Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO
Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.
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New domain or flagged domain?
New client had a domain get flagged by Google and disappear from search rankings. He left is old website company and wants us to design new site using the flagged domain. Are we better off using a new domain or try to resurrect the flagged domain?
| Group20 -
Link Quality and Anchor Text
ok I was wondering how to determine the quality of a link and if there is a way to tell that the site linking to you could be passing on penalized link juice to your site. Also i would like to know some of yalls opinion on using anchor text links in articles and blogs. Now that google seems to have taken some of its "importance" away
| daugherty0 -
Best use of domains with keywords
I own a domain with just the company name in it (no keywords) that I use as main domain. I also own some other domain with keywords inside that right now I redirect all to the main domain with a 301 redirect. What is the best use for these domains? Should I use them when I do link building or is better to use just the main domain? Can they be useful to increase the main domain link juice/page rank? If yes, how? Thanks
| darkanweb0 -
Multiple domains pointed at one site
I know things are changing and the things Google thinks are cheating searchers from finding what they are really looking for are changing too. So, I have multiple domain names that are related to my site, but not the actual site name. For instance, I have a certification program called Certified NetAnalyst that has a few domains for it... .com, .org and other derivatives like NetAnalyst. I would like to point the domains to my main company web site and not create a site just for the certification. Does Google think it is cheating to point domain names with my company branding names to my main web site? What about domain name forwarding to a specific URL, like taking the certification name domains and pointing them to the certification page instead of the main site? Wondering if one could no follow (don't know how to do that) the domain forwarding links so it is not duplicate content? Is that possible in some way? Could you put another robots.txt file with excludes in the domain forwarding url landing page so it would not be duplicate content? For the future I want all SEO "juice" to go to the main domain, but the keyword value of the domain names is valuable. I sure would be grateful if someone that has a good understanding and specific recent experience with Google policy and enforcement could offer some sage and practical advice and perhaps a case study example where Google "likes it" or on the other hand a good explanation of why I may not wish to do this! Thank You! Bill Alderson www.apalytics.com
| Packetman0071 -
Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
Hello there ! Everything is in the subject of this post but here is the context : we are a web agency and we, among others, build websites for our clients (most of them are shops). Until now, we put a link in their footer, like "developped by MyWebShop". But we don't know if it is bad or not. With only one website we can have like hundred of backlinks at once, but is it good for SEO or not ? Will Google penalize us thinking that is blackhat practices ? Is it better to put our link in the "legal notices" or "disclaimer" part of the websites ? What is the best practice for a lasting SEO ? I hope you understand my question, Thnak you in advance !
| mywebshop0 -
Why won't my home page rank for branded terms?
Hello, I've been trying to figure out what factors are causing my home page not to rank for my branded terms. The site is www.lipozene.com and after the late April Google algorithm our rankings have disappeared off the map for the term "lipozene". Different element of the site show up in organic rankings, including our shopping cart (http://shop.lipozene.com) as high as page two. However, the home page is not ranking organically. On Yahoo & Bing we have never dropped out of the number 1 spot. We did engage in some link building activities, however we've removed nearly all of the links that were created by our SEO guy. I did NOT receive any notifications from Google regarding their link policy. If you search for lipozene.com we rank #1. Any thoughts on what we're missing thats causing us to not rank is greatly apprecaited. Thanks!
| lipoweb0 -
Does PR 7, PR 8, PR 9 links help really?
HI GUYS, I have been offered a few link opportunities on websites that have a PR 7, 8 & 9 but will it help my rankings because the website it not related whatsoever to what my website is about.. My website is about insurance and these high PR websites are not related to insurance.. Does it really matter??? Any guidance much apprciate please guys... Thanks Gareth
| GAZ090 -
Would Headspace Plug-in be a bad idea?
We use the plug in headspace for some posts because some things we want to show in a certain way on our site ie with a certain title but we want the title to be more descriptive for google. It used to work really well but now I have noticed a lot of posts that used to do really well in search being flagged up for multiple meta description and headers that I wondered wether they would be harming the site's query stats? Does anyone think that after the penguin/panda updates etc using headspace might be a negative option?
| luwhosjack0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
| inhouseseo0 -
Someone COPIED my entire site on Google- what should I do?
I purchased a very high ranked and old site a year or so ago. Now it appears that the people I purchased from completely copied the site all graphics and content. They have now built that site up high in rankings and I dont want it to compromise my site. These sites look like mirror images of each other What can I do?
| TBKO0 -
Does it fall under cloaking in pagination?
When i am trying to implement rel=next and prev tag in my pages and due to prefetching feature of firefox browser some how more calls are coming to my server for one page and its effecting my page performance. Solution that i can think of is 1. Increase my server capacity to handle it smoothly - not possible to invest for this change 2. Show this tags only when bot crawls the pages and not when user is coming through browser. My question is does option 2 fall under cloaking ?
| Myntra0 -
SEO for location outside major city
Hello, I'm hoping to get some opinions on optimising a site for a client based 30 minutes outside of Dublin. Obviously there is a higher search volume for "x in Dublin" than "x in small town". What do you think the best strategies are for incorporating the "Dublin" into keywords? For example is it OK to use phrases like "x near Dublin" or "x in Greater Dublin", or do you think this is a bit misleading? The client in question sells good online, so the customer wouldn't physically have to visit the store. Thanks!
| gcdtechnologies0 -
Dentist office website has foreign country backlinks. Scrap it or Move On
Another SEO person who was working my potential dental customer website managed to hookup over 147 backlinks to various bogus weather sites, watch sites, chinese sites etc. The dentist owns the URL which is "dentist" plus his zipcode. Is it worth continuing SEO on this site or should I scrap the URL? I am worried that Google may take action on this site sometime in the future and all the work I will do will be lost. He does have another website, because SEO's keeps trying to sell dentists microsites... This site isn't too bad but he doesn't own the URL but the url is a combination of the two doctors names and isn't easy to remember... and we would have to spend time trying to gain control of the URL. Suggestions?
| Czubmeister0 -
How best to do Location Specific Pages for Eccomerce Post Panda Update..
Hi , We have an eCommerce site and currently we have a problem with duplicate content. We created Location specific landing pages for our product categories which initially did very well until the recent Google Panda update caused a big drop in ranking and traffic. example http://xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/London/100 http://.xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/Manchester/100 Much of the content on these location pages is the same or very similar apart from different H1 tag, title tag and in some cases slight variations on the on page content but given that these items can be hired from 200 locations it would take years to have unique content for every location for each category... We did this originally in April as we can't compete nationally but we found it was easier to compete locally ,hence the creation of the location pages and it did do well for us until now. My question is , since the last Google Panda update, our traffic has dropped 40% , and rankings have gone through the floor and we are stuck with this mess Should we get rid off (301 ) all of the location specific pages for each of the categories ot just keep say 10 locations per cities as the most popular ones and either do No follow no index the other locations or 301's or what would people recommend ? The only examples I can see on the internet that others do with multiple locations is to have a store finder type thing... but you cant' rank for the individual product /category doing it that way... If anyone has any advice or good examples of sites I could see that employ a good location url specific method, please let me know. thanks Sarah
| SarahCollins0 -
Duplicate user reviews from hotel based database?
Hello, Just got a new client who has a hotel comparison site, the problem is the reviews and the hotel data is all pulled in from a database, which is shared and used by other website owners. This obviously brings up the issue for duplicate content and panda. I read this post by Dr Pete: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content but am unsure what steps to take. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Its about 200,000 pages. Thanks Shehzad
| shehzad0 -
Link package review and recommendations
Hello there, I recently spoke to a contractor that offered me the following package, and i have to ask, in this post-penguin world, does it make sense to pursue this kind of linking? Or will it be considered spam. They said it's a manual submission process and they will 'do their best' to ensure that it's under a related category, but can't promise anything in regards to that. What should i be requesting in this post-penguin world? How do i get quality backlinks that won't harm me given the current environment? Any help is greatly appreciated, here is the package info: 1. 900 links submissions = 450 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links - The links are built by manually publishing 5 Original Articles (500 words each) on 125 different article sites (each published article will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 10 keywords and 10 different URLs of your site to build the links.70% of our Article Sites have PR 2 to 6, all with different C classes IPs. 2. 300 links submissions = 150 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 4 Reviews for your site from 4 different accounts (we can use up to 4 URLs of your site to link back) on 150 Social Bookmarking sites, 90% of the sites have PR 2 to 8, all with different C classes IPs. 3. 480 links submissions = 240 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 3 Original Press Releases on 35 Press Release sites(each published press release will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 6 keywords and 6 different URLs of your site to build the links. All our Press Release Sites have PR 2 to 7 all with different C classes IPs. 4. 220 links submissions = 110 Guaranteed One Way blog links – These links are built by publishing 3 Original Blog Article (300 words each) with 2 back links to your site on 20 different free blog sites. These free blog sites are our sites (new sites with PR 0) which we are promoting to get the highest PR for them and your blog back links too.
| symbolphoto0 -
"take care about the content" is it always true?
Hi everyone, I keep reading answer ,in reference to ranking advice, in wich the verdict is always the same: "TAKE CARE ABOUT THE CONTENT INSTEAD OF PR", and phrases like " you don't have to waste your time buying links, you have first of all to engage your visitors. ideally it works but not when you have to deal with small sites and especially when you are going to be ranked for those keywords where there's not too much to write. i'll give you an example still unsolved: i've got a client who just want to be ranked first for his flagship store, now his site is on the fourth position and the first ranked is a site with no content and low authority but it has the excact keyword match domain. tell me!!! what kind of content should i produce in order to be ranked for the name of the shop and the city?? the only way is to get links.... or to stay forth..... if you would like to help me, see more details below: page: http://poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it keyword: poltrona frau brescia competitor ranked first: http://turra.poltronafraubrescia.it/ competiror ranked second: http:// poltronafraubrescia.com/
| guidoboem0 -
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
| MangoMan160 -
So what's up with UpDowner.com?
I've noticed these guys in link profiles for several sites I manage. They'll usually show up around 1,000-10,000 times in the backlink profile. From what I can tell they index websites, build up keyword relationships, and then when you search for something on their site (e.g. poker) they'll present a list of related sites with stats about them. The stats seem to be yanked straight from Alexa. Where the backlink comes from is that every time 'your' site shows up for a search result they'll put a little iframe that contains your site. This means if your site's name/keywords are pretty broad, you could be showing up thousands and tens of thousands of times as being linked from these guys on their pages that Google indexes. And Google indexes, boy do they ever. At the height, they had over 53 million pages indexed. That has apparently shrunk now to around 25 million. I believe their strategy is to generate a crap-load of automated content in the hopes they can cash in on obscure long tails. So my questions for you guys are: Are you seeing them in your backlinks too? Should I block their spider/referrers? What is their deal man?
| icecarats0 -
Huge diifference linking root domains in SEO MOZ and opensite explorer
Hi there, I have fairly large site that has never really been optimised. I think an old forum i hosted has either been spammed or my webmaster at the time used some black hat techniques to get me more root linking domains. I am a newbie and would really appreciate if someone could just quickly look at my donain and confirm that this is a problem and something i should fix before i start my SEO campaign. I am also worried this will negatively effect my domain authority. I dont really want to broadcast my domain so if anyoone would be so kind to confirm the problem so i cant start to research the answer. Thanks v much
| nimble0 -
Purchased an expiring domain, Now the pagerank has gone.
A few days ago I had asked a question regarding purchasing an expiring domain to redirect to a new related site. The post can be found here >>> http://www.seomoz.org/q/purchasing-an-expiring-domain-with-quality-related-links The domain has some great links with several being from PR5 pages on nih.gov aswell as several keyword rich domains. This made my day and I ended up paying $309 for it. So today I have the domain with the registrar network solutions who I believe are owned by Google, not sure if that is the truth or not as I can't find any info on that. now my domain is no longer indexed in Google and the toolbar's pagerank has dropped from a 4 to a 0. It was not my choice to use network solutions but namejet only use them or ENOM. I have now installed a wordpress site on the domain to see if any pagerank exist, if it does then the site will shortly be indexed in Google without me building any links to it. Just 2 days ago the site was in Google, had the correct info:domainname.com command and now the info: command shows nothing. the site is either banned or all of the actual pagerank has been removed by Google. I am a little bit dissapointed in this even though it was initially an experiment to see if I could purchase good links through expiring domains. The thing is I am seeing people purchase domains with good links in excess of $3000. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
| umtmedia0 -
Pages higher than my website in Google have fewer links and a lower page authority
Hi there I've been optimising my website pureinkcreative.com based on advice from SEOMoz and at first this was working as in a few weeks the site had gone from nowhere to the top of page three in Google for our main search term 'copywriting'. Today though I've just checked and the website is now near the bottom of page four and competitors I've never heard of are above my site in the rankings. I checked them out on Open Site Explorer and many of these 'newbies' have less links (on average about 200 less links) and a poorer page authority. My page authority is 42/100 and the newly higher ranking websites are between 20 and 38. One of these pages which is ranking higher than my website only has internal links and every link has the anchor text of 'copywriting' which I've learnt is a bad idea. I'm determined to do whiter than white hat SEO but if competitors are ranking higher than my site because of 'gimmicks' like these, is it worth it? I add around two blog posts a week of approx 600 - 1000 words of well researched, original and useful content with a mix of keywords (copywriting, copywriter, copywriters) and some long tail keywords and guest blog around 2 - 3 times a month. I've been working on a link building campaign through guest blogging and comment marketing (only adding relevant, worthwhile comments) and have added around 15 links a week this way. Could this be why the website has dropped in the rankings? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks very much. Andrew
| andrewstewpot0 -
Start over or try to recover?
I have a question about a site that was making good money while it was ranking, but no longer gets traffic. This site did 3 things that might have gotten it in trouble: 1. Targeted keywords often showed up twice in the URL. So the url would be something like http://mydomain.com/keyword/keyword-included-in-title/ 2. It got links from low-quality sites, including blog networks like (the now dead) BMR 3. It got lots of links with the same anchor text The content quality is actually pretty good. I don't know if the site got penalized by Panda, Penguin, or perhaps lost rank because of something else. What I can tell you is that the rank loss was gradual - one page at a time starting at the end of March and ending this month. So the question is - in such a case: Is it best to start over using good SEO practices? Or is there a way to recover the sites?
| SiteDeveloper1 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
| cbielich0 -
Keyword Rich Domains on Same IP
In addition to my main website, I want to create two new sites for the upcoming football and basketball seasons. By starting now, I'm thinking I have enough time to get them ranked decently. I have purchased www.collegefootballpredictions.net for the upcoming football seasons. The intent here is two fold. First, I'd like to rank in the top 3 for "College Football Predictions." Second, and this is why I'm thinking that Google won't hate me for the approach, is that someone looking for that search term is much more likely to convert on a landing page geared for them then on my main website. If the goal of a separate website is truly to compliment the main website, then is it considered white hat? I'm thinking that, as long as my intentions are pure, they should go on the same IP. Placing them on separate IPs could be a good way of letting the big G know that I'm trying to cheat the system and get away with it.
| PatrickGriffith0 -
Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?
I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/. It's an attorney website. All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url. I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing? It's set up like this: www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl /law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.
| DeltonChilds0 -
Explain To Me How Negative SEO ISNT Real?
I'm seeing lots of "offers" springing up to do negative SEO on your competitors. I know people keep insisting this sort of thing is just a bogeyman, but follow my logic here: We know the Penguin update PENALIZED, and not just devalued "over optimization." Read: exact match keyword links. We know that if your link profile is too "unnaturally" keyword heavy, (it should be majority your brand or your domain or your company name, etc) you get penalized. Again, not devalued, PENALIZED. Ok. So what is to stop a blackhatter from using one of those software bots to just kill a competitor? Knowing the above two points, lets say a website is ranking for "cool widgets". Why not just create a bunch of exact match keyword spam links for "cool widgets" targeting that website. In a while, the Penguin penalty kicks in and bammo. The thing that scares me about the post Penguin landscape is that google has specifically named an activity ("over optimization") that will get you PENALIZED. So, don't do that, right? Except, that means they've explicitly outlined an activity that will be penalized, and is easy for others to do to you, and that you would be powerless to prevent. I await the usual "this is an age old worry that has never come true" replies. But if you reply that way, ask yourself, can you refute the logic of the points above? And also... oh no... It's happening. I'm seeing it.
| brianmcc1 -
Should We Pull The Plug On This Site?
I am helping a retailer out with their site. They were hit hard with the Penguin update, and traffic has dropped by about 75%. Here are the stats: It is fairly new, has been up for about 3 years. Has partial match domain name Is nearly fully indexed with over 4K pages Has NOT received an unnatural link message from Google, so no manual penalty. Has had most keywords BURIED in the search results. Link profile: Has done about 50-100 blog comments, 500 directory submissions, 800 social bookmarks, 5-6 press releases, 300 article submissions (most removed), about 30-50 guest blog posts. I am thinking it may have just been hit because of aggressive use of anchor text as opposed to massive spamming. Then again, the site has never really added great content and the product pages have no unique content. Any thoughts?
| inhouseseo1 -
How to rank internal pages?
Hello, I have a website about consoles, on the homepage are a few thoughts about what consoles are and a short history. The main attraction are the pages about Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, PSP Vita. So, I want to rank my homepage and my internal pages about the consoles ranking for "xbox360", "play station 3" each one on a separate page of course. Basically I want to rank brands. My main questions are: 1. How much link builing should I do for my homepage considering that I'm not really interested in ranking it as much as the internal pages? In percentage how it would look like? Random (stupid) example: 60% links to homepage, 10% to each internal page? 2. I guess I must do links for internal pages otherwise they won't rank good, only linking to homepage. 3. Considering the penguin update, my main keyword should be around what % of the overall anchors to each internal page? Thank you very much for your help!
| corodan0 -
Is this Penguin or Manual Penalty?
I have a client that's traffic dropped off on April 10th. They did get a message in GWT on March 21st. The April 10th date leads me to believe that it is a manual penalty and couldn't be penguin since penguin was released on April 24th. I guess either way backlinks need to be cleaned up though.
| RonMedlin0 -
Is pulling automated news feeds on my home page a bad thing?
I am in charge of a portal that relies on third-party content for its news feeds. the third-party in this case is a renowned news agency in the united kingdom. After the panda and penguin updates, will these feeds end up hurting my search engine rankings? FYI: these feeds occupy only 20 percent of content on my domain. The rest of the content is original.
| amit20760 -
Site ranking position 1, after 1 day existing
Hi, I'm working in the Online gaming and since a few months there was a website called 'Htmlwijzer.nl', it ranked page 1 for 'online casino' in Google.nl which is of course a high competive keyword and remained there for about 2 months. This website didn't come up slowly in Google.nl from page 10 to 1, it just was there one day at page 1. This one only had HTML-related information content and did rank for 'online casino' with a layer ad on it's site which would only be showed to users in the Netherlands. Now that website received a penalty after 2 months, and since today a new site is in Google at position 1, called www.casinowijzer.nl. It has completely no backlinks (online a 301 from the former domain). It just popped up there.. Does anyone know how this website could have gotten here? It's obviously blackhat, but for a keyword like 'online casino' it's quite amazing. Thanks,
| iwebdevnl0 -
Weird backlinks
Using SiteExplorer we managed to find a large number of weird polish sites ranking to our site. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains.html?page=6&scope=domain_to_page&site=www.meresverige.dk&sort=domain_authority&target=page Actually most of them does not on purpose link to our site. They seem to be scraping content from wikipedia articles and our link happens to be in the article about Sweden. A typical links looks like this http://www.xn--wiey-katalog-mlc97b.kepno.pl/kalmarunionen.php?title=Sverige Today we took a HUGE drop in rankings and I had some suggestions that these polish links might have something to do with it. Any ideas how to solve this? Anyone seen anything similar before? Thanks in advance and have a great day Fredrik My site can be found at: http://www.meresverige.dk/
| Resultify0 -
301 redirect from an unwanted non-affiliated domain
Hey everyone, Our site was hit with an unnatural link penalty a few weeks ago, and it looks very much like a malicious link attack. We've never participated in any link schemes or anything resembling black hat link building. In fact, we've barely even done any link building. Reviewing our backlink profile, there are hundreds of links from just a few (very dodgy) domains that we have no control over, and we've have had no luck when contacting webmasters to get them removed. More importantly, we've seen several domains which 301 redirect straight to our domain. We don't know who they are and they're not contactable. I believe that the redirect means they're passing link value from all of their terrible links to us? How can we get the redirects removed, as at worst they're really harming us, and at best, they're adding no value. Thanks
| Sarbs0 -
Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?
Greetings everyone! I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions. The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions. I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile. We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51. I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are. I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too. Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete... ❤ Jennifer
| Virage0 -
Any e-commerce users recommend an SEO company for link building?
I manage an e-commerce site. I wanted to know if anyone has worked with an SEO company for link-building that they would recommend. I DO NOT want articled directories, bookmarks, etc.. I want real link-building from credible/related sites. If you would give me an idea of the results or the general process they use I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
| inhouseseo0 -
Can a Page Title be all UPPER CASE?
My clients wants to use UPPER CASE for all his page titles. Is this okay? Does Google react badly to this?
| petewinter0 -
Beating the file sharing sites in SERPs - Can it be done and how?
Hi all, A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd" If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right? How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking? How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do? Thanks,
| Martin_S0 -
It Shows as "google results" but it's an incoming links, is it spaming me...?
Hello everyone I have 2 issues to share: 1) We have a site (personal-loans.org), In the past few weeks we notice that there are sites that have links to our site and we get traffic from them but...! when you go online to these sites they show you that all they do is provide "google search" results, because we where in first page on the results we had hits there as well what leads me to think that this is the reason we are at page 7 now after yesterday the ranking was at page 4. these are some of these sites so you can see it: internetpayadvances.com fastlivecashadvance.com assistancemoney.com scoutcashnow.com officialpayday.net Does anyone else got to see anything like that...??? I have many more links like that, these are only 5 out of 9 that had hits yesterday only, site traffic went from 250-300 to 63 a day... For the same site - it was on google search results 1st page and ranked 4-7, even after the big penguin changes. What we did notice is that A LOT of non related sites like surfing (yes ocean surfing) and sites that had no content AT ALL - all the text was inside of an image and ranked 3! 3rd on payday loans search result. (and the rest was and still just looks the same with different content...) Google say they want quality but does not do homework for the 2nd largest search for keywords such as loans and payday loans market, same goes for the cash advance. Please help, need your advice.... Thanks
| Yonnir0 -
Duplicate Articles
We submit articles to a magazine which either get posted as text or in a flash container. Management would like to post it to our site as well. I'm sure this has been asked a million times but is this a bad thing to do? Do I need to a rel=canonical tag to the articles? Most of the articles posted to that other site do not contain a link back to our site.
| SirSud0 -
I've done some link building on my website... why is google showing this?
Hi guys, it seems Google is going crazy as always, basically sometimes i'm ranked first page sometimes i'm not there, not sure if it's because of my link building and Google is indexing the links. At the moment in IE i'm top 3-4 for this keyword however the Title tag is not what I set it to be it's basically taking the product name then adding something after it. (I know google sometimes changes to what they want if they feel its more relevant but it isn't in this case) Not sure if this is normal for my keyword to keep appearing then dissapearing in Google. I noticed in FF my keyword isn't there but in IE it is. I've logged out of my Google account deleted all history/cookies etc. Even checked on my friends computer. Hope this makes sense and i'm not going crazy!
| InkCartridgesFast0 -
Ways to find private - non-indexed forums in a niche
I would wondering if there were ways to find non-indexed content in private forums/discussion boards. Is there a scalable 'foot-print' that suggests the forum has a private section?
| ilyaelbert0 -
Anybody have useful advice to fix a very bad link profile?
Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain. This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale. Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get. Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same. So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?
| CustomCreatives0 -
Merging four sites into one... Best way to combine content?
First of all, thank you in advance for taking the time to look at this. The law firm I work for once took a "more is better" approach and had multiple websites, with keyword rich domains. We are a family law firm, but we have a specific site for "Arizona Child Custody" as one example. We have four sites. All four of our sites rank well, although I don't know why. Only one site is in my control, the other three are managed by FindLaw. I have no idea why the FindLaw sites do well, other than being in the FindLaw directory. They have terrible spammy page titles, and using Copyscape, I realize that most of the content that FindLaw provides for it's attorneys are "spun articles." So I have a major task and I don't know how to begin. First of all, since all four sites rank well for all of the desired phrases-- will combining all of that power into one site rocket us to stardom? The sites all rank very well now, even though they are all technically terrible. Literally. I would hope that if I redirect the child custody site (as one example) to the child custody overview page on the final merged site, we would still maintain our current SERP for "arizona child custody lawyer." I have strongly encouraged my boss to merge our sites for many reasons. One of those being that it's playing havoc with our local places. On the other hand, if I take down the child custody site, redirect it, and we lose that ranking, I might be out of a job. Finally, that brings me down to my last question. As I mentioned, the child custody site is "done" very poorly. Should I actually keep the spun content and redirect each and every page to a duplicate on our "final" domain, or should I redirect each page to a better article? This is the part that I fear the most. I am considering subdomains. Like, redirecting the child custody site to childcustody.ourdomain.com-- I know, for a fact, that will work flawlessly. I've done that many times for other clients that have multiple domains. However, we have seven areas of practice and we don't have 7 nice sites. So child custody would be the only legal practice area that has it's own subdomain. Also, I wouldn't really be doing anything then, would I? We all know 301 redirects work. What I want is to harness all of this individual power to one mega-site. Between the four sites, I have 800 pages of content. I need to formulate a plan of action now, and then begin acting on it. I don't want to make the decision alone. Anybody care to chime in? Thank you in advance for your help. I really appreciate the time it took you to read this.
| SDSLaw0 -
'Stealing' link juice from 404's
As you all know, it's valuable but hard to get competitors to link to your website. I'm wondering if the following could work: Sometimes I spot that a competitor is linking to a certain external page, but he made a typo in the URL (e.g. the competitor meant to link to awesomeglobes.com/info-page/ but the link says aewsomeglobes.com/info-page/). Could I then register the typo domain and 301 it to my own domain (i.e. aewsomeglobes.com/info-page/ to mydomain.com/info-page/) and collect the link juice? Does it also work if the link is a root domain?
| RBenedict0 -
Using an auto directory submission
Has anyone used easysubmits.com and what's your experience with it? Any other directory submission or link building tools that help automate and manage the process like easysubmits.com says they can do? I'm just looking at it currenlty and wanted to hear others thoughts before I get taken in by some black hat method that hurts my websites instead.
| Twinbytes0 -
Impressions in Google SERP has declined from 3500 to 1600 after 5-25-2012\. Is it Penguin?
It's about the website http://www.apartments-houseboats-amsterdam.com/ The visitors had declined from 270 to 150 visitors per day. Is this caused by the Google update Penguin? If so what can I do to solve the problem? Thank you for your time and effort,
| letsbuilditnl0 -
Trying to determine if my site was de-indexed...
I ran a search using the allinsite:floridainboundmarketing.com command and found that virtually all of my pages are not being returned in the results. I'm one of those who (foolishly) used ALN blog network for a few months, got the unnatural links notice in WMT and on advice of other SEOs (including some here) I ignored it based on the idea that if my SERPS dropped due to alog update that a request for reconsideration was of no value. As I watched my SERPs dropping I was confident that it was simply because those links were no longer being counted and overall link profile was poor, so the results started dropping. I've not read where G has gone back and started de-indexing pages for such sites but it may be happening as (unless I'm wrong) my site is gone... Anyone got any ideas? Am I searching correctly?
| sdennison0 -
I think I've been hit by Penguing - Strategy Discusson
Hi, I have a network of 50 to 60 domain names which have duplicated content and whose domains are basically a geographical location + the industry I am in. All of these websites have links to my main site. Over the weekend I saw my traffic fall. I attribute our drop in rankings to what people are calling Penguing 1.1. I want to keep my other domains as we are slowly creating unique content for each of those sites. However, in the mean time, clearly I need to deal with the inbound linking and anchor text problem. Would adding a nofollow tag to all links that point to my main site resolve my issue with Google's penguin update? Thanks for the help.
| MangoMan160 -
Could a sitewide footer EXACT MATCH anchor text link hurt or potentially penalize a site?
I am pretty sure this would hurt rankings yet I just want another's opinion on it. Would a sitewide footer link with exact match keyword anchor text to the page you want to rank for your main keyword hurt you? Basically if it were a link to the homepage, yet you wanted to make the anchor text your main objective keyword, would it hurt to have this in the footer along with the logo link at the top of a page that is just "home" anchor text?
| jbster130
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