I come across Number 4 a LOT and it still makes my eyes water.  Reminds me of the Top 10 Dumbest Web Site Decisions article I wrote for SiteProNews last year.

The moral of this story? Beware the angry SEO!

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First of all I find the info on your site extremely useful -  I always look forward towards the newletter! I have been trying to find the time to do the SEO course but finding the time is always a problem! However, its still on my to do list.

I am trying to sort out a problem regarding duplicate content on my sites. We run local sites for each language/country we trade in (e.g. .fr for France and .co.uk for England). Unfortunately whilst growing the business I never had time to research SEO optimisation practices so I ended up with a lot of sites with the same duplicate content in them including title tags, descriptions etc. I had no idea how bad this was of course for organic ranking!

I have now created unique title tags and description for ALL the pages on ALL the sites. I have also changed the content into unique content for the home page and the paternity testing page (our main pages) for each site in English. The only site with complete unique content pages is .com and parts of .co.uk. For the rest of the pages that still have double content I have also put a NO INDEX, FOLLOW code on the pages that have duplicate content so that the spiders will not index the duplicate content pages. I did a FOLLOW as opposed to NO FOLLOW as I still want the internal links in the pages to be picked up - does this make sense ?

Also having made such changes how long does it normally take for Google to refresh its filters and starting ranking the site? The changes are now about a month old however the site is still not ranking.

Also should this not work - do you have any experience with submitting a re-consideration through the webmaster tools? What are the upside and downside of this?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Kevin

Dear Kevin

Thanks for your coffee donation and I’m glad you like the newsletter. Now, about your tricky problem:

1) First up, take a chill pill. There’s no need to lodge a reinclusion request to Google. According to Google’s Site Status Tool, your main site is being indexed and hasn’t been removed from their datacenter results. A standard indexed page lookup shows 32 pages from your .com site have been indexed by Google, while a backward link lookup reveals at least 77 other sites are linking to yours. If you’ve put NoIndex tags on any dupe pages, you’ve covered yourself.

2) Next, pour yourself a drink and put your feet up. Your .fr site is also being indexed by Google, but there isn’t a dupe content issue because the site is in French, meaning that Googlebot sees the content as being completely different. Your .co.uk site is also being indexed by Google and again, there isn’t a dupe content issue because it looks like you have changed the content enough to ensure it doesn’t trip any duplicate content filters.

3) Now you’re relaxed, login to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure each of your domains are set to their appropriate regional search markets. To do this, click on each domain in turn and choose “Set Geographic Target” from the Tools menu. Your regional domains should already be associated with their geographic locations i.e. .co.uk should already be associated with the UK, meaning that Google will automatically be giving preference to your site in the SERPs shown to searchers in the UK. For your .com site, you can choose whether to associate it with the United States only (recommended as it is your main market), or not to use a regional association at all.

4) Now it’s time to do a little SEO clean up job on your HTML code. Fire or unfriend whoever told you to include all these unecessary META tags in your code:

• Abstract
• Rating
• Author
• Country
• Distribution
• Revisit-after

All these tags are un-supported by the major search engines and I really don’t know why programmers still insist on using them! All they do is clog up your code and contribute to excessive code bloat.

5) Finally, you need to start building up your site’s link popularity and boost your Google PageRank beyond the current 2 out of 10. And by link building, I mean the good old-fashioned type - seeking out quality sites in your industry and submitting your link request manually, NOT participating in free-for-all link schemes or buying text links on low quality link farms.

Good luck!

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But our October edition is finally out, despite the fact that it’s November. It includes a summary of the latest feature of Google Webmaster Tools, some search FAQs, and an article about avoiding web site disasters.

If you’re not yet a subscriber (don’t get me started), catch it here.

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Ken has spent the past 4 years creating his online business and can’t seem to get any traffic or traction in Google. In fact, according to Google Analytics, the site is only receiving a measley 189 visits per month.

The site has a lot going for it - it’s a brokerage site for buying and selling businesses and the concept appears solid, with businesses ranked by cost, location and industry. It has an attractive design, but the site has never been optimized with search engines in mind.

Ken needs some guidance in terms of the following:

• Keyword Research
• Basic SEO
• Link Building
• Copywriting
• Anchor Text
• Search compatible design elements

Due to a ridiculous workload, I’m not currently taking on new SEO clients for at least 6 months. Ken can’t wait that long so he’s looking for an experienced SEO specialist or a recent graduate of Search Engine College to help him.

If you think you can help, please get in touch via his contact form.

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Google is now giving out SEO advice by making their internal publication the SEO Starter Guide available to the general public. This is a world away from Google’s attitude to SEOs in the past, where they called us unethical scammers.

These days, Google acknowledges the work of SEOs in adding value to a web site by making it more search engine compatible. Their language for describing search engine optimization has softened considerably and now here they are, giving out SEO advice of their own. Who would have thunk it?

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Sadly, a level of bureaucratic lunacy seems to have pervaded Google AdWords in terms of ad approvals and editorial policy in the past 12 months. Here’s the latest example:

My client, a psychotherapist based in New York, had asked me to create a series of new ads for his AdWords campaign based on a new service he was offering. His site domain is unusual in that it contains 44 characters - way beyond the standard 35 character limit allowed by Google for display URLs in text ads. So we had been using a non-existent but similar shortened version of the URL as the display URL for years, with Google’s approval.

Scores of ads were still running successfully using the fake display URL so when it came time to draft new ads a couple of weeks ago, I used it again. But every time I created a new ad, it would show up as “disapproved” within minutes. I double checked the running ads to make sure I typed the display ad correctly and tried again and again. Every time the ads would be approved and then show up a few minutes later as “disapproved” with the display URL being cited as the cause of the problem.

In despair I emailed AdWords support staff to ask for their help. The first response I got was from Manvee, who wrote:

“The ads are getting disapproved when you are using another shortened version. Please know that I reviewed your client’s account and found that their ads are being disapproved because they are using display URLs which do not match their destination URL. Please know that we have allowed your client to use only specific shortened versions like [shortened display URL]. Therefore, their ads will be disapproved if they use any other version that we have not allowed.”

Sure. Except that the specific shortened version they suggested WAS the one we were using. So after another week of disapprovals and an increasingly frustrated client, I sent a follow up email asking AdWords staff to please have somebody login and manually approve the ads or explain why the display URL they recommend was no longer acceptable, even though it was running fine on older ads.

The next response I received from AdWords support was from Ruchi:

“Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned about your ads being disapproved even after you have made the required changes.

WHAT WE FOUND

Our AdWords Specialists found that there was unauthorized access to your AdWords account [account number removed]. No campaign changes were made to your account on that date, but we believe that the security of your account has been compromised.”

Huh? What? Did I not just explain that my client and I both have full access to the account via separate logins? Could it be that you think one of us is a hacker? And even if the account was compromised (which it wasn’t), how on earth would that influence the approval or disapproval of my client’s display URL? And why haven’t you addressed my actual problem?

As you can imagine, my patience was fast running out.  I emailed my frustration and asked Ruchi to escalate the issue to a senior account manager. The response I received was not the one I was expecting:

“Thank you for your response. I apologize for any frustration experienced by you. We suspect unauthorized access to you account by a 3rd party. We have reactivated the MCC and child account. However for the client account: [account number removed] we still need you to check and confirm that all the changes made in your account were authorized. As soon as your confirm this we will activate your account.”

So not only did they NOT offer any assistance with the problem at hand, but they de-activated my client’s account without warning! At this point, my client stepped in and called AdWords support directly, which was probably a good idea given my plummeting patience and rising stress levels. This time we both received a response from someone called Priti:

“Thank you so much for your patience.  I received a response from our specialist team, and it looks like in order to use an alternative URL for your ad, the URL must be of a non-functioning website.  Currently, [shortened display URL] is a functioning site (this is possibly a recent development), so the ads cannot be approved for this URL.

We definitely want your ads to be approved, so here are the steps that need to be taken:

1) Please change the display URL for these ads to [shortened display URL (a)]
 or [shortened display URL (b)] (both of which are non-existent websites and within the character limit)

2) Please then email me back you once you have done so.

3) I will then send your ads back to our Ad Review team for expedited review, and follow up with you once they have done so.”

Phew! At last somebody at AdWords support was offering us a solution. I logged into my client’s account, made the changes to the ads and emailed Priti immediately. Problem solved right? Wrong! Within a couple of hours, my client received the dreaded You Have Disapproved Ads status notification.

By this stage, my client’s stress levels had caught up to mine and he sent back an email to Google that simply said:

Here we go again! When will it ever end!?

I was dumbfounded by 3 weeks of fighting AdWords bureaucracy and decided it simply wasn’t worth pursuing any further. It wasn’t until 4 days later that my client received the following email from Priti:

“Thank you again for your patience.  I apologize - I was not in the office over the weekend, and so did not get your email nor Kalena’s email until just now.  I do see that you have made these changes in the account, and I am going to send this to the ad review team immediately so that they can approve your ads.”

She then expedited the process and the ads were up and running within the hour.

Hats off to Priti for finally resolving things, but shame on Google for hiring support staff that don’t seem to have the ability to solve relatively simple problems and for creating so many unecessary layers of bureaucracy for advertisers to jump through in order to do so.

Given the number of web sites inflating the size of the Internet on a daily basis, it’s likely that domain lengths are going to increase as fewer short domain names become available for registration. In light of this, you would think that perhaps Google would consider increasing the allowed character limit of display URLs, or at least suggest alternatives at the point of ad creation.

Anyone else got a tale of woe to share about AdWords editorial policy?

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I’m a regular reader, but have not “asked Kalena” anything in probably over a year now. I own around 40 URLs, all related to real estate in the Atlanta area. Currently they are sitting in my Hostmonster account, doing nothing. Q: Should I “park” all of them which will point them all to my main URL?

Thanks!
Rob

Dear Rob

Thanks for your question. It really doesn’t make any sense to point 40 domains to a single domain.

In my opinion, the only logical reasons to park one domain to another domain include:

• Moving an entire site from one domain to another.
• Pointing identical domains with different regional suffixes to a central domain for targeting purposes (e.g. redirecting site.com.au and site.co.uk to site.com).
• Pointing several brand-related domains with different suffixes to a central domain for marketing and trademark purposes (e.g. redirecting brand.net and brand.org to brand.com).
• Pointing misspelled or similar sounding brand-related domains to a central domain for marketing and branding purposes (e.g. redirecting misite.com and maisite.com to mysite.com).
• Pointing hyphenated domains to a un-hyphenated domain, or vice versa, for marketing and branding purposes (e.g. redirecting my-site.com to mysite.com).

You should think carefully about your motivation for buying the domains in the first place. If some of them meet the criteria above it might be worth parking them to your main domain. But there really is little search engine value in redirecting so many domains, even if the keywords are of a similar theme.

I think you would be better off monetizing the domains using Google AdSense for Domains and making some affiliate income from them. You could still include a text link or image ad promoting your main domain on each of the parked domains, but just be aware that 40 instant incoming links to your main domain may trigger a red flag in Google’s ranking algorithm.

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Webmaster Tool’s new Crawl Error Sources feature allows you to identify the sources of 404 Not Found errors that are found on your site. Listed next to “Crawl Errors” in the Webmaster Tools control panel, you’ll now find a “Linked From” column that lists the number of pages that link to a specific “Not found” URL on your site.  Clicking on an item in the “Linked From” column opens a separate dialog box which lists each page that links to this URL (both internal and external) along with the date it was discovered. You can even download all your crawl error sources to an Excel file.

If your webserver doesn’t comprehend 404s or fetch error pages very well, Google has also introduced a widget for Apache or IIS that consists of 14 lines of JavaScript that you can paste into your custom 404 page template to helps your visitors find what they’re looking. It provides suggestions based on the incorrect URL.

You can use the “Linked From” source information to fix the broken links in your site, place redirects to a more appropriate URL on your site and/or contact the webmasters linking to missing pages or using malformed links and ask them to fix the links.

Webmasters have been asking for something like this for a long time, so it’s a relief to see it live at last. The official post about the feature is on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and Matt Cutts goes into more detail on his blog.

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Direct Partners helps clients to acquire customers, measure behavior and develop meaningful relationships through targeted, results-oriented direct marketing. They are located in beautiful Marina del Rey and offer a friendly work atmosphere, room to grow and learn as well as innovative thinking.

They are looking for an experienced marketing professional to provide strategic leadership, tactical execution and analytic support surrounding the development of SEM programs for various clients. The perfect candidate will create, implement, track, analyze and optimize keyword campaigns across multiple search engines while helping to drive the company’s overall paid search strategy.

As a key member of the media team, the perfect candidate will play a central role in driving customer acquisition, revenue growth and profitability. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience managing SEM campaigns.

Job Responsibilities:

• Lead efforts to drive profitable customer acquisition and increase the long-term effectiveness of search engine marketing.
• Manage day-to-day relationships with multiple paid search engine partners.
• Manage budgets, analyze keyword costs, and develop all business processes for maximizing return-on-investment (ROI).
• Test and optimize keyword bids, ad copy and landing pages.
• Conduct competitive research and make recommendations on keyword selection.
• Maintain a database of keywords, categories and campaigns.
• Employ advanced search marketing techniques such as contextual ads, geo-targeting and day parting, etc.
• Contribute to senior management communications concerning online marketing issues and initiatives.
• Stay abreast of industry trends and best practices.

Minimum Job Qualifications:

• Strategic mind and creative problem-solving skills.
• 2-4 years experience in online marketing, direct marketing, consulting, strategic planning and strong expertise in search engine marketing.
• Aptitude for analyzing large datasets in order to gain insights and drive business decisions.
• Solid understanding of web analytics tools and advanced Excel skills required.
• Ability to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced work environment.
• Adept at project management and multi-tasking.
• Strong communication and presentation skills.

Direct Partners
4755 Alla Road
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Phone: (310) 482-4459

Salary range: Up to $75K, DOE
Closing date: Unknown
More info about company from: http://www.directpartners.com
Contact: Send resumes to address above. Further enquiries email jmcruer[at[directpartners.com

For more search industry job vacancies visit Search Engine College Jobs Board.

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You’ve helped me out before so I hope you can help me untangle this one. Although my site is doing OK, I’m concerned about one of my pages which has fallen like a stone in Google for crucial keyword phrases like “Croatia map” and “map of Croatia”.

It’s one of my oldest pages (4 years) but the drop has occurred over the following year. I wonder if it is competing with a newer page which is also not doing as well as it should? I don’t know what to do. Combine the pages? Dump one? Redo the page completely (thus putting up a brand new page to crawl up the SERPs)?

I feel that my page is much better than my competitors, but how to convince Google? I’d really appreciate your feedback. If you need more coffee to figure it out, let me know!

Jeanne

Dear Jeanne

First up, thanks for your generous caffeine donation. That will keep me in Starbucks lattes for a while!

I’ve had a look a the two pages you’ve provided, as well as the Google rankings for those phrases and here’s what I found:

• The two best ranking pages for those phrases are from the domains lonelyplanet.com and visit-croatia.co.uk
• Your first page has a Google PageRank of 4, as does the Lonely Planet page, whereas the UK page has a PR 5
• Both Google snippets for those competing sites come directly from the Title tags of those pages
• Both Title tags from those pages contain one or both keyphrases and very little else
• Your Title tag contains the keyphrase “map of croatia”. but also an additional six words
• Your page doesn’t contain an optimized META Description tag
• Your HTML code is suffering from unnecessary code bloat

So what does this mean? You’ve got some work to do. Try slimming down your Title tag to your most important keyword phrase and get rid of any extraneous words. Look at the Title for the UK site - they’ve managed to include both keyword phrases you are targeting without sacrificing space.

If it doesn’t make sense from a usability perspective to have two pages about Croatia maps, combine them. A little more on-target text from the second page would likely help your first page to rank better anyway. Run your code through a HTML validator to prevent indexing problems and see if you can extract some of that excess code and reference it in external files to reduce code bloat. Compare your code to your competitor’s and you can see what I mean. Googlebot likes clean code that is faster and easier to index. Also less code increases the keyword density on your page for target keywords.

Add a META Description tag that is optimized for your target keyword phrases. Use variations and contractions of your target keywords in the page, rather than repeating them ad nauseum.

Above all, remember that Google doesn’t care whether YOU think your page is better than your competitors, it’s their algorithm that determines who ranks above whom.

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