Free Answers to your Troubling SEO Questions
Ok, so I’ve been busy and not really had a chance to post (also - I’ve been uninspired). I’m keeping this post short and sweet, so let’s start by talking about Raymond Chandler. Say what? Well - I love reading Raymond Chandler books and sometimes I like to think of myself as the online equivalent of Philip Marlowe (the lead character from his books)
Combining suave sophistication, witty put downs and online investigative powers which border on the super-human. Ok, so I don’t have much sophistication and I’m not that witty (plus I don’t get to sleep with as many of my clients as he does. Disclaimer: ANY of my clients!) but I AM pretty good at the online investigation. You know the sort, where a new client comes on board, they ask your advice on an issue, you come up with a solution in a few minutes by using the online tools at your fingertips, some complex Google searches and a whole lot of know-how.
Now often, this is just a theoretical solution and implementing it can be much trickier but doesn’t it make you feel good when you solve these problems? Just me? Ok, well I love the challenge of a fresh problem, even more so if I can solve it quickly and help someone out which is why:
I’m answering your questions for free
That’s right - just email me at tom@distilled.co.uk (the same address for all fan mail 
) and I’ll take a look at your problem/question. If I can’t answer it, you can have your money back!
Alternatively, just leave a question in the comments.
Please - I’m looking for something which has been troubling you, a nagging issue, burning question or flummoxing results.
Please don’t ask me: “How do I rank 1st for this phrase” - I’m not giving away the whole playbook here guys.
Please don’t ask me: “What’s an XML sitemap” - you can all find wikipedia (hiss) yourselves.
This offer is open to webmasters, bloggers, young, old. Heck - I’m even offering it to any rival SEO firms who internally are scratching their heads about a problem (confidentiality will be preserved, just mark your email confidential and I’ll treat it as such).
Disclaimer: I’m not the most incredible SEO’er to walk the earth, I’m no Rand, Grey Wolf, or Danny Sullivan but hey - they all charge for their services so go figure 
PS - It appears Raymond Chandler may have predicted Google many years ago, read about it here!
PPS - After writing this article I have seen this post from Grey Wolf. I realise this is a similar idea but really it’s not since I’ll answer specifics for you (he’s looking for more general discussion I believe). This post wasn’t based on that at all!
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Judd on Fri (29 Jun) @ 1:06 am
Greetings,
Enjoy the blog and am relishing your offer to impart such wisdom. I’m not necessarily an SEO ninja either, though I’m alright there is always more to learn.
My question is: What is your preferred first, or alternatively most important, step when doing off-site SEO?
Thanks mate, keep up the great blog!
-Judd
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Tom Critchlow on Fri (29 Jun) @ 4:45 pm
Hi Judd, thanks for the comments. Your question is pretty vague but I’ll do my best!
Depending on how established the site is or how well known your brand is will dictate your off-line optimisation strategy.
If your site is well known and already has good domain trust then you would be best placed starting your off-site optimisation by creating anchor-text specific links to improve your targeted rankings for specific phrases. Often I see old domains with lots of links missing out on ranking simply because they lack a few keyphrase specific links. By adding a few anchor text specific links you can dramatically affect the rankings for old, trusted domains.
If your site is less well known, or it is a new domain then I’d recommend trying to leverage social media sites to gain a quick spike in traffic, instantly gain lots of links and get your domain trust boosted. What I’m talking about of course is linkbait. Lyndon writes a great roundup of linkbait articles/resources here which should get you started (and of course it’s also an example of a piece of linkbait!).
Regardless of which type of site you have, however, I’d recommend making sure you’re keeping up with any mentions of your brand/product/site online. Reputation Monitor is the best way of doing this
Hopefully that helps, of course these are just general recommendations, if you’re looking for something more specific you’ll need to give me more details
Tom
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Qamar on Mon (17 Dec) @ 11:24 am
Why do we have different Google PageRank for / and index.jsp?
I noticed that most of Java websites own two different Google PageRank for “/” and “index.jsp” home page URLs. Here my first question is that why do we have two different pageranks for both urls when both relate to one page (homepage) - second question is that how can we make sure that each url (/ and index.jsp) has similar pagerank.
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Duncan Morris on Mon (17 Dec) @ 12:35 pm
Hi Qamar.
I think there are two things here. Firstly I wouldn’t be worrying about page rank too much. This is a bad way of judging how well a page is doing. Judge the page on how well it ranks for the keywords you are targeting, not on pagerank, which is at best always out of date.
The reason you are seeing different values for pagerank is part of a bigger problem. From what you say it sounds like you have a duplicate content problem. You should only ever have one url for any page, if both / and index.jsp return the homepage then you need to fix that. I would probably (depending on the number / quality of inbound links to the two pages) 301 redirect index.jsp to the / page.
Basically you have two URL’s with the same content competing against each other. Each page is treated independently.
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EFUK on Fri (21 Mar) @ 1:16 pm
Hi,
been reading your blog with interest. I have a question I’d really appreciate your thoughts on…
I have a site selling items currently in the UK under a .co.uk domain. I have recently bought a mix of .com, .net and .eu variations, copied the UK site and launched under the new domains and used Google webmaster to identify to google which countries these sites are aimed at. The reason for this is simple, I’m planning on launching a business in these countries and wanted to start getting on the SEO ladder now to try and stimulate interest. My quandry is that currently my .co.uk version of the site performs fairly well in SEO terms on google UK. I have simply taken a copy of this site and launched it under the .com, .eu. .net domains and I’m worried that google may see this as ‘duplicated content’ and as such penalise my decently SEO performing UK website.
Do you hav any thoughts on this? Currenly the copies of the site are verbatim, but when business abroad gets going the content will change slightly to suit each target country. Could I be diminishing my good results in the UK this far by taking this approach?
Many thanks
EFUK
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Tom Critchlow on Thu (27 Mar) @ 4:25 pm
@EFUK thanks for stopping by and glad you like the blog
Yes, if you’ve just copied the content it will be viewed as duplicate content and this could harm your rankings in the UK. It’s a tricky issue which doesn’t always have a ‘right’ answer. Will was recently featured on video discussing this very thing:
http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/geo-location/video-internationalisation-or-internationalization-a-tricky-problem/
If you’re targeting non-english languages then translating the content is the best plan. If you just want to begin targeting the US then launching a .com is most likely your best bet - with fresh content and links. Email me if you want to discuss further!
Thanks