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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • potterharry


    Recently, we noticed a website in our site rise higher in SERP shortly after launching. The key strategy they are using is to Blog on High PR Drupal Blogs, which allow you to create profile and write articles. What does the community here think of such tactic.  Is it a grey area, or considered a White Hat technique?

    | potterharry
    0
  • MacPaw


    Hi Mozers, Below you can see some examples of spam ( hidden text and  sneaky redirects) which are in SERP for our branded keywords during last 3 months. Some of them occupy very high position in SERP (top 3/top5). https://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&safe=off&biw=1883&bih=1028&q=%22your+mac+-%22%2B%22cleanmymac%22  I sent spam reports and I’m going to continue doing so. (~500 spam reports from personal and work google account) I contacting directly with some of the hacked sites (web-masters) and tried to help them to fix this issue, but it takes a lot of my time. But 3 months!? Can you give me any advice, what doing next? Thank you!

    | MacPaw
    0
  • wellnesswooz


    I'm having a hard time finding a (good) SEO company which specializes itself in Penalty analysis? Any recommendations? I only found Bruce Clay, but they charge 8,000$ :)...

    | wellnesswooz
    0
  • SVmedia


    This may not be the most productive Q&A discussion, but I've had some really interesting experiences this last month that have made me even more distrusting of "SEO" companies. I can't help but think of this post (not much has changed since '09).  Even though it takes a pretty extreme stance, I agree with the core of it - _"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web."   _ I didn't start doing this type of work wanting to have such a negative opinion of SEO companies, but I just keep having the same experience: I'll get referred to someone who isnt' happy with their SEO company.  They send me their web address, I check out the site, and seriously can't believe what I find. MISSING PAGE TITLES, EVERY CANONICAL URL ISSUE IMAGINABLE, AND 10'S OF THOUSANDS OF BOT SPAM EMAT LINKS FROM PAGES LIKE THIS...AND THIS and just recently a company a called one of my clients and conned him into paying for this piece of spam garbage, obviously scraped from the site that I made for him.  and what's worse, sometimes for whatever reason these companies will have all the client's FTP and CMS logins and it can be hell trying to get them to hand them over.  There's no webmaster tools set up, no analytics, nothing.... These businesses are paying a good chunk of change every month, I just can't believe stuff like this is so common...well acutally, it's what i've come to expect this point.  But I used to think most SEO companies actually had their clients best interest at heart. Does every honest consultant out there run into this same type of stuff constantly? How common is this type of stuff really? Now, on to the positive.  This community rocks, and I feel like it represents real, ethical, solution-oriented, boundary-less SEO.  So thank you Mozzers for all you do.  and I love using the tools here to help businesses understand why they need an honest person helping them. If anyone has thoughts on the topic, I'd love to hear 'em...

    | SVmedia
    3
  • semoney


    I had a new site that was ranking on the first page for 5 keywords. My site was hacked recently and I went through a lot of trouble to restore it. Last night, I discovered that my site was nowhere to be found but when i searched site: mysite.com, it was still ranking which means it was not penalized. I discovered the issue to be a .htaccess and it have been resolved. My question is now that the .htaccess issue is resolved , will my site be restored back to the first page? Is there additional things that i should do? I have notified google by submitting my site

    | semoney
    0
  • buysellrentspain


    Hi everyone I hope you can help. I run a property portal in Spain and am looking for an answer to an issue we are having. We are in the process of uploading an XML feed to our site which contains 10,000+ properties relating to our niche. Although this is great for our customers I am aware this content is going to be duplicated from other sites as our clients advertise over a range of portals. My question is, are there any measures I can take to safeguard our site from penalisation from Google? Manually writing up 10,000 + descriptions for properties is out of the question sadly. I really hope somebody can help Thanks Steve

    | buysellrentspain
    0
  • TheLastSeo


    Hi @all, a friend has an interesting problem. He got a manuel link penalty in the end of 2011...it is an old domain with domainpop >5000 but with a lot bad links (wigdet and banners and other seo domains, but nothing like scrapebox etc)...he lost most of the traffic a few days after the notification in WMT (unnatural links) and an other time after the first pinguin update in april´12. In the end of 2012 after deleting (or nofollowing) and disavow a lot of links google lifted the manuel penalty (WMT notification). But nothing happened after lifting, the rankings didn´t improve (after 4 months already!). Almost all money keywords aren´t in the top 100, no traffic increases and he has good content on this domain. We built a hand of new trust links to test some sites but nothing improved. We did in february a test and build a completely new site on this domain, it´s in the menu and got some internal links from content...We did it, because some sites which weren´t optimized before the penalty (no external backlinks) are still ranking on the first google site for small keywords. After a few days the new site started to rank with our keyword between 40-45. That was ok and as we expected. This site was ranking constantly there for almost 6 weeks and now its gone since ten days. We didn´t change anything. It´s the same phenomena like the old sites on this domain...the site doesnt even rank for the title! Could it still be an manuel penalty for the hole domain or what kind of reasons are possible? Looking forward for your ideas and hope you unterstand the problem! 😉 Thanks!!!

    | TheLastSeo
    0
  • JohnWeb12


    We have a client that has signed on with a national business network for contractors.  This was done without our consent, so I wanted to get everyone's feel on whether or not we should talk them out of continuing this partnership. The example I am showing is not our client, but they are part of this network and have the exact type of setup. Regular website: http://www.palmerheatingandcooling.com
    Network webpage: http://www.heatingandair.com/annapolis-marlyand Regular Google Plus Local Profile: https://plus.google.com/117245435648294066529/about?hl=en
    Network Google Plus Local Profile: https://plus.google.com/112323273882064003718/about?hl=en Here is a local search with both profiles showing up:http://goo.gl/8fxZV
    I have attached a screenshot of the results. Is this type of partnership ok in Google's eyes?  Is this network listing going to hurt their regular listing in the future? ZGPJfvi

    | JohnWeb12
    0
  • mollysmusic


    My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.

    | mollysmusic
    0
  • madegood


    Hi, My site has been hit with a google penalty of some sort, but it doesn't coincide with a penguin or panda update. I have attached a graph of my visits that demonstrates this. I have been working on my SEO since the latter part of last year and have been seeing good results, then all of a sudden my search referrals dropped by 70%. Can anyone advise on what it could be? Thanks! Will XBvZq2e

    | madegood
    0
  • jesse-landry


    As soon as I began working in my current position at my current company I noticed my predecessor's tendency towards buying link packages from blackhat companies... I knew we were being penalized, and had to prove to him that we needed to halt those campaigns immediately and try our darndest to remove all poison links from the internet. I did convince him and began the process. There was 57% of our backlinks tied to the same anchor phrase with 836 domains linking to the same phrase, same page. Today there are 643 of those links remaining. So I have hit a large number of them, but not nearly enough. So now I am getting messages from Google announcing that our site has been hit with an unnatural link penalty. I haven't really seen the results of this yet in the keywords I am trying to rank for, but fear it will hurt very soon and know that I could be doing better in the meantime. I really don't know what to do next. I've tried the whole "contact the webmasters" technique and maybe have had 1/100 agree to remove our links. They all want money or don't respond.. Do I really need to use this Disavow tool?
    I hear mixed things about it.. Anybody with experience here like to share their stories? Thanks for the moral support!

    | jesse-landry
    0
  • unitedworld


    hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?

    | unitedworld
    0
  • JesusD


    Hey everyone, i looked for a similar question but didnt found anything. Ive been having a lot trouble competing with other websites that use the "exact-keyword" domain (www.keyword.com), then they just stuff some mediocre content and rank 1-3 in Google SERP for that keyword I wasnt worried before because i thought they were going to be penalized or decreased in ranking. But they bought several keyword domains and outrank everyone in almost every word. Their conversion rate cant be that good because of the mediocre content, but still i dont like the fact that they rank better just because of the keyword. Any comment on this? , what would you do? Regards

    | JesusD
    0
  • chrisellett


    Hi, I have a website with over 500 pages. The website is a home service website that services clients in different areas of the UK. My question is, am I able to take down the pages from my URL, leave them down for say a week, so when Google bots crawl the pages, they do not exist. Can I then re upload them to a different website URL, and then Google wont penalise me for duplicate content? I know I would of lost juice and page rank, but that doesnt really matter, because the site had taken a knock since the Google update. Thanks for your help. Chris,

    | chrisellett
    0
  • klsdnflksdnvl


    I have been advised to take a particular path with my domain, to me it seems "black hat" but ill ask the experts: Is it acceptable when one owns an exact match location domain eg london.com, to run as a tourist information site, gathering links from wikipedia,bbc,local paper/radio/sports websites etc, then after 6 - 12 months, switch the content to a business site? What could the penalties be? Please advise...

    | klsdnflksdnvl
    0
  • themegroup


    Hi there. We've been approached by a company called AdInsight, selling their Clarity product for tracking phone calls. It seems to offer a great solution in terms of knowing what keywords are actually effective, and would be particularly useful for a number of our clients whose websites have traditionally low conversion rates on the sites themselves, but which (anecdotally, at least) seem to drive business. I read up on the kinds of software these products usually use, and found numerous concerns on the negative effects on local search (which is why I looked it up to begin with). Their rep, who talked me through the system, said part of the set up involves setting a default number for people without Javascript, and that each number is used once so is unlikely to be indexed. I then asked if this counted as cloaking, and he assured me that numerous SEO companies use this product, as do major websites with large internal web teams, and that they would not do anything to compromise their sites. My question is two-fold: Has anyone used this product, and if so did it have negative effects on the local search side of things. Would this count as cloaking, or is it an accepted method of tracking web conversions? Thanks in advance

    | themegroup
    0
  • CaseyDaline


    Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked  about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey

    | CaseyDaline
    0
  • sandyallain


    I have a list of websites that are not spam.. there are ok sites... just that I need to work on the conent again as the sites content might not be useful for users at 100%. There are not bad sites with spammy content... just that I want to rewrite some of the content to really make great websites... the goal would be to have great content to get natual links and a great user experience.. I have 40 sites... all travel sites related to different destinations around the world. I also have other sites that I haven't worked on for some time.. here are some sites: www.simplyparis.org
    www.simplymadrid.org
    www.simplyrome.org etc... Again there are not spam sites but not as useful as they coul become... I want to work on few sites only to see how it goes.... will this penalise my sites that I am working on if I have other sites with average content or not as good ? I want to make great content good for link bait 🙂

    | sandyallain
    0
  • topclass


    Hi guys, below is a proposal i received from someone on freelancer.com for some seo building. Is this really all it takes? Obviously done overtime but basically is this it aside from the usual basics onsite keywords, urls, artciles, content etc. This is a the proposal for $250 (some are cheaper but almost the same details as below). This is one of the top seo people on freelancers.com and they all have good reviews. Is this basically it? Shell out $100 bucks or more a month to someone who will just post stuff all over the internet. It just seems all very simple, what is $100 bucks a month to stay at #1. Is there any real questions i should ask to make sure i am not just throwing my money away? I would like to recommend the following services for attaining better search results for the website. 1)Press Release Submissions
    2)Social bookmarking submissions
    3)Drip Feed Article Links - 100 Article submissions everyday for 25 days
    4)Article directory submissions
    5)Link directory submissions
    6)Blog Post Submissions(All Blogs have PR1 to PR6)
    7)Wiki Page Submissions(.EDU and .GOV Sites Included) PR of the directories, social bookmarking websites, Blogs, wiki pages and Article directories are from PR0 to PR8.
    Most of them are in the range of PR1 to PR4. If you are interested in the above services then these are the details about those services. 1)Press release Submissions - We will write 3 press release and submit them to 25 press release websites.
    Submitting press release gets the news to Google news, Yahoo news etc..
    Please note we even submit to Paid press release websites like PRBuzz, SBWire, pressdoc etc.. 2)Social Bookmarking submissions - I will also submit your website to 150 social bookmarking websites.
    Here are the example of social bookmarking websites.
    www.digg.com
    www.furl.net
    After we finish submitting to social bookmarking websites we will then create rss feeds with approved link URL's and ping them so that links get indexed. 3)Drip Feed Article submissions - We will be writing one article.
    Everyday we will submitting the article to 100 different websites.
    We will be submitting for 25 days.
    100 submissions x 25 days = 2500 submissions.
    In each article submissions we can use 2 links to the website. 4)Article directory submissions - We will write 5 articles.
    Each article will be around 500 words.
    Then we will submit them to 300 different article directories. That means 5 articles x 300 article directories = 1500 article submissions.
    In each article we can use 2 links to the website.
    1500 x 2 Links.
    I have experience in submitting articles to article directories.
    Till now i have submitted more than 1000 articles to article directories.
    I will also create separate accounts with article directories wherever possible. 5)Link directory submissions - I have a list of 1300 directories.
    I will submit your website to these directories.
    I have experience in submitting to link directories.
    Till now i have submitted more than 2500 websites.
    All the submission work is done manually.
    All these directories provide one way links. 6)Blog Post Submissions(700 PR1 to PR6 Blogs) - We will write 1 article.
    we spin and post to 700 PR1 to PR5 blogs.
    We can spin the article, title of article and links
    You will be given a confirmation when complete, and a code to search backlinks in the search engines.
    They are hosted on 650 different C Class IPs! 7)Wiki Page Submissions - Get 200+ wiki site contextual backlinks (3 per posted article) from a range of PR 0 to 8 wiki sites including over 30 US .EDU and US .GOV sites.
    I will also ping Them.

    | topclass
    0
  • howardd


    Hello, For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack 😞 I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently. Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself.  So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site. Questions: 1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack? 2. Should I worry about this? 3. If so, what is the best way to go about this? Would appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks in advance! Howard

    | howardd
    1
  • charliedouglas123


    A lot of my competitors are using a lot of unsavoury/old-fashioned SEO methods to build links but are actually doing really well from it. A few different competitors are buying links in directories, using blogspam comments, forum posts, buying links in other places. The problem is, they all seem to be doing very well with it! What I've always been taught is that these methods are out and they could actually harm you - yet I haven't seen this happen to my competitors. Should I be using these spammy methods too or just concentrate on building quality content and high quality link building?

    | charliedouglas123
    0
  • wellnesswooz


    In the last couple of weeks Bing has gradually removed 5 webpages of my website from their SERP's. The URL's are totally gone. They all had top 5 rankings and just got removed out of nothing. Have can I investigate what went wrong with these pages? Are here perhaps experts who are willing to investigate this for a fee? How can I restore a page-level penalty? I have no messages in my Bing Webmastertools account.

    | wellnesswooz
    0
  • SEO_MediaInno


    So ok, I have a gambling site that i want to target for Australia, Canada, USA and England separately and still have .com for world wide (or not, read further).The websites content will basically stays the same for all of them, perhaps just small changes of layout and information order (different order for top 10 gambling rooms) My question 1 would be: How should I mark the content for Google and other search engines that it would not be considered "duplicate content"? As I have mentioned the content will actually BE duplicate, but i want to target the users in different areas, so I believe search engines should have a proper way not to penalize my websites for trying to reach the users on their own country TLDs. What i thought of so far is: 1. Separate webmasterstools account for every domain -> we will need to setup the user targeting to specific country in it.
    2. Use the hreflang tags to indicate, that this content is for GB users "en-GB"  the same for other domains more info about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
    3. Get the country specific IP address (physical location of the server is not hugely important, just the IP)
    4. It would be great if the IP address for co.uk is from different C-class than the one for the .com Is there anything I am missing here? Question 2: Should i target .com for USA market or is there some other options? (not based in USA so i believe .us is out of question) Thank you for your answers. T

    | SEO_MediaInno
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi mozzers, today I received a message from one of my blogger partners announcing me that he got hit by panda. 2 weeks ago I had him placing 2 anchors one in our main domain and a second one on our subdomain. I know panda focuses essentially on dups and I have paid attention to our webmaster tools to make sure we haven t got any messages Which we re good with. What do you guys suggest, will this affect us at some point or we re good? also in case that we re good will panda affect the blogger's authority therefore ours? if yes I should probably remove them, right? Thanks

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • blagger


    Hey Everyone, Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as "This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa" "Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes" "The organs in the female reproductive system incl" The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server 3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed. So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us <colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
    | http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 | If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner. We have 268 of these links from 200 domains. Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc. I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool? Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem. <colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
    |   | |   |

    | blagger
    0
  • gslc


    OK so my website ranks fairly well for keywords i would say 50-60 % are ranking in the top 3 my DA is 15 and PA is 28 I have a few other sites that i blog on that i own they have a DA of 11 and PA of 20 i was thinking of just guest posting on those using a keyword Anchor text that im not ranking for and seeing what that would do. I was thinking of creating a few other sites and just blog about random stuff for 3-6 months generate traffic and start guest posting redirecting links back towards me. Is this bad?

    | gslc
    0
  • JonathanGoodman


    A recent review of all client and personal websites showed a strange correlation. Traffic was coming in from Pelotas Brazil. The real clue was that some of my personal sites shouldn't see any traffic at all. So when I started getting traffic from Brazil I did some further research. It turns out Google is well aware of these events as seen in this forum post. Referral spam - one week online and www.web.com is using my google site Further reading lead me to this article: Stop Google Analytics Referrer Spam My question is: Why? Since the articles state referrer spam doesn't negatively affect search engine ranking then why bother in the first place? How is this spammer gaining anything by doing this? After reading both the Google Support Forum and the related article I'm still scratching my head trying to understand the method for this madness.

    | JonathanGoodman
    0
  • CLTMichael


    Site A is my Main Site.
    Site B is my Blog. Is using site B to link back to site A a good idea or should site A have it's own blog going after keywords?

    | CLTMichael
    1
  • MorganPorter


    In general, I understand that having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing. But I see a lot of small businesses (specifically dentists in this example) who hire the same company to provide content to their site. They end up with the EXACT same content as other dentists. Here is a good example: http://www.hodnettortho.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.braces2000.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.gentledentalak.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth/ If you google the title of that blog article you find tons of the same article all over the place. So, overall, doesn't this make the content on these blogs irrelevant? Does this hurt the SEO on these sites at all? What is the value of having completely unique content on your site/blog vs having duplicate content like this?

    | MorganPorter
    0
  • FrankSweeney


    I'd like to get some thoughts about redirecting your homepage URL (www.site.com) to a keyword rich URL (www.site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever). Thank you, in advance.

    | FrankSweeney
    0
  • Eteach_Marketing


    I can see that a lot of you are worrying about this new Panda update just as I am! I have such a headache trying to figure this one out, can any of you help me? I have thousands of pages that are "duplicate content" which I just can't for the life of me see how... take these two for example: http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=18753 http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=31241 My campaign crawler is telling me these are duplicate content pages because of the same title (which that I can see) and because of the content (which I can't see). Can anyone see how Google is interpreting these two pages as duplicate content?? Stupid Panda!

    | Eteach_Marketing
    0
  • gfiedel


    I just read the following comment in a response to someone else's question. The Responer is an SEOMoz Authority whose opinion I respect and have learned from (not sure if it's cool to mention names in a question) and it spurred my curiosity: "...Generally you will receive a warning from Google before your site is penalized, unless you are talking about just specific keywords." This is something I have been wondering about in relation to my own sudden  ranking drop for 2 specific keywords as I did not receive any warnings or notices. I have been proceeding as if I had over used these keywords on my Home page due to an initial lesser drop, but identifying the cause for the huge drop still seems useful for a number of reasons. Can anyone explain this further?

    | gfiedel
    0
  • Silkstream


    Heres the scenario... We recently took on a new client who's previous seo company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics. They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly. The situation we are now in is this: We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous seo company submitted a disavow request, theres a message in webmaster tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence. I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus im not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keyword on the internal page. Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that google doesnt know about yet from 800+ websites. Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation? Any advice is much appreciated, Thanks, Hayley.

    | Silkstream
    0
  • THB


    OK - so we currently own two websites that are in the same industry. Site A is our main site which hosts real estate listings and rentals in Canada and the US. Site B hosts rentals in Canada only. We are shutting down site B to concentrate solely on Site A, and will be looking to redirect all traffic from Site B to Site A, ie. user lands on Toronto Rentals page on Site B, we're looking to forward them off to Toronto Rentals page on Site A, and so on.  Site A has all the same locations and property types as Site B. On to the question: We are trying to figure out the best method of doing this that will appease both users and the Google machine.  Here's what we've come up with (2 options): When user hits Site B via Google/bookmark/whatever, do we: 1. Automatically/instantly (301) redirect them to the applicable page on Site A? 2. Present them with a splash page of sorts ("This page has been moved to Site A.  Please click the following link <insert anchor="" text="" rich="" url="" here="">to visit the new page.").</insert> We're worried that option #1 might confuse some users and are not sure how crawlers might react to thousands of instant redirects like that. Option #2 would be most beneficial to the end-user (we're thinking) as they're being notified, on page, of what's going on.  Crawlers would still be able to follow the URL that is presented within the splash write-up. Thoughts?  We've never done this before.  It's basically like one site acquiring another site; however, in this case, we already owned both sites.  We just don't have time to take care of Site B any longer due to the massive growth of Site A. Thanks for any/all help. Marc

    | THB
    0
  • steelintheair


    Why do press release websites, and their submissions, carry so much influence with organic search results right now?

    | steelintheair
    1
  • smallpotatoes


    We have a website that's a single person barbershop. She has been promoting on Craigslist, and that is outranking the website in the SERPs. However, the craigslist results showing up are actually expired and don't link to anything. They just seem to be cached by Craigslist. My question is, is Craigslist considered to generally not be a good avenue for directing inbound links for services on your site? Or is it a good strategy to use Craigslist to build link traffic for service businesses? I get mixed responses when I search for this. Thanks eYtdHtg.png

    | smallpotatoes
    0
  • EmarketedTeam


    If company A is paying 5k a month and some of that budget is buying links or content that might be in the gray area but is ranking higher than company B that's following the "rules" and paying the same but not showing up at all, what's company B suppose to do?

    | EmarketedTeam
    2
  • cewe


    Hi, I am currently looking for a new SEO agency to manage strategies on 3 websites, budget of about £15k pm in total. Any recommendations would be really appreciated as trying to navigate through all the usual sales waffle and hollow promises of most SEO agencies is becoming rather difficult. Thanks

    | cewe
    0
  • b4004040


    Mozers, A few questions for the community: Distributing a press release through a service like 24-7pressrelease.com - is it a serious duplicate content issue when an identical press release is distributed to multiple sites with no canonical markup (as far as I can tell)? All of the backlinks in the press release are either nofollow or redirects. If there IS a duplicate content issue, will the website be affected negatively given the numerous Panda and Penguin refreshes? Why SHOULDN'T a company issue a press release to multiple sites if it actually has something legitimate to announce and the readership of a given site is the target demographic? For example, why shouldn't a company that manufactures nutritional health supplements issue the same press release to Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Health News, etc _with a link to the site?_I understand it's a method that can be exploited for SEO purposes, but can't all SEO methods be taken to an extreme? Seems to me that if this press release scenario triggers the duplicate content and/or link spam penalty(ies), I'd consider it a slight deficiency of Google's search algorithm. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks.

    | b4004040
    0
  • Harbor_Compliance


    Dear Community, I'm getting into blog commenting heavily now for the relationships I'm building with other bloggers.  I think the relationships I will build with these other influencers will be helpful. But I'm concerned that Google may penalize my site if I have a lot of links coming from blog commenting.  If I sense that a blog is spammy, obviously I stay away.  I've also noticed that a number of CommentLuv sites include a link to my latest blog post, and that has helped me greatly in promoting my posts and building readership.  I am also interested in the follow links I get from it, but concerned in that regard that (1) Google won't count those follow links (won't pass page rank) and (2) Google will penalize me for some reason or in some way. What does everyone think about this approach of blog commenting, and in particular, including posting some comments on CommentLuv blogs. Thanks! Mike

    | Harbor_Compliance
    0
  • gslc


    Im trying to rank for a keyword and i saw that this domain is available the top listing under this search team is a domain authority 14 and according to seo site explorer has 1 page linking to it and its a no follow link. Would it make since to buy this domain optimize it and forward it back to my main site or is this bad to do.

    | gslc
    0
  • vahidafshari45


    What happen when I redirect301 10 domain to one? I have 10 domain with ave Page Authority=45 and Domain Authority 60 and want to increase my new domain by redirect them. is it right or wrong?

    | vahidafshari45
    0
  • Choice


    | Choice
    0
  • mjmorse


    So here's the situation.  My companies site has over 30 thousand backlinks from Rippling.info  These links all point to 3 product pages, some of which are no longer in production.  Apparently a former employee was experimenting with some link farm ideas. My questions are; 1. does anyone here have experience with rippling.info?  Is it legit?  It seems like a link farm but Google allows adsense ads???  I thought Google was against link farms... 2. if I use the Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools to tell Google these 30k+ incoming links are to be ignored, will there be any consequences? -Google Analytics shows zero referral traffic since jan 1st 2012.

    | mjmorse
    0
  • intelmixx


    Hi, I'm running a text message site mixsms.com from 2009. It was performing good till Oct 2012. In the end of Nov 2012 I noticed a drop in traffic and then with each passing month I'm getting 1500-2000 unique visitors drop. In Oct 2012 my daily unique visitors were 15000+ each day and now it is just having 2000 after Feb end. I've done several things to improve my site. I changes the template, removed all unnecessary html elements, changed seo structure (optimize with all modern seo techniques). Stop backlinking from Nov 2012 but instead of getting improvements I'm continuously having a drop in traffic. I'll highly appreciate your time if you look into site deeply to findout exact issues that are causing for this drop. I'm even ready to hire any seo consultant if he is pretty sure to get 100% results. Thanks in advance for your support

    | intelmixx
    0
  • Mase


    See these pages that we've created to rank. There are 3 types: Designed to be topic-specific:
    https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/trademark Designed to be location-specific:
    https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/san-francisco Designed to be a combo of both topic & location:
    https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/san-francisco-real-estate Are the keywords at the bottom too many and considered keyword spam? Any other SEO tips on these pages? I'm thinking about making them a bit more hierarchical, so there can be breadcrumbs and you could click back to San Francisco Lawyers from San Francisco Real Estate Lawyers. Good examples of sites that have dome structures like this really well?

    | Mase
    0
  • mario33


    I have been looking at a strategy used by a division of Tripadvisor called Flipkey. They specialize in vacation home rentals and have been zooming up in the rankings over the past few months. One of the main off-page tactics that they have been using is providing a badge to property managers to display on their site which links back. The issue I have is that it seem to me that they are hiding a link which has keyword specific anchor text by using javascript. The site I'm looking at offers vacation rentals in Tamarindo (Costa Rica). http://www.mariasabatorentals.com/ Scroll down and you'll see a Reviews badge which shows reviews and a link back to the managers profile on Flipkey. **However, **when you look at the source code for the badge, this is what I see: Find Tamarindo Vacation Rentals on FlipKey Notice that there is a link for "tamarindo vacation rentals" in the code which only appears when JS is turned off in the browser. I am relatively new to SEO so to me this looks like a black hat tactic. But because this is Tripadvisor, I have to think that that I am wrong. Is this tactic allowed by Google since the anchor text is highly relevant to the content? And can they justify this on the basis that they are servicing users with JS turned off? I would love to hear from folks in the Moz community on this. Certainly I don't want to implement a similar strategy only to find out later that Google will view it as cloaking. Sure seems to be driving results for Flipkey! Thanks all. For the record, the Moz community is awesome. (Can't wait to start contributing once I actually know what I'm doing!)

    | mario33
    0
  • anthonytjm


    I know this individual does this with several sites and then offers them for sale to his competitors. Obviously spammy thru and thru, but how can google reward a site thats not even two months old, with 1900 + links with a ranking of #3 for a highly competitive keyword? Please dont post the actual name or url of the website as we dont want to give him any more credit but this blows my mind as he has done this several times with other sites and never gets penalized. http://tinyurl.com/b9jysa5 Any ideas as to how he can accomplish this besides almost 2000 links in less than 2 months? How is that even remotely natural? I know his other sites have been reported to google but they never did anything about it. Thanks for any feedback.

    | anthonytjm
    0
  • scanlin


    Saw this article on JC Penny receiving a 'manual adjustment' to drop their rankings by 50+ spots: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html Curious what you guys think they did wrong, and whether or not you are aware of their SEO firm SearchDex? I mean, was it a simple case of low-quality spam links or was there more to it? Anyone study them in OpenSiteExplorer?

    | scanlin
    0
  • WillWatrous


    I recently received an offer from Attracta.com because I have a hostgator account. They are offering different levels of service for submitting xml sitemaps on a weekly basis. Is this a good idea? Thanks for your feedback! Will PS see graphic: Screen%20Shot%202012-02-08%20at%2010.06.56%20PM.png

    | WillWatrous
    0

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