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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • te_c


    Dear all, I want to create an additional domain in order to: Rank better for a very specific keyword with an exact match domain (I already ask about that, but I did not have my ideas clear at the time); Offer to the user usefull infomation about the topic, without duplicating the content I have in my main domain, just additional and very specific information; Use this domain as landing page, offering a tutorial on "how to" use a specific section of my main domain, including a video tutorial; Link to the related section of my main domain. So, the main idea is, if an user type in google "this specific keyword of ours", they will have in the results "thisspecifickeywordofus.es", they will click and go to the site, where they will find unique and specific information, complementing what I have in my mainsite, and showing how to use my site, so trying to use it for conversion. I want to do only white hat SEO, so first at all, I would like to ask you if you think it is a good idea. The keyword is difficult to rank for, and if I can take advantage of this exact match domain (even if it is nowdays no more so big an advantage), would be great. Second, do you see any problem in managing different domains from the same google account? Newbee question, sorry. Thanks in advance for your help, Daniel

    | te_c
    0
  • swzhai


    Hey SEOmoz Community! I've spent a bit of time now reading about SEO in books as well as online here within the SEOmoz community. However, I've still struggled to find a straight answer to whether or not directory submissions to non-penalized websites is acceptable.I suspect the reason I haven't found a straight YES or NO answer is because it isn't so straightforward and I respect that. My dilemma is as follows: I want to raise the domain authority for a few websites that I optimize for. I've submitted and gotten listed a bunch of excellent backlinks, however it still is a painfully slow process. My clients understandably want to see results faster, and because they have virtually no past outsourced link-building campaigns, I am beginning to think that I can invest some money for outsourcing directory submissions. I see more and more people talking about the latest Penguin updates, and how many of these sites are now penalized. BUT, is there any harm to submitting to directories such as the ones on SEOmoz's spreadsheet that aren't penalized? My concern is that in the future these will be penalized anyways, and is there a chance then that my site will also be de-listed from Google? At what point does Google completely 'blacklist' your site from its engine? Furthermore, I don't understand how Google can penalize a website to the point of de-listing it, because what would prevent other competitors from sending mass spammy back-links to another? What it all comes down to: At this point, are verified mass directory submissions through outsourcing still much more beneficial than detrimental to the ranking of a website? Thanks SEOmoz community, Sheldon

    | swzhai
    0
  • BobAnderson


    We have a printing website specializing in a single field but had added other products to it along the way, we are looking at adding a second site (redesigned from the ground up) that with cover everything (so will inevitably cover some of the same keywords) is this ok. We are considering some of the other things such as putting both sites on different IP's and also wondered about the registration details (would it be ok to have them under the same company?). Just to make it clear they will not be used for cross link or any other such things so just wanting to know if they could end up on page one for some of the same keywords and Google would be ok with this. Thank you for your time.

    | BobAnderson
    0
  • DavidKonigsberg


    I see in OSE banner ads counting ads as incoming links - My question is has anyone done a study showing a non tagged banner ad link and its effects on seo? Does google counting it as organic since it has no tagging or since its in a ad spot its ignored?

    | DavidKonigsberg
    0
  • Ryguy87


    When does Google actual reset backlinks to a domain. If i am buying expired domains from godaddy action for linking purpose am i wasting my time.Also if that the case whats the point of buying expired domains with many links pointing to them. If the backlinks to the expired domain still show up under my Google webmaster tool window does that mean Google counts that link?

    | Ryguy87
    0
  • pbhatt


    A link building agency we are interested in is promising to work until X number of whitehat (manual) links are acquired for $YYYY each month. They say they don't report on hours, but instead focus on results. Is this common or is it a red flag?

    | pbhatt
    0
  • Wayne76


    Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. Our goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states. To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
    journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
    content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
    tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content/media is 100% original. A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entries are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.) (I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances.) I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources??? The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well? Are they bound to fade away? While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states. OR Is our competitor's site bound to fade away? Thanks, gang, hope all of you have a great 2013! Wayne

    | Wayne76
    0
  • lethal0r


    do a UK based search for 'short term loans' on google. there are 7 sites on page 1 without any page or domain authority, several of them registered to a 'jeremy hughes', who I am guessing does not really exist. this is a very competitive term and they just shouldn't be making it onto page 1. im thinking this must be some clever 301 redirecting, as I cant see any backlinks to any of these sites in opensiteexplorer. any ideas how these sites are pulling this off?

    | lethal0r
    0
  • fergusonconsulting


    I own a subscription to PHP Link Directory but was wondering if anyone could suggest an alternative link directory script/software/service to PHPLD. Thanks!

    | fergusonconsulting
    0
  • daan.loening


    Hi, We operate a website that helps parents find babysitters. As a small add- on we currently run a small blog with the topic of childcare and parenting. We are now thinking of introducing a new category to our blog called "best articles to read today". The idea is that we "re-blog" selected articles from other blogs that we believe are relevant for our audience. We have obtained the permission from a number of bloggers that we may fully feature their articles on our blog. Our main aim in doing so is to become a destination site for parents. This obviously creates issues with regard to duplicated content. The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance? And if so, how can this effect be avoided? It isn't important for us that these "featured" articles rank in SERPs, so we could potentially make them "no index" sites or make the "rel canonical" point to the original author. Any thoughts anyone? Thx! Daan

    | daan.loening
    0
  • waqid


    Keywords he is ranking for , houston dwi lawyer, houston dwi attorney and etc.. Client was acquired in June and since then we have done nothing but build high quality links to the website. None of our clients were dropped/dinged or impacted by the panda/penguin updates in 2012 or updates previously published via Google. Which proves we do quality SEO work. We went ahead and started duplicating links which worked for other legal clients and 5 months later this client is either dropping or staying in local maps results and we are performing very badly in organic results. Some more history..... When he first engaged our company we switched his website from a CMS called plone to word press. During our move I ran some searches to figure out which pages we needed to 301 and we came across many profile pages or member pages created on the clients CMS (PLONE). These pages were very spammy and linked to other plone sites using car model,make,year type keywords (ex:jeep cherokee dealerships). I went through these sites to see if they were linking back and could not find any back links to my clients website. Obviously nobody authorized these pages, they all looked very hackish and it seemed as though there was a vulnerability on his plone CMS installation which nobody caught. Fast forward 5 months and the newest OSE update is showing me a good 50+ back links with unrelated anchor text back links. These anchor text links are the same color as the background and can only be found if you hover your mouse over certain areas of the site. All of these sites are built on Plone and allot of them are linked to other businesses or community websites. These websites obviously have no clue they have been hacked or are being used for black hat purposes. There are dozens of unrelated anchor text links being used on external websites which are pointing back to our clients website. Examples: <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">autex Isuzu, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Toyota service department ratings, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">die cast BMW and etc..</a> Obviously the first step is to use the disavow link tool, which will be completed this week. The second step is to take some feedback from the SEO community. It seems like these pages are automatically created using some type of bot. It will be very tedious if we have to continually remove these links. I hope there is a way to notify Google that these websites are all plone and have a vulnerability, which black hats are using to harm the innocent... If i cannot get Google to handle this, then the only other option is to start fresh with a new domain name. What would you do in this situation. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you

    | waqid
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, Can you be penalized for having 2 ecommerce sites in the same niche? Is there a way to do it white-hat? Please explain.

    | BobGW
    0
  • wickedsunny1


    Hello, I have been in contact with a smo to optimize my site for search engines and social media sites. my site was doing great from last 4 years. but suddenly it started dropping in ranking. then i came and joined seomoz pro to find a way out. i was suggested to categories content in form of subdomains ... well that put a huge toll on my rankings.. thanks to suggestions here i have 301 them to sub directories. Now another huge question arises. i found out that my smo guy was taking artificial votes or whatever youc all them on twitter, facebook and g+ ...twitter and facebook's are understandable but i am getting to think that these votings on g+ might have affected my site's ranking ? here is a sample url http://www.designzzz.com/cutest-puppy-pictures-pet-photography-tips/ if you scroll below you will see 56 google plus 1s... now the big question is, i have been creating genuince content. but nowt hat i am stuck in this situation, how to get out of it ? changing urls will be bad for readers.. will a 301 will fix it ?  or any other method. thanks in advance

    | wickedsunny1
    0
  • b4004040


    As part of my daily routine, I checked out inbound.org and stumbled upon an article about Grey Hat SEO techniques. One of the techniques mentioned was sending product to a blogger for review. My question is whether these types of links are really considered paid links. Why shouldn't an e-commerce company evangelize its product by sending to bloggers whose readership is the demographic the company is trying to target? In pre e-commerce marketing, it was very typical for a start-up company to send samples for review. Additionally, as far as flow of commerce is concerned, it makes sense for a product review to direct the reader to the company, whether by including a contact phone number, a mailing address, or in today's e-commerce world, a link to their website. I understand the gaming potential here (as with most SEO techniques, black-hat is usually an extreme implementation), but backlinks from honest product reviews shouldn't have a tinge of black, thus keeping it white-hat. Am I wrong here? Are these types of links really grey? Any help or insight is much appreciated!

    | b4004040
    0
  • BWrightTLM


    Hi Moz community, New to the Moz community and hopefully first post/comment of many to come. I am somewhat new to the industry and have a question that I would like to ask and get your opinions on.  It is most likely something that is a very simple answer, but here goes: I have a website that is for a local moving company (so small amounts of traffic and very few pages) that was built on Wordpress... I was told when I first started that I should create tags for some of the cities serviced in the area.  I did so and tagged the first blog post to each tag.  Turned out to be about 12-15 tags, which in turn created 12-15 additional pages.  These tags are listed in the footer area of each page. There are less than 20 pages in the website excluding the tags. Now, I know that each of these pages are showing as duplicate content. To me, this just does not seem like best practices to me.  For someone quite new to the industry, what would you suggest I do in order to best deal with this situation. Should I even keep the tags? Should I keep and not index? Should I add/remove from site map? Thanks in advance for any help and I look forward to being a long time member of SEOMoz.

    | BWrightTLM
    0
  • RobertChapman


    Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked. All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans. Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO. This looks like a bad neighbourhood site: 3 pages indexed PR 0 And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text: payday loans I assume its a wait and see at this stage.

    | RobertChapman
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hi - just been looking at a clients backlinks and seeing a couple of hundred from this website - from different subdomains. http://www.wales.info/ is the main url then you have loads of subdomains: e.g. http://esplanade-hotel.wales.info/areasite_list.asp?Curpage=7&q_group=7 - all with follow backlinks pointing at the same bed and breakfast / hotel / hostel. I'm tempted to remove my listing or request nofollow links. Is that the right thing to do?

    | McTaggart
    0
  • superlordme


    The following site is huge in the movie trailer industry: http://bit.ly/18B6tF It ranks #3 in Google for "Movie Trailers" and has high rankings for multiple other major keywords in the industry. Here's the thing; virtually all of their movie trailer pages contain copy/pasted content from other sites. The movie trailer descriptions are the ones given by the movie companies and therefor the same content is on thousands of websites/blogs. We all know Google hates duplicate content at the moment... so how does this site get a away with it? Does it's root-domain authority keep it up there?

    | superlordme
    0
  • postagestamp


    I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read  as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty. Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.

    | postagestamp
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, I have a client that partnered up with a person in his field 4 years ago and got him to place a sitewide link to his site, high domain authority. Now with recent developments this site owner wants to take off these links so that they won't leak pagerank. The person insists in taking all the links off with his next website redesign. I have found several years ago in my own SEO efforts that removal of a sitewide link actually damages the domain. Is this still true? Should he ask for a nofollow or will that change damage our domain as well? Is there any way he can not take a huge hit on this? He doesn't mind the loss of links, he just don't want to be damaged. Please only post if you have recent experience with sitewide link removal, or if you have something related or a solution.

    | BobGW
    0
  • McTaggart


    Just been investigating PR newswires for the first time (despite having worked in PR for over a decade!) One of my clients has asked my to send out a news release via a newswire of my choice. I will not be posting the news release on my client's website, to avoid the most obvious duplication issue. Has anyone had SEO probs from newswires though? I just saw one which offered: "Minimum guaranteed number of media websites on which your release is posted" alarm bells!

    | McTaggart
    0
  • RonMedlin


    I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue?  Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?  What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?

    | RonMedlin
    3
  • djlittman


    We are currently paying to have a listing in the directory Best of the Web.  Should I be paying to renew our listing in this directory?

    | djlittman
    0
  • DarrenX


    I've seen some discussion here about whether or not negative seo is real. I've just spent 6 months recovering from Penguin, rewriting content, removing hundreds of bad links, and seeing our traffic slowly improve. Yesterday we noticed in Google webmasters tools that we're ranking for the term "Free Sex."  Here... http://screencast.com/t/ezoo2sCRXQ Now we have discovered that thousands of "sex" links have been directed at our improving domain. I am convinced I know who the culprit is. What would you advise a client to do in my situation? Forget about removing these damn links. I don't have the time, money or energy to go through that again. I'm sure he can add them much faster than I can ever remove them. Is the disavow tool best answer in this case? Or is there an international court of seo justice that I can appeal to?

    | DarrenX
    0
  • anthonytjm


    Looking over a clients site and they have a bunch of link directory links that seem very skeptical to me, but the mozrank and authority seem to be ok on the home page. One directory is addlinkzfree and they have the same template and layout as a few other directories this client has. Link page has no juice whatsover, but home page has PA 54, MR 5.04 and root domain is DA 45. At first glance this would appear to be respectable numbers right? But the title of the directory and multitude of links lead me to think its nothing but a link farm. Should I advise the client to run and try to remove links from these type sites even though home page has decent scores? Im of the mindset that anything diredctory with links, free, partners etc in title need be avoided. Would appreciate any backup on this or am I just being paranoid?

    | anthonytjm
    0
  • Bromtec


    Hello, One of my clients received the notorious message from Google about unnatural links late last March. We've removed several hundred (if not thousands) of links, and resubmitted several times for reconsideration, only to continue with responses that state that we still have unnatural links. Looking through the "links to your site" in google webmaster tools, there are several hundred sites / pages listed, from which we removed our link over 60 days ago.   If you click each link to view the site / page, they contain nothing, viewable or hidden, regarding our website / address. I was wondering if this (outdated / inaccurate) list is the same as the one their employees use to analyze the current status of bad links, and if so how long it will take to reflect up-to-date information.  In other words, even though we've removed the bad links, how long do we need to wait until we can expect a clean resubmission for reconsideration. Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated -

    | Bromtec
    0
  • leatherhidestore


    Rand is unquestionably much smarter than I however his pronouncements concerning the link building don't seem to hold true for some sectors of the online marketplace.  We sell upholstery leather and one of our main competitor runs the table with the most important search terms and has a total garbage backlink profile.  I don't know if there is some onsite magic they are working but they don't use brand name anchor text, links are not relevant to their products and most of their links are from high DA blogs, craps posts to .edu forums and no follow. The point is, maybe black hat is out but a lot of what I see being rewarded out there suggests grey hat is alive and well.

    | leatherhidestore
    0
  • Bodybuilding.com


    I work for a commerce company and our IT team is pushing to switch our JSP server-side templates over to client-side templates using a JavaScript library called Dust.js Dust.js is a JavaScript client-side templating solution that takes the presentation layer away from the data layer.  The problem with front-end solutions like this is they are not SEO friendly because all the content is being served up with JavaScript. Dust.js has the ability to render your client-side content server-side if it detects Google bot or a browser with JavaScript turned off but I’m not sold on this as being “safe”. Read about Linkedin switching over to Dust.js http://engineering.linkedin.com/frontend/leaving-jsps-dust-moving-linkedin-dustjs-client-side-templates http://engineering.linkedin.com/frontend/client-side-templating-throwdown-mustache-handlebars-dustjs-and-more Explanation of this: “Dust.js server side support: if you have a client that can't execute JavaScript, such as a search engine crawler, a page must be rendered server side. Once written, the same dust.js template can be rendered not only in the browser, but also on the server using node.js or Rhino.” Basically what would be happening on the backend of our site, is we would be detecting the user-agent of all traffic and once we found a search bot, serve up our web pages server-side instead client-side to the bots so they can index our site.  Server-side and client-side will be identical content and there will be NO black hat cloaking going on.  The content will be identical. But, this technique is Cloaking right? From Wikipedia: “Cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable.” Matt Cutts on Cloaking http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355 Like I said our content will be the same but if you read the very last sentence from Wikipdia it’s the “present but not searchable” that gets me. If our content is the same, are we cloaking? Should we be developing our site like this for ease of development and performance? Do you think client-side templates with server-side solutions are safe from getting us kicked out of search engines? Thank you in advance for ANY help with this!

    | Bodybuilding.com
    0
  • danatanseo


    I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our YouTube videos. They are free, work really great and I highly recommend them. Today I received an email from DotSub with recommendations for SEO on video. I have a question about #5 on their list. Here it is: "Step 5: Embed the video transcript into the non-visible meta-data of the page" "Always embed the video transcript in the page meta-data This is done by placing
    the content of the transcription within a non-visible HTML element (a hidden
    div). While most search engines do not weight non-visible content as high as
    visible content, this will still provide additional SEO for your page.  Do
    this whether you include the full transcript visibly on your page or not." This is something I have never heard before. And, like many of you, I have always heard that putting anything "hidden" in the HTML is a very bad idea. Is this different? Do any of you do this? Is it really a recommended technique? Thanks all! Dana

    | danatanseo
    0
  • eranariel


    According to my recent SEOmoz links analysis, my competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority... e.g. wedding site linking to a transportation attorney's website. Aother competitor site has an overall of 2 million links, most of which are seemingly questionable index sites or forums to which registration is unattainable. I recently created a 301 redirect, and my external links have yet to be updated to my new domain name in SEOmoz. Yet, by comparing my previous domain  authority rank with those of the said competitor sites, the “delta”  is relatively marginal. The SEOmoz rank is 21 whereas the SEOmoz ranks of two competitor sites  30 and 33 respectively. The problem is, however, is to secure a good SERP for the most relevant terms with Google… My Google pagerank was “3” prior to the 301 redirect.  I worked quite intensively so as to receive a pagerank only to discover that it had no affect at all on the SERP. Therefore, I took a calculated risk in changing to a domain name that translates from non-latin characters, as the site age is marginal, and my educated guess is that the  PR should rebound within 4 weeks, however, I would like to know as to whether there is a way to transfer the pagerank to the new domain… Does anyone have any insight as to how to go about and handling this issue?

    | eranariel
    0
  • maestrosonrisas


    Hello my web has been hit for external links maybe because of the work of SEO consultants y had before. The web name is http://www.propdental.com Some seo consultants will try to use the disalow tools on webmaster tools other recomends to do another web with the content wich is very rich and start over again with a new domain I would like to know what is your opinion thank you very much

    | maestrosonrisas
    0
  • simplistics


    I have been looking up different seo tactics to use on my website. One of the ones I came across is article spinning. It's interesting that if done right you can create total unique content within a few minutes. However will it be considered black hat? And does Google penalize you for it?

    | simplistics
    1
  • CMTM


    Although google told me No manual spam actions found i had not received an unnatural link request notice i figured it would be a good idea to clean these up so i did. So i have submitted 3 reconsideration requests from google. They all came back with the same response: No manual spam actions found. I really doubt that anyone at google really checked those out.You will notice that i don't even appear on page 1-10 at all...its clearly google filtering the site out from the results(except for my brand terms), but i have no idea what for.What do you guys think it is? If you see anythign let me know so i can have it fixed.This has been going on for 2 months now...my company has been around for a long time...i dont understand why suddenly im not showing up in searches for the keyword si used to rank for...

    | CMTM
    0
  • BallyhooLtd


    I am currently working for a client who's back link profile is questionable.  The issue I am having is, does Google feel the same way about them as I do? We have no current warnings but have had one in the past for "unnatural inbound links". We removed the links that we felt were being referred to and have not received any further warnings, nor have we noticed any significant drop in traffic or rankings at any point. My concern is that if I work towards getting the more ominous looking links removed (directories, reciprocal links from irrelevant sites etc.), either manually or with the disavow tool, how can I be sure that I am not removing links that are in fact helping our campaign? Are we likely to suffer from the next Penguin update if we chose to proceed without moving the aforementioned links? or is Google only likely to target the serious black hat links (link farms etc.)? Any thoughts or experiences would be greatly appreciated.

    | BallyhooLtd
    0
  • eugeneku


    Site in question: cellphoneshop.net From what I can tell from their link profile, the links they garner don't appear to be particularly high value but they dominate organic listings for my vertical (cell phone accessories), esp. in the last 2-3 months when Google was supposedly increasing the quality of their search results. Can anyone tell me why in particular this site ranks so well for competitive short and long tail terms?

    | eugeneku
    0
  • k9byron


    Ok here goes. Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder. 1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile. 2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it? 3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links? 4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing?  My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed? I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake. Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.

    | k9byron
    0
  • RonMedlin


    With the launch of Google's Penguin I know that footer links could possibly hurt rankings.  Also too many links on a page are also bad.  I have a client http://www.m-scribe.com  That has footer links creating well over 100 links on many of their pages.  How should I handle these footer links?  Suggestions are greatly appreciated.

    | RonMedlin
    0
  • steve_benjamins


    Hi SEOMozzers, I'm building a website for a client that provides photo galleries for travel destinations. As of right now, the website is basically a collection of photo galleries. My client believes Google might like us a bit more if we had more "text" content. So my client has been sending me content that is provided free by tourism organizations (tourism organizations will often provide free "one-pagers" about their destination for media). My concern is that if this content is free, it seems likely that other people have already posted it somewhere on the web. I'm worried Google could penalize us for posting content that is already existent. I know that conventionally, there are ways around this-- you can tell crawlers that this content shouldn't be crawled-- but in my case, we are specifically trying to produce crawl-able content. Do you think I should advise my client to hire some bloggers to produce the content or am I just being paranoid? Thanks everyone. This is my first post to the Moz community 🙂

    | steve_benjamins
    0
  • spciuk


    Hi There my site ranking dropped suddenly today for my main keywords such as security companies in london and security services in london from first page to 4th-5th page. these keywords were ranked on homepage http://www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk/ other keywords from some internal pages, such as this one http://www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk/security-services/event-security-london.html theygot hit slightly and went couple of listings down the road for event security london, event security companies london as well. same slight hitting happened on this page for main keywords http://www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk/bodyguard-for-hire-london.html can anyone help me, how to get the rankings back? my site authority is around 60 which is far better than most sites ranking higher than me now. these are some problems that i understand so far. keyword rich anchor text link profile for my main keywords over optimised pages let me know if anything you might find suspicious on my site that i can fix either on site or in my link profile. looking forward to your help. thanks gill

    | spciuk
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hi, I'm just putting pizza restaurant on various very relevant 'eating out' directories. Just noticed one directory then proceeds to place your listing on around 40 other sub-directories (each with own URL). They don't put <no follow="">tags on any of the 40 odd backlinking URLs.</no> I currently have around 300 existing backlinks, to this pizza restaurant, from a diverse range of sites. Should I ask them to put a nofollow on these 40 odd new backlinking directory URLs?

    | McTaggart
    0
  • patrickmilligan


    I'm pretty new to seo but think I'm starting to get a decent grasp on it. One thing I'm really struggling with is how to organize the meta title tags on my website. I work in real estate and I'm noticing a lot of my local competitors that are ranking for the top keywords seem to using that particular keyword on every title tag within their website. An example would be www.paranych.com. Many of his internal pages have the word "Edmonton Real Estate" in the meta title tag, yet his home page is the page that is ranking for that particular keyword. It doesn't seem logical to have every one of my pages featuring the same keyword, but there are many examples within my industry of this working. Is the best practice with meta title tags to have your keyword on every title tag of your site or just the home page? Thx, Barry

    | patrickmilligan
    0
  • jpretz


    Howdy! I have been tossing this idea around in my head over the weekend and I cannot decide which answer is correct, so here I am! We a retailer of products and is currently in the midst of redesigning our site-- not only design but also content. The issue that we are facing is with product descriptions from our vendors. We are able to access the product descriptions/specs from their websites and use them on ours, but my worry is that we will get tagged for duplicate content. Other retailers (as well as the vendors) are using this content as well, so I don't want this to have an adverse effect on our ranking. There are so many products that it would be a large feat to re-write unique content-- not to mention that the majority of the rhetoric would be extremely similar. What have you seen in your experiences in similar situations? Is it bad to use the descriptions? Or do we need to bite the bullet and do our best to re-write hundreds of product descriptions? Or is there a way to use the descriptions and tag it in a way that won't have Google penalize us? I originally thought that if we have enough other unique content on our site, that it shouldn't be as big of a deal, but then I realized how much of our site's structure is our actual products.  Thanks in advance!

    | jpretz
    0
  • Vinss


    Hello Guys, I am totally new to SEOMOZ.com, when I had issues with my website I asked one of my friend who does SEO  he suggested me to implemented 301 redirection approximately 11 months a go, here is the URL of the website http://www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad . Will Google ban my website from search engine results, what would be the worst scenarios. know there are really good SEO people who follow SEOMOZ everyday... Can any one here please suggest me with some good answers weather I have to remove 301 redirection or I can still keep the same until my home page gets redesigned. I don't really understand all the concepts of SEO, but if some one can help me with the good answers I can ask my developer to the same. Thank you

    | Vinss
    0
  • JessTopps


    To achieve this we need to set up a new architecture of domains and sub-websites to effectively build this network. We want to make sure we follow the right protocols for setting up the domain structures to achieve good SEO for the primary domain and local websites. Today we have our core website at www.doctorsvisioncenter.com which will ultimately will become dvceyecarenetwork.com. That website will serve as the core web presence that can be custom branded for hundreds. For example, today you can go to www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/pinehurst.  Note when you start there, you can click around and it is still branded for Pinehurst or spectrum eye care.  So the burning question(s). - if I am an independent doc at www.newyorkeye.com, I could do domain forwarding but Google does not index forwarded domains so that is out.  I could do a 301 permanent redirect to my page www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/newyorkeye. I could then put a rule in the HT Access file that says if newyorkeye.com redirect to www.doctorsvisioncenter/newyorkeye and then have the domain show up as www.newyorkeye.com.  Another way to do that is we point the newyorkeye DNS to doctorsvisioncenter.com rather than a 301 redirect with the same basic rule in the HT Access file.  That means that, theoretically, every sub page would show up, for example, as www.newyorkeye.com/contact-lens-center which is actually www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/contact-lens-center.   It also means, theoretically, that it will be seen as an individual domain but pointing to all the same content under that individual domain just like potentially hundreds of others.  The goal is we build once, manage once and benefit many.  If we do something like the above which will mean that each domain will essentially be a separate domain,  but,  will google see it that way or as duplicative content? While it is easy to answer "yes" it would be duplicative, it is not necessarily the case if the content is on separate domains. Is this a good way to proceed, or does anyone have another recommendation for us?

    | JessTopps
    0
  • TylerReardon


    I've done a lot of competitive link analysis lately and found that a lot of my competitors links for a certain keyword are coming from low quality directory sites and they're outranking my site. This leads me to my question which may or may not have an answer(I at least hope it fuels a good discussion)... Are links from directory sites good or bad for SEO?

    | TylerReardon
    0
  • ShoutChris


    Today I went about my business in trying to understand what is happening in our market, eyewear, after the last Panda update.  I was interested to know if any of our competitors were effected as much as we were for a very competitive key phrase To my surprise a new kid appeared on the block, well, on page one, position two.  Imagine my second surprise, when the new kid turn out to be a 3 month old domain, yes 3 months, with zero page rank and zero back links.  I was in for one more surprise before I stood up, walked to the window and gazed into space to contenplate the meaning of Panda and SEO as we know it. This third surprise was the site in question is a counterfeiting site using black hat SEO with fast results. It has a Blog its a good looking site with the key phrase menstioned a hundred times. google-UK-%20Search-Result.jpg panda-help.jpg

    | ShoutChris
    0
  • devoted2vintage


    For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.

    | devoted2vintage
    0
  • Ron10


    my site has disappeared from the serps.  Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?  It used to rank around 4 for the search "austin wedding venues" and it still ranks number three for this search on Bing.  I haven't done any SEO work on it in a while so i don't think i did anything to make Google mad but now it doesn't even rank anywhere in the top 160 results.  Here's the link: http://austinweddingvenues.org Thanks in advance Mozzers! Ron

    | Ron10
    0
  • AndrewAkesson


    I have a client who has one main service website, on which they have local landing pages for some of the areas in which they operate. They have since purchased 20 or so domains (although in the process of acquiring more) for which the domain names are all localised versions of the service they offer. Rather than redirecting these to the main site, they wish to operate them all separately with the goal of ranking for the specific localised terms related to each of the domains. One option would be to create microsites (hosted on individual C class IPs etc) with unique, location specific content on each of the domains. Another suggestion would be to park the domains and have them pointing at the individual local landing pages on the main site, so the domains would just be a window through which to view the pages which have already been created. The client is aware of the recent EMD update which could affect the above. Of course, we would wish to go with the most Google-friendly option, so I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice about how would be best to handle this? Many thanks in advance!

    | AndrewAkesson
    0
  • taradmkt


    When I search this keyword Backlink คือ by Google browser(Google.co.th) then I saw these Domain that is spam keyword and worse content (Spin content and can not understand what it said) อํานาจเจริญ.dmc.tv/?p=19
    ฉะเชิงเทรา.dmc.tv/?p=28 พังงา.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink หนองคาย.dmc.tv/?p=97 ขอนแก่น.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink ชัยนาท.dmc.tv/?p=70 ตราด.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink etc As you can see the search result**.** My question is 1. How to tell Google to check these network 2. Why these network display Top 10 for 3 weeks!!!!! and after that they rank drop. 3. Why Facebook page rank on Google in the search result Please make me clear.

    | taradmkt
    0

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