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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • SuperMikeLewis


    My company has been approached a number of times by computer generated content providers (like Narrative Science and Comtex). They are providing computer generated content to a number of big name websites. Does anyone have any experience working with companies like this? We were burned by the first panda update because we were busing boilerplate forms for content

    | SuperMikeLewis
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  • icecarats


    Hi all, I'm posting what is sure to be a common question, but I can't seem to find much information by searching Q&A over the last month so thought I'd throw this out there. There's a lot of 'what do I do??' questions about 'unnatural link notification', but most of them are from first timers. We're pretty far along in the process and it feels like we're going nowhere, so I was hoping to pick the brains of anyone else who's 'been there'. We have a client that we inherited with an unnatural link profile; they were warned shortly after we took them on (around March was the first warning). We compiled an apologetic letter, specifically identified a previous agency who >was< doing bad things, mentioned things would be different from now on, and provided a list of links we were working on to remove based on WMT and OSE and some other sources. This was submitted in early June. Traffic on the main keyword plummeted; ranking went from top 5 to about mid-page 4. We got hit with that same rash of Unnatural Link warnings on July 23 that everyone else did and after looking around I decided not to respond to those. We got a response to the reinclusion request submitted in June above, saying the site was still violating guidelines. This time I went all out, and provided a Google docs spreadsheet of the over 1,500 links we had removed, listed the other links that had no contact info (not even in WHOIS), listed the links we had emailed/contact formed but got no response, everything. So they responded to that recently, simply saying 'site still violates guidelines' with no other details, and I'm not sure what else I can do. The campaign above was quite an investment of resources and time, but I'm not sure how to most efficiently continue. I promised specific questions, so here they are: Are the link removal services (rmoov, removeem, linkdelete, et al) worth investigating? To remove the 1,500 links I mentioned above I had a full time (low paid) person working for a week. Does Google even reconsider after long engagements like this? Most of what I've read has said that inclusion gets cleared up on the first/second request, and we're at bat for the third now. Due to the lack of feedback I don't know if their opinion is "nope, you just missed some" or "you are so blackhat you shouldn't even bother asking anymore". One of the main link holders is this shady guy who runs literally thousands of directories the client appears in thanks to previous SEO agency, and wants $5 per link he removes. Should I mention this to Google, do they even care? Or is it solely our responsibility? Thanks in advance for any advice;

    | icecarats
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  • stevefidelity


    I recently had an old client that called me in a bit of a panic over a significant loss of rankings due to penguin. The internet marketing company she had hired, is actually a very large player in the industry, but because I'm not out to slander anyone, I won't name names. They engaged in some "link building" that resulted in the vast majority of the website's anchor text being keyword-rich, exact match anchor text from such gems as www.link-add.net. They also placed a couple dozen incredibly keyword-rich articles on the site that were clearly not meant for human consumption, and were only accessible through a footer link that's only located on the homepage. The client forwarded me a response from them saying, (quoting verbatim). "We have never engaged in any black hat SEO techniques, nor will we ever engage in any black hat SEO techniques. Just that notion is ridiculous" So clearly, the strategy I outlined above, in the mind of this company, is not black-hat SEO. So getting to my point: **if that's not black hat, then what is? ** I'm posing this question largely because I'm appalled that a large internet marketing company seems to be suggesting that the aforementioned techniques represent good, sound SEO, and I'd like to get an idea as to what people in our industry actually feel are good, acceptable practices. Where is the line? Can we not set higher standards for ourselves?

    | stevefidelity
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  • freebetinfo


    I run a website that's been ranked well for good keywords related to our business for some time. It was founded back in 2007 and has been there a while. Recently a new site has popped up that ranks brilliantly for everything. It's a new site, and the only redeeming factor I can see is that it has an AddThis box showing the Facebook Likes and Google Plus Ones, and they are around 400 Facebook Likes and 80 Google+ (for every page that ranks). Any other pages on their site which doesn't have any Facebook likes or Google Plus Ones, they don't rank. Our site doesn't have any likes or pluses. Is this making the difference? I stress that other than this our sites are very similar, other than the fact we've been around over 5 years.

    | freebetinfo
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  • yoni45


    That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"? That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices? Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices? I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt? Thanks!

    | yoni45
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  • StickyRiceSEO


    Content is syndicated legally (licensed). My questions are: What is the best way to approach this situation? Is there any a change to compete with the original site/page for the same keywords? Is it okay to do so? Will there be any negative SEO impact on my site?

    | StickyRiceSEO
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  • petestein1


    I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
    Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
    Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉

    | petestein1
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  • vansy


    Wherever you look, you see experts advising people not to use automated tools. To do things the right way. That a website with good content will win over a site with tons of junky links. So I came to seomoz for some enlightenment. I have a website that I created, it gets an A here on the website auditor. I have written over fifty completely original articles. I am barely making spot 10 in and out. The sites that are ranking are terrible. Some have one post, have completely wrong information, have pasted the product page as their own. Have no privacy page, contact  page etc. Many of them are in broken English and full of misspellings. So I go the Open Site Explorer here and what do i find? Seomoz has it right on the nose. The site authority,linking domains etc are highest for the #1 site, #2 etc. So I examine the links and what do I find? Quality backlinks? Authority backlinks? Hardly. I find completely junk links, that were made with xrumer or scrapebox . Russian bride sites, completely unrelated to the niche. Backlinks that were purchased on Fiverr. These are the types of backlinks Ive avoided. The kind the experts say to stay away from. Yet these people are making serious money with lousy websites and lousy backlinks. Ive looked at others and its the same thing. Content is king? I dont think so. It looks to me like I SHOULD be making tons of these lousy links. Im not sure what direction to go in at this point. So Id like to hear some suggestions.

    | vansy
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  • GladdySEO


    I recently acquired rights to a URL that is one of our keywords. Instead of developing a landing page with that URL and then only linking it back to the company root, I was thinking about adding a link within the company's global nav that pushes to this new URL (and new page content of course). Are there any Pros or Cons to doing it that way? Thank you so much!

    | GladdySEO
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  • SnowFX


    Hi there I want to drive traffic to one of our eCommerce sites by building satelite sites that focus on our chosen niche longtail keywords. so, 'where can i buy fake snow' wherecanibutfakesnow.com The problem is for other keywords ie. fake 'ice cubes', the com and co.uk are already taken. So, my question is, should i settle for a .net / .biz / .eu etc. or choose the next best keyword/phrase that i can secure a .com/.co.uk top level domain name for? Many thanks, Ben

    | SnowFX
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  • THB


    Pseudo question: I have a website that has 100K pages.  On about 50K of those pages I have information that is fed to me via an outside 3rd-party website. Now, I like to give credit where credit is due, so I add a backlink to the website that is feeding me this content.  A simple backlink like so: Information provided by: Company ABC Now, this 3rd-party website wants me to remove the nofollow tags from the backlink, but I am very, very skeptical because to me, sending ~50K dofollow backlinks to a single site might make the Google monster upset with me. This 3rd-party site is being very hard-headed about this, to the point where I am thinking of terminating the relationship all together.  I digress. Scoured the net before writing this, but couldn't really find anything directly related to my issue. Thoughts?  Is a nofollow required here?  We're not talking 1 or 2 links here; we're talking tens of thousands (50K is low; it will probably be upwards of 100K when all is said and done as my site has many, many pages). Thanks in advance.

    | THB
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  • opusbyseo


    We have a website (mysite.com) that we control and a subdomain (affiliate.mysite.com) that is 3rd-Party Content completely out of our control. I've found that nearly all or our Crawl Errors are coming from this subdomain. Same deal with 95% of our warnings: they all come from the subdomain. The two website are very much interlinked, as the subdomain serves up the header and footer of the root domain through iFrames and the 3rd-party content in the middle-section. On the root domain there are countless links pointing at this 3rd-party subdomain. How do these errors affect the root domain, and how do you propose we address the issue?

    | opusbyseo
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  • RobertChapman


    Howdy Mozzers, For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback. How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty? Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon. Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem. "Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site." Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

    | RobertChapman
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  • inhouseseo


    I have an opportunity to place a guest blog on a site. The site has the following metrics: DA/PA: 24/36 Inbound links: 3K+ from 16 root domains Here is what makes me uneasy: The number of links from the same domain, suggesting sitewide or footer links When I look at the backlinks, there are links from sites like http://best-american-law-firms.info/, or http://www.luvbuds.info/. They sare blogroll links that are likely paid for. Would you get a link from this blog?

    | inhouseseo
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  • Sangeeta


    The rankings for our transcription site (gmr transcription) fell around Jul 19. Its been an uphill task to get the rankings back particularly for the keyword 'transcription services'. As per our opinion except for one competitor the rankings of the other top 4 makes no sense to us. We have tested our site and there seems to be no reason for it to be penalized. After a month of trial I am reaching out to the community for advise.

    | Sangeeta
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  • Radomski


    i want to build high piority links and some high pr one's. what tool should i use? i was thinking of using scrapbox. any insights? i already have 2 high ones from youtube and google +1

    | Radomski
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  • cyberlicious


    Fantastic day! I am seeing exact match domains still dominating.  SEOmoz has some insight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exact-match-domains-are-far-too-powerful-is-their-time-limited But that's from two years ago.  Is Google ever going to target the manipulators that buy up all the exact match domains? One of our partners is getting the itch, and I am running out of explanations on why we don't manipulate.  But if these practices are dominating their industry, what to do?  I have to get paid to feed the family so just telling the client buh-bye isn't going to work.  At least not in this stage of agency building. Their root domain doesn't do much for them, however, you know we well optimize those subdomains and rank those fine. But if my client can just buy an exact match domain, and it will take less SEO work to get it ranked then why not?  He has the SEO expert in his back pocket to clean up the mess IF they would even get a penalty or drop in rank. Is all SEO really is find algo hole, manipulate, penalty, fix, find algo hole, manipulate, penalty, fix.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Please share your experiences and insight! Thanks, Ben

    | cyberlicious
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  • wcuk


    Hi Over the last 4 months I have been trying to remove as many poor quality links as possible in the hope this will help us recover. I have come across some site's that the page our back-link is on has been de-indexed, goggle shows this when I look at the cached page... 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGNI_enGB482GB482&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fforom.eovirtual.com%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D84 was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins> If goggle is showing this message do I have to still try to remove the link, or is it a case goggle has already dismissed the link?

    | wcuk
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  • Oklahoma_


    Everyplace I check, the pagerank for both of those domains is either 0 or NA. However on this site oru.edu actually has a pagerank and this is the only source I can find for that. The sub www.oru.edu still has a zero on this site. A historical checker has oru.edu a N/A ranking just a few days ago and in June.

    | Oklahoma_
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  • McTaggart


    Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names). To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed. Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.

    | McTaggart
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  • stevefidelity


    I just stumbled upon an SEO company's website that says they are a 'Google Preferred Agency'. This isn't just a line of copy on the site, it's featured prominently on the site, and they use the Google logo as well. I've never heard of a 'Google Preferred Agency'. One would think that even if there was such a thing, that it would involve a link back to a profile page on Google like they do with AdWords/Analytics partners... Am I missing something, or is this company doing something a little shady? I don't want to toss the name of the company out there because I don't want to publicly bash them.

    | stevefidelity
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  • YNWA


    Hi, What I want to know is, if listing multiple items of the same product, but they are available in different colours, should I name them the same but just change the colour at the end eg Lyle & Scott Polo Shirt White, Lyle & Scott Polo Shirt Blue Or should I vary it, to get the different page titles that cover different terms? eg Lyle & Scott Polo Shirt White and then Lyle & Scott Polo Blue and then Lyle & Scott Long Sleeve Polo Red? And finally, If my page has a item Title which is a clickable link in the store, then a Short Description which is also a clickable link on the store, so each give out some sort of keyword internal anchor text line? Then should I base my SEO Title and H1 title on the Item Title name exactly? Or mix it up again? Thanks

    | YNWA
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  • McTaggart


    This boundary thing seems to be haunting me at the mo. Oh what I'd give for somewhere within a defined boundary! Anyway, just noticed a client has one city in its official postal address, and another city under its geotag. So I'm looking at the title tags and I'm thinking of mentioning both cities on the main entry pages (6 of them) then dividing mention in sub pages. Is this acceptable to Google? Might they see mention of both cities in homepage title tag (and other entry pages) as spammy. I don't want to upset Google!!! PS. Both cities are core markets. I would say they're of equal importance in terms of current business bookings and business potential.

    | McTaggart
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  • ilyaelbert


    My Question Is I have 16 pages on my site that were all indexed until yesterday now there are only 3  indexed. I tried resubmitting my site map, and when i did it was the same result as before 3 pages indexed and 13 pages deindexed. I was wondering if someone could explain to me why this is happening and what I can do to fix it? Keep in mind my site is almost three months old, and this has happened before but, it fixed itself over time thanks.

    | ilyaelbert
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  • ilyaelbert


    My question is I blog commented on this site http://blogirature.com/2012/07/01/half-of-200-signals-in-googles-ranking-algorithm-revealed/#comment-272 under the name "Peter Rota". For some reason the recent comments is a site wide link so, bascially my link from my website is pretty much on each page of their site now. I also noticed that the anchor text for each one of my links says "Peter Rota". This is my concern will google think its spammy if im on a lot of pages on a same site for one blog comment, and will I be penailzied for the exact same anchor text on each page? If this is the case what could I do in trying to get the links removed? thanks

    | ilyaelbert
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  • JonathanRolande


    Hi, I hope you are all well. Would there be any problem with exchanging a guest blog, so two websites doing a guest post for each other and both sites linking back to each other. I don't think this would be an issue on a small scale though I just wanted to see what everyone else thought. Are there any other things I should bear in mind when doing this as well? Kind Regards

    | JonathanRolande
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  • Saunders1865


    My site's domain authority has gone down by a few points recently. What the best ways of increasing it? It's currently 29 out of 100. What is a good domain authority number?

    | Saunders1865
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  • Bragg


    I have read Eric Enge's Comprehensive Guide To Hidden Text but I'm no coder so I would appreciate some clarification. Am I assuming correctly that the following is hidden text coded within a style sheet: here I am! Thanks!

    | Bragg
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  • RobertChapman


    Howdy fellow Mozzers.... Since Googles Penguin Update I am overly cautious when reviewing our link profile. I spotted 2 domains linking to us yesterday, 80+ links from each domain to our homepage. This looked superstitious, site wide links effectively. At first inspection I couldn't spot the links....they turned out to be two individual comments, but as the site had a plugin with "most recent comments", 1 link became 80. The link is an exact match of the individuals name who made the comment. And is a result of filling out the comment form. Name: Website: Comment: By filling out the name and website the name becomes the anchor text for the link to the website. Long story short...do you think this is penguin esq. link spam? Is it not? Or is it just not worth the risk and remove them anyway???

    | RobertChapman
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  • Dweber


    I just took on a client and first thing I saw in Webmaster Tools was the dreaded "Unnatural Link Patterns" message dated Apr 7th, 2012.  MajesticSEO is reporting 212 backlinks, OSE is reporting 251.  Nothing out of the ordinary, in fact they only anchor text is their brand. However, we then ran an SEO PowerSuite Crawl and found 429 backlinks with 78.1% of links use the anchor text "here" and 77.9% of all links point to the same URL.  If this is indeed true I can see why they got the message from Google. The company has admitted they hired a service to do SEO for $299/mo for several months but when they saw no results they quit.  Could this company really have gone after "here". It not, I can't find anything that would give them the message they got from Google Webmaster Tools.

    | Dweber
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  • MichaelWeisbaum


    I have a client that has been paying someone for what is basically directory placement on very specific niche sites that they have created. These sites are exact match keyword domains with not very high PA or DA (they're in the teens) and they provide no direct traffic. It's basically a link wheel that is probably helping them to rank for some of their bigger holy grail keywords. They are also providing some low quality article/blog marketing on these sites. Ultimately, they link to them ALOT and it's working in this specific niche. This client no longer wants to pay for these services, but there's the possibility of all of the links being taken down and their rankings being set back a ton. Has anybody ever experienced this and if so, how did you deal with it? What are some good tactics? Any tips would be great.

    | MichaelWeisbaum
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  • darkanweb


    Hi I have heard that penguin penalizes a site for bad backlinks. Do you think that it is true? Do you think that is possible for someone to penalize my website adding my link to some spam website? I'm worried that someone could do it...

    | darkanweb
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  • IanTheScot


    So last December we saw our hard work pay off as our Panda penalty was lifted and our traffic shot back up to pre-Panda levels. Then in February we received this note: We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Since December we've lost position on 80% of our top 100 keywords. I've gone through our links and can't figure out what the problem may be. Maybe I'm not using OSE properly. We don't buy links so I'm not sure what the problem is. If someone can walk me through using OSE to see what the problem may be I would appreciate it. Our domain is http://bit.ly/rbkYkp

    | IanTheScot
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  • McTaggart


    Hi, just wondering what your thoughts are on this one - several businesses I work for are located in in-between places. For example, one is in one city for its address, but in another city's council (/state) area. Another is in a rural area, almost exactly the same distance between 2 cities (about 10 miles either way). Both businesses mention both cities on several pages of their websites, including in title tags (including homepage title tags), and it seems to be working OK in terms of rankings (ie they're ranking well for keyphrases for both cities). Is it acceptable practice to mention both cities in a single title tag though? That's my question. (some of this confusion dates back to UK local authority boundary/name changes, in 2009)

    | McTaggart
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  • PedroM


    Hello, The SEO world is a bit confuse in the last months with the Google Antartic updates. Its normal since Google is trying to kill SEO to have more Adwords publicity results. My most recent doubt is about directories. I heard Matt Cutts from Google in a recent Google Hangout saying that registering a website in directorys was ok, but not the ideal method to become relevant in the internet world. However it seems that this procedure is not against the Google policies. Now, here in the forums, I already saw someone writing about adding your site to directories and how dangerous that situacion is. So, whats your opinion about adding your site to free and pay directories as first link-building strategy? If directories are out of the question, why SEOmoz as a huge list of paid directorys? Is SEOmoz outdate?

    | PedroM
    1
  • imageworks-261290


    What does everyone think about this article? http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2 … l-content/ I tend to think its off base, Link building still works and there are tons of things that have to do with SEO that have nothing to do with link building... I think its actually quite ridiculous and written by people that actually no nothing about SEO...kind of a lame attempt by Forbes, and if anything at all, this is just forbes practicing "SEO" with a link attraction post like this. Becase SEO, is NOT dead

    | imageworks-261290
    1
  • HandsomeWeb


    I like the guest blogging idea for two reasons.  One, it builds links, and two, it allows me to add content to a lot of blogs that are really interested in growing a lot of good content.  But I often read articles that give credit to another article, that give credit to another article. I have been offered plenty of documents for client blogs, but I am worried that at some point in the future Google will decide all this guest blogging is similar to link trading and selling. What does everyone else think of guest blogging?

    | HandsomeWeb
    1
  • GroupeDSI


    I'd like to know if there's any difference between using m.domain.com/pages or domain.com/mobile/pages for a mobile website? Which one is better? Why? Does Google treat the two differently? As you can see, I'm new to this! This is my first time working on a mobile website, so any links/resources would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

    | GroupeDSI
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  • soulmktpro


    When the press office sends content about my business portals and it is published, is it considered a natural link or not? What is the correct form to put the link on this content?

    | soulmktpro
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  • soulmktpro


    I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t  I need to worry about it?

    | soulmktpro
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  • soulmktpro


    I have a shop and also a blog where I explain better the products on the site, such as: how to use, tips, recipes and more. How do I place the product link on my blog? Should I put a link with nofollow? Should not I put link? To put the link anchor text or just put the page URL? Don’t I need to worry about it?

    | soulmktpro
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  • VermilionDesignInteractive


    We are moving our Online store to a new service and we need to create 301's for all of the old product URLs. Being that the old store was hosted off-site, what is the best way to handle the 301 re-directs? Thanks!

    | VermilionDesignInteractive
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  • Liammcmullen


    I have provided a site maps for google but although it craws my site www.irishnews.com at 6:45AM the details in the site map are not seen on google for a few days  -  any ideas how to get this feature working better would be great. example <url><loc>http://www.irishnews.com/news.aspx?storyId=1126126</loc>
    <priority>1</priority>
    <lastmod>2012-01-23</lastmod>
    <changefreq>never</changefreq></url> thanks

    | Liammcmullen
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  • LaunchAStartup


    General Idea: Rules: The winner is the person who ranks highest for "Random Easy to Rank for Key Phrase" Prize: Some cool prize White or Black hat?

    | LaunchAStartup
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  • 1000Bulbs


    I've searched the web for any objective articles, good or bad, written about Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers written in the past two years. Other than the occasional discussion board question, SEOs are silent about these services. I know back in 2006, Rand looked upon them almost favorably. But what has happened since then? Is there any legitimate use for these services anymore (as a link builder)?

    | 1000Bulbs
    0
  • soulmktpro


    I'm a developer and each time than I put at the bottom of the sites I build my company's logo with a link to our site. Could This action harm my website? Should I use nofollow or don’t I have to worry about that?

    | soulmktpro
    0
  • soulmktpro


    What should I do with links that Google considers link unnatural, but I have no control over them?

    | soulmktpro
    0
  • clairerichards


    We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's  trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?

    | clairerichards
    0
  • Martin_S


    Hi all, A client has been penalised, having received the message in Google Webmasters last week, along with two more yesterday. It seems the penalty is for something specific: “As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole“. This is the first time I've had to deal with this so I'll be a bit layman about it The penalty, firstly, seems to be for the old domain, from which there is a re-direct to the current one. This redirect has been in place since Feb 2012 (no link building has been done for the old domain since then). In Webmasters, I have the old and new domains set up separately and the messages are only coming for the old (but affecting the new, obviously).  I need to determine if it’s the old or new URL I’m being hit for, or would that even matter? Some questionable links I can see in WM: There is an affiliate for whom WM is showing 154,000 links (all followed) from their individual products listings to the client’s site (as a related product) but they’re linking to the new domain if that matters. Could this affiliate be an issue? There is also Updowner, which has added 2000+ links unbeknownst to me but apparently they are discounted by Google. I see a ton of recent directory submissions - right up until last week - that I am not responsible for. Could that be intentional spam targeting? I did also use a 3<sup>rd</sup> party link building company for Feb, March and April who ‘manually’ submitted the new domain to directories and social bookmarking sites. Could this be issue? For what kind of time-scale are penalties usually imposed - how far back (or how recently) are they penalising for?  Ranking were going really well until this happened last Thursday. Will directories with non-followed links effect us negatively - one such one has over 2000 links. What is the most conclusive way to determine which are the poor, penalty-incurring links pointing to us? I know I now have to contact all the dodgy directories the site is now listed on to get links removed, but any and all advice on how to rectify this, along with determining what had gone wrong, will be most appreciated. Cheers, David

    | Martin_S
    0
  • AndyMediaLounge


    Hi, I've attached a copy of our Google ranking for one of our keywords for our site and a competitor. Also shown is the number of external links over time for the same 2 sites. There seems to be a striking resemblance between the 2 sites so could this be the result of negative SEO? What's the best way to determine whether you've been targeted for negative SEO? Thanks, site-analysis.jpg

    | AndyMediaLounge
    0

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