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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • gamnaking1


    Hi All, Just wanted to get everyones opinions on this, I see it more and more now where businesses own multiple domains for [keyword] + [location], they have multiple domains for different locations and setup individual sites on them. I see these types of domains rank very easily for medium competition keywords, as long as the on page is good and there are a handful of back links, they rank. just to clarify, for example - iphonerepairmanchester.co.uk (purely an example not sure how this site ranks!!) What are Googles views on this? I've always insisted its better to build a strong brand with the "real" business rather than creating extra websites named by keywords. But I've recently had a client want to pursue this and it seems it currently works, but is there a danger down the line Google will penalise it? The short term traffic increase is undeniable but like anything in the world of Google at the moment, I'd rather persuade clients not to go this route if it will protect future interests.

    | gamnaking1
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  • imran2078


    I have got a domain by the name stock-wallpapers. Now I want to give a post with name download (my keyword) stock wallpapers, where the keyword stock wallpapers comes twice? Should i go for it or not? or what should i do instead? Looking for nice response and Hopefully everyone has got my question!! For example: stock-wallpapers.com is the domain Post URL - stock-wallpapers.com/download-mykeyword-stock-wallpapers-here

    | imran2078
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  • Llanero


    I have had 3 tourism web sites for many years (each site represents a different place in Costa Rica) and they cross link with each other. www.monteverdetours.com is the main site -  the most important one. In order to help ranking and to comply with all the new google changes.... I have recently been advised that (page by page, I should incorporate the other site, www, arenalvolcanotours.com into the monteverde site with 301s, In other words there will be a new  directory on monteverde called /arenal-volcano-tours which will be the new home page for the arenal section.  So page by page I can map the old URL's to the new URL's  eg arenalvolcanotours.com/arenal-hotels-economy.html
    301 redirect to
    monteverdetours.com/arenal-volcano-tours/arenal-hotels-economy.html Now my monteverde site was once penalized by google and I am worried that doing this might have an adverse effect (although the thinking behind doing this change is because google prefers it to all the cross linking and also I will be able to consolidate all the links from Arenal into Monteverde). I respect the person who made the suggestion but I was interested in opinions from other people! I want to be positive this is a good ideas before undertaking this major work! Any opinions would be appreciated!

    | Llanero
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  • BobGW


    It looks like we have the same penalties on more than one ecommerce site. What subtle on-site factors can contribute to non-manual penalty, specifically rankings slowly going down for all short tail keywords? And what does it take to pull yourself out of these penalties?

    | BobGW
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  • WebServiceConsulting.com


    Hello, So I have a website (example.com). I have an ajax pop-up (example.com/#example) that I am receiving a bunch of links to. Since this pop-up (example.com/#example) is on my homepage, are these links giving juice to the homepage, or this pop-up, or both?

    | WebServiceConsulting.com
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  • nicenike


    Hey guys, So a lot has been said about private blog network. I have but only 1 question: Do you choose PA/DA over PR when purchasing expiring domains or PR is most critical? Thanks a lot!

    | nicenike
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  • kimmiedawn


    I noticed this recent drop in impressions in Google Webmaster Tools. It started mid-February, and I know there was the page layout algorithm on the 6th, and I've heard mention of a Panda update around the 11th, so I started to wonder what was resposible. A manual penalty was just recently removed, too. As I dug deeper, I discovered other problems. For one a misredirected blog causing 404s, plus a redirected site whose duplicate pages were never removed from Google's index. There are also two exact match domains 301 redirected to the site, but there were no links or content prior to the redirect. In a site:operator search, one is showing a duplicate homepage. When the wordpress.com blog was redirected, it was not redirected to the /blog subdirectory. Could the resulting 404s which go back as far as I can see in GWT (3 month limit) be the cause of this drop? We're talking about hundreds of blog pages and their links. FYI the main nav in /blog pointed to the old site until 2/7 when I pointed them to the existing domain (so hundreds, if not thousands of links were being redirected) The million dollar question is: is it just the 301 redirect issue causing the problem here? It looks like I might just have exacerbated it when I fixed the nav menu links. Will fixing the redirect rescue the impressions? My plan of attack includes killing the 301 redirects from the exact match domains with no backlinks, and removing the old site from Google's index from within GWT. Any yays or nays? FYI, a 301 redirect of .index.html, default.asp, and non-www was done 1/8,
    the reconsideration request was sent 1/24, manual penalty lifted 2/10. Index.html still redirects twice, going to www.site.com/index.html before resolving at .com. Same with default.asp. IarDs8u

    | kimmiedawn
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  • BobGW


    This ecommerce site was hit (mostly) slowly by updates but there is nothing in GWT. Below is the graph. Keep in mind that most of our traffic is return customers, so the drops don't look dramatic, but they are. "New Visitors" doesn't show the drop. This is a "Daily" Google Analytics setting. The drop I've circled is May 23-May 24, 2013. It was a huge hit in non-return customers. This graph is "Unique Visitors" I don't know why the "New Visitors" graph is not showing the dip Although we had some big drops, a lot of the drop was gradual. Any help in identifying what could be causing the problem is appreciated. ga.png

    | BobGW
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  • BobGW


    I've attached both graphs of the traffic drop. Our website rankings have been steadily declining since May of 2013. We have mostly return customers or our drop would have been much more severe. There's never been any warnings in GWT We cut a bunch (but not all) of our paid links in May of 2013. We didn't have a manual penalty or anything, we just wanted to see what happened if we moved towards being white hat. When our rankings plumited, we quit cutting links. We currently have about 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was May 22, 2013 In looking at these graphs, was it our cutting links that caused the traffic drop, or was it Penguin 2.0? I'm looking for people who have experience in diagnosing a "Unique Visits" Google analytics graph for Penguin and have experience with what happens when you cut links. It looks like, in viewing the graphs, that May 23 was more the day that the big drop happened, but you guys have more experience with this than me. Thank you. ga.png ga2.png

    | BobGW
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  • BobGW


    Hello,Does the attached graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit? Keep in mind that on our eCommerce site most purchases are from return customers. I forgot to add here that we cut a bunch of paid links in May 2013 as well. We quit cutting paid links when our rankings dropped - we thought it was the paid links. We currently have 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was on May 22. ga2.png

    | BobGW
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  • smaavie


    Hello all, I would like to get your opinion on whether I should invest time and money to improve a website which was hit by Google Penguin in April 2014. (I know, April 2014 was nearly 2 years ago. However, this site has not been a top priority for us and we have just left until now). The site is www.salmonrecipes.net Basically, we aggregated over 700 salmon recipes from major supermarkets, famous chefs, and others (all with their permission) and made them available on this site. It was a good site at the time but it is showing its age now. For a few years we were occasionally #1 on Google in the US for "salmon recipes", but normally we would be between #2 and #4. We made money from the site almost entirely through Adsense. We never made a huge amount, but it paid our office rent every month, which was handy. We also built up an email database of several thousand followers, but we've not really used this much. (Yet). In the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012 the site attracted just over 500k visits. After the rankings dropped due to Google Penguin, traffic dropped by 77% in the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012. Rankings and traffic have not recovered at all, and are only getting worse. I am happy to accept that we deserved our rankings to fall during the Google Penguin re-shuffle. I stupidly commissioned an offshore company to build lots of links which, in hindsight, were basically just spam, and totally without any real value. However they assured me it was safe and I trusted them, despite my own nagging reservations. Anyway, I have full details of all the links they created, and therefore I could remove many of these 'relatively' easily. (Of course, removing hundreds of links would take a lot of time). My questions ... 1. How can I evaluate the probability of this site 'recovering' from Google Penguin. I am willing to invest time/money on link removal and new (ethical) SEO work if there is a reasonable chance of regaining a position in the top 5 on Google (US) for "salmon recipes" and various long-tail terms. But I am keen to avoid spending time/money on this if it is unlikely we will recover. How can I figure out my chances? 2. Generally, I accept that this model of site is in decline. Relying on Google to drive traffic to a site, and on Google to produce revenue via its Adsense scheme, is risky and not entirely sensible. Also, Google seems to provide more and more 'answers' itself, rather than sending people to e.g. a website listing recipes. Given this, is it worth investing any money in this at all? 3. Can you recommend anyone who specialises in this kind of recovery work. (As I said, I have a comprehensive list of all the links that were built, etc). OK, that is all for now. I am really looking forward to whatever opinions you may have about this. I'll provide more info if required. Huge thanks
    David

    | smaavie
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  • AAC_Adam


    We've noticed that when we search our web copy in Google the first result is under a proxy server "HideMyAss.com," and our actual website is no where in sight. We've called Google and they really didn't have an answer for us (well the 2-3 people) we spoke with. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

    | AAC_Adam
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  • SinaKashani


    We are looking for very competent and expert to handle the SEO for a plastic surgery clinic in Toronto Canada. Does anyone knows who are the best people in that field.. I am looking for the best of the best .. any suggestions or recommendations? Thank you

    | SinaKashani
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  • esiow2013


    Thanks in advance!

    | esiow2013
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  • esiow2013


    Thanks in advance!

    | esiow2013
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  • SinaKashani


    I have someone to write new pages for my site. How do I know the pages she is writing is not duplicated from other other website. is there any website or software to do this? What is the best way to check? Thank you

    | SinaKashani
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  • BobGW


    Hello, Does this URL need to be rewritten? http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modelingwithnlparticleandreas.html Bob

    | BobGW
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  • esiow2013


    Thanks in advance!

    | esiow2013
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  • SCW


    I am working on a project for a physician who only cares about reaching patients within a specific geographic region. He has a new technique at his practice and wants to get the word out via radio spots. I want to track the effectiveness of the radio campaigns without the use of call-tracking numbers or special promo codes. Since the physician's primary domain is very long (but well-established), my thought is to register 3-4 short domains referencing the technique and location so they would be easy for listeners to remember and type-in later. 301 these domains to the relevant landing page on the main domain. As an alternative. Each domain could be a single relevant landing page with a link to the relevant procedure on the main site. It's not as if there is anything deceptive going on, rather, I would simply be using a domain in place of a call tracking number. I think I should be able to view the type-in traffic in Analytics, but would Google have an issue with this? Thoughts and suggestions appreciated!

    | SCW
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  • jampaper


    I am considering buying and redirecting a domain that has a pretty strong, relevant link profile. However, it's very expensive. There is another option to rent the domain on a month-to-month basis. I am interested in doing this for at least a month just to see what SEO benefits are to be had and if it would ultimately be worth buying or not. Can renting a domain have any negative impacts on my primary site? Would the search engines know if I did this? Is there any harm in having those redirects appear and then disappear?

    | jampaper
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  • ServiceCrowd_AU


    I'm working on a directory that has around 800 results (image rich results) in the top level view. This will likely grow over time so needs support thousands. The main issue is that it is built in ajax so paginated pages are dynamically generated and look like duplicate content to search engines. If we limit the results, then not all of the individual directory listing pages can be found. I have an idea that serves users and search engines what they want but uses cloaking. Is it grey or black? I've read http://moz.com/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful and none of the examples quite apply. To allow users to browse through the results (without having a single page that has a slow load time) we include pagination links but which are not shown to search engines. This is a positive user experience. For search engines we display all results (since there is no limit the number of links so long as they are not spammy) on a single page. This requires cloaking, but is ultimately serving the same content in slightly different ways. 1. Where on the scale of white to black is this? 2. Would you do this for a client's site? 3. Would you do it for your own site?

    | ServiceCrowd_AU
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  • BCB1121


    So I discovered a website the other day that is a complete duplicate of ours: justinchina.co.uk This is our website: petmedicalcenter.com . Thanks to help from Erica, I dug in deeper to see why this was happening. It seems that the justinchinca.co.uk which is hosted by GoDaddy has their A Record pointing at our web host. So that being said, our website does not seem to be hacked which is good news. Would this still cause an issue with our Google rankings? Our host, Host Monster said to contact GoDaddy and GoDaddy said that a domain owner can point their URL to anywhere that they choose. Anyway, any feedback would be helpful. Thanks for everyone thus far that has helped me. Brant

    | BCB1121
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  • AaronHenry


    Google is increasing cracking down on bad local results. However, in many regions of the US there are twin cities or cities that reside next to each other, like Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Kansas City. According to Google guidelines your business should only be listed in the city in which your business is physically located. However, we've noticed that results just outside of the local map pack will still rank, especially for businesses that service the home. For example, let's say you have a ACME Plumbing in Saint Paul, MN. If you were to perform a search for "Plumbing Minneapolis" you typically see local Minneapolis plumbers, then Saint Paul outliers. Usually the outliers are in the next city or just outside of the Google map centroid. Are there any successful strategies to increase rank on these "Saint Paul outliers" that compete with local Minneapolis results or are the results always going lag behind in lieu of perceived accuracy? We're having to compete against some local competitors that are using some very blackhat techniques to rank multiple sites locally (in the map results). They rank multiple sites for the same company, under different company names and UPS store addresses. Its pretty obvious, especially when you see a UPS store on the street view of the address! We're not looking to bend the rules, but rather compete safely. Can anything be done in this service based scenario?

    | AaronHenry
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  • Whebb


    Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

    | Whebb
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  • CurriculosOnline


    Hello Guys, Im Reorganizing my link building list in excel. I have tons of good links that I found in the last 3 months. What I want to ask is if there is a way to put those links in my excel list in a automatic way with the folowing fields: Domain Pagerank DA (from moz) Type Submission link Im doint it manual and is driving me crazy 😛 Tks in advance! Regards, MM

    | CurriculosOnline
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  • Tosten


    If someone has a domain that is spammy, such as "http://seattlesbestinsurancerates.com" can this cause Google to not index the website? This is not our domain, but a customer of ours has a similar one and it appears to be causing issues! Any thoughts? Thanks for any input!

    | Tosten
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  • Jaybeamer


    Do Wikipedia pages/links add any value to your website and SEO? We are not an advertiser or seller of products, whereas we help people with planning so say I add an external link from an established page relevant to our service, will we get penalised by Wikipedia? Or is it worth setting up a page about our company, similar to say - the BBC with an external link? Thanks!

    | Jaybeamer
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  • bjs2010


    We have an ecommerce site. We installed an AJAX feature that when you scroll down to say, the end of 6 rows of products, it loads another page below the seam. Question is, is this good or bad for SEO? Any tests you can suggest? Thanks Ben

    | bjs2010
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  • MartinDS


    My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene.  Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.

    | MartinDS
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  • Muhammad_Jabali


    Hey guys, I need help. hope it is a simple question : if I have horizontal 4 text pages which you move between through hashtag links, while staying on the same page in user experience, can I canonical tag the URL free of hashtags as the canonical page URL ? is this white hat acceptable practice? and will this help "Adding the Value", search queries, and therefore rank power to the canonical URL in this case? hoping for your answers. Best Regards, and thanks in advance!

    | Muhammad_Jabali
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  • AymanH


    I've jsut realized that since almost for ever I use to code first my website using the non sef for internal linkings. It's very convenient as I'm sure that what ever will be the final url the link will always be good. ex: website.com/component1/id=1 Before releasing the website I use extensions to make the url user friendly according the choosen strategy. ex: website.com/component1/id=1  -> website.com/article1.html But I just wondered if google consider both urls as the same ones or if it consider just as a 301 redirection. What do you think is the best to do ?

    | AymanH
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  • BobGW


    Hello, How would you suggest I gain backlinks for bobweikel.com in light of all present and future Google updates? Thanks!

    | BobGW
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  • CFSSEO


    Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale.  We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory.  We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc.  We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign.  We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses.  "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com.  We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on.  We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name.  We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines.  **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has?  ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?

    | CFSSEO
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  • innovatebizz


    I have store with 5000+ products in one category & i m using Lazy Loading . Does this effects in indexing these 5000 products. as google says they index or read max 1000 links on one page.

    | innovatebizz
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  • yacpro13


    Hello, here is the situation: let's say we have a website www.company1.com which is 1 of 3 main online stores catering to a specific market. In an attempt to capture a larger market share, we are considering opening a second website, say www.company2.com. Both these websites have a different URL, but offer the same products for sale to the same clientele. With this second website, the theory is instead of operating 1 of 3 stores, we now operate 2 of 4. We see 2 ways of doing this: we launch www.company2.com as a copy of www.company1.com. we launch www.company2.com as a completely different website. The problem I see with either of these approaches is duplicate content. I think the duplicate content issue would be even more or a problem with the first approach where the entire site is mostly a duplicate. With the second approach, I think the duplicate content issue can be worked around by having completely different product pages and overall website structure. Do you think either of these approaches could result in penalties by the search engines? Furthermore, we all know that higher ranking/increased traffic can be achieved though high quality unique content, social media presence, on-going link-building and so on. Now assuming we have a fixed amount of manpower to provide for these tasks; do you think we have better odds of increasing our overall traffic by sharing the manpower on 2 websites, or putting it all behind a single one? Thanks for your help!

    | yacpro13
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  • BrandLabs


    I noticed Moosejaw was adding quite a bit of content to the bottom of category pages via a div tag that makes use of a scroll bar. Could a site be penalized by Google for this technique? Example: http://www.moosejaw.com/moosejaw/shop/search_Patagonia-Clothing____

    | BrandLabs
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  • WebRiverGroup


    Are there any strengths (benefits) in having outbound links within the site regarding SEO? If linking to reputable sites, would that help increase our SEO strength or does that only work if they links back to us?

    | WebRiverGroup
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  • esiow2013


    1. Should I ask them to remove and replace the content with their unique and original content? 2. Should I ask them to link to the URL where the original content is located? 3. Should I use a tool to easily track these "copycat" sites and automatically add links from their site to my site? Thanks in advance!

    | esiow2013
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  • aronwp


    why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.

    | aronwp
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  • 1akal


    Hi All, One of my website stopped showing in SERP, after analysing in webmaster, found that Googlebot is not able to crawl. However it was working alright few days back. Try to investigate for panelisation, but  no intimation found. I checked robot.txt for no follow etc but all seems to be ok. I resubmitted Sitemap in webmaster again, it crawled 250 pages out of 500 but it still site is not available in SERP (google), in bing it is ok. Pl suggest the best possible solutions to try. Thx

    | 1akal
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  • BobGW


    Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth.  With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?

    | BobGW
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  • JABacchetta


    When developing a WordPress plugin, is it OK to include a dofollow backlink with the name of the source site as the anchor text? Or would Google consider this spammy?

    | JABacchetta
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  • keeot


    www.heartwavemedia.com / Wordpress / All in One SEO pack I understand Google values unique titles and content but I'm unclear as to the difference between changing the page url slug and the seo title. For example: I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About I've noticed some of my competitors using url structures more like "www.competitor.com/san-francisco-video-production-about" Would it be wise to follow their lead? Will my landing page rank higher if each subsequent page uses similar keyword packed, long tail url?  Or is that considered black hat? If advisable, would a url structure that includes "san-francisco-video-production-_____" be seen as being to similar even if it varies by one word at the end? Furthermore, will I be penalized for using similar SEO descriptions ie. "San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | Portfolio" and San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | Contact" or is the difference of one word "portfolio" and "contact" sufficient to read as unique? Finally...am I making any sense?  Any and all thoughts appreciated...

    | keeot
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  • Sir


    Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?

    | Sir
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  • MarketingOfAmerica


    Hello,
    Please ignore misspells and grammar, this was typed quickly as I am spending my time researching not writing a perfect book on it. My goal is to find ethical very hard to get links unlike guest posts which are now dead according to Matt Cutt's blog here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/. My journey started with a quick message to Rand Fishkin, he responded the following "Hi Matthew - thankfully, there's literally hundreds of link building methodologies that are still completely legit. Check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and you'll find tons and tons of them. The key is that none are easy, none are particularly scalable, and all of them require doing work that will add value for searchers, for your brand, and for your overall marketing - which is exactly what Google wants to count. Wish you all the best," Thanks Rand Fishkin! So I started my search looking for links that are hard to get other than those that are directories, forum links that are dead and spammy, blog comments which are overused, guest posts, or any type of black hat link. I figured I would start to check what other popular SEO companies were doing and that have been at the top through many of the updates. After running an analysis on the term SEO services I found the following Test 1. I analyzed Main Street Host to start with. If you type in SEO services in Google you can see they are rank 1 for it. After a quick analysis it's easy to see that they have 100's of footer links on clients that they have, some with exact match anchors and some without. My question is, is why is this a viable tactic? Lets take for example the following. If you pull up their http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ stats and look at the inbound links you will come to an exact match anchor right away that says SEO Marketing Company. I went to the weebly link that they have and found that they have put their name at the bottom of this page. Issue 1 - Why is it ok for this type of link, but it's not ok for a template link? Aren't these links suppose to be penalized? Issue 2 - Nothing on the page is even relevant to their link at all. As we have read before, you need to have links surrounding relevant text. Take a look at their backlinks you and you will find almost all of their high quality links are exact match anchors coming from their clients surrounded by irrelevant text. Why is this working? How is this different than a network? What stops someone from just starting a network and dedicating 1 footer link to a full site and putting up dummy info... Anyone can go to Godaddy and purchase a DA 40+ site or so and throw up $20 of content and a footer link. As I dove deeper into finding what is ethical and working I discovered many of the top SEO companies use this. Not just one, but over 20 of them use this same method. Lets use another example. So I started to look at what they did for their clients. How did I know who they worked for? Simple I assume that since they have their link at the bottom of the page and claim that they do SEO for them, they are indeed working for them. So I analyzed the site we talked about a while ago on the Weebly that they had their link on. It's the Valley Art Weebly link if your checking yourself. I quickly found that they are using a network to rank up some of their clients as well. For example http://firesidebookshop.com/index.html Take a look at the link on this page leading to the art place. At first glance the site doesn't look spammy, but try to buy a book, or even order one. Who has an online book store, but doesn't sell books lol? Who also puts interesting links on their home page? This screams network to me. I am willing to bet the following will happen - Matt Cutts and his spam team will ad something like the following to the algorithm or whatever you would like to call it "ignore link if total outbound dofollow links on full site = x amount or higher" = internal Google disavow tool = bye to guest blogging. So what is everyone going to do? Okay it's time to figure out what that number is right? Lets do some tests and lets say that magic number is 5 to 10 links on a whole site. What does this do? This drives the price of quick SEO up again evening the playing field for others using ethical SEO like myself. How do I figure this? Lets face it black hat SEO will never end as long as someone is able to do it. Now since guest posts are gone, the quick link on quality sites surrounded by enough text to count is gone. This means that it will cost extra money, because everyone will be forced to put a max of x amount of links to be safe and for the links to get noticed on a website. So now they have to purchase an established domain that is high enough quality to pass the correct link juice through to a clients site that they want to rank up. Lets figure a few dollars for a unique IP, another few for the hosting, $40 to $100 for the domain if your lucky on Godaddy auctions, and then $40 for the content to make it look realistic if your getting it for $0.01 a word. Plus the time it takes to setup your site. This price of that $30 Odesk guest post backlink just went up to a min of $100 or so. Diving deeper into what's working and moving past the networks, because I feel this will only work temporarily as well if you are brave enough to use this and I know I am not. It doesn't seem to ethical to me at the end of the day even though some may argue, you are just creating more relevant websites which can maximize your traffic streams. The problem is I have stopped here and am stuck. Sure I have looked at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and read the most recent post where it talks about 31 types of links. Most of those links don't apply or are outdated and you shouldn't use them. Some of them talk about forum links,directories, bookmarks.. Those have been tactics for years and sure you may find 1 out of 1000 that are good, but the rest are just spam. I have been over to search engine land, and a handful of other sites. I have talked to many other SEO's as well. They are emailing me asking what they should do after guest posts, because they are unsure. The question is, what is ethical? Let say you have a plumber, or a roofer, .gov links are nearly impossible for them and quite frankly that seems spammy to me to even post them on one. I know what many are going to say, build links as if your not worried about Google and you will grow.. Where are you going to build the links to if everything is unethical? As we know clients will walk if they don't see improvements quickly. What's quickly? I would say around the 3 to 6 month period using ethical SEO. Sure there is onpage, a great blog, etc., but what is there left truly ethical for offpage SEO besides some good press releases, some social profile links like a pinterst, and the normal? I must be missing something! I am not looking for the easy way, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and work hard. If anyone can show me a quick example of a truly ethical link I would be grateful to see this. I can't seem to wrap my head around something that I can do that will last at this point. If you don't want to share it to the world, please PM me. [edited for formatting by Keri Morgret]

    | MarketingOfAmerica
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, We've been experiencing rank drop in all major keywords for the past 9 months. I've had different people say different things here at Moz about how backlinks effect rank drop. Brilliant answers, but different opinions. Nothing is showing up in GWT for this site. Here's the backlink breakdown: 72 linking root domains. 20 of those are blogs. These blogs have no backlinks in and of themselves, and were created originally as easy links. Not white hat stuff. Three additional root domains are still paid links in this profile, though all but one was made to look editorial. The one that doesn't look editorial has links sprinkled throughout their website, among other paid links. The rest of the linking root domains (49) are legitimate. Again, nothing shows up in GWT. We had 96 root domains last March but in March of 2013 we cut most of the paid links and half (20) of the blogs. This brought our ranking down immediately by 2 or 3 slots. We've been slipping every since. I would like people to speak from experience and let me know if you think the backlinks could be causing the ranking drop and what to do about it. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • lidush


    We all know that exact match domains are not getting the same results in the SERP's with the algo changes Google's been pushing through. Does anyone have any experience or know if that also applies to having an exact match URL page (not domain). Example:
    keyword: cars that start with A Which way to go is better when creating your pages on a non-exact domain match site: www.sample.com/cars-that-start-with-a/ that has "cars that start with A" as the or www.sample.com/starts-with-a/ again has "cars that start with A" as the Keep in mind that you'll add more pages that start the exact same way as you want to cover all the letters in the alphabet. So: www.sample.com/cars-that-start-with-a/
    www.sample.com/cars-that-start-with-b/
    www.sample.com/cars-that-start-with-C/ or www.sample.com/starts-with-a/
    www.sample.com/starts-with-b/
    www.sample.com/starts-with-c/ Hope someone here at the MOZ community can help out. Thanks so much

    | lidush
    0
  • jampaper


    I am conducting a link audit for one of my formerly high-ranking pages. But despite reading quite a bit on the issue, I am still quite confused as to how to decide whether to keep or remove a link. Some links come from directories and social bookmarking sites. I know that generally speaking, you do not want to be on these types of sites, but what if their domain authorities, pageranks, and mozTrusts scores are good? For example, here is one of my links for "envelopes": http://www.folkd.com/detail/www.jampaper.com%2FEnvelopes The page itself has no MozRank, MozTrust, or links but the domain has an authority of 88, a MozRank of 6.41, a mozTrust of 6.31. Should I be looking on a page level or domain level basis? It also has over 5 million links, with over two million of those being external followed links. Is the high quantity of links a warning sign? I also used a free online tool (thesitevalue.com) to determine how much traffic the domain gets. Apparently it receives over 350,000 unique visits daily, so it must be useful to people. This, combined with the fact that we've received 5 visits from the link over the last year (not a lot, but something), makes me believe that the link's intent wasn't purely to "trick" Google. Despite this, I still have a feeling the link could be considered low-quality based on the domain's appearance. Similarly, some of our links are coming from domains named linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com. Is it safe to assume these are harmful links strictly because of their names? Thank you!

    | jampaper
    0
  • BetAmerica


    Hi, Can anyone help with recommendations on good SEO agencies based in the Bay Area who have some history of working with gaming or adult brands which have been badly hit by rankings falls in the past 12 months, we suspect due to Penguin. Thanks

    | BetAmerica
    0
  • MickEdwards


    Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text.  These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page. I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?

    | MickEdwards
    0

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