Typically, our SEO questions are around "how to's" and etc. So, to change it up I will ask a business question: What is your biggest selling point when presenting your SEO services to a new client? In a spirit of transparency, I will tell you mine ahead of time. With PPC, TV, Radio, and Print at some point in time that ad comes to an end. When it ends, that is it. There is no residual from that advertisement - or very minimal at best. With SEO, once you are ranked well and well optimized you continue to get clients for a much longer period of time. With clients who TV and print, this rings especially true and is easily provable. I can't wait to hear yours.

I try to keep up to date with everything SEO to ensure my sites rank well.. marblerenovation.com & Trailersafe.co.uk I now have a spanish site that I am having trouble ranking well for clima2000egara.es I have recently found out (by asking our lovely moz community) that googles algorithms are not rolled our world wide. SO I have no idea where I am at with Google.es. Does anyone know how I can find out at what stage google.es is at? and what the last update was? and whether there is an equilalent community like Moz for Spain? I am fluent spanish so the language won't be a problem.. Thanks in advance for all your help

I want to hear the opinion of other Marketers My main goal is found a place where I can get an integral knowledge, not just SEO or PPC or whatever. Simplilearn offers a Master Program called "Digital Marketing Specialist" Which cover this areas Advanced Web Analytics - Advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Advanced Pay Per Click (PPC) - Advanced Social Media But also they have available other related topics such as Email Marketing Conversion Rate Optimization I know there are some ones that are mandatory and FREE and for me this are not a big deal, because all the documentation is available for everyone Google Analytics > Data Analytics Facebook Blue Print > Data Analytics Google Adwords > PPC Bing > PPC I will make the certifciation But Im looking for something with better level Such as "Integreted Marketing Campaign"

I was going to purchase an expired domain but then I came to know that it has been redirected to some other website. I have two questions: Can I build a website around this domain if I purchase it? and will the Domain Authority remains the same ? Can I redirect it to my own site? and will all the Link Juice flow to my site?

My site was hacked and I had 1000s of pages that should not exist created and has had 1000s of backlinks put in. Now i have the same pages and backlinks redirecting to 404 pages. Is this why my site crashed out of google and my SEO fixes since have made no progress to my problem?

If Google and Bing show an older version of a site's Yelp rating in the search results, what options are there to help ensure Google and Bing recrawl the Yelp page? Additionally, it appears third-party sites such as MapQuest show Yelp ratings and appear in Google search results; is it possible to request MapQuest to recrawl Yelp and then ask Google to recrawl MapQuest? Any advice would be much appreciated!

I really had no idea where to place this question as there seemed to be no 'suitable' place. I do though feel that it is a viable question and would appreciate any responses that I receive. Essentially, I'm currently working full time doing digital marketing covering most general aspects as it is in-house and primarily local venturing to maybe 50-70 miles in the region of the local area. I'm doing SEO, PPC, Social Media etc. I'm certified in networking (I studied in Australia) and have my UK GCSEs along with a variety of other general certifications e.g. business. The college in the area where I work is offering a NVQ in digital marketing and social media so although I'm self taught I'm currently doing this once a month purely for the paper to recognize that I know what I'm doing. Anyway, getting to the point. I have the opportunity to pursue a degree long term with my employer. I've always had an interest in actually learning to code in a web development language (I can cope at the moment with PHP and do what I need to do) and I've also had an interest in developing iPhone apps etc. What degree would you recommend in aiding a career in SEO and Digital/Internet marketing in general?. To me it seems to boil down to either a marketing degree or a web development degree. Thank you in advance, I would love to hear your own experience and what you have a degree in. Thanks, Luke Hutchinson.

Hi Mozzers, I have a question: which top 5 questions to ask for a first meeting with a "future" customer to avoid bad surprises? Thank you for your help. Regards, Jonathan

Occasionally some of our clients receive editorial mentions and links in which the author adds utm parameters to the outbound links on their blog. The links are always natural, never compensated, and followed.  However, they are sometimes listed as utm_source=affiliate even thought we have no existing affiliate relationship with the author.  My practice has been to ask the author to add a rel="norewrite" attribute to the link to remove any trace of the word affiliate. I have read that utm parameters do not affect link juice transfer, however, given the inaccurate "affiliate" source, I wouldn't want Google to misunderstand and think that we are compensating people for followed editorial links. Should I continue following this practice, or is it fine to leave these links as they are? Thanks!

I'm curious how many of you all work at home or mostly at home either through an company or freelance. Or are most of you employed at a corporation? My company was recently bought by a very large global company. Recently I found out that all the SEO and web design is contracted through outside sources. With the headquarters in Europe, this being my primary job function I kinda feel well you know.... down.. Websites I put my life into for the last 7 years are going to be handed over to a corporation to do with whatever they feel they should. I know they were never really mine, but when you spend so much of your life to making them the best you can, so much so to attract the attention of a global billion dollar company, you should feel great right? But I feel like my dog just died. I don't have a bad impression of the company but the shift of moving me to the IT guy has begun. Normal web updates I would have done, are now being pushed aside. I don't hate IT I like helping others, but I really loved being able to make a difference through the web. Now I'm left contemplating my future, big corporations have so much bs, I just don't feel comfortable. I would really appreciate you all giving me your thoughts and tell me about any similar experiences you have had in your life. Cheers, Don

I manage an ecommerce site and had a question about 301 redirects vs 410 when removing product pages. What we have in place now is a 410 because we have removed products that are no longer available and the content itself no longer exists. In all my research, SEO Best Practices is to have a 301 in place. Should we replace our 410 with a 301 redirect or keep it?

A client (we designed their website) recently employed an SEO who required FTP access or access to the CMS. We told the client they would need to take full responsibility for any updates the SEO carried out, otherwise, the SEO could send over the changes and we would put them in at no extra cost to the client. The client didn't want to take responsibility and denied the SEO access to the CMS, and told the SEO to send over the completed work for us to put into the site. The SEO was not happy with this arrangement, and didn't seem to understand that we needed to trust him before access was would be given at a future date. Other SEO's have never had a problem with this arrangement, but this SEO claimed what they do is secret and for no one else to see. SEO want's to proceed, client doesn't want to proceed, we are happy to update the website with the client's approval.  This particular client has a reputation for backing out of things.  Also from the initial client, SEO contact the SEO was ready to update the website within 24 hours. Are we being unreasonable?

When setting up a Hubspot blog you are asked to create a subdomain such as blog.website.com in order to have the blog hosted there. Two questions: 1. Does a blog on a subdomain pass on SEO credit to the main domain?  My understanding is that a subdomain is treated like a unique site but I'm not finding current articles to confirm this is still true. 2. If it does not pass on credit to the main domain and the subdomain is only building "SEO love" for itself but your posts are getting found and driving conversions... from a marketing perspective does this non-transfer of SEO credit really matter? Meaning if blog.website.com is linked to the navigation on website.com, your site has quality content, has relevant calls to action, and you are lead nurturing like a good marketer... does the passing of SEO credit matter if your posts are what's getting found and filling the top of the funnel? Thank you in advance, Christine

Hi, I'm new to the Moz Community here although I have visited this site quite a few times. Recently my company has been contacted by MultiView for a B2B marketing strategy to get our business in front of targeted and potential customers - based on behavior of website visitors - basically behavior based marketing and inbound lead summary. Are you all familiar with what Multiview does? If not, I can explain some more. But, I have a couple questions: Are they actually what they claim to be? Are they a trustworthy company? Is there a way I can do everything they are telling me with the getting particular ads in front of people based on behaviors (similar to AdWords, but this seems more in depth) and detailed info for the visitors to my site (actually see who they are)? I realize this may take more work on my part than having them do it. But, is there a way I can collect this info myself and do all this work myself? Behavior based campaigns and this sort of thing are new to me, as I haven't worked with this before for my company. So, any and all info is appreciated! Thanks!

Hi, So I was just wondering if someone with more knowledge than myself can answer this question for me. I have a site - currently sat on page 2 of google. On-site optimisation is done, however I am struggling to get backlinks that are from highranking pages. I am new to SEO so need a hand. My understanding of backlinks is that the higher the PR of the site that links to your 'money' site, the better that link is, and that these links are very hard to come by. (something that I am finding). Many times I have found sites that have a high rank and offer for a free listing, only for me to fill in details and get listed on a sub-page that has no ranking whatsoever. So my question is, are these kind of links worth the effort? Do they actually have any effect on rankings? And generally would anyone have any tips on the best sites to get links? Thanks

Moz.com is the best forum I have been a part of. There is a local forum I really like but spend less time on (we have staff who live on it.) I am interested in a forum where everyone is agency related. Does anyone know of a good one? If not, would anyone have an interest?

I just realized many of the links on my site are BROKEN when entered from a Google SERP. This didn’t used to be this way. I have no idea what’s going but I’m worried. It involves a folder of our site that has a space in it. Google is even displaying the proper “%20” in the SERP but when I click the link it replaces that “%20” with a + which breaks the link!! You can see this in action by typing in “brown jordan sheffield furniture” without quotes into Google. You’ll see our site come up first and displaying this link sheffieldfurniture.com/Other%20Furniture/BrownJordan.html but when you click it the link is broken! This is happening on many of our pages! Anyone know what in the world is going on?

What are peoples thoughts and ratings on SEO agencies in London. There are so many of them it is hard to understand which are the best.

Hey Guys, How can you verify a website is not violating Google's guidelines for cloaking? Cheers, LW

One of my clients sells lingerie and with it being lingerie there are a fair few photos of bottoms and some exposed breasts. Gosh. Anyway I know how this affects Adwords campaigns - Google classifies the site as 'adult' and your ads don't show anywhere. I also know how it affects image searches. However how does it affect text seaches?? Are rankings demoted because of nudity? I've worked with a clothing site with some nudity on it before and this didn't affect it, but would love to hear from anyone with specific experience of thisThanks

Learn some basic salesmanship.  Do you realize that business owners are getting 3-4 phone calls and emails a day from other SEOs claiming to be the best?  Be polite, ask questions, and don't insult me or yourself through ignorance.  Ask questions.  You might just discover that we could work together. When you tell me that I'm not ranking for "competitive keywords" it tells me that you don't know what I'm trying to rank for.  When you tell me you can get me to the top of Google in 3 months or less, you're still telling me that you don't know my business and what I want from my website.  Who said I wanted national ranking anyway?  Oh right, not me because you never asked. And if I answer the question "Do you want more business/leads?" with "No." Then politely end the conversation and move on. The rare time that I do get asked about my current efforts, don't insult me by calling me an amateur.  I may be one, but talking down to me, or trying to make SEO sound like you're turning lead into gold will get a quick hang up from me. If you want a contract with me, learn to negotiate based on my needs, not your process that you feel married to.  There are a lot of business owners out there that would be willing to work with you if you treated you leads with respect rather than iteration 23 of your cold call script. And in response to the person this morning that sent a "free report" of basic SEO fixes for my website, make sure you put that report together using **my website. ** I know you're working from a template, so it should be really easy to remove the info from the wedding company and the lawyer's webpages before you email it to me.

Hi guys, we relaunched our website www.segafredo.com.au a few weeks ago, however google is still showing site links from our old page that no longer exist... Is there anything we can do about this? Sit back and wait or try demoting the old urls in webmaster tools? Looking forward to see your tips! Ciao, Manny.

Hi all, I hope there is a search guru out there who can assist with this. I decided 3 months ago that our SEO contractors weren't doing as well as they should be and after long discussion, i reoptimised all pages myself. Most are performing better now but sales and enquiries went through the floor. I have today found ranking information from the week before i made the changes, something i thought i had lost. Now i have this, i have found that one of the two main pages has gone from position 1 to position 38. This explains the problem. I know all things are not equal and in the intervening months, competitors have updated their sites and links, however, this is the security sector and things don't change much, so, all things being equal, would reinstating the old version of the page be likely to reinstate my previous ranking position or thereabouts? or will the MIGHTY GOOGLE punish me in some way for swapping back to a previous page version? We use a CMS system and all revisions are stored. The page in question is www.compoundsecurity.co.uk/security-equipment and the keyword in question is 'wireless alarms'. Any help will be greatly appreciated by this non SEO plebe. Cheers Si P.S. feel free to berate me for not recording all pertinent info about rankings BEFORE i star playing around with the site. It was my first time and i have well and truly learn my lesson.

My company is thinking about rebranding and moving over to a new domain.  While we dont have a lot of backlinks, we do have some very valuable ones that we hate to lose.  That being said, I think we are in such an infancy that the backlinks we have shouldnt prevent us from rebranding if thats what we choose to do. I am just trying to get an idea of how moving to a new domain will effect the domain authority if we redirect all the pages?  Is the best thing to do simply re-direct, or should we reach out to our most valuable links and let them know the domain/link has changed and hopefully they change their link to us? How much is lost by simply 301 every page? We are getting around 70 organic clicks per day and would rather not start from zero again

I have submitted XML sitemap in Google's webmaster tools for some of the categories of my website. after submitting the sitemap i have seen the drop in traffic and ranking of keywords for the categories tof which sitemap was submitted. The other categories for which i  have  not submitted the sitemap the ranks have not changed. my sites alexa rank is approx 3000 Please help me out should i remove the site or change the priority of the urls which i have fixed in the sitemap?

I have a flower delivery website and flower shop in Edmonton.  When I set us the website I used my office address and not the Flower shop Address.  We are moving now and I am moving the Website and changing my map listing to be at the flower shop now but the flower shop already has a google map listing.  What is the best way to move this business into the flower shop without being punished by Google?  Should I delete the current map listing at the flower shop or should i Just change the address and website of the flower shops listing to my website? Sorry I know I have not explained it well but its kinda complicated.  Any help would be great as I just want to make sure I do this right. This is my map and website listing.  https://plus.google.com/112887922864576573528/about?gl=ca&hl=en This is the flower shop's website and listing. https://plus.google.com/101712543043690197786/about?gl=ca&hl=en Thanks

Hi Guys I am currently looking for an SEO company in France. Cant anyone recommend a good reputable agency? Thanks

This is a pretty basic question, but I'm wondering if there is any meaningful difference between the terms Organic and Natural traffic? My assumption is that Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes in through search engines, whereas Natural traffic would also include people directly entering a URL, coming in through social referrals, and through links on other sites in addition to organic search. Is this correct, or are there other definitions for what these terms mean?

Based on this answer from Google, http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750 you can't use the product schema if a customer has to make the purchase offline or at another retailer. Does anyone know why they set it up this way? Has anyone ever tried to use product markup on a website when the product is purchased offline? Also, is there another solution or another markup that would apply? Thanks!

After you calculate how many hours you need to complete a marketing project for a client, how much extra do you add for project management, communication, all the little things that come up, unexpected problems, client questions, etc.? One resource I read said to add 10% to 20% for project management, then add 25% to 33% more for fluctuations, then state a +/-15% margin of error on the estimate. I was wondering what percentages others use when estimating client projects.

Hi, I Have a Blog that I have attached a "sticky" post, obviously the content in the "sticky" post is the content that I want to ensure that everyone sees. I do update, by adding new posts daily or at least everyother day, my question is:  Is the "sticky" post hurting, helping, or is it indifferent to SEO?  I know the SE enjoy fresh content, and was wondering does that fresh content have to pop-up at the top of the page otr not. Any input would be great.  Thanks. Jimmy

I am having problems for a few clients where google is suggesting negative related searches. I have had success getting Google suggestion (auto-complete) to suggest the keywords we want to be associated with the brand but the 'Searches Related to....' at the bottom of the search page is a big problem. Many of the terms are negative of sometimes defamatory and have absolutely not relevance to the brand.  Even upon clicking on the related searches the pages Google displays are about other businesses. Can anyone suggest how to teach Google these term are irrelevant or any other suggestions as to how to remove them?

Hi Guys, My first question for the forum. So here's my question, everyone in here has something to do with seo, but how would you choose an seo company. There are many a wild claim made by so many companies. Having done seo on our portfolio for about 6 years, however now I just dont have the time to spend. In my initial inquires I have asked for examples of their work and run a back link analysis to see the kind of links they have been building for their clients but so far all I have found is a load of directory links and no real innovation. I would be interested in your thoughts of how to sound out some companies. Thanks Alex

See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week. farmer-3x.gif

My memory is failing me tonight.  Someone very recently put out a blog post on measuring and reporting on link building post penguin. I didn't save it to diigo at the time (my usual backup memory) and I can't find it now. I had thought it was on the blog here or at distilled. Turns out it was neither.  Anyone have a clue what I am on about?

Considering Google seem to be on a great crusade with all their algorithm updates to raise the overall "quality" of content on the Internet, i'm a bit concerned with their seeming lack of action towards penalising sites that contain terrible English. I'm sure you've all noticed this when you attempt to do some proper research via Google and come across an article that "looks" to be what you're after, then you click through and realise it's obviously been either put together in a rush by someone not paying attention or putting much effort in, or been outsourced for cheap labour to another country whose workers aren't (close to being) native speakers. It's getting really old trying to make sense of articles that have completely incorrect grammar, entirely missing words, verb tenses that don't make any sense, randomly over-extravagant adjectives thrown in just as padding, etc. etc. No offense to all those from non-native speaking countries who are attempting to make a few bucks online, but this for me is becoming by far more of an issue in terms of "quality" of information online as opposed to some of the other search issues that are being given higher priority, and it just seems strange that Google have been so blasé about it up to this point - especially given so many of these articles and pages are nothing more than outsourced filler for cheap traffic. I understand it's probably hard to code in something so advanced, but it would go a long way towards making the web a better place in my opinion. Anyone else feeling the same way? Thoughts?

So I was reading the latest search improvements to Google search on http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-changes.html Good to see they are doing something about "domain diversity" explained as More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains. OK so it sounds good, right? I was hopeful too but I have been running a few queries myself to see how it helped us. Not even a single change yet. So, I'm wondering how this works. They make a change and it takes some time to see it actually happens? Or is it all done for now and it just fixed a small part of the problem and we have to wait for another change? I'd have been ok if the authority site with 3 links actually were useful links. Unfortunately (not for only competitors, but Google search users too) 2 of the links listed are pages from 2008 and is not really helping anyone.

Has anyone used Hubspot?  What was your experience?

Hi Mozzers! With the shut down of the SEOMoz marketplace what are some other resources for finding people to help with SEO tasks? Craigslist seems like the best resource for this, but are there any other good ones?

We've got a client building a site using node.js (http://nodejs.org/) I'm not at all familiar with this and of course need to know how nodejs impacts SEO?   Are you familiar with it?  Any sites you know of using it?  But as I said, bottom line - how will it impact the SEO on the site?

Is such a thing possible? Can we google for a specific keyword that can be found on the source code of a website? Is there any search operator for this? Thanks in advance!

Hey as part of my link building efforts i was thinking of offering free articles to people in exchange for a backlink on that article i was planning to use the Anchor text 'Phone Recycling' on every article is that the optimal way or should it be different for each article

Hi guys, I have a question. Do you have an experience about google national and international ranking algorithm. For example, is the same algorithm for " Google.de " Germany, and " Google.com "??? For example, lot of tactics, are valid and effective on google.de and not effective on google.com, tell us about this . Do you have any idea? Share your skills please! we need your help!

I've been moved to a busines development part of the business but I'm still in charge of all of our SEO and SEM. I was only an advanced beginner to begin with but our needs have grown. I'm not sure whether to contract with one or two people. Can someone be extremely well versed in all things SEO and SEM or is it better to get two people on board that might serve as a better sounding board? While they certainly work together, both are a constant moving target and it requires us to stay on top of trends and white hat policies of all the major players. My worst nightmare is to get someone that tries to game the system and screws up our rankings long term.

Hi, I'm currently creating a number of sites which target the wedding market. Each site is localized and specific to a niche within the wedding market. The intention is to create the site, rank it in the top position of Google and then sell it to a local business within that niche and area. The problem that i am having is that I don't know how to place a value on each site. I have factors taken from Google (using Market Samurai) so I know the broad and phrase match traffic details as well as the Google PPC average prices. My initial thought was to use the Google PPC price and multiply that by the number of organic visitors the site would receive if it was ranked #1 on Google. I appreciate that the PPC figures may be higher than what an advertiser would actually pay per click so I conservatively halved the Google PPC figure given in Market Samurai. Is this a good way of valuing the site or do I need to look at the value per customer to the business that I am trying to sell the site to and work from a conversion factor based on the number of visitors that the site would receive. If the site received 500 visitors per month and 5% of those became customers multiplied by the average profit per customer - that would give a monthly value of the website. I am very unsure as to what the best approach is here and look forward to hearing any advice and ideas from fellow members. Thanks, Michael

Or worded differently: Has anyone heard of "big" SEO companies removing links after termination of service? I have a client who isn't particularly happy with the SEO he's getting from a big Aussie SEO firm, and he wants to terminate, however they've built thousands of links for him and he's a little concerned they might all get pulled. Has anyone heard of this happening, or; Do you think this is a legitimate concern? I think its physically possible to remove backlinks like this because it seems the SEO firm in question is building links by using other client's websites. I also wonder if they might have large content farm style sites where they place links for clients which might be quite easy to take down. Please discuss!

Can anyone recommend a good external sitemap generator (that is not also a tool owned by a search engine)? I'm looking for a reputable tool that is independent of Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc that will crawl, index, report problems, but also that will submit to the search engines. Would love to hear what other Mozzers recommend!

Okay so I keep on seeing stuff like this, I know it's been going on for ages but it seems to be increasing in intensity. Anyway, thanks to Facebook knowing I click on their ads to do with SEO it shows me pretty much just those ad types now. I'll get to the point. I saw an ad for the "Search Marketing Business Academy", or "SMBA" so I was curious and clicked. There's a chap who professes 12 years experience in internet marketing and has a bunch of companies and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he's offering himself up as basically an expert of experts, one that can show other search marketers how to make it. www.searchmarketingbusinessacademy.com/ There's a few things that look fishy though. The testimonials have common names and no business names There's no mention of what these companies he runs are There's no work to see in the form of case studies or a portfolio Under "Meet Lee Gilbert" it states that they've been supporting other SEM companies since 2004, yet a quick Google of the company and the name shows little to support this. Googling the chaps name just gets you his own website www.leegilbert.co.uk which professes more of the same and just a bunch of products Of just a few pieces of advice given for how to rank on Google it includes keyword density The chap seems to still place a lot of importance on Page Rank (As in the old PR that we all know means nothing now, and his blog about this is only a month old) From searching, it doesn't seem that there is any history at all, let alone this history of mass success There doesn't appear to be any social presence for the company or the man, except that ad. It seems just like an average SEO (albeit one that's a bit behind on the times) who knows an average amount, trying to say he can tell other SEO's how to master the arts. He's not even a member on SEOmoz, that's the biggest give away haha. So, could I be wrong? Am I being too harsh?