mOxby Design

The only concerns I would have are: 1. Are the pages doing the linking on authoritative sites - i.e. is the site quality doing you good? 2. How much text are they copying? Just because you don't want your content duplicated across the web 3. What anchor text are they using to link to you and is it consistent with the subject matter of the page they have linked to? Otherwise, even a nofollow link has value (just not for page rank, but that's only one consideration so never mind) and a more natural link profile has nofollows in it anyway. So long as the site doing the linking is not likely to harm your reputation I wouldn't worry too much.

Have you checked in Google WMT or robots.txt that you're not excluding certain query strings? There's nothing innately wrong with your URL construction and still has keywords in it so is helpful for search and humans. So check 1. WMT 2. Robots.txt 3. Also check the links between the pages are fine and followed 4. Sitemap.xml? Are they in there? 5. Finally - make sure you haven't canonicalled incorrectly such to remove URLs accidentally from search. Hope this helps.

Any time you are treating search engines (not just Google) differently from human visitors you are getting into the realms of a potential penalty. You may see a short-term gain but it is not worth the risk of a long-term penalty/ As has been said above Google isn't stupid and their algorithms get updated so often you cannot assume you can get away with stuff like hidden links, hidden search-engine-only-content etc. And why do you need to hide a 'high quality' link or good content anyway. If you're providing a great page and have a link to a helpful resource for your visitors, then why hide it in the first place. Wanting to hide it suggests you shouldn't have that link to me.

With the right amount of keyword research and focussed page topic/content text you can have one 'company' website and then each of your services as a 'department', to use that analogy. Renaissance-Design makes a point about similar services etc, but equally if your website has a clear message and each page has the right focus, then when people search for your services they are delivered the appropriate page in the search results, which is what. Separate sites may also multiply your work when it comes to link building as a good link gives value to the page and the overall domain, so if you have one domain you are serving all pages well with every link you can build.

What do you mean by 'selling SEO services to the trade'? We work with a Social Media guy whose client we are working on THROUGH him, so I don't get direct contact with the client. If that's what you mean then we fulfil that criteria. In terms of your reports, we do our own website analysis report without automation based on some manual research and output from a few tools, a good report takes a couple of hours to be useful, practical to the client and provide a good method of knowing what to do against the competition.

If the two sites have different purposes and different content then there's no reason they should be adversely affecting each other. If the two sites are related but have different content then you could do one site some good by linking from the other. Sites fall and rise in search in ebbs and flows depending on 1. Algorithm Updates 2. How you change your own website 3. The quality of the content and links to your website 4. Your keyword strategy 5. What other sites are doing ... etc etc so the simple ownership of two unrelated sites won't be a problem. The only thing that comes to mind was if you had www.my-blue-widgets.co.uk AND www.my-blue-widgets.com then depending on how well optimised both addresses are, you may find the .com ranks better for 'my blue widgets' just due to exact match. But all in all, I wouldn't worry and keep focussing on your organic, ethical SEO activities and making sure you don't have duplicate content.

When did you last change the TITLE tag? You say it's never been just 'Ferret Beds UK' - how long as the website been live and what other things have you done to increase the frequency Google/Yahoo/Bing re-index the site? e.g. 1. Re-submitting XML Sitemap 2. Share on social media 3. Link on a more frequently crawled (and high quality) website ...for example?

Hi there, I'm hoping this is going to be a short answer! We can hope I guess... I'm sorting out some mess that problems our own website had ages ago created, which means we now have loads of duff URLs appearing in Google Webmaster Tools. Long story short - old website was based on /index.php and used query strings. New site is pure HTML, however there's still some query string mess in GWT. I have done 301 redirects in htaccess for any requests using /index.php however, some of the pages appear like this: /?page=search_engine_submission So there is a query string but no reference to the old index.php, making this technically a valid URL, therefore not 404-ing. The following haven't worked. RedirectMatch 301 ^/\?page=$ new-url-here RedirectMatch 301 ^/?page=$ new-url-here RedirectMatch 301 ^page=$ new-url-here RedirectMatch 301 ^page$ new-url-here All I want to identify is if there is the querystring page ANYWHERE in the URL then redirect to root, but it's not playing ball. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Can you post the URL and I will look to see if I can spot problems?

Any information that people will find interesting and are happy to share is worth adding to your website. Don't add anything unless it adds value to the site and to your visitors' experience. If you can do a blog and add to it regularly (everyday, once a week, once a month... whatever but be consistent) then you can increase the likelihood of repeat visitors, yes. And make sure the content you are adding is related in some way to what you do or the area you work in.

iFrames are bad full stop really. Moreover if the page that's INSIDE the iFrame is indexed, then visitors can get to that page without even seeing the containing page, which can make you look bad. If you have a valid internal link in an <A> tag and that loads in the iFrame, then any search engine will jump from that link to the relevant page and then any links thereafter. And yes, keywords in your URL do make a difference. It's only one factor, but it does affect your rankings.

Shove a load of keyword combinations into the Google keyword tool http://bit.ly/t4KpDM This way you can put in the words you think work and Google can tell you what people are actually putting in. As henbast rightly says if you are niche AND people are searching for it then if you do the right SEO stuff you can be really strong in your rankings quite quickly. The important thing is to get the keyword combinations people are really using rather than what you would put in yourself.

The current rough guidance from Google is here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=99170 and here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146897 basically, if a rich snippet is in any of the accepted methods then it will be beneficial and perfectly okay. The easiest thing is to choose a method of marking up your snippet and stick to that method rather than chopping or changing else you're just going to give yourself headaches (literal, not metaphorical!)

If your content is copied, firstly you have a right to complain and stand up against it. The main SEO impact of duplicate content is the weakening of the potential ranking factor for the copied page, as another will be trying to compete with you. If your site is authoritative, people love to share it and is well linked to, then as the original writer you shouldn't be penalised. And as a last resort you can always report the site who is copying you. Of course... you could see copied content as an opportunity to get a link crediting you as the original author

Sub-domain If you are trying to rank more than one page, especially on the same website (which a subdomain is) then you're weakening your ranking potential for BOTH pages - so it is not advised. Links I'm not sure what you mean by 'a couple of links went down to the second page' - but make sure your internal linking structure is sound and makes it clear which keywords you intend to target for the page you're linking to. Downtime Downtime can cause a temporary drop in rankings. However if your site's optimisation is strong and you're linked to from worthwhile sources then you should see this situation fix itself.