted.

SEO Answers: Not sure how good of an idea this is to answer this one publicly, but why not, eh.

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SEO Question: A friend of mine has a non profit organization. Part of the organization sells topical literature and another large roll of the site(s) will be to give the background information about the charity. Should we use one or two websites?

SEO Answer: When does it make sense to use two or more sites?

• If hosting the product catalog on the same site will make it exceptionally harder to get links to your organizational site you may want to use two separate sites.

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SEO Question: When people talk about buying links and how they don't help you, does this mean if I were to buy a link on cnn.com it wouldn't help me. Or are they talking about the pages that have nothing but 1,000+ links?

SEO Answer: Most of the paid links on major news sites that are sold are probably discounted in Google as far as their direct effect on SEO.

Many link buyers buy from multiple sites that are obviously selling links. They further compound their problem by not doing things like mixing anchor text and not also building up a wide variety of link types.

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SEO Question: I am trying to get a higher listing in Google. I've read a several articles that say the more links that I have, with a high PageRank, the higher up the ranking I should appear. Having said that, what page does Google look at when considering the link to my site? Does Google look at the page that I'm listed on or that websites home page? To say it another way, does Google, when looking at the PageRank for relevant links, look at the page that my website is linked from or does Google look at that websites home page?

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SEO Question: Do you know of any tools that would let me check all the ranking of my site by just givin my url? I mean, I want to know where I am rank right now, even for keywords I have not intended to rank for, any ideas?

SEO Answer: Rule #1: It really only matters that you rank if people are actively searching for a topic.

Most sites probably rank for hundreds or thousands of phrases that might be searched for once a year, so it is not important just to get the data, but also look for ways to make it useful.

Log Files and Analytics Data:

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SEO Question: What you often hear though is that ideas presented very often work for combined keywords or not so competitive keywords but much less for keywords in competitive areas especially if they are single keywords.

We are building a portal hence single keywords are of interest to us.

SEO Answer: The whole advantage of owning a large portal with a large amount of relevant related content is that you will match for many various longer search phrases.

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SEO Question: I wish I had a list of free good directories that I could auto submit to, and the paid inclusion list as two separate tools or checkboxes or something. Do you still update your directory list and do you offer anything like this?

SEO Answer: I don't update my directory list very often for a few main reasons:

1. most general directories are pure garbage

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SEO Question: I'm going to be working on a site that was written in frames. I heard that there is some tag you can put in the code so that search engines can spider a frames site. Do you know about this? And if so, can you tell me how to do it?

SEO Answers: The first step with frames is to convert the site to a non frames site.

Why?

Because if your site is framed it becomes much harder for people to deep link to your content since they dont know the actual url of the interior pages unless they view the source code.

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SEO Question: Aaron, In you opinion, what is the best resource to obtain for learning how to developing landing pages?

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