White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Have you seen Phishing scam around WhoIs data?

Got an email this morning on a domain that is not privacy protected. (One of mine that I own significant extensions for). I am attaching the email and the link. The thing did not throw me off because I know where all is and it had nothing identifiable, but to those with a domain and they want to keep it, this has to have some real chance of taking some peoples money. The domain you land on is SecureTrans32456.com/order/......... Just keeping the world alert... best eXorT.png?1 eXorT.png?1 mZvcK.png?1

| RobertFisher

1

Article Re-posting / Duplication

Hi Mozzers! Quick question for you all. This is something I've been unsure of for a while. But when a guest post you've written goes live on someone's blog. Is it then okay it post the same article to your own blog as well as Squidoo for example? Would the search engines still see it as duplication if I have a link back to the original?

| Webrevolve

0

Penguin issues

Hello everyone, I run about 10 sites and pretty much every single one got hit by Penguin (the traffic plummeted on 24th April). I have never done reciprocal links (except 1 domain upto 2005 or so), I have never bought links, I have never spammed message boards or anything like that (except 1 different domain got hit by negative SEO by someone else) and I have never employed anyone to do any of the above. The way I have created sites for the last 10 years is to try to make them useful and let the links build naturally which more or less worked until April this year. I've been tearing my hair out ever since. The only thing you can say about all of them (apart from that I own them but I've been careful with whois etc) is that the link profile is 100% natural apart from the 2 provisos above. Since April I've hired people but I'm down $20K but not any better in the rankings. A few of the sites are: short-hairstyles.com was number 1 for short hairstyles and short haircuts for years then Penguin came and its dropped off for both. It had 10000 or so spammy message board links posted by someone as negative seo I have got some removed but google webmaster tools still reports them as there. There are tentative signs of recovery (maybe) but no traffic increase. 1001-hairstyles.com has been there or there abouts for 10 years for the keyword hairstyles and hair styles until April. A site ourlipsaresealed.skyblogs.be has 30000 links to it (there are only 40000 total) with the anchor text haarstijls which is dutch for hairstyles, I don't think its malicious just they set a template and do a new page every day and they also link in the same way to a competitor who wasn't affected. An seo firm have been working on this one for a few months, the traffic increased 50% a couple of weeks ago but bombed the day after to worse than before. Prom-hairstyles.org when the same way as above in April. The only back link oddity is a site polyvore.com links to it about 400 times (out of 1000 or so total) they are using our pictures to sell their prom dresses (with out permission) but mostly deep link. Most of the other sites went in a similar way but have no obvious backlink anomalies. Do I use the link disavowel tool? I am a bit wary of it because if you watch matt cutts video he keeps reiterating that the tool is for people who have used dodgy link practises in the past and want to do a clean up but that isn't me so am I owning up to something I haven't done by using it? Are the search results as strange in everybody's niche? In mine there is some real dross as well as loads of pinterest and other user generated stuff. Sorry to go on for so long and thanks for getting this far. Ian

| jwdl

0

Can I just delete pages to get rid of bad back-links to those pages?

I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters). We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality. Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question.. b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it? Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033 I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s... Thanks so much!!!!

| zingseo

0

Does having the same descrition for different products a bad thing the titles are all differnent but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?

does having the same description for different products a bad thing the titles are all different but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?

| Casefun

1

Negative SEO on my website with paid +1's

Hi guys, I need a piece of advice. Some scumbag played me quite well with paid +1's on my two articles and now I'm in a problem.
http://sr.stateofseo.com/seo-vesti/google-implementacija-ssl-protokola-not-provided-problem/
http://sr.stateofseo.com/napredni-seo/najnovije-promene-google-panda-algoritma/
They are both translated articles (written originally by me on the same website). I've noticed those +1's (476 on both articles) when my website received a penalty for "SEO" keyword on Google.rs (Serbian Google) and I'm now on the 11th page.
Other keywords still rank just fine. Not cool, right? Now, I think there could be two solutions:
First one is to remove my inner link that's pointing to my homepage with "SEO" anchor, and hope for the best. Second one is to completely remove/delete those two articles and wait for Google to reindex the website and hopefully remove my ban. Do you guy have some other ideas how can I fix this or remove / disavow those +1 or somehow explain to the Google crew / algo that I'm just a humble SEO without any evil thoughts? 🙂 Thank you in advance.

| Fastbridge

0

Does the SEOmoz Suggested Directory List Need to be Updated?

So, since Google updated their link schemes page (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356) with avoid using "Low-quality directories", I've been thinking a lot about what makes a directory "low-quality". Obviously, this is important, or Google wouldn't have mentioned it. I was wondering if someone could explain to me how some of the directories suggested by SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/directories are NOT low-quality, specifically some of the ones marked "General". The page lists stuff like busybits.com, for instance. One that I guess many are aware of, and yea it has a high home page PageRank, and it's got some history, and it's human-edited, ok great. But does it actually add any value to anyone that's not just looking to get a link? A page like http://busybits.com/Business/Others/2/ having (dofollow) listings like "Phone cards, Calling cards" "Insurance in Canada" .... ect. It just looks like an SEO backlink hub. No value at all to a user trying to discover new sites/content. Anyway, back to my main question, how is something like this NOT "low-quality"? Thank you

| MadeLoud

4

| 2Hillz

0

Is this a Doorway problem?

Hi, You have a site with good content that you don't want it anymore, so you redirect it to another domain you have. Is it a blackhat tactic such as Doorway page? Is this bad for SEO? What is the best solution? Thanks!

| HildebrandoTrannin

0

Are duplicate item titles harmful to my ecommerce site?

Hello everyone, I have an online shopping site selling, amongst other items, candles. We have lots of different categories within the LED candles category. One route a customer can take is homepage > LED candles > Tealights. Within the tealights category we have 7 different products which vary only in colour. It is necessary to create separate products for each colour since we have fantastic images for each colour. To target different keywords, at present we have different titles (hence different link texts, different URLs and different H1 tags) for each colour, for example "Battery operated LED candles, amber", "Flameless candles, red" and "LED tealights, blue". I was wondering if different titles to target different keywords is a good idea. Or, is it just confusing to the customer and should I just stick with a generic item title which just varies by colour (eg. "LED battery candles, colour")? If I do the latter, am I at risk of getting downranked by Google since I am duplicating the product titles/link texts/URLs/H1 tags/img ALTs? (the description and photos for each colour are unique). Sorry if this is a little complicated - please ask and I can clarify anything...because I really want to give the best customer experience but still preserve my Google ranking. I have attached screenshots of the homepage and categories to clarify, feel free to go on the site live too. Thank you so much, Pravin BqFCp.jpg KC2wB.jpg BEcfX.jpg

| goforgreen

0

Competitor is using a blog network - worth reporting?

Hey guys, Today I checked the backlink profile of a competitor who is #1 in Google Australia for a highly competitive keyword. To my surprise though, every single link (except a few directory link) seems to be from a private blog network. It's a business selling advertisment products, yet somehow seems to have links on blog from website that sell pc repair services, sleepwear, bali villas rentals, etc.. In this case, would filing a spam report in google WMT be beneficial? It's not like they advertise that they sell links (nor are the websites the links are on), but it is quite clear that something dodgy is going on. Thanks

| Michael-Goode

0

Keywords in Bold?

A friend mentioned to me that the bolding of keywords is not "frowned" upon by google, ad should be replaced by anchor text links about 2-3 per phrase / word depending on the overall content on the page. Is this true?

| entourage212

0

How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?

Ok I know what you're going to say.. social media etc right? The problem is we do that already but we're stuck in an industry that just isn't very sexy! People reading twitter/facebook don't want to read about toilets in their spare time, or keep it as a hobby. If you search bathroom blog (uk google), you will see we are about 5th, it gets us no traffic, as I imagine it's not a popular term so I can see you starting to ask why we write a blog in the first place. We write the blog because at the moment the whole industry is dominated by pile it high sell it cheap online stores and all their blogs are written for google only so finding decent or unbiased advice is rare. Seriously, these guys are creating fake blogs and paying for links inside other blogs all over the place in order to boost their rankings so we figure if you really want some good advice people can't find it. If they find our blog they will get some good advice and good content.. and then the hope is that they give us a call and we can see if we can help them. The problem is these guys are hogging all the keywords.. and it seems the bathroom industry has very few keywords that people search! Now I know we are in it for the long haul.. so taking time doesn't bother me, but I was wondering if there were any tried and tested places to post a blog that could get us at least seen so that people could see how different our content is? Or if all else fails, can anyone suggest the right keywords to aim at besides the "bathroom suites" etc that these huge online stores dominate?

| willryles

0

Who's still being outranked by spam?

Over the past few months, through Google Alerts, I've been watching one of our competitors kick out crap press releases, and links to their site have been popping up all over blog networks with exact match anchor text. They now outrank us for that anchor text. Why is this still happening? Three Penguin updates later and this still happens. I'm trying so hard to do #RCS and acquire links that will ensure our site's long-term health in the SERPs. Is anyone else still struggling with this crap?

| UnderRugSwept

2

Check For Bad Directory Backlinks For Free

I used http://deletebacklinks.com/ yesterday to search 7 of the directories they have access to for searching bad links. I found one of my sites had links on these directories and I was able to remove them for fairly reasonable price. Thought this is a good tool to do a free quick check for any bad linkbacks on deindexed directories. I know this may be a small portion but every little bit helps.

| TheSEODR

0

Is it bad to no follow all External LInks at the same time?

I am working on more than 40 EMDs. They are good quality brand sites but they all are interlinked to each other through footer links, side bar links. (and they dont have much of linking root domains) Now Some of those sites have been renovated with new templates and these new sites has very few external links (links going out to our own sites) but some of these old sites has 100s of external links (all these external links of course link to our own sites). But anyways, we are planning to no follow all those external links (links that are linking to our own sites) slowly to avoid penalty? question is, can it be bad to implement no follow to all those links on those sites at the same time?Will Google see it as something fishy? (I don't think so) Also, Is it good strategy to no follow all of them? (I think it is) What you guys think ?

| Personnel_Concept

0

Backlinks from foreign language websites?

I have faced an interesting situation about linkbuilding strategy. Currently I am doing SEO for one of my clients located in United Arab Emirates, so accordingly he has a website in English language. And keywords are in English. So what do you think, can the links placed on Russian language websites pass some link juice (make a positive impact on rankings) and in which language (Russian or English) should be the text surrounding the keyword? Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Russel

| smokin_ace

0

Next Step to Improve SERPS?

Hello... Just looking for some opinions on what my next steps should be in regards to improving my rankings in the SERPS. Most of my category and subcategory pages (as well as the home page) have received grades of "A" on SEOMOZ's on page grader... None of my competitors have as much or as unique of content as I do. My question to all of you SEO genius' and experts (i mean that as a great compliment, not sarcasm) is what would your next steps be in terms of moving up in the search results? My url is : http://goo.gl/XUH3f Thanks in advance!

| Prime85

0

Ethical question about setting up a local business directory...

I've just launched a local business directory that allows the small businesses in my local area to get noticed by a very targeted audience. People such as self-employed builders, painters and decorators and the like. As well as helping them out, they'll be helping me out by testing the waters of local keywords and seeing just how difficult and how much traffic they'll get. Kind of like spreading myself across 100's of keywords without the need for domains etc. All the links on there are nofollow, but what are the ethics behind letting my clients have a dofollow link from it? I wouldn't use this directory as a marketing tool for my self and my business, but if I acquired a client from my website or other source, but they would benefit from a dofollow link?

| jasonwdexter

0

Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?

Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?

| RUNNERagency

0

Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?

Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?

| RUNNERagency

0

Build Backlinks on this site? - Advice Please

Hello, I am trying to build some backlinks to my E-Commerce site and was wondering how you all view sites like this: http://www.bookmark4you.com/ If I were to put a listing for my company/site on that site, would that be considered a good backlink or a bad backlink (in terms of Google's guidelines)... There are a bunch of sites like these, online directory or bookmark sites, and i was wondering what the general opinion is on using them for backlinking purposes. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. THANKS!!

| Prime85

0

Attracting custom from 3 cities - Is this the best way to optimize?

Hi, I'm working for a client that draws custom from 3 nearby cities - I was thinking of creating a new page for 2 of the cities, reachable from within the website and not simply doorway pages. Each new page would include (1) General info (2) info relevant to the city in question, if relevant to client - perhaps well-known customers already coming from the city in question (3) transport from the city - directions. Is it OK to do this, or could Google see it as manipulative seeing that business is not geographically located in all 3 cities (in actual fact the business is in just one location, within the official borders of one city, in another city for some administrative services and 40 miles away from the third). Thanks in advance, Luke

| McTaggart

0

Considering which agency to choose for a link building campaign is starting to seem like beating a dead horse.......

So first off, I've got to admit, I really haven't shopped around enough on SEOmoz's Recommended page. I have been doing some shopping, and have considered a few different people. The two main people that we are considering (or should I be saying 'were' right now?) is a company called Mainstreet Host. They have the best price, and when I first came into my partnership with Roseann at Uncommon Thread, she had already paid for some $1,500 trial of sorts. Our problems with these guys? Roseann says the sales guy is extremely pushy They want us to pay them a monthly fee to "optimize 11 pages, create 12 blog posts on wordpress blog, rss on homepage for fresh content, blah blah blah..." I was stuck on the fact that they want a recurring fee for a fairly small job I just looked into their ability to rank for the keyword they are targeting, and they rank #2 for a keyword difficulty score of 83. BUT, I looked into their linkbuilding and it's pretty blackhat. Several blog comments, mostly guest posts on what looked like some sore of article marketing site, and a few missing links according to opensiteexplorer.org did not say anything about link building other than a single Press Release distribution I guess my question is, is the $6,000 they want us to pay for those services actually going to get us to rank for some competitive terms? like keyword difficulty score 30 - 60? The other guys we have been considering is OrangeSoda. Right off the bat, they seem awesome, i mean just take a quick look at their site. but just like with the other company, they have a pretty dark backlink profile too. The only thing that they really have going for them is a few paid links on some sort of what appears to be semi-legitimate advertising partner based network. Google was on their too, near the bottom, which I thought was very strange, because it clearly discloses that its a paid network. They are asking $7,200 for 12 hours per week of work, in which time they will help us go through and fix any technical aspects, create a blog, and create content, as well as build a link building strategy. Should I keep shoppping??

| TylerAbernethy

0

How to idesntify "inorganic" links

I am intending to remove spammy link of my website http://cellspyexpert.com/ which has been ranking well but I noticed a sudden drop in its ranking. I took a lot of care while building links, I tried to get links from relevant high authority websites with high page rank. I used profiling and guest blogging method only and never participated in any link scheme but received following message in google webmaster tools " Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.cellspyexpert.com/" I got this message on 19<sup>th</sup> Sep and ranking dropped on 6<sup>th</sup> Oct 1- Is this EMD issue?? I am pretty sure it is not because of EMD (Exact match domain) as I have been using phrase match, brand name+phrase and other anchor texts. I used exact match also but only 2%. 2- If it is bad quality, inorganic link issue?? Then I am intending to remove inorganic links so that I could send reconsideration request but facing problem in detecting inorganic links. Please advise!!

| shaz_lhr

0

Reciprocal Links NoFollow

I am working on the SEO for a company that sells commercial construction materials and I am noticing that the vast majority of the older, authoritative construction related sites and directories require a reciprocal link to be linked to from their site. 1. If I create a reciprocating link, but nofollow/noindex that page, is that seen as blackhat? Will I see any benefit from this over a link passing page rank? 2. Will these reciprocating links hurt me, or are they worth the risk within a young portfolio? I am seeing well ranked sites listed such as justblinds.com, this would imply they reciprocated a link as well?

| GoogleMcDougald

0

Unnatural Link Profile

Hi All, We are about to take on a new client whose site has been penalised for having a very unnatural link profile. They have over 1k links, which have 5 differing anchor texts, though the majority leans towards one particular phrase. Their previous SEO company had done this for them and the strategy worked, keeping them in the top 3 for most phrases, until Penguin. Now they reside in the 70-100 ranks. My initial though is we need to get rid of a lot of these links, however its going to be labour intensive and as we all know, labour is expensive. The website is nicely designed and has lots of great unique content. Its just the link profile letting it down. My question is; If this were your client, what would you recommend? A link removal program which could take a long time and be very expensive or would you recommend that they start again and build a new site, also expensive and time consuming. or would you suggest something different? If anyone knows of any Link removal people who have done a good job in the past I'd love to get some contact details. Thanks Aran

| Chiefblob

0

Is widgetbait no longer valid at all according to the new quality guidelines?

Google recently updated their quality guidelines. I found this example of something that was against the guidelines very interesting: "Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites, for example:
Visitors to this page: 1,472
car insurance" So, what do you think? Are the links against the guidelines? Or the fact that the link is using an anchor texted keyword? I personally don't see the problem with producing a great widget and putting a link on the bottom saying, "Provided by example.com", but then again it's sort of a self made link. On the other hand it's not completely self made because a webmaster has to like the widget enough to embed it. Thoughts?

| MarieHaynes

1

Very Big Pr blogs

Hi there, I was wonder how come a simple blog with 1-2 page ..not very old (<1 year) ..can get Pr 7 or Pr 8? Take a look: Mit4.info pr 6 , 6 months old... http://odubai.info/ Pr 7 esenderlink.info Pr 8 !!! webstreamingsmania.com/ PR 9 ! Very strange! Can someone explain how they got this <acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym> and if they transfer anything if we post links there? Thanks in advance!

| willyg

0

Fix Bad Links in Google

I have a client who had some grey hat SEO done in the past. Some of their back links aren't from the best neighborhoods. Google didn't seem to mind until 9/28, when they literally disappeared for all searches except for their domain name. Google still has their site indexed, but it's just not showing up. There are no messages in Webmaster Tools. I know Bing has the tool where you can disavow bad links and ask them to discount them. Google doesn't have such a tool, but what is the strategy when you don't have control over the link sources, such as in blog comments? Could this update have been a delayed Penguin ranking change from the latest Penguin Update on the 18th? http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom

| TomBristol

0

Link Building on Blog Posts w/ Ads & Mostly Pictures

I found a group of similar websites that offer anchor text links with good to great domain and page authority (30 to 75), but I'm not sure how "safe" they are. Most of their posts are compilations of images/logos and there are a lot of ads on the page. Would links from sites like TutorialChip.com help or would Google discount them because of the nature of the site? Thanks!

| pbhatt

0

How fast should I make links

I have an eCommerce site. I like to review 100 of my products on Squidoo. There will be 50 lenses each lens will review 2-4 products. Each lens will link to each product review and one link to website URL. at the end of the project I would make around 200-250 links to my site. How should I extent the work. Should I do it within a month? of course I will do my other link buildings along with this task Thanks

| giftbasket4kids

0

Can I be penalized for offering incentives for links and social followers?

A competitor of mine is using contest/loyalty software like ContestBurner or PunchTab to generate social followers and links. This has been very successful, and over the past several months his rankings have improved. Does anyone know if Google is "OK" with this type of program? I'm trying to decide if I should start one myself.

| dfeemster

1

Please help? unique penguin problem with a blogger template

**Can any one help? The problem: **There is a free blogger template on this site http://btemplates.com/2012/blogger-template-crystalweb/ that has a anchor text link to our site using the keyword "wholesale" in the footer, that is the main course of our site being hit with a penguin penalty.**The story so far:**On the 24th April our website dropped out of the serps for our main keywords, traffic has been down 90% ever since, we are a small family run business that relies on the inter-net and goggle for our site to work. Goggle organic serps is about 30% of our turnover and have already had no choice to let 3 people go, problem now is we are left with Me, my Dad and Mum, Both my Brothers and nephew and my wife and my brothers wife so unless we can turn this around I can see us going bankrupt.**What I have done so far:**After the 24th I have learnt a lot about S.E.O , and managed to remove 99% of all bad/spammy links and have now come to a dead end. I have been promoting what we do as a company and promoting our blog over the last 4 months and also built a great twitter/facebook following with lots of re-tweets and shares which we have made some good sales from. We have re-designed most parts of our website and managed to up the conversion rate by 300% We have worked on all aspects of our website to make sure we have little/no duplicate content , have worked on ways to speed up the site and fixed most dead links/404 problems.<var id="yiv904548185yui-ie-cursor"></var>**Now onto our main problem:**After a few weeks of removing links I found a blogger page that kept coming up with the same link, after some detective work I found the template was originally designed by http://www.deluxetemplates.com/ after a few emails we found out that someone paid deluxetemplates to add the link to the site, I'm guessing it was a S.E.O. company we used for 2 years, but they did not admit to this and could not help. A guy called Klodian from deluxtemplates was really helpful and helped remove from his site, also he agreed to a cost of $250 to remove all the pictures on his server to force the blogger's to update, this is what the template from deluxtemplates now looks like vozconuncion.blogspot.co.uk .Now this was only helping fix this issue a small bit as a different site called btemplates also used the template and added it to there website as a free download and hosted the template pictures on there servers. I have emailed a few times, I have sent them twitter messages and also added messages to lots of there templates on there site in the hope they can help, I have also contacted the owner directly on his goggle+1 page but no reply. This template is being downloaded once or twice a day, with no way to get hold of the blogger's using it. As a last resort I offered the owner $1000 to help me remove the template but still no luck.Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve? we are willing to pay to resolve this and will do what ever needs to be done.Thank-you for taking the time to read.Karl.

| wcuk

0

Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?

Hi all, I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages. These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs. I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs. Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it? Thanks in advance, Luke

| McTaggart

0

Sitewide logo footer link - what's the risk?

Hi, an incredibly popular website, with several thousand pages, has offered me a site-wide footer logo link. The site this popular website would backlink to has 50 high quality backlinks (and low volumes of traffic - it's a new site). I am tempted to say no, because of the risk of penalty, but then I started wondering whether a logo link posed the same penalty risk as a text link.

| McTaggart

0

I need de-spam help/advice

For one of my sites I am working on I outsourced SEO about 3 years ago. One of the "tricks" the SEO used at the time was to pay for several Blog posts to be "sponsored" by this web site using exact match keywords for the domain. 1 Where do I look to determine the spammy links pointing to this site? 2 Have you had success getting rid of these bad links?

| kadesmith

0

Will my association's network of sites get penalized for link farming?

Before beginning I found these similar topics here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-domains-on-same-ip-address-same-niche-but-different-locations http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-domains-on-1-ip-address We manage over two dozen dental sites that are individually owned through out the US. All these dentists are in a dental association which we also run and are featured on (http://www.acedentalresource.com/). Part of the dental associations core is sharing information to make them better dentists and to help their patients which in addition to their education, is why they are considered to be some of the best dentists in the world. As such, we build links from what we consider to be valuable content between the sites. Some sites are on different IPs and C-Blocks, some are not. Given the fact that each site is only promoting the dentist at that brick and mortar location but also has "follow" links to other dentists' content in the network we fear that we are in the grey area of link building practices. Questions are: Is there an effective way to utilize the power of the network if quality content is being shared? What risks are we facing given our network? Should each site be on a different IP? Would having some of our sites on different servers make our backlinks more valuable than having all of our sites under the same server? If it is decided that having unique IPs is best practice, would it be obvious that we made the switch? Keep in mind that ALL sites are involved in the association, so naturally they would be linking to each other, and the main resource website mentioned above. Thanks for your input!

| DigitalElevator

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Can a "Trusted Retailer" badge scheme affect us in the SERPs?

Hi Guys, In the last week our website saw a drop on some of our biggest and best converting keywords and we think it might be down to us rolling out a “Trusted Retailer” badge scheme. We sell our products directly to consumers via our website, but we also sell our products to other online resellers. We think badges are a good to show the consumer that we trust a site. On the 17th September we sent out badges to about 39 of our best retailers, two of whom have already put them on their sites. Instead of sending them a flat jpeg, we sent them HTML files containing code that pulled in the image from our servers. We wanted to host the image to make sure that we always had some leverage. So if a company stopped selling our products, or the quality of their site went down, we could just remove the badge. Whilst at it, we stuck a link in there pointing to an FAQ on our website all about trusted retailers and what people need to look out for. We chose the anchor text “(brand name) Trusted Retailer”, because that seemed to be the most relevant. The code looks like this: (our brand) Trusted Retailer You might notice that there is a div just before the link. This is there to stop the user from clicking on the top 65% of the badge (because this contains the shop name and ID number), and we also used a negative text-indent to move the anchor text out of the way. But right underneath this is our Logo, so it’s almost a hidden link, but you can still click it. So far the badge has been put in on two sites, one of which isn’t so great and maybe looks a tiny bit spammy. (They sell mostly through ebay as opposed to on their main site). Also, these sites seem to have put it on most of their pages! So my questions are; Is this seen as black or grey hat? Is it the fact we put in anchor text with our brand? Or is it the fact the url is transparent in the coding? Or is it the fact the sites are using sitewide links? In any case would Google react so quickly as to penalise us in two days? If this is the issue, do you think there’s anything we can do to stop getting penalised? (Other than having to e-mail 39 retailers back and getting them to take the badges down). Thoughts much appreciated – we do our SEO in-house and are still learning every day… Thank you James

| OptiBacUK

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NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!

Hello, I need help from somebody, anybody, in trying to figure out why my site dropped so much for the keyword “wildblue” and “wild blue”. On the week of Feb. 13, 2012, my website jumped from middle of the first page to the fourth page, and then a week or two later jumped completely out of the index (or at least off the top 5 pages). We do not engage in any deceptive practices. Our entire website is centered around this keyword, and we are very relevant, and have informative and continually updated content for visitors. I thought at first we got hit by Panda, but our overall organic traffic has not decreased, it has actually been steadily increasing compared to same time last year. I have tried over the past several months to get us back up, or at least figure out what happened, with no luck. If anyone could advise me on what might have happened, how to correct it, or even has any ideas of how I could figure out what happened I would greatly appreciate it. Website is: http://www.mybluedish.com

| MyNet

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Need some advise on using a micro site

I thought I would use a micro site with just some main product landing pages being used. I would use the same design and code as main site, then re-write the text and then link everything to the new site. “BUT” I'm concerned about getting a penalty (duplicate) as all the anchor text links going to the main site would be identical! EG. To use the same design as the main site I would need to use the same layout etc including navbars, anchor text links in the footer etc.. and I'm worried this may trigger a duplicate content penalty ? Any advise please

| doorguy88

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I would like to know if there is a tool to know what keywords

Hi everyone, I am looking for a keywords searcher or a program that can help me to know which keywords my competitors are using. thanks!

| lnietob

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Index page de-indexed / banned ?

Yesterday google removed our index page from the results. Today they also removed language subdomains (fr.domain.com).. Index page, subdomains are not indexed anymore. Any suggestions? -- No messages in GWT. No malware. Backlink diversification was started in May. Never penguilized or pandalized. Last week had the record of all times of daily UV. Other pages still indexed and driving traffic, left around 40% of total. Never used any black SEO tool. 95% of backlinks are related; sidebar, footer links No changes made of index page for couple months.

| bele

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Clear out Spammy Links

I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck) I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating. Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop. We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

| AmandaJ

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Infographic submission sites potentially offering paid links....

Good Morning/Afternoon fellow Mozzers, I recently created an infographic and am now looking to get it distributed via as many publications as possible. I discovered some great sites with collections of infographics.However I have discovered a multitude of sites offering to review and feature the infographic, or "express" submissions so the graphic features faster for a price..... links below. http://www.amazinginfographics.com/submit-infographics/ http://infographicjournal.com/submit-infographics/ 2 questions 1. Is this considered as buying links? My instincts say Yes. 2. Some sites offer mix of free and "express" paid submissions. If the answer to Q.1 is yes, should I avoid them all together even if my graphic gets picked up free? Thanks in advance for the feedback.

| RobertChapman

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Is it outside of Google's search quality guidelines to use rel=author on the homepage?

I have recently seen a few competitors using rel=author to markup their homepage. I don't want to follow suit if it is outside of Google's search quality guidelines. But I've seen very little on this topic, so any advice would be helpful. Thanks!

| smilingbunny

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Adding Domain Names

Hi all, I am pretty new to SEO but i wanted to check out an idea with you guys, I have a business that is called Totaldriveways and the URL is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk Although Driveways is a big part of what we do, we are also heavily involved in other services to do with landscaping. The idea ive got is to brand each service with the "Total" for eample Total Driveways is a reconisgened name in my area and i would like to expand that into Total Patios Total Artificial Grass Total Driveway cleaning so each page and service come under a similar brand, my question is is it worth buying these domains also and directing them at the specific pages that they are relevant to, these domains are obviously keyword rich and am guessing will create extra traffic, but will i be penalised at all by google etc. I know this is probably simple stuff to alot of you's but i have no idea Thanks John

| totaldriveways

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Best Website Security Service

Having been hacked twice and, it seems, still suffering from problems as a result (file changes and alterations, etc) I'm wondering if there is a good paid service that provides security for websites? I'm an online travel agent so our websites "up-time" and search engine position is vital but I'm spending more time trying sort out our websites' security than selling travel. It would be sensible to pay for a service that would ensure, as much as possible, that our site is secure and any optimisation we do is not cancelled out by hacking and security problems. If anyone could recommend a good company I would be very grateful. Colin

| NileCruises

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Passing page rank with frames - Is this within Google Guidelines?

It appears this site is gaming Google for better rankings. I haven't seen a site do it this before way before. Can you tell me what enables this to get such good rankings, and whether what they are doing is legitimate? The site is http://gorillamikes.com/ Earlier this year this site didn't show up in the rankings for terms like "Cincinnati tree removal" and"tree trimming Cincinnati" etc. The last few months they have been ranking #1 or #2 for these terms. The site has a huge disparity in MozRank (8, very low) vs. Page Rank (6, high). The only links to this page come from the BBB. However, when you look at the source code you find 100% of what is displayed on the site comes from a page on another site via a frame. The content is here: http://s87121255.onlinehome.us/hosting/gorillamikes/ When I go to onlinehome.us I'm redirected to http://www.1and1.com/. I'm only speculating, but my guess is onlinehome.us has a high page rank that it is passing to http://gorillamikes.com/, enabling Gorilla Mikes to achieve PR of 6. Does this make sense? In addition, the content is over optimized for the above terms (they use "Cincinnati (Cincinnat, OH)" in the first three H2 tags on the page. And all of the top menu links result in 404 errors. Are the tactics this site is using legitimate? It appears that everything they're doing is designed to improve search results, and not in ways that are helpful to users. What do you think?

| valkyrk

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HOW TO: City Targeted Landing Pages For Lead Generation

Hi guys, So one of my clients runs a web development agency in San Diego and for lead generation purposes we are thinking of creating him city targeted landing pages which will all be on different domains ie. lawebdesginstudio / sfwebdesigngurus I plan to register these 20-30 domains for my client and load them all up on a my single linux server I have from godaddy. I noticed however today using google's keyword tool that roughly only 5-10 cities have real traffic worth trying to capture to turn into leads. Therefore I am not sure if its even worth building those extra 20 landing pages since they will receive very little traffic. My only thought is, if I do decide to build all 30 landing pages, then I assume I will have a very strong private network of authority websites that I can use to point to the clients website. I mean I figure I can rank almost all of them page 1 top 5 within 2-3 months. My question is: 1. Do city targeted micro sites for the purpose of lead generation still work? If so are there any threads that have more info on this topic? 2. Do you suggest I interlink all 30 sites together and perhaps point them all to the money site? If so i'm wondering if I should diversify the ip's that I used to register the domains as well as the whois info. Thanks guys, all help is appreciated!

| AM213

0

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