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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • ptdodge


    Hi everyone, I do some SEO work for a personal injury attorney, and due to his profession, he gets cold-called by every digital marketing company under the sun. He recently got called by a company that offers packages that include posting in multiple directories (all on domains they own), creating subdomains for search listings, and PR services like writing and distributing press releases for distribution to multiple media outlets. The content they write will obviously not be local. All this and more for less than $500 a month! I'm curious if any of you have any experience with companies like this and whether you consider them black hat. I realize I'm asking you to speculate on a very broad description of what they offer, but their linking strategies sound risky to me. What experiences have you had with companies like this? Do you know anyone who has ever gotten a penalty using these tactics? Thanks, in advance, for sharing your thoughts.

    | ptdodge
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  • JMSCC


    I find it alarming that my client has canonical tags pointing to "page=all" product gallery pages. Some of these product gallery pages have over 100 products and I think this could effect load time, especially for mobile. I would like to get some insight from the community on this, thanks!

    | JMSCC
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  • Rich_Coffman


    So I have this website that got hacked with cloaking and Google has labeled it as such in the SERPs. With due reason of coarse. My question is I am going to relaunch an entirely new redesigned website in less than 30 days, do I pull the hacked site down until then or leave it up? Which option is better?

    | Rich_Coffman
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  • Direct_Ram


    in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates). since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings. We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages. we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80). we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions. we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content. we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords. We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower. 1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at. 2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice. 3.  we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building? Advice is appreciated!

    | Direct_Ram
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  • wlingke1


    Suppose I have a new website about cars and I had created a page about something completely not-related - like cupcakes. However, I found that it was very easy to get high quality sites to link to the cupcakes page where as it was very difficult to get people to link to the homepage about cars. If my goal is to increase the SEO for the homepage (which again is related to cars), is there a point where additional high quality links to my cupcakes page is not useful for it anymore? What if I created another page - about frosted cupcakes - which was also easy to get high quality links to?

    | wlingke1
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  • eImprovement-SEO


    Hello, During my research of our website I uncovered that our visible links to our product detail pages (PDP) from grid/list view category-nav/search pages are <nofollowed>and being sent through a click tracking redirect with the (PDP) appended as a URL query string.  But included with each PDP link is a <noscript>tag containing the actual PDP link. When I confronted our 3rd party e-commerce category-nav/search provider about this approach here is the response I recieved:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The purpose of these links is to firstly allow us to reliably log the click and then secondly redirect the visitor to the target PDP.<br /> In addition to the visible links there is also an "invisible link" inside the no script tag. The noscript tag prevents showing of the a tag by normal browsers but is found and executed by bots during crawling of the page.<br /> Here a link to a blog post where an SEO proved this year that the noscript tag is not ignored by bots: <a href="http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/" target="_blank">http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/<br /> </a> <br /> So the visible links are not obfuscating the PDP URL they have it encoded as it otherwise cannot be passed along as a URL query string. The plain PDP URL is part of the noscript tag ensuring discover-ability of PDPs by bots.</p> <p>Does anyone have anything in addition to this one blog post, to substantiate the claim that hiding our links in a <noscript> tag are in fact within the SEO Best Practice standards set by Google, Bing, etc...? </p> <p>Do you think that this method skirts the fine line of grey hat tactics?  Will google/bing eventually penalize us for this?</p> <p>Does anyone have a better suggestion on how our 3rd party provider could track those clicks without using a URL redirect & hiding the actual PDP link?</p> <p>All insights are welcome...Thanks!</p> <p>Jordan K.</p></noscript></nofollowed>

    | eImprovement-SEO
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  • shopperlocal_DM


    I have a coupon website (http://couponeasy.com)
    Being a coupon website, my content is always keeps changing (as new coupons are added and expired deals are removed) automatically. I wish to create a sitemap but I realised that there is not much point in creating a sitemap for all pages as they will be removed sooner or later and/or are canonical. I have about 8-9 pages which are static and hence I can include them in sitemap. Now the question is.... If I create the sitemap for these 9 pages and submit it to google webmaster, will the google crawlers stop indexing other pages? NOTE: I need to create the sitemap for getting expanded sitelinks. http://couponeasy.com/

    | shopperlocal_DM
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  • Lukas_TheCurious


    Hi everyone, I am taking care of the large "news" website (500k pages), which got massive hit from Panda because of the duplicated content (70% was syndicated content). I recommended that all syndicated content should be removed and the website should focus on original, high quallity content. However, this was implemented only partially. All syndicated content is set to NOINDEX (they thing that it is good for user to see standard news + original HQ content). Of course it didn't help at all. No change after months. If I would be Google, I would definitely penalize website that has 80% of the content set to NOINDEX a it is duplicated. I would consider this site "cheating" and not worthy for the user. What do you think about this "theory"? What would you do? Thank you for your help!

    | Lukas_TheCurious
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  • CayenneRed89


    Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection.  The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built.  That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster.  Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site.  These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings.  Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan

    | CayenneRed89
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  • DPG_Media


    My concern is described more in details in the following hypothetic scenario(basically this is the same method that CNN site applies to its site): In one page i have a specific anchor text e.g. "A firefighter rescued a young boy" and this one is linked to an article which if you enter you will see that it has a different title than the anchor text/short title that i mentioned above.  So the internal titlte of the article is "A firefighte rescued a young boy in Philippines while it was rainy".  I want to know whether this is a good SEO practice or not. Regards, Christos

    | DPG_Media
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  • kheberger


    My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo

    | kheberger
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  • TVape


    So there is this exact match domain that gets about 500 visitors a day. it has trust flow 17 and citation flow of 23 which is just a little lower than our own website. The website talks about one of our keywords and rank on second page in SERPs. I am not interested in buying and running that website, but rather just to liquidate all the pages with 301s into our existing domain and onto relevant pages. So the 301s would be to relevant pages. The question is, would this strategy be worth it in todays SEO world and Google updates?

    | TVape
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  • ChopperCharlie


    I operate a local print and direct mail company located in Houston called Catdi Printing (www.catdi.com)We do very well with our local rankings and rank 1 or 2 in our main keywords ( direct mail Houston & eddm Houston ) We are looking to upgrade our online quoting and ordering system. The software is very expensive and the only way we can incorporate this new system is create on our end a new subdomain (printing.catdi.com) and redirect it to an ip thats with their server. Their server is located in Californiaa and might even be hosted by Google but im not certain on this point.  Our current host provider is Hostgator and they are based in Houston so im not this provides any benefit. I guess my main question is will Google look at this negatively?  Would this change our SERPS organically and what about how Google indexes pages on the subdomain?  Im also concerned that the load times will be off and make the user experience awkward. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

    | ChopperCharlie
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  • 2mlab


    Someone more expert than me could help... I am not a pro, just doing research on a website... Google Search Console shows many backlinks in pages under unknown domains... this pages are mirroring the pages of the linked website... clicking on a link on the mirror page leads to a spam page with link spam... The homepage of these unknown domain appear just fine... looks like that the domain is partially hijacked... WTF?! Have you ever seen something likes this? Can it be an outcome of a previous blackhat activity?

    | 2mlab
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  • BobGW


    Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks

    | BobGW
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  • BobGW


    Hello, I made a slideshow and referenced Google Images without searching with advanced copyright settings. Can I just put a copyright disclaimer in my video, or do I need to reshoot it? Thanks!

    | BobGW
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  • timthetanker


    Hi I have been a lurker for a long time, so I finally took the step to make my 1st post, and will hopefully start giving back more in the future since I have gained invaluable info from this great site Background I hired a new freelancer on our team of SEO consultants ("specialists") During the course a month he (the new consultant) submitted our website to numerous link directories (he assured me this is good), today I received the report of the work he had been doing for the past 4-weeks. I opened the report and I was furious and wanted to sack him there and then The Problem / My Question He had submitted our website to 150 directories with various levels of page rank, ranging from 7-1. Most of the directories are totally irrelevant to our niche (we are in the catering business) and he had gone and submitted the site to directories such as "finance busters", "questfinder" etc For all 150 submissions he used: exactly the same url exactly the same title exactly the same description exactly the same keywords My Concern Am I right to be worried about this? Or am I completely wrong and may this actually have an effect (even if none)? The way I see it is that Google is seeing 150 duplicate links coming from irrelevant directories all within a months time, which will trigger a red flag and possibly do major damage to my site, which has always been strictly white hat and been doing pretty well. p.s does link directory submissions even count these days anyway? Thanks for reading and advice very much welcome

    | timthetanker
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  • mickburkesnr


    Hey everyone, I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common. Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust. My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO? Thanks!

    | mickburkesnr
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  • WeBuyCars.com


    I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.

    | WeBuyCars.com
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  • Chemometec


    Hey folks, A URL on my webpage that has been climbing in search results ever since has suddenly completely disapeared from the search results and i'm absolutely stuck - no idea what the reason might be. It was ranked #11 for the targeted keyword, than it slightly started dropping down to #14 and #17 after which it completely disappeared, not only for specific targeted keyword, but also for exact name of the product. The URL has vanished from search results. I looked in search console, no particular errors or messages from Google. The only case I might come with is that many URLs are cannonicaly linked to the URL in matter, but i don't assume this might be the case. Does anyone have a suggestion what might the reason why the URL has completely vanished from the search results? Thank you a lot. The URL:  http://chemometec.com/cell-counters/cell-counter-nc-200-nucleocounter/ Targeted keyword: 'cell counter'

    | Chemometec
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  • Voltron


    Ive done quite a bit of research and I'm strongly considering using a back linking service to speed up my rankings. The one I found to be the best is Red Square SEO, do any of you guys have any feedback on them? Heres their website. http://www.redsquareseo.net

    | Voltron
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  • wlingke


    According to: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews - all someone has to do is add in some html code and write the review. How does google do any validation on whether these reviews are legitimate or not?

    | wlingke
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  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi I have found a lot of links from a majestic report (not found on moz open site explorer).  inwhich I have found lots of links from 2010 and possibly earlier which either I can't get hold of the webmaster.  Is a disavow the right way to go if I can't get them removed myself? Also I have noticed that there are a lot of free directories listing new pages from our site and I am concerned Google are going to find these.  I surpose there is nothing I can do about this, does anyone have any recommendations.

    | Cocoonfxmedia
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  • damon1212


    I have a personal site that is pretty strong (35 DA) likely from the fact that I have had it for so damn long (like. . . 15 years). So, since it's my own site of course I used it to link to my business site. Sadly, it looks like that site has "five spam flags" . . . which is ironic since it's totally legit. Anyway, what can I do to reduce spam flags?   It mentions "low trust", small proportion of branded links, and "large site with few links".   Pretty sure it's not the latter, since the site is just a wordpress site I use to share some of my music. (www.damonsongs.net in case anyone wants to hear it . . . ). So. . . 1) can I do much of anything to legitimze the site and 2) am I better off removing the site link I am trying to promote? Insights welcome!

    | damon1212
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  • glitterbug


    I had a question with reference to https protocol. We are planning to shift from HTTPs to HTTP version of the website will it provide any significant advantage in ranking better in Google. This question is specific to Google India and that too in a competitive landscape such as Finance

    | glitterbug
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  • SEOBirmingham81


    Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan

    | SEOBirmingham81
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  • SEOhughesm


    We have a client that we've been doing white-hat SEO for for over 3 years and they've always been number 1 in Google for all their targeted keywords. This year, their competition has been ranking above them and our client has been pushed towards the bottom of the first page. After thorough research, we discovered that this competitor is doing no SEO at all, just regular PR which our client is also doing. Our client is even spending money in Adwords and their competition isn't. Can anyone explain how a website that does zero SEO can magically be ranked at the top now and above our competitor who we're doing everything possible for?

    | SEOhughesm
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  • Alaniz


    I'm planning to begin contributing to several different media outlets and blogs on the net, and hoping that I can get some decent placements for me and a few of my colleagues. Looking specifically at legit media outlets and corporate blogs with a structured and considered editorial process where we can contribute thought leadership pieces. In light of all of the Google algorithm changes surrounding guest blogging, I am curious if this would be viewed as legit editorial placements, or as guest posts that would either carry no weight or be penalized? Secondly, what are the considerations and value of including a high quality in-article link back to our site vs. a byline link, or both. Does anyone have any data or experience with this? Thanks in advance!  Andrew and wondering if anyone has any experience or insights

    | Alaniz
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  • edward-may


    Hi Mozers I have 3 top level domains co.nz com.au and com each meta tag for the home page is unique for each country and I have tried to figure this out for the last 3 months, but unfortunately I can't seem to pin point why all 3 meta tags are showing up exactly the same.  It seems all meta tags are showing up for the co.nz domain. In the attachments you can see all urls are showing up correctly for each country specific domain, however the meta tag description defaults to the NZ Any help around this would be much appreciated! Thanks all

    | edward-may
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  • TVape


    Hi Folks, back in june 2012 when link building was the thing and I had no idea how to do it and hence outsourced link building. Company 1 would write a post and distribute it on multiple different domains after spinning it. Company 2, after company 1 was fired did directory submissions on PR0 websites for two months before i discontinued the service with them. I still have the excel file of the links they built. It goes without mentioning that the links were junk. When panda came about our website was hit. Back then i let it slide and we stopped link building and started doing things "white hat". Genuinely doing good things so to say. I never however did anything to fix the penalty. Now i would like to look back at that issue and see if the penalties are still holding us back and if I can do anything to fix it. Should I address this issue now or is it too late to matter? How would i do it, a link audit through a freelancer? What do you SEO mozters recommend?

    | TVape
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  • CFSSEO


    We have a desktop site that has been getting worked on over the year regarding improving SEO.  Since the mobile site is separate, the business decided to not spend the time to keep it updated and just turned it off.  So any mobile user that finds a link to us in search engines, goes to a desktop site that is not responsive. Now that we're hearing Google is going to start incorporating mobile user friendliness into rankings, the business wants to turn the mobile site back on while we spend months making the desktop site responsive.  The mobile site basically has no SEO. The title tag is uniform across the site, etc. How much will it hurt us to turn on that SEO horrid mobile site?  Or how much will it hurt us to not turn it on?

    | CFSSEO
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  • seomozinator


    Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/

    | seomozinator
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  • edward-may


    Hey Mozers, Just wondering I noticed a few sites show "this article first appeared on domain.com" if there has been an article published on another site and is now publsihed on ours, how do we create a backlink to say it had first appeared on "domain.com" Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks

    | edward-may
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  • adnan1101


    Hello all, my question is if my website targets a country abc and I have server in the same country abc compared to suppose I shift my server to country xyz can it effect SEO and ranking of my website ?

    | adnan1101
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  • AMurelli


    We have a mandatory keyword tag field in our cms page templates, which we have to keep
    as our internal search facility bases queries on the keywords we use. Should we hide the keywords from the search
    engines, as I read that Bing uses it as a spam signal? Or do we just need to stick to best practise ensuring the keywords match the keywords found in the body content? Many thanks for any help. Sophie

    | AMurelli
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  • adnan1101


    Hello all I want to ask you why there is difference in DA authority vs majestic trust authority as both of these companies say they have the best authority alogrithm see the below link for refrence. http://wp.auburn.edu/bassclub/next-meeting-1-28-2014/

    | adnan1101
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  • _nitman


    I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case. **Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page. Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well. **What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.

    | _nitman
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  • williamgoodseoagency.com


    Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.

    | williamgoodseoagency.com
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  • EGOL


    I saw an ad on Search Engine Roundtable and the call to action was... "What is the #1 metric that Google uses to rank websites?" I thought, "I gotta know that!". (I usually don't click ads but this one tempted me.) So I clicked in and saw a method "proven by Rand Fishkin" that will "boost the rankings of your website".   This company has software that will use Rand's proven method (plus data from another unattributed test to boost the rankings of your website). I am not going to use this software.  The video made my BS meter ring.   But if you want to see it.... http://crowdsearch.me/special-backdoor/ Rather than use this "software", I would suggest using kickass title tags that deliver the searcher to kickass content.  That has worked really well for me for years. Great title tags and great content will produce the same results.  The bonus for you is that the great content will give you a real website.

    | EGOL
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  • JMSCC


    What would be the approach if my website is no longer selling products for a brand that is driving top organic traffic? Where should I redirect the traffic on the page? I'm trying to decide between the homepage or another similar brand product page.

    | JMSCC
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  • edward-may


    Hi Guys, It seems I get a lot of visits from Baidu spider does anyone know much about this?  I notice they visit every single page at least 5 times a day, just wondering if anyone knows anything about this?

    | edward-may
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  • Kelly3330


    Okay something I am struggling with Using YOAST - but have a recipe blog - However the category archives have /are being optimized and indexed as I am adding custom content to them , then listing the recipes below. My question is if I am indexing the Category Archives and using these to add custom content above - then allows the recipe excerpts from the category to be listed underneath - will these recipe excerpts be picked up as duplicate content?

    | Kelly3330
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  • Kelly3330


    Just checked my Crawl insights. I have 1981 on Moz 302 redirects - temp I'm not too familiar with Magento - however site domain has moved from .com to .co and although I have set a 301 redirect on the base domain through hta I am assuming it is also temporary redirecting things in the CMS itself? The temporary directs that the site is creating are still on the new domain - but are really odd! Eg Wishlist, Product compare links .co/wishlist/index/add/product/498/form_key/5e7CQkZ54tMSsJtwAnyone have ideas in regards to this?

    | Kelly3330
    1
  • Palmbourne


    I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4. According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed. Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is? Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.

    | Palmbourne
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  • Kelly3330


    The recipes are in most cases in more than one category (usually two) each. Do and (and if so how) need to set each post to one canicol url? E.g  A recipe on Peas is in healthy foods (which is the default wordpress cat.) and also Vegetarian Dishes. I use YOAST for wordpress

    | Kelly3330
    0
  • ShaunPhilips


    Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a client’s website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda/ Penguin update because of some spammy links. We have analysed and disavow sapmmy links edit anchor tag and landing pages. We've made a decent climb back while working on it keywords ranking was improved some of them are from out of 500 to top 30, but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords are again dropping and traffic is gone: I notice keyword ranking is dropping and some of the keywords which are on 2 and 3 page, now on 9<sup>th</sup> page. And also traffic is down. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, S

    | ShaunPhilips
    0
  • sususu


    As all other marketeers do I follow closely my keywords, one particular keyword has ranked continually at #2 and has suddenly dropped to +#60, but all others remain the same. We are a fairly large site in terms of numbers 9m views annually, could it be possible that someone has black hatted that particular keyword, and if so how do I find out how and more importantly who?

    | sususu
    0
  • SMD_


    Hello fellow mozers! I am having a problem you might be able to help me with and any thoughts on the issue will be greatly appreciated. Yesterday, I received an automated monthly report from Quill Engage, a tool that fetches data from Google Analytics and generates reports in a narrative format. Last month's 'referral traffic' section indicates two incredibly spammy websites driving more than 200 sessions to our website. Naturally, I checked out GWT and Open Site Explorer but couldn't find any traces of such activity. Futhermore, all our metrics seem ok. Can this possibly be a negative SEO attack that was only traced by the aforementioned tool? Can you propose any other way to test this and make sure we're not being attacked?

    | SMD_
    0
  • Tyrell


    I used to offer design and web services on a site that is current blank (no content, no links). My questions is should I add a little bit of content, maybe a brief explanation with a link to my new site. Or should I just add 301 redirect. This is purely a question of what is better for SEO and ranking for my new site (not a branding question).

    | Tyrell
    0
  • edward-may


    Hey Mozers, Just watched Rands white board friday about consolidating domains https://moz.com/blog/rebrand-or-redirect-my-site-consolidate-multiple-sites-whiteboard-friday I would like to consider looking at consolidating my cctld's zenory.co.nz and zenory.com.au over to zenory.com I have been told by our previous seo guy to go international eg. target USA, NZ and Australia. Consolidate into 1 website (your .com), and separate your website into different subfolders for each target country zenory.com/us/, zenory.com/au/, zenory.com/nz/. If I'm not really writing country specific content for the blog I could just keep 1 blog at zenory.com/blog/ Can anyone recommend a guide around the technical side of how to apply these changes without causing issues?  Our website is custom built with wordpress being the blog. Any advice will be much appreciated Cheers

    | edward-may
    0

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