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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • bjs2010


    Hi, If we highlight products on homepage, they rank better as they are linked to from the homepage - we cannot increase the amount of products or links on homepage for dilution reasons. So, if we change the products on homepage for some others, presumably those will get the link juice benefit? I think what I am asking is, is there any "longevity" once the product has been removed from the homepage as a link - will it lose it's "priority value" or will it retain some of it's importance after the homepage link has been removed? If that is the case, I could circulate my products via homepage over a course of time to help them all get some benefit no? Help!

    | bjs2010
    0
  • eyeflow


    I know I'm not the only one that's seen this. After Penguin 2.0 some obvious blackhat SEOed sites flew up in the rankings. There's obviously a hole that hasn't been closed. I'm surprised it's been a month and that hole still hasn't been patched. I have no problem with other legit companies out ranking ours for various keywords. In that case I can feel alright knowing it's just something they were able to do that I wasn't but when I see complete blackhat sites ranking that's a whole different story. Estimated traffic before and after Penguin 2.0: http://goo.gl/gurXt What are they doing that's blackhat? Hidden text - compare the cached version vs. the live http://goo.gl/YYGDK 301ing lots of domains, many irrelevant. http://goo.gl/RjOJu Using a trade marked brand (steelers) - not SEO related but I'm sure the NFL wouldn't be happy. Linking between other domains they own. Notice how spammy these sites are. http://pittsburghwebdevelopment.org/2013/06/23/website-development-firm-website-design-pittsburgh/ http://seoinpgh.com/2013/06/23/website-designer-pittsburgh-affordable-web-design-in-pittsburgh-pa/ They were inflating their social presence. Wanted to show you but looks like twitter already took care of them https://twitter.com/seopittsburgh . Also making client sites link to them . http://pittsburghpaplumbing.com/2013/06/19/pittsburgh-plumbersplumbers-in-pittsburgh-paplumber-pittsburgh/ I've talked to other people and they've seen similar things. Thoughts, opinions? Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?

    | eyeflow
    0
  • Atlanta-SMO


    Knowing how co-citation and co-occurrence function, or how we speculate that they function, it seems there could be several ways that competitors could associate negative words and phrases with sites they compete with.  This could also be disastrous for reputation management.  Someone could associate negative terms about a person or business without linking to them and it could do harm. Does this make sense?  Is this possible or are there safe-checks in place?

    | Atlanta-SMO
    0
  • marcuslind


    I have a web service that help bloggers to do certain tasks and find different partners. We have a couple of thousand bloggers using the service and ofcourse this is a great resource for us to build links from. The bloggers are all from different platforms and domains. Currently when a blogger login to the service we tell the blogger that if they write a blog post about us with their own words, and tell their readers what they think of our service. We will then give them a certain benifit within the service. This is clearly encouraging a dofollow-link from the bloggers, and therefore it's not natural link building. The strategy is however working quite good with about 150 new blog posts about our service per month, which both gives us a lot of new visitors and users, but also give us link power to increase our rankings within the SERP. Now to my questions: This is not a natural way of building links, but what is your opinion of this? Is this total black hat and should we be scared of a severe punishment from Google? We are not leaving any footprints more than we are asking the users for a link, and all blogposts are created with their own unique words and honest opinions. Since this viral marketing method is working great, we have no plans of changing our strategy. But what should we avoid and what steps should we take to ensure that we won't get in any trouble in the future for encouraging our users to linking back to us in this manner?

    | marcuslind
    0
  • danatanseo


    It amazes me that every day in search marketing is filled with something new that I don't know or never heard of. Most of you are probably familiar with referrer spam, but I hadn't ever heard of it before. I am currently experiencing referral spam on my personal blog. What's the best way to get rid of this pest? Shall I ignore them? Block them in my robots.txt file? Use Google's Disavow? or should I just plain holler "Curse you referral spam people!!!"  ? Thanks all!

    | danatanseo
    0
  • TranswebGlobal


    Hi All, I have joined a new company and I am supposed to post relevant comments to blog articles. In the comment I want to provide them the source like www.example.com example.com example which of the above 3 will give me the maximum benefit with the backlinking.

    | TranswebGlobal
    0
  • Llanero


    Has anyone used this? www.linkdetox.com/ Any opinions about it?

    | Llanero
    0
  • SmartWebPros


    We have a client www.atvandtrailersales.com who recently (March) fell out of the rankings. We checked their backlink file and found over 100 spam links pointing at their website with terms like "uggboots" and "headwear" etc. etc. I submitted a disavow link file, as this was obviously an attack on the website. Since the recent Panda update, the client is back out of the rankings for a majority of keyword phrases. The disavow link file that was submitted back in march has 90% of the same links that are still spamming the website now. I've sent a spam report to Google and nothing has happened. I could submit a new disavow link file, but I'm not sure if this is worth the time. '.'< --Thanks!

    | SmartWebPros
    1
  • TomNYC


    Hi everyone, I run a 12-year old travel site that primarily publishes hotel reviews and blog posts about ways to save when traveling in Europe. We have a domain authority of 65 and lots of high quality links from major news websites (NYT, USA Today, NPR, etc.). We always ranked well for competitive searches like "cheap hotels in Paris," etc., for many, many years (like 10 years). Things started falling two years ago (April 2011)--I thought it was just normal algorithmic changes, and that our pages were being devalued (and perhaps, it was). So, we continued to bulk up our reviews and other key pages, only to see things continue to slide. About a month ago I lined up all of our inbound search traffic from Google Analytics and compared it to SEO Moz's timeline of Google updates. Turns out every time there was a Panda roll-out (from the second one in April 2011) our traffic tumbled. Other updates (Penguin, etc.) didn't seem to make a difference. But why should our content that we invest so much in take a hit from Panda? It wasn't "thin." But thin content existed elsewhere on our site: We had a flights section with 40,000 pages of thin content, cranked out of our database with virtually no unique content. We had launched that section in 2008, and it had never been an issue (and had mostly been ignored), but now, I believed, it was working against us. My understanding is that any thin content can actually work against the entire site's rankings. In summary: We had 40,000 thin flights pages, 2,500 blog posts (rich content), and about 2,500 hotel-related pages (rich and well researched "expert" content). So, two weeks ago we dropped almost the entire flights section. We kept about 400 pages (of the 40,000) with researched, unique and well-written information, and we 410'd the rest. Following the advice of so many others on these boards, we put the "thin" flights pages in their own sitemap so we could watch their index number fall in Webmaster tools. And we watched (with some eagerness and trepidation) as the error count shot up. Google has found about half of them at this point. Last week I submitted a "reconsideration request" to Google's spam team. I wasn't sure if this was necessary (as the whole point of dropping the pages, 410'ing and so forth was to fix it on our end, which would hopefully filter down through the SERPs eventually). However, I thought it was worth sending them a note explaining the actions we had taken, just in case. Today I received a response from them. It includes: "We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages..." And thus, I'm a bit confused. If they say that there wasn't any manual action taken, is that a bad thing for my site? Or is it just saying that my site wasn't experiencing a manual penalty, however Panda perhaps still penalized us (through a drop in rankings) -- and Panda isn't considered "manual." Could the 410'ing of 40,000 thin pages actually raise some red flags? And finally, how long do these issues usually take to clear up? Pardon the very long question and thanks for any insights. I really appreciate the advice offered in these forums.

    | TomNYC
    0
  • ElBo913


    While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?

    | ElBo913
    0
  • buysocialexposure


    Hello, my rankings dropped last year (penguin update) - I think it was April 2012 and the website went from 300 visitors per day to 10 per day. This probably happened because I bought links, but I also did a lot of manual and natural SEO (at that time). After the drop, I didn't know what to do... so I did some manual SEO, blog comments, forum posts, article publications (lets say 60 links in total - with diverse anchor texts - brand keywords, etc) and then I paused working on the site to see if there will be any changes... and 1 year latter, there are still no changes. My site used to be in the top results of the first page and now it is totally out of Google. http://getmoreyoutubeviews.com Should I move on and start a new website or do something to fix this one? Thanks Alex

    | buysocialexposure
    0
  • bjs2010


    Notice the space between them - I am trying to debug my application and sometimes it put in a space - Will this small difference matter to the bots?

    | bjs2010
    0
  • bjs2010


    So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben

    | bjs2010
    0
  • BobAnderson


    I have one or two competitors (in the UK) in my field who buy expired 1 - 8 year old domains on random subjects (SEO, travel, health you name it) and they are in the printing business and they stick 1 - 2 articles (unrelated to what was on there before) on these and that's it. I think they stick with PA and DA above 30 and most have 10 – 100 links so well used expired domains, hosted in the USA and most have different Ip’s although they now have that many (over 70% of their backlink profile) that some have the same ip. On further investigation none of the blogs have any contact details but it does look like they have been a little smart here and added content to the about us (similar to I use to run xxx but now do xxx) also they have one or two tabs with content on (article length) that is on the same subject they use to do and the titles are all the same content. So basically they are finding expired 1 – 10 year old domains that have only been expired (from what I can see) 6 months max and putting 1 – 2 articles on the home page in relation with print (maybe adding a third on the subject the blog use to cover), add 1 – 3 articles via tabs at the top on subjects the sites use to cover, registering the details via  xbybssgcf@whoisprivacyprotect.com and that’s it. They have been ranking via this method for the last couple of years (through all the Google updates). Does Google not have any way to combat link networks other than the stupid stuff such as public link networks, it just seems that if you know what you are doing you get away, if your big enough you get away with it but the middle of the ground (mum and pop sites) get F*** over with spam pointing to there site that no spammer would dream of doing anyway?

    | BobAnderson
    0
  • Modi


    Hi, Cant implement rel next and prev as getting difficulty in coding - tried lot for same, but to no luck... Considering now rel=canonical and rel noindex,follow to 2 sections Deals and Discounts - We have been consistenly ranking on first position for over 1.5 yr, however recently slipped to position 4,5 on many keywords in this section URL - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9 here, the page content for page 1 and 2 pertains to the current month and from page 3 to all other pages pertains to previous months. Is adding up rel canonical from page 3 to last page to page 1 - makes sense & also simultaneously add noindex, follow from page 3 to last page News & Reviews Section - Here, all news & article items are posted. Been the links of news items are primarily there. However, the pages are not duplicates, does adding noindex, follow makes sense here URL - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 Look forward for recommendations to implement the best - to gain SERP, avoid duplicate and white hat method.. Many thanks

    | Modi
    0
  • mnkpso


    Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?? If yes then how ?

    | mnkpso
    0
  • PremioOscar


    Hello guys, I was checking my product descriptions and I found out that there is a website that is using my descriptions word by word, also they use company name, product images, they have a link that sends you to my site, contact form.. I tried to purchase something and the order came through our email, but i made an inquire and it didn't come through. Also they have a sub-folder with my company name. Also they have url's with my company name, and this isn't right is it? I am confused and honestly I don't know what to do, we don't take part to any affiliation program or anything like that and we don't ship out of Europe. This is a Chinese website. Just for curiosity, I noticed that one of our competitors is there as well, and it does seem weird. Here is the links:   www.everychina . com/company/repsole_limited-hz1405d06.html

    | PremioOscar
    0
  • BobAnderson


    We run a printing company and we are struggling to come up with unique content people will actually want to know, is there any way of getting the ball rolling? We were thinking of ideas such as exhibition guide but this seems to have been overdone. Any help would be appreciated.

    | BobAnderson
    0
  • MarzVentures


    Hi, Currently cleaning up a clients link profile in preparation for disavow file and I have reached the stage where I am undecided on some directories as I don't want to remove all links. Is Page Rank an indication that Google is okay with a particular directory? For example the following domain is questionable, but has a PR of 3. Do I need to consider scrapping all such links in anticipation of future updates? http://www.easyfinddirectory.com/shopping-and-services/clothing http://www.toplocallistings.co.uk/Apparel/West_Midlands/Shropshire/ Thanks in advance Andy

    | MarzVentures
    0
  • xcyte


    I've read everywhere that it's vital to get your target keyword to the front of the title that you're writing up. Taking into account that Google likes things looking natural I wanted to check if my writing title's like this for example: "Photographers Miami- Find the right Equipment and Accessories" ..Repeated for every page (maybe a page on photography in miami, one on videography in Orlando etc) is a smart way to write titles or if by clearly stacking keywords at the front of every title won't be as beneficial as other ways of doing it?

    | xcyte
    0
  • xcyte


    Hi Guys, Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy. Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too. Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built

    | xcyte
    0
  • Mozzi


    Hi, I am working with a client and have discovered that a direct competitor has hidden the clients business name in meta information and also hidden the name on the page but off to the side. My intention is to ask the company to remove the content, but the client would like me to report it to Google. Is this a waste of time and what request in webmaster tools should I use. The name is not a trademark but the business name is not generic and it is an obvious attempt to target my clients business. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks in advance

    | Mozzi
    0
  • eminent


    Hi I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's. Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page. Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates. I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this. The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them. Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.

    | eminent
    1
  • whis


    My URL is: www.graduate-jobs.com/graduate-schemesAfter ranking on page 1 for the search term 'graduate schemes' for over 4 months, the page then disappeared completely from the SERPS for over 6. I've been assured it isn't a Penguin/ Panda problem, as this is the only page on our site that has seen this sort of drop. When checking backlink profiles of the ranking pages, our page is as strong if not stronger and it receives a good amount of traffic with decent user metrics.If anyone could take a look at the page and have a guess at why it isn't moving anywhere, it would be really appreciated.Thanks.

    | whis
    0
  • mnkpso


    My website is daily showing different position on maps.google.com and for the last few days like yesterday it was on 21st position on some keyword and today it is no where and same with other keywords. Is this a Google Dance ?? what can be its period ? and what is the solution to handle it ??

    | mnkpso
    0
  • clickermediainc


    I am currently working a site re-design and we are looking at if href="#" and href="javascript.void()" have an impact on the site? We were initially looking at getting the links per page down but I am thinking that rel=nofollow is the best method for this. Anyone had any experience with this? Thanks in advanced

    | clickermediainc
    0
  • JAGA


    I have a big concern with my website. Recently I have been combing through the back links that I have been able to find associated with my web domain. Almost half of the links- 52 links- are from kinder-host. They are from what looks like could be valid sources, like babies-r-is.com/kinder-host.com or babies.kinder-host.com/page/6 etc. but they are junk. Some of these links are from articles I've written that are ripped off and placed on these websites along with my links. Some of the sites I can't even find the link but its there somewhere. Another 40 of the links are from attracta.com and although I can tell I have links on there to my website as well, I don't even see the link on the page and it is not related to my website. It's another junk site. So, I have bad link backs and no control over it. My understanding is this is potentially very harmful to my website! What can I do about it?

    | JAGA
    0
  • EmarketedTeam


    I notice when I search for my clients brand name it pulls up the Google local info and Google+ stuff, knowledge graph etc, as well as a section at the bottom, 'People Also Search For' and lists a number of the clients competitors. However when I search one of the competitors no Google local or knowledge graph stuff comes up. Client obviously wants to limit promotion of the competitors. Does anyone have any experience with this? I know Google Author rank seems to play a factor in knowledge graph results? Are the competitors doing anything on their end SEO wise? What can be done to limit this? Thanks for any help! jkn0BMT.png

    | EmarketedTeam
    0
  • edu-SEO


    We came across today some very strange forum postings. Essentially they look like some nonsense text followed by a list of "adult" terms. In the middle of the list, completely randomly and strangely our brand terms appear in the list. There are no links to anything. The only thing I can think of is that someone is trying to make our brand terms algorithmically associated with questionable "red flag" terms in the eyes of search engines. I have no idea why else this would be happening. Could this be a case of some kind of Fiverr negative SEO attack? Is there any risk? Doesn't seem like anything we can do about it...

    | edu-SEO
    0
  • Sved


    I've found the following abuse, and Im curious what could I do about it. Basically the scheme is: own some content only once (pictures, description, reviews etc) use different domain names (no problem if you use the same IP or IP-C address) have a different layout (this is basically the key) use schema.org tricking, meaning show (the very same) reviews on different scale, show a little bit less reviews on one site than on an another Quick example: http://bit.ly/18rKd2Q
    #2: budapesthotelstart.com/budapest-hotels/hotel-erkel/szalloda-attekintes.hu.html (217.113.62.21), 328 reviews, 8.6 / 10
    #6: szallasvadasz.hu/hotel-erkel/ (217.113.62.201), 323 reviews, 4.29 / 5
    #7: xn--szlls-gyula-l7ac.hu/szallodak/erkel-hotel/ (217.113.62.201), no reviews shown It turns out that this tactic even without the 4th step can be quite beneficial to rank with several domains. Here is a little investigation I've done (not really extensive, took around 1 and a half hour, but quite shocking nonetheless):
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqbt1cVFlhXbdENGenFsME5vSldldTl3WWh4cVVHQXc#gid=0 Kaspar Szymanski from Google Webspam team said that they have looked into it, and will do something, but honestly I don't know whether I could believe it or not. What do you suggest? should I leave it, and try to copy this tactic to rank with the very same content multiple times? should I deliberately cheat with markups? should I play nice and hope that these guys sooner or later will be dealt with? (honestly can't see this one working out) should I write a case study for this, so maybe if the tactics get bigger attention, then google will deal with it? Does anybody could push this towards Matt Cutts, or anybody else who is responsible for these things?

    | Sved
    0
  • ts24group


    I have tried everything,  followed everything by the book...yet nothing is happening. I I yet have to try PPC, but I am sure that by now the website is healthy since I have spent from January to the current date fixing every sort of warning and errors. While I have worked on link building strategies(only submitting links to directories for the moment) However the website is dead. What should I do? Is this due to a Google penalty?

    | ts24group
    0
  • irvingw


    As we have a major Penguin update looming in the background, I am looking for expert advice on how to deal with professionals buying into link programs whether they are doing it deliberately or not. Our site provides detailed profile information on hundreds of 1000's of professionals and some professionals apparently believed that buying into link program will lift their profile in the SERPS. About 10 professionals have paid shady link building companies to buy links to their profiles on our site. The biggest offender bought over 1,500 links to his profile. Aside from adding the known toxic links to our disavow file, what else can we do to avoid any link penalties? I can think of three distinct options and would love to hear feedback especially based on actual experience. Option 1. 404 the existing profile - "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith" and create a new URL "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith_1". Option 2. Keep the existing URL and fully rely on the disavow file. Contact the professionals and kindly ask them to stop buying links and to contact their link building companies to remove the links. Any other ideas?

    | irvingw
    0
  • megapixall


    I had someone help me with SEO and they basically used some stupid form to get back-links  I am still learning and have taken over my site to better do things right. I have had a major drop across the board since Panda and Pinguin and rightfully so from what I am seeing. My question is: Google obviously removed the backlinks and SEO MOZ shows this in its report. Do I need to disavow these links still or can I just focus on link building properly? What is the best course of action here? gGuSyJf

    | megapixall
    0
  • Llanero


    I recently had my link profile done as I was badly effected by something in 2012 (Penguin, Panda.. who knows? never got a message from google in webmaster about anything). Loads of INBOUND links were identified as being 'dodgy'' and the person highlighted them in different colors. However, another seo éxpert' told me to leave them (perhaps remove just 3 of them) and don't bother with the rest. Now I am not sure what to do? Any opinions? RED
    3 were highlighted as being from untrusted malware. I think I should disavow them but really, would 3 make that much difference for a fall in my site? ORANGE
    240 were said to be spam articles and I was advised:
    The following pages highlighted in orange are on sites created for the purpose of publishing articles for link building. Since the same articles appear on multiple sites, Google views this as duplicate content. Links to Monteverde Tours in these articles should be removed or tagged "nofollow." Where this is not possible, the domains should be disavowed. YELLOW
    85 were said to be from Low-quality directories
    The following pages highlighted in yellow are on low-quality directories and link farms. Links to Monteverde Tours on these pages should be removed or the domains disavowed. GREEN
    340 were said to be from sites were the page was not found , Account suspended, Problem loading page, Link removed, domain expired
    The following pages highlighted in green include pages whose links to Monteverde Tours have been removed and pages that were inaccessible for various reasons, as shown in the Comments column. These pages or their domains should be disavowed to remove them from the Google index. I have read (and asked on this forum) about disavow but the more I read the more I am getting confused about the next action. I tried for one year to get rid of any bad outbound links, did blogging, social media, improved content, landing pages etc but all to no avail. Any opinions appreciated. I am not looking for a magic bullet, I know there isn't one. I know I need to keep improving content etc  but after a year of NO improvements should I consider the link removal route? <colgroup><col width="215"></colgroup>
    | Untrusted site - malware! |

    | Llanero
    0
  • mnkpso


    What are best local SEO practices 2013 ?? to get website on top of all major keywords ???

    | mnkpso
    0
  • mnkpso


    My website was ranked on top of all keywords on Google Local results but in january 2013 it has droped to 2nd page on all keywords. After my checking i had found keyword staffing on place page which i have removed two months back. During last two months site was on 2nd page but now it is dropping more. Website is listed on all major local directories. What is the best way to handle such website case for local seo to get back rankings ??? what should be our new plan or strategy ??? I will be very thankful to all of you for best suggestion.

    | mnkpso
    0
  • CSawatzky


    Hi Mozzers, I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all. Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week. Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected. Suggestions? Advice? Answers? Thanks!

    | CSawatzky
    0
  • bjs2010


    Hi guys, Has anyone used Netpeak? I found it quite useful to retrieve the "Google Cache Date" as that way I know how often Google is assessing our pages. But of course, repetitive requests makes Google block IP's - Ive tried using a proxy service, but still no go. Can I achieve the same using Google Spreadsheets / XPATH ? Any ideas or advice? thanks

    | bjs2010
    0
  • mnkpso


    Is there any tool for to check website position on Google maps ?? and also what is the way to check that a website is listed on which local directories and on which not listed and to get suggestions for improvements ?? so need Tools to check Google Local SEO with suggestions.

    | mnkpso
    0
  • KevinBloom


    I'm talking the least relevant and incredibly spammy. We've all done site audits and stumbled across some ridiculous ones. The funnier the better.  I'm compiling a list of hilarious links that sites have gotten. Any input would be great!

    | KevinBloom
    0
  • CleanEdisonInc


    An old SEO consultant left a lot of comments with exact anchor text links on non relevant blogs back in 2010. At this point most of them are no-follow, but I'm obviously still concerned they are damaging. Is the no-follow enough? Or should I still work to remove them? Is the time worth the effort? Thanks,

    | CleanEdisonInc
    0
  • inhouseninja


    The person in my position previously had quite a few paid directories our site was listed on. What is the best resources you guys have used or know of to figure out which ones are good to keep? For instance one that is up for renewal this week is site-sift.com. I know the person previous to me did some not so ethical stuff and I'm trying to clean up messes. Any advice on directories would be much appreciated.

    | inhouseninja
    0
  • bjs2010


    Hi, I am managing the tech and SEO for an ecommerce site with a big mega menu with over 140 cats/subcats and well, I know that my link juice is diluted and am thinking of cutting back on the categories but in the meantime. Is there a link juice visualizer? How can I see in a visual format how linkjuice is flowing through the site? Thanks

    | bjs2010
    0
  • mcany


    As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...

    | mcany
    0
  • jaredkipe


    I'm really just curious about everyone’s thoughts on post-Penguin 2.0 guest blogging. Is it still a viable option for link building? Is there anything you should proactively do to make it "safe"? What makes a guest blog post "advertorial" (or would it never be, if it is clearly marked as a guest post with a writer's bio)? Will moderate guest blogging on highly related, top ranked sites ever be a prime target for Google updates? I feel like guest blogging is still a viable way to build links, as long as it is on high quality and highly relevant sites that post content people actually read. Limit the number of links to 1-3 for every post, use generic or branded text as anchor text rather than your "top keyword" anchor text of old, and make the content interesting (educational or funny, not just for the sake of getting links) and completely unique to the site you are posting on. Just my 2 cents. Anyone else?

    | jaredkipe
    0
  • cbielich


    Im not here to say this is concrete and should never do this, and please if you disagree with me then lets discuss. One of the biggest things out there today especially after the second wave of Penguin (2.0) is the fear striken web masters who run straight to the disavow tool after they have been hit with Penguin or noticed a drop shortly after. I had a friend who's site who never felt the effects of Penguin 1.0 and thought everything was peachy. Then P2.0 hit and his rankings dropped of the map. I got a call from him that night and he was desperately asking me for help to review his site and guess what might have happened. He then tells me the first thing he did was compile a list of websites back linking to him that might be the issue and create his disavow list and submitted it. I asked him "How long did you research these sites before you came the conclusion they were the problem?" He Said "About an hour" Then I asked him "Did you receive a message in your Google Webmaster Tools about unnatural linking?" He Said "No" I said "Then why are you disavowing anything?" He Said "Um.......I don't understand what you are saying?" In reading articles, forums and even here in the Moz Q/A I tend to think there is some misconceptions about the disavow tool from Google that do not seem to be clearly explained. Some of my findings with the tool and when to use it is purely based on logic IMO. Let me explain When to NOT use the tool If you spent an hour reviewing your back link profile and you are to eager to wait any longer to upload your list. Unless you have less than 20 root domains linking to you, you should spend a lot more than an hour reviewing your back link profile You DID NOT receive a message from GWT informing you that you had some "unnatural" links Ill explain later If you spend a very short amount of time reviewing your back link profile. Did not look at each individual site linking to you and every link that exists, then you might be using it WAY TO SOON. The last thing you want to do is disavow a link that actually might be helping you. Take the time to really look at each link and ask your self this question (Straight from the Google Guidelines) "A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee" Studying your back link profile We all know when we have cheated. Im sure 99.9% of all of us can admit to it at one point. Most of the time I can find back links from sites and look right at the owner and ask him or her "You placed this back link didn't you?" I can see the guilt immediately in their eyes 🙂 Remember not ALL back links you generate are bad or wrong because you own the site. You need to ask yourself "Was this link necessary and does it apply to the topic at hand?", "Was it relevant?" and most important "Is this going to help other users?". These are some questions you can ask yourself before each link you place. You DID NOT receive a message about unnatural linking This is were I think the most confusing takes place (and please explain to me if I am wrong on this). If you did not receive a message in GWT about unnatural linking, then we can safely say that Google does not think you contain any "fishy" spammy links in which they have determined to be of a spammy nature. So if you did not receive any message yet your rankings dropped, then what could it be? Well it's still your back links that most likely did it, but its more likely the "value" of previous links that hold less or no value at all anymore. So obviously when this value drops, so does your rank. So what do I do? Build more quality links....and watch you rankings come back 🙂

    | cbielich
    1
  • Kibin


    One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to? They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related? Wh10b97

    | Kibin
    0
  • PeterAlexLeigh


    Has anyone used the tiered link building service offered by seolutions (http://seolutions.biz/store/seo-solutions/premium-solutions-paint-it-white.html)? If so, can you provide any insight into how effective it was in the long and short term? Thanks!

    | PeterAlexLeigh
    0
  • Johnnyh


    Hi, I am based in the UK and in a very competitive market - van leasing - and I am thinking about using an Indian SEO company for my ongoing SEO. They have sent me some sample artilces that they have written for link building and the English is not good. Do you think that google can tell the difference between a well written article and a poorly written article? Will the fact that articles are poorly writtem mean we will lose potential value from the link? Any input would be much appreciated. Regards John J

    | Johnnyh
    0
  • bjs2010


    Hi all, So I recently filed a Google reconsideration request - but it came back saying "No manual spam actions found" - ok, so that's that. But from what I've read, if we have been hit by Panda for duplicate or thin content, we wouldn't know - in other words, Google does not report it as it is an algorhythm penalty as opposed to a manual one. So what are my options - do I wait until the next Panda update? when can that be? Or do I start over on a fresh domain? Input and views appreciated. thanks,

    | bjs2010
    0

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