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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • MangoMan16


    Hi, Over the last couple of days I have found a HUGE drop in traffic. I checked a lot of our rankings, and we are definitely out of the game for at least a few keywords (not on 1st page). Our ranking has dropped on other keywords. We even dropped to #2 (for the first time ever) for our branded keyword search term. What happened?! Could it have been the Penguin update, 1 month after it was released? Help!

    | MangoMan16
    0
  • RBenedict


    Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.

    | RBenedict
    0
  • lethal0r


    A client has a competitor who is ranking above them for a highly competitive term they shouldn't really be able to rank for. I think I know how the site got there, and I think I can replicate it myself with a quick test, but it's definitely grey hat if not black hat to do so. I do not want my own sites and company to be damamged by the test, but i'd like to let the client know for sure, and also i'd love to know myself. The test should take about a week to run, there is no hacking involved or password stealing or anything damaging to another. How would you do such a test? I'm dubious about using my own server / site for it, but would a week really matter? Tom

    | lethal0r
    0
  • SirMax


    We can set our own keywords as branded in SeoMoz campaign, but Google would not necessarily see them like branded. After reading the Blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update I had a question: Are there known rules (or at least guesses) what Google considers a branded keyword/anchor text? I guess the first one would be your website domain. So bluewidget.com for example would be a branded keyword for bluewidget.com website. How about Blue Widget or Blue Widget Company?

    | SirMax
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  • SirMax


    As I understand in order to rank well for the page in google, the page/site has to have a lot of back links that have an anchor text with the keywords that you want to rank for. At the same time if google finds that your anchor text contains kewords that are in your title or h1 tag, it may penalize your site. So what do i do to rank well for my chosen keywords. Lets say I am only interested in keywords San Francisco widget and Oakland widget The title of my webpage says San Francisco | Oakland widget The anchor text that I usually pick is either San Francisco widget or Oakland widget. I also have plenty of links that have anchor text like "website" or "click here" What should I use for my anchor text in my backlinks?

    | SirMax
    0
  • Khem_Raj7


    Well Guys there are lot of discussions in almost all the communities, blogs, forums about Post Penguin impact. Google says that if find that you're involved in any link building activities, we may penalize you. People out there have already started their developed links. But what if our competitors would have developed those links. Initially it was okay to develop one way links, I even developed lot of quality, but deliberately, links. around 95% links are placed manually, if return to some favor or money but all links looks natural. Most of the links I developed through content only, like articles, blog comments, PR submission, etc now really skeptical about the quality (after hearing lot of talks and reading n number of posts). Now, can I also submit my competitor's websites in 1000 topic directory (obviously not in any spammy directory), would it effect that website adversely? What if I spun an existing content and submit it into 500 article directories and give backlink to competitor site from using only one anchor text (which is obviously the main keywords - highest sales generating keyword) I look forward to some experts comments.

    | Khem_Raj7
    0
  • Webpresence


    A quick question, born out of frustration! If a webpage has been penalised for unnatural links, what would be the effects of moving that page to a new URL and setting up a 301 redirect from the old penalised page to the new page? Will Google treat the new page as ‘non-penalised’ and restore your rankings? It really shouldn’t work, but I’m convinced (although not certain) that our clients competitor has done this, with great effect! I suppose you could also achieve this using canonicalisation too! Many thanks in advance, Lee.

    | Webpresence
    0
  • InkCartridgesFast


    Hi guys, I have a question, for high quality backlinks apparently you go to these article websites where you submit your site such as Ezine etc etc, however is it just one article you submit to these as it'll look like duplicate content? Also can I have it on my site first? How does it work? Also I run an ecommerce website, how can I build backlinks to each product, theres over 200+ products and 1.6k subcategories. I would like to rank for as many as possible but getting an SEO company to do this would cost to much. Any ideas on how I should go about it?

    | InkCartridgesFast
    1
  • ScottDudley


    Since about May 17 my site - http://lowcostmarketingstrategies.com - has suffered a big drop in traffic from Google, presumed from the dreaded Penguin update. I am at a loss why I have been hit when I don't engage in any black hat SEO tactics or do any link building. The site is high quality, provides a good experience for the user and I make sure that all of the content is unique and not published elsewhere. The common checklist of potential problems from Penguin (such as keyword stuffing, web spam and over optimisation in general) don't seem relevant to my site. I'm wondering if someone could take a quick look at my site to see any obvious things that need to be removed to get back in Google's good books. I was receiving around 200 - 250 hits per day, but that has now dropped down to 50 - 100 and I fee that I have been penalised incorrectly. Any input would be fantastic Thanks 🙂

    | ScottDudley
    0
  • joeG66


    duplicate page indexing

    | joeG66
    0
  • penn73


    When I do a search for this site it ranks number 2 on Google just below the official federation of master builders website for the keyword phase "builders in london" this is the site http://bit.ly/Lypo8E which is a nasty looking blog which has nothing to do with builders and they don't even have an address anywhere on the site. The only thing I can see is that they are sharing there address with a lot of other businesses and all of the citations from those other businesses are causing them to rank higher on Google places, but surely Google can't be that stupid right?

    | penn73
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  • foodsleuth


    We committed an SEO sin and created a site with links back to our primary website. Although it does not matter, the site was not created for that purpose, it is actually "directory" with categorized links to thousands of culinary sites, and ours are some of the links. This occurred back in May 2010.  Starting April 2011 we started seeing a large drop in page views.  It dropped again in October 2011.  At this point our traffic is down over 40% Although we don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it, we know it is best to remove the links. The question is, given its a bad practice what is the best fix?  Should we redirect the 2nd domain to the main or just take it down?  The 2nd domain does not have much page rank and I really don't think many if any back-links to it. Will it hurt us more to lose the 1600 or so back links? I would think keeping the links is a bad idea. Thanks for your advice!

    | foodsleuth
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  • SwissNinja


    k, so I run an ecommerce website with a kick ass domain name. 1 keyword (plural)
    3.3 million broad match searches (local monthly)
    3.2 million phrase match
    100k exact match beginning of march I got a warning in GWT about unnatural links. I feel pretty certain its a result of an ex-employee using an ALN listing service to drip spun article links on splogs. This was done also for another site of mine, which received the same warning, except bounced back much sooner (from #3 for EMD w/ 100k broad, 60k phrase and 12k exact, singular keyword phrase) I did file reinclusion on the 2nd (smaller) domain. Received unnatural warning on 4/13 and sent reconsideration on 5/1 (tune of letter is "I have no clue what is up, I paid someone $50 and now Im banned) As of this morning, I am not ranking for any of my terms (had boucned back on main keyword to spot #30 after being pushed down from #4) now back to the interesting site....
    this other domain was bouncing between 8-12 for main keyword (EMD) before we used ALN.
    Once we got warning, we did nothing. Once rankings started to fall,we filed reinclusion request...rankings fell more, and filed another more robustly written request (got denials within 1 week after each request)until about 20 days ago when we fell off of the face of the earth. 1- should I take this as some sort of sandbox? We are still indexed, and are #1 for a search on our domain name. Also still #1 in bing (big deal) 2- I've done a detailed analysis of every link they provide in GWT. reached out to whatever splog people I could get in touch with asking them to remove articles. I was going to file another request if I didn't reappear after 31 days after I fell off completely. Am I wasting my time? there is no doubt that sabatoge could be committed by competition by blasting them with spam links (previously I believed these would just be ignored by google to prevent sabatoge from becoming part of the job for most SEOs) Laugh at me, gasp in horror with me, or offer some advice... I'm open to chat and would love someone to tell me about a legit solution to this prob if they got one thanks!

    | SwissNinja
    0
  • RonMedlin


    So my question is, if you are getting guest posts on sites with high Domain Authority, is it really that benefitial since the actual post will have a low page authority?  Is just getting a post on a high domain authority that good?

    | RonMedlin
    0
  • LilyRay


    Hi there. I work with a company that was originally all white hat, then began to dabble in some pretty serious black hat activities last year (usually paid linking in private blog networks). At the time we saw tremendous results - many of our most highly competitive keywords shot up 20, 30 positions to the top 10. And they didn't seem to budge so long as we kept those (very expensive) links intact. Alongside all of this, we have had a lot of white hat activity going on (pretty much everything recommended by Google/SEO Moz is ALSO in effect on this domain - lots of consistent/relevant blogging, social media, good content, good on-site SEO, etc), which I attribute to SOME of our success with keyword ranking, but what really made the difference was the paid linking. Let's just say we had two different mindsets behind the SEO strategy of the company, and the "Get rich quick" one worked for a while. Now, it doesn't. (Can you guess if I'm the white hat or the black hat at the company?) So here's my question. I have made the effort to contact all of the webmasters  of our egregious links and, as everyone else has described, it is effectively useless. Especially given the amazing post by Ryan Kent on this question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links) I have sort of given up on the strategy of contacting these webmasters on a case by case basis and asking for the links to be removed, especially if Google is not going to accept anything less than a perfect backlink portfolio. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to clean up these links. Meanwhile, this company is a big name in a very competitive online market and it really needs to see lead generation from organic SEO. (Please don't give me any told-you-so's here, it was out of my hands.) MY QUESTION IS: WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Should we just keep the domain going and focus on only building quailty links from now on? Most of our keywords fall anywhere from position 40 to position 150 right now, so it's not like ALL hope is lost. But as any SEO knows that is basically as good as not being indexed at all. OTHER OPTION: We have an old domain that is the less-SEO-friendly, but it is the official name of our company . com, and this domain is currently 301'd to our live (SEO-friendly) domain. The companyname.com domain is also older than our SEO friendly domain. Should we manually move our site back over to the old domain since there is no penalty on it? It seems like a lot of sites that are ranking are brand new anyway (except their URL's are loaded with keywords.) Blah, I know that was a lot, but I'm feeling lost and ANY insight would be helpful. Thanks as always SEOMoz!!

    | LilyRay
    1
  • Amjath


    In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge) still considered a white hat tactic? I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective. Look forward to feedback from MOZers.

    | Amjath
    0
  • harrygardiner


    What are the best methods of White Hat SEO? How can you create good quality White Hat links? For example, how do you convince someone to link to your site?

    | harrygardiner
    0
  • rdominey


    I dropped like a rock in Google rankings on the 24<sup>th</sup>
    of April. After having to become familiar with Google webmaster tools and doing
    allot of investigating I discovered that there is a website www.siteloki.com  that has 6,742 links to my website. I have
    tried to contact siteloki with no response. I tracked them on Whois to an
    office suite in LA called the building to find that the suite listed is the
    building management suite.  I have had
    the following sent to them via email, their contact page and posted on their website
    forum and still no reply: Please take action to remove all links to this website
    immediately! I have been notified by my client that your website has a
    malicious attack using links from www.siteloki.com
    against www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com. My client did not solicit these links, pay for these links or authorize any
    third party to build links for them. They just appeared. The links are even
    pointing to my client’s old website (same url). This is a big problem and I
    don’t understand why these links exist. There are currently 6,471 links from
    your domain. Please remove these links immediately or we will consider legal
    action against your company. We have contacted Google on the behalf of our
    client and informed them of this malicious act. I expect to see these links
    removed immediately! Regards, I have submitted the site in the malware reporting section
    of webmasters tools. I have searched but cannot find any documentation on how
    to block this type of attack. It seems that Google failed to provide any means
    for an honest website owner following the rules to block this type of attack and
    as a result we have been unjustly penalized by Google with a drop to the bottom
    in our page ranking. I would appreciate ANY HELP in removing these links and getting the Siteloki website blocked from linking to my website? Any Ideas?

    | rdominey
    0
  • DeliaAssociates


    I'm curious to get people's opinion on this. One of our clients (Company A) has a competitor that's using duplicate sites to rank.  They're using "www.companyA.com" and "www.CompanyAIndustryTown.com" (actually, several of the variations).  It's basically duplicate content, with maybe a town name inserted or changed somewhere on the page.  I was always told that this is not a wise idea.  They started doing this in the past month or so when they had a site redesign.  So far, it's working pretty well for them.  So, here's my questions: -Would you address this directly (report to Google, etc.)? -Would you ignore this? -Do you think it's going to backfire soon? There's another company (Company B) that's using another practice- using separate pages on their domain to address different towns, and using those as landing pages.  Similar, in that a lot of the content is the same, just some town names and minor details changed.  All on the same domain though.  Would the same apply to that? Thanks for your insight!

    | DeliaAssociates
    0
  • Martin_S


    So, you've recently begun as a SEO manager for a new company who's just launched a lovely, gleaming corporate site to boot. The onsite stuff is taken care of and your attention turns to link building. Now you've been in the game for a few years. You've seen things change in that time. Directories are out. Link networks are done. You're not going to embark on reciprocal linking either because it's bad and looks horribly tacky. Black Hat, White Hat - you know the score. You're lucky that the company produces a page or two of news a day - it's original, informative, is great for keeping your clients informed and you punt this on Twitter and FB. A bit of link bait, eh? But there's a rub: your competitors, with their bigger budgets, and industry clout, have been around for a some time longer than your company has been. They've snapped up all the good (industry-related) sites to get links from. You've approached all potential targets with the offer of good, relevant content and affiliate partnerships but they aren't having any of it. You're simply out-sized by the big boys next door - you can't compete. They're rich kids. There just seems nowhere to get links from. Do you just go the route of press releases and articles? Do you use paid blogging services? Grovel at doorsteps. The industry you're in is incredibly commercial - no meek altruist is going to take pity and give you  a couple backlinks out of kindness. What do you do? What indeed...?

    | Martin_S
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  • Svetoslav


    About an year, the business I work for purchased 20+ domains: sendmoneyfromcanada.com sendmoneyfromaustralia.com sendmoneyfromtheuk.com sendmoneyfromireland.com The list goes on, but you can get the main idea. They thought that the domains can be useful to aid http://www.transfermate.com/ . I can set up a few micro sites on them, but from that point there will be no one to maintain them. And I'm, honestly, not too happy with hosting multiple sites on one IP and having them all link to the flagship. It is spammy and it does not bring any value to end users. I might be missing something, so my question is - Can I use these domains to boost my rankings, while avoiding any shady/spammy techniques? P.S. I had this Idea of auctioning the domains in order to cover for the domain registration fees.

    | Svetoslav
    0
  • nwright


    Hello Seomoz members. I'm relatively new to SEO, so please forgive me if my questions are a little basic. One of the sites I manage is GoldSilver.com. We sell gold and silver coins and bars, but we also have a very important news aspect to our site. For about 2-3 years now we have been a major hub as a gold and silver news aggregator. At 1.5 years ago (before we knew much about SEO), we switched from linking to the original news site to scraping their content and putting it on our site. The chief reason for this was users would click outbound to read an article, see an ad for a competitor, then buy elsewhere. We were trying to avoid this (a relatively stupid decision with hindsight). We have realized that the Search Engines are penalizing us, which I don't blame them for, for having this scraped content on our site. So I'm trying to figure out how to move forward from here. We would like to remain a hub for news related to Gold and Silver and not be penalized by SEs, but we also need to sell bullion and would like to avoid loosing clients to competitors through ads on the news articles. One of the solutions we are thinking about is perhaps using an iFrame to display the original url, but within our experience. An example is how trap.it does this (see attached picture). This way we can still control the experience some what, but are still remaining a hub. Thoughts? Thank you, nick 3dLVv

    | nwright
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  • b4tv


    I own Simply Bags and have been sending sample bags to bloggers as a link building strategy.  The following four links are a sample of recent product reviews. http://bit.ly/Mk6Z1t http://bit.ly/Mk6Smq http://bit.ly/Mk7atN http://bit.ly/Mk7wR8 Product reviews were considered a good link building strategy.  After Panda & Penguin is Product Reviews still a good strategy? Please comment on the quality of the four sample links. Thanks 
    Bob Shirilla

    | b4tv
    0
  • veed23


    How important are social signals for SEO? Is it worthwhile to invest in building it up?

    | veed23
    0
  • seqal


    Curious what you SEO people think of the link profiles of these (high-ranking) Google-backed UK sites: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.startupdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.lawdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.marketingdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.itdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.taxdonut.co.uk Each site has between 40k and 50k inlinks counted in OSE.  However, there are relatively few linking root domains in each case: 273 for marketingdonut 216 for startupdonut 90 for lawdonut 53 for itdonut 16 for taxdonut Is there something wrong with the OSE data here?  Does this imply that the average root domain linking to the taxdonut site does so with 2857 links? The sites have no significant social media stats. The sites are heavily inter-linked.  Also linked from the operating business, BHP Information Solutions (tagline "Gain access to SMEs"). Is this what Google would think of as a "natural" link profile? Interestingly, they've managed to secure links on quite a few UK local authority resources pages - generally being the only commercial website on those pages.

    | seqal
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  • TheGrid


    So, ever since Google "went nuclear" a few weeks ago I have seen major fluctuations in search engine results pages. Basically what I am seeing is a settling down and RE-inclusion of some of my web properties. Basically I had a client affected by the hack job initially, but about a week later I not only saw my original ranking restored but a litany of other long tails appeared. I wasn't using any shady link techniques but did have considerable article distribution that MAY have connected me inadvertently to some of the "bad neighborhoods." The website itself is a great site with original relevant content, so if it is possible, Google definitely recognized some error in their destructive ranking adjustment and is making good on it for those sites that did not deserve the penalty. Alternatively, it could just be random Google reordering and I got lucky. What are your experiences with the updates?

    | TheGrid
    0
  • KateZDCA


    I have an interesting scenario: Domain A was worked on by a disreputable SEO company off shore. The owner of Domain A came to me for my assistance and evaluation on how the off shore company was doing. I concluded that he should terminate the relationship immediately. One of the bad things they did was register Domain A with a LOT of link farms. I started working on a new site that eventually we decided to go with Domain B (a better, but totally related domain name to Domain A). I added a nice new site and had my client write clean, relevant information for it. We've done all legitimate, above ground by-google's-recommendation SEO for Domain B. I have a series of 301 redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Since April 24th, organic search results have plummeted. I see many incoming links via Webmaster Tools as the massive link farms, but those link farms have Domain A in their databases, not Domain B. My question: is Domain B inheriting the link juice from Domain A insofar as the incoming links are showing up in Webmaster Tools as directly related to Domain A? Should I sever the ties with Domain A altogether? Thanks.

    | KateZDCA
    1
  • RonMedlin


    Is there a way to find out if your site has an over optimization penalty?

    | RonMedlin
    0
  • RonMedlin


    What are your suggestions about moving forward with sites hit by the "Penguin" penalties? Wait it out and see if the penalty goes away Try to remove spammy backlinks and resubmit (is this worth the time and effort) Build quality backlinks to offset (will this even work if they have thousands of spammy links) Blog more (I think this is probably a no brainer) Scrap the site and start from scratch (This is last resort and don't want to do this if at all possible) Or any other ideas are greatly appreciated

    | RonMedlin
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  • RonMedlin


    I see a lot of opportunity to get lower quality, but highly relevant backlinks, should we try to get these?  I'll give you an example, lets say we have an asphalt paving company ( not a lot of authority blogs out there, that we can find yet) We found this one http://www.wolfpaving.com/blog/ - DA of 27 and PA 29 should we go after links like this.  I would actually like to know about sites with less authority than this one, I would probably go for this one without question.  So Should we go after worse DA and PA but still legitimate looking sites and highly relevant?

    | RonMedlin
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  • RustyF


    I was hit very hard in the last Google update. Yes, i was building links. Before i started doing that, i was earning $1 a day despite having a very good blog. i saw my income rise to $3000 a month over the last year.  Now I'm back to $1 a day. I have suspected it was coming for the last two months because of the things Matt Cutt's has been saying. Worked hard to avoid it but not hard enough. i stopped using blog networks after Build my Rank got hit.  I've been using another tool known as ABC3000 or Automatic Backlink Creator. Its not automatic. 😉 That's the tool that got me the rankings and that's the tool that took them away. 🙂 I've removed all links from the tool now. Yeah, I know its a bad sign to loose 10,000 links all at once but Google already knows so the best thing to do is get ride of them. ALL of my sites were hit, not deindexed. I'm seeing minus 30 and minus 100 penalties. One of the websites has 10,000 + Pages. I've got one on page issue that revolves around my forum, vBulletin is causing a massive amount of duplicate page titles. I don't know how to fix that. It looks like each post creates a new page with the title of thread. I plan ot move it to another domain but I'm fearful of doing that. I'm not sure how. I will research it. But the Google slap is massive and I'm really wondering if I have any hope of restoring a site with good content and good social signals with good engagement. A TRUE bounce rate of less than 30% was higher before the slap at about 23%. I have an average of 4 to 5 minutes per visitors. All my stats look great except 1.  That's SERP results as of April 24th, also known as my personal dooms day. haha Trying to keep my head up but it is starting to get hard now. Thanks for the help, Rusty

    | RustyF
    0
  • BeTheBoss


    I work for a network of international websites, the site I work on is for Canada. Our partners in Australia were hit by penguin hard because they hired a black hat SEO guy and didn't know. He was creating profiles on highly authoritative sites and keyword stuffing them. Now, they've completely dropped off the SERP. This is where the issue occurs, because we are all international partners we are all linked together on the header of every page so visitors can choose their country. Now, because they were hit hard and we have reciprocal links (not for rankings but for usability) will we be affected? It seems like we have, but I just want some opinions out there. Also, should we go ahead and stop linking our sites between countries to avoid this mess?

    | BeTheBoss
    0
  • TWPLC_seo


    Hello All, I just wanted to ask the question to start a discussion on link building after the Google Updates. I haven't been very proactive lately with regards to link building due to the updates and not wanting to get penalised! Are there any link building trends/techniques people are using since the changes? Thanks, seo_123

    | TWPLC_seo
    0
  • RonMedlin


    Once your guest posts go live do you do anything to promote them or do you just wait and hope they get indexed?  If so what do you do exactly?

    | RonMedlin
    0
  • penn73


    Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem. I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed. I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back. Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?

    | penn73
    0
  • Juratovic


    Hello Everyone, I own a small web design firm website. My site was for sure hit by Penguin, but not sure why they devalued my pages. I dont really do SEO or link building except for my own site. I normally turn clients down when they want SEO services. Mainly because we do web design really well, so I've chosen to invest my time doing that versus doing both. For most of my keywords I took a 5-10 spot drop. Nothing super major, but enough that its tanking my business. I've survived all of the panda stuff, so I assumed my content writing, and link building tactics were good, but I'm wrong. Here is my website: http://www.clikzy.com/ I will explain what I have been doing below, and I am looking for a little help/direction. I don't mind if you look at my site, links, and are brutally honest. I do have original content ( I just ran everything through copyscape a month prior), and I occasionally get duplicate pages as my CMS tends to create them automatically, but we do a fairly good job of redirecting those pages when they occur. My link building tactics have been a mixture of the following. I have used anchor text alot which could be my demise. Forum postings
    Blog Comments
    Website Footers (roughly 20 over the course of a year)
    Web Design Directories (explain below) I did start using directories in January. I would use OpenSite Explorer, and review some of my bigger competitors, and would occasionally get listed on a web design directory they were on. I think total I probably purchase 8-10 since Jan  including botw, business.com, etc. I have some local pages which I create case studies for which ranked fairly well. For instance for the term Baltimore Web Design I used to rank #1, but not I'm 5-6. Here's the keyword: http://www.clikzy.com/reston-web-design.html One more note: I did redirect an older website I have (12 years) to my current site (3 years) in Jan. Mainly because it ranked well for terms in NYC. I've dropped for those terms around 5 spots. I have a few questions: 1. What would you suggest to fix something like this? Power Content? Better Links? (of course, we all want better links) 2. Remove links? I am not sure which ones are bad. One thought was to just kill my local pages (roughly 15 pages) which would also kill any bad links I may have point to them. 3. If I have a bad link pointing to a internal page, could that bring down my home page rankings? Any help would be appreciated. I am in the process of interviewing  for a full time PR person to come on staff to help us with our content, and PR. I knew I should have invested in this person a year ago! ha! Thank you! Pete

    | Juratovic
    0
  • SavvyPanda


    Hey Mozers, We are a Joomla Web Design firm located in Milwaukee Wisconsin, however, we serve clients all over the midwest (and US) (chicago, madison, minneapolis, etc) I'm curious what the best strategy for ranking in these new geographic areas? Originally I was thinking of creating geographic specific landing pages for each area, however, i'm scared it will hurt us with Google's recent penguin and panda 3.5 updates. Also, won't i need to link to these landing pages from our main website to get them indexed? What about creating mini websites on subdomains: (example) Chicago.SavvyPanda.com?? What are your ideas? Do you have clients who have successfully started ranking in multiple geographic cities/areas?

    | SavvyPanda
    0
  • UnderRugSwept


    Back in my dumb days, I decided to use Fiver to get 25 backlinks from .edu sites. Well, they were all nofollowed, and they share space with hundreds of other sites spamming them. Top top it off, all the spam links for my site are exact-match anchor text: embroidered patches. If you look at my link profile in OSE, it looks so polluted with these. I'm just looking for post-Penguin opinions about this--if it has the potential to hurt. Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches, but I am still scared that future algorithm tweaks will incorporate this blog comment spam. What do you think?

    | UnderRugSwept
    0
  • BeTheBoss


    It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed: I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization. If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so? The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot. Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings. I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account. Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.

    | BeTheBoss
    0
  • Choice


    We have 50 product videos and 100 product images to distribute. For the sake of increasing nofollow Linking Root Domains, my manager wants to distribute them in the following manner: 10 Company profiles on 10 video sites, each with 5 videos.  The sites to be used are sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc. 10 Company profiles on 10 image sites, each with 10 images.  The sites to be used are sites like Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, Imgur, etc. My thoughts are that we should stick to one service for video (YouTube) and one service for images (Flickr).  We can increase nofollow LRD's by doing some quality blog commenting. Keep in mind that the product images look great, but the videos are amateur and consist of someone holding the product and discussing it's features. Each vid is around one minute in length. What do you think of the two approaches and which do you prefer?  Do you think creating many profiles will come off too spammy?  We are also weathering a Panda penalty and submitting a Reinclusion Request to Google within the next two weeks.  Your thoughts are very welcomed and appreciated.  Thanks 🙂

    | Choice
    0
  • TWPLC_seo


    Good Morning, Google has just recognized some links going to my site. I used a seo toolbar downloaded from firefox that informed me of the Links according to Google. My question is that them links have been there for ages and Google has only just recognized them. Is there a reason for this? Does Google  only show links quarterly or half yearly? Thanks SEO_123

    | TWPLC_seo
    0
  • creativeguy


    Hey all, WIhen I first started doing SEO, I was encouraged by several supposed experts that it was a good idea to buy links from "respectable" sources and as well make use of SEO experimentation offered on Fiverr. I did that a lot for the clients I represented not knowing if this was going to hurt.  But now after the latest Google shift, I am realizing that this was stupid and thus deserving of the ranking drops I have received. In the aftermath, I want to list out here what I am doing now to try to build better and stronger rankings for my sites using white hat techniques only... Below is a list of what I'm doing.  Please let me know if any of these are bad choices and I will immediately dump them.  Also, If i am not including some good options, please let me know that too. I am really embarrassed and humbled by this and could use whatever help you can offer.  Thanks in advance for your help... What am I doing now? *Writing quality articles for external blogs with keyword links back to sites *Taking the above articles and spinning them at SEOLINKVINE to create several articles *Writing quality articles for every site's internal blog and using keywords to link out to other sites that are on different servers - All articles are original, varied and not duplicate content. *Writing quality, relevant articles and submitting them to places like Ezine *Signing clients up for Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, etc so they have a social presence *Working to fix mistakes with onsite issues (mirror sites, duplicate page titles, etc.) *Writing quality keyword-rich unique content on each page of each site *Submitting URL listings and descriptions to directories like JoeAnt, REALS and business.com (Any other good ones that people can recommend that give good link juice?) *Doing competitive research and going after highly authoritative links that our competitors have That is about it... HELP!!! Thanks again

    | creativeguy
    0
  • SimCaffe


    What could the reasons that a domain is ranking for the plural version of a key word on SERPs page 1 and for the singular version not at all? Google knows that both key words belong together, as in the SERPs for one version also the other version of the key word is being highlighted. If I search for the domain with the plural keyword it shows up on the first page in SERPs, but If I search for the same keyword as singular (in German it is just removing an “s”) I see the plural version highlighted many times but I cannot find my domain. What could be the reason for this behavior? penalties?

    | SimCaffe
    0
  • diogenes


    I have 2 main sites for my business. One is a creaky homestead site about 4 years old  Another is a much more sophisticated wordpress site now almost 2 years old. That site's traffic steadily increased until May of 2011 when it suffereed a 25 to 30% decline probably due to Panda. I did all of the recommended fixes with little effect until about 3 months ago when its traffic started going up again and had almost a complete recovery until last week when my traffic is down about 95%. I strongly suspecct the penguin. Interestingly, my old site has been virtually unaffectted even though bost sites are fairly similar, on both sites I started with a lot of directory links including DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW, some strong lawyer sites like NOLO.COM, Lawyers.com, and others not so strong but I tried to get the best directories I could find. Then I started getting a lot of natural links but some of these aee pretty junky sites and scraper type sites. I am curious if anyone has any thoughts on why www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com was hit so hard while www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com  is unscathed. The newer site has, accoring to majestic seo and market samurai, around 35, 000 backlinks, while the older site has around 3500. Thanks, Paul

    | diogenes
    0
  • contactatonce


    Our site, www.autodealerchat.com got hit hard by Google's recent Penguin update (also known as the over-optimization update). For our main set of keywords including: auto dealer chat dealer chat car dealer chat automotive chat We lost placement across the board most notably on automotive chat where we were third and are today non-existent. If you look at our site, we were following former best practices and SEOMoz recommendations. If you look at our backlinks, we were playing the white hat game like everyone else. SEOMoz tools indicated that we were tops in terms of Domain Authority, etc. according to the old rules. Everything changed on April 25th. Going forward, what are some of the things that we can do to regain some of that lost ground? Thanks in advance for the insights.

    | contactatonce
    0
  • cewe


    Hi, Our website www.photoworld.co.uk has been improving it's SERP's for the last 12 months or so, achieving page 1 rankings for most of our key terms. Then suddenly, around the end of March, we suffered massive drops in nearly all of our key terms (see attached image for more info). Basically I wondered if anyone had any clues on what Google has suddenly taken a huge dislike to with our site and steps we can put in place to aid with rankings recovery ASAP. Thanks n8taO.jpg

    | cewe
    0
  • eddiejsd


    Is it still ok to use infographics for link bait now that the penguin update has rolled out?  Are there any techniques that should be avoided when promoting an infographic? Thanks

    | eddiejsd
    1
  • chronicle


    I was updating product info on my site which was apparently hammered by Penguin.  As I was updating I was "Googling" the products.  I noticed that every single product I carry, Wikipedia held the #1 position in search results. Anyone else noticing this?  I previously held the number 1 position on 2 of my products but I was knocked down to 60+...

    | chronicle
    0
  • UnderRugSwept


    I guess this is the most logical place to share this with you. I do SEO for many sites. I've recently been focusing on two in particular for the same client. We used Netfirms SEO services to get links--he insisted--which basically consists of writing articles in broken English and placing them all over blog networks with our desired anchor text. On the other site, I simply refused to employ those services. This was the client's main site, and was way too important to mess around with. I built links myself, the legit way. Long story short, for months I watched the shady, black hat site climb and climb in the SERPs, while the white hat one kept falling. This morning, I checked my SEOmoz campaigns and my white hat site went from #8 to #2 and my black hat site went from page 2 to no longer being in the top 50. Just another example of what's been happening with Google lately and how great it is. Interestingly, the black hat site never got a warning in GWT about buying links. Now I just have to figure out a way to break the news to my boss and tell him I told him so without actually using those words.

    | UnderRugSwept
    5
  • wcuk


    HiOur website www.wholesaleclearance.co.uk has been hit by the penguin update, I'm not a SEO expert and when I first started my SEO got court up buying blog links, that was about 2 years ago and since them and worked really hard to get good manual links.Does anyone know of a way to dig out any bad links so I can get them removed, any software that will give me a list of any of you guys want to do take a look for me? I'm willing to pay for the work.Kind RegardsKarl.

    | wcuk
    0

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