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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • Townpages


    Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great

    | Townpages
    0
  • chronicle


    I just redid my site from Godaddy Quick Shopping Cart to Drupal.  The site is much cleaner now.  I transferred all the content. Now my site dropped from being in the top ten on almost every key word we were targeting to 35+. I "aliased" the urls so that they were the same as the Godaddy site.  However when I look at our search results I notice that our URLs have extra wording at the end like this: ?categoryid=1 or some other number. Could this be the reason that our rankings tanked?  Previously on the godaddy site the results didnt show this.

    | chronicle
    0
  • smckenzie75


    Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!

    | smckenzie75
    0
  • SEODinosaur


    With all the new over opting talk, one of the things mentioned is having the same anchored text linking to a page over and over without variation. Is there a good estimate on how many external linking in keywords should be exact versus how many should be in variation? Also, keeping value of pages links in mind. Would it be best to use [Exact] phrase for the higher PR sites or more relevant higher traffic sites? and save the long tail or keyword variation text for the lesser valued sites. When to use exact phrase and when to long tail is my question/discussion I always stay relevant in my link building, and all my links are liking within context. Because I know that relevancy has been an important factor. After watching this video from Matt Cutt's http://youtu.be/KyCYyoGusqs I assume relevancy is becoming even more of an important factor.

    | SEODinosaur
    0
  • RiseSEO


    Looking for a solid analysis of a white-hat campaign that showed tangible results (if one exists).

    | RiseSEO
    0
  • webfeatseo


    We came up with this idea at work for a client but before I initiate it I was wanting to get feedback on if this would be considered whitehat and alright to use. It is for an ecommerce site. On the order confirmation and thank you page (not email cause they are on some old system that does not send out emails) we are wanting to put a thank you for your order message and continue with a statement about how they can save money on future purchases with a link that takes them to a page with info on how to do so. That new page will have info about linking to the site from a blog or website. And will say if you link back to us and send us an email with that link as proof we will give you a promo code for your next purchase. Is this alright?

    | webfeatseo
    0
  • Springboks


    If I'm looking for weak points in my competitors linking structure, how can I use Open Site Explorer to do that? In other words, I'm not sure how to use Open Site Explorer? Zane

    | Springboks
    0
  • DenverDude


    Hello everyone - I just became a PRO member today and wanted to say hello and ask this question... I am launching a new product, but 6 months before I created 4 different domains with landing pages to "prime" my SEO for the keywords I am trying to pursue. Now that I have launched my new product, it resides on the main domain name (let's call it "MainDomain.com"). Here's my dilemma... I want to create landing pages on each of the different domains for my PPC and optimized organic search traffic. For example, on one of the other domains (let's call it "LandingDomain1.com"), I have created a page to optimize for the keyword "event planning software" and sending my PPC traffic for "event planning software" there as well as my email campaigns. This page has original content that I have written for it (it's not duplicate content used elsewhere), but it also has navigation and links pointing to MainDomain.com, which is where we convert and collect registrations. My question is, will this activity be considered a doorway page even though I'm using it for a landing page for a particular audience? And, if it could be considered a doorway page, would I be better off moving all these optimized landing pages to my MainDomain.com and then doing a 301 redirect from those other domains to the MainDomain.com. Your input is much appreciated ... thanks.

    | DenverDude
    1
  • dean1986


    Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.

    | dean1986
    0
  • BobAnderson


    We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.

    | BobAnderson
    0
  • ravynn


    Client spent almost a year with link wheels and mass link blasts - end result was getting caught by google. I have taken over, we;ve revamped the site and I'm finishing up with onsite optimization. Would anyone have any suggestions how to undo the damage of  the unnatural links and get back into googles favour a little quicker? Or the best next steps to undo the damage.

    | ravynn
    0
  • TWPLC_seo


    Good afternoon, I have been comparing competitors with the Open Site Explorer looking at their inbound links. I have noticed that they have been getting credit for their own inbound links within their site. Is there something I am doing wrong as inbound links on my site aren't getting found? Could this have anything to do with Webmaster tools? Thanks in advance, SEO_123

    | TWPLC_seo
    0
  • mozcrush


    Hello. I am curious to better understand what I've been told are "shadow pages" for Flash experiences. So for example, go here: 
    http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Kraft.aspx#/home View the page as Googlebot and you'll see an HTML page. It is completely different than the Flash page. 1. Is this ok?
    2. If I make my shadow page mirror the Flash page, can I put links in it that lead the user to the same places that the Flash experience does?
    3. Can I put "Pinterest" Pin-able images in my shadow page?
    3. Can a create a shadow page for a video that has the transcript in it? Is this the same as closed captioning? Thanks so much in advance, -GoogleCrush

    | mozcrush
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, Just been reading up on theme pyramids, I have seen these before but found a good article on the subject going into quite some detail. http://www.canonicalseo.com/theme-pyramids/ Using the word 'Pyramid' does scream black hat to me but looking at the structure, this must be the best way for internal linking. Even the keyword structure looks good, Example: homepage - shoes category - red shoes sub category - size 7 red shoes Building anchor text links for shoes, red shoes or size 7 red shoes will benefit all 3 terms. Negative/Positive comments please.

    | activitysuper
    0
  • supermarketonline


    We would like to be able to submit lower prices to google than we do to other sources.  How i see it working is that at the end of each url we submit to google base there is a tracking code (source=googlebase). When a user visits the site via one of these urls we would knock 10% of the price of that item and store the item in a cookie to ensure that the price of that item, for that user would stay at the low price for 24 hours. My question is whether google would have a problem with us doing this?  The second part of my question is whether they check the full url including the query strings?  If theyt just checked the canocial URL they would see a price thats 10% higher than the one we submitted to base - which, of course - would be bad

    | supermarketonline
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  • SoundinTheory


    I have a really tricky decision to make concerning one of our clients. Their site to date was developed by someone else. They have a successful eCommerce website, and the strength of their Search Engine performance lies in their product category pages. In their case, a product category is an audience niche: their gender and age. In this hypothetical example my client sells lawnmowers: http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-34 http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-33 http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-25 http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-3 For all searches pertaining to lawnmowers, the gender of the buyer and their age (for which there are a lot for the 'real' store), these results come up number one for every combination they have a page for. The issue is the specific product pages, which take the form of the following: http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-34/fancy-blue-lawnmower This same product, with the same content (save a reference to the gender and age on the page) can also be found at a few other gender / age combinations the product is targeted at. For instance: http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-34/fancy-blue-lawnmower http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-33/fancy-blue-lawnmower http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-32/fancy-blue-lawnmower So, duplicate content. As they are currently doing so well I am agonising over this - I dislike viewing the same content on multiple URLs, and though it wasn't a malicious effort on the previous developers part, think it a little dangerous in terms of SEO. On the other hand, if I change it I'll reduce the website size, and severely reduce the number of pages that are contextually relevant to the gender/age category pages. In short, I don't want to sabotage the performance of the category pages, by cutting off all their on-site relevant content. My options as I see them are: Stick with the duplicate content model, but add some unique content to each gender/age page. This will differentiate the product category page content a little. Move products to single distinct URLs. Whilst this could boost individual product SEO performance, this isn't an objective, and it carries the risks I perceive above. What are your thoughts? Many thanks, Tom

    | SoundinTheory
    0
  • Blaze4Fire


    Since early March I have been slowing moving up the SERP for my site http://amplereviews.com/. At around the end of March I have reached the top 5 rankings for every keyword I had targeted. Maybe a week or so later the keywords I have been targeting disappeared from the rankings. Now I am here today stuck in the ~600s for at least 2 weeks. So have I been sand boxed?  And If so what should I do? PS. My rankings on Yahoo and Bing are still in their usual range. Domain is 3 months old.

    | Blaze4Fire
    0
  • AdeLewis


    Hey Fellow Mozzers, I have recently been approached by a new client that has been issued with an 'Unnatural Link' warning and lost almost all of their rankings. Open Site Explorer shows a ton of spammy links all using main keyword anchor text and there are way too many of them to even consider manually getting them removed. There are two glimmers of hope for the client; The first is that the spammy links are dropping off at a rate of about 25 per week; The second is that they own both the .com and the .co.uk domain for their business. I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to handle this, should I :- Wait it out for some of the spammy links to drop off whilst at the same time pushing social media and build some good clean links using the URL and brand as anchor text? Then submit a recosideration request? Switch the website over from the .com domain to the .co.uk domain and carry out a 301 redirect? Switch the website over from the .com to the .co.uk without doing a redirect and start again for the client with a clean slate? I would still register an address change via Webmaster Tools. Add a duplicate site on the .co.uk domain. Leave the .com site in place but rel="canonical" the entire domain over to the .co.uk Any advice would be very much apprecited. Thanks
    Ade.

    | AdeLewis
    0
  • mikescotty


    My company runs a real estate site (http://yochicago.com) that features editorial blog and video content. In our footer, we feature links to some of our client sites.  That footer is global, i.e., on every page of the site, of which there are thousands. One of our clients has been hit by Google for unnatural links.  While I am very aware of them using a network of junk sites (http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-our-white-hat-links-get-a-bad-rap-when-they-re-alongside-junk-links-busted-by-panda), could we be contributing to the problem? Our site has the most links into the troubled site.

    | mikescotty
    0
  • seoczar


    Lets say a company (provider.com) offers a whitelabel solution which enables each client to have all of the content on their own domain (product.client.com), with no branding by the content provider. Now lets say that client.com is a site with a lot of authority, and to promote the launch of product.client.com, they put a lot of links from their main site to the subdomain. This can be very valuable link juice, and provider.com would like to be able to take advantage. The problem is, that client.com wouldn't like it if provider.com put in links on their whitelabel site. Suppose the following: All pages on product.client.com start to have a rel="canonical" link to themselves, with a get variable (e.g. product.client.com/page.htm -> product.client.com/page.html?show_extra_link=true) When the page is visited with the extra get parameter "show_extra_link" a link appears in the footer that points to provider.com My question is, would this have the same effect for provider.com as placing a link on the non-canonical version of the pages on the whitelabel site would?

    | seoczar
    0
  • TwoPints


    Hello Everyone, I'd be grateful for a little feedback please; This is my site, the home page
    of which is targeting the phrase jobs in **** (I'm sure you can fill i the gap
    :)) I've made a few changes recently which has included having the
    Contract jobs in **** | Permanent Jobs in **** | Temporary Jobs in **** & Today’s
    jobs in **** links added to the homepage... Perhaps foolishly and impatiently, I did all of these at the
    same time, whilst also changing the sites internal link structure, specifically
    for all links to the homepage, which previously were like <a<br>href="/">Home and have now been changed to <a<br>href="/">jobs in ****</a<br></a<br> Meaning that I have 4500 internal links with the anchor text
    'jobs in ****' But rather than seeing an improvement n my SERPs ranking, I have
    gone from page 2 of Google to page 6, and falling...... Apart from being inpatient, what have I done wrong? Many thanks

    | TwoPints
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    I was reading this article about how many websites are being deindexed because of an unnatural linking profile and it got me thinking about some widgets that I have created.  In the example given, a site was totally deindexed and the author believes the reason was because of multiple footer links from themes that they created. I have one site that has a very popular widget that I offer to others to embed into their site.  The embed code contains a line that says, "Tool provided by Site Name". Now, it just so happens that my site name contains my main keyword.  So, if I have hundreds of websites using this tool and linking back to me using the same anchor text, could Google see this as unnatural and possibly deindex me? I have a few thoughts on what I should do but would love to hear your thoughts: 1. I could use a php script to provide one of several different anchor text options when giving my embed code. 2. I could change the embed code so that the anchor text is simply my domain name, ie www.mywebsitename.com rather than "my website name". Thoughts?

    | MarieHaynes
    1
  • dynamic08


    for the sake of this post I am selling lighters. I have 3 domains small-lighters.com medium-lighter.com large-lighters.com On all of the websites I have the same template same images etc and same products. The only difference is the way the content is worded described etc different bullet points. My domains are all strong keyword domains not spammy and bring in type in traffic. Is it ok to continue in this manner in your opinion?

    | dynamic08
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  • VipinLouka78


    I have multiple websites with same content such as http://www.example.com http://www.example.org and so on.  My primary url is http://www.infoniagara.com and I also placed a 301 on .org. Is that enough to keep away my exampl.org site from indexing on google and other search engines? the eaxmple.org also has lots of link to my old html pages (now removed). Should i change that links too? or will 301 redirection solve all such issues (page not found/crawl error) of my old webpages? i would welcome good seo practices regarding maintaining multiple domains thanks and regards

    | VipinLouka78
    0
  • blocker0408


    Whilst there have been quite a few q & a's and one or two posts on the blog about the google onslaught on "unnatural" links, with over 1 million sites impacted I'm surprised Moz hasn't said more about this. With google now muddying the waters even further about what is natural or not (with due respect to Moz, if you're not a brand like Moz, the vast majority of seo's buy some links one way or the other) with all the uncertainty, how is it now possible to trust any metrics about links ? In essence, does Domain Rank and Domain Trust now mean anything in the new google world and can they be relied upon ? No doubt someone will come back and say that a lot don't buy any links. Fair enough but the reality is that most do some kind of deals for links, writing in niches like law it is very difficult to get people to share content. Simply a fact. The Serps are in a mess. Google has replaced many decent sites who played the game to one degree or another, with a lot of sites that are worthless, not bothering with links or content,, so rising by default ! Directory sites seem to be doing better again, because, you guessed it, they are brands like yell.

    | blocker0408
    0
  • ontarget-media


    For a client of ours, we are likely to create a sub-domain that is to be targeted at a specific country. Most of the content on this sub-domain will be from the main site, although with some specific differentiation to suit that geographic market. We intend to tell Google through Webmaster Centre that the sub-domain is targeted at a specific country. Some questions: a) Any idea how long it could take before google gives precedence to the content in this sub-domain for queries originating from that particular country? b)  What is the likely impact of content duplication ? What extent of differentiation is necessary from a search engine perspective? Thanks.

    | ontarget-media
    1
  • Ben-HPB


    I have a competitor that ranks in Google Search for a Top Dollar Keyword in the organic rankings with the normal result, however just below that it shows another result that contains the Local City Name followed by their business name. In the URL they have domain.com > Local and below the description data it shows a map for a totally different location as this competitor only has one location... Once clicking on the link I found that it has everything in the title, description and h1 and body content in footer that talks about the local area but not their product. and when you click the breadcrumbs you can go back to a directory of all the other cities and states they are targeting with doorway pages with the same layout however the anchor text is cityname+keyword How are they getting away with this?

    | Ben-HPB
    0
  • WebMarketingHUB


    Hi, I'm aggressively link building for my clients using blog posts and have come upon information that using Google Analytics (as well as GWT, etc.) may increase my chance of deindexation. Anyone have any thoughts on this topic? I'm considering using Piwik as an alternative if this is the case. Thanks for your thoughts, Donna

    | WebMarketingHUB
    0
  • mozcrush


    Hello. I am curious to better understand what I've been told are "shadow pages" for Flash experiences. So for example, go here: 
    http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Kraft.aspx#/home View the page as Googlebot and you'll see an HTML page. It is completely different than the Flash page. 1. Is this ok?
    2. If I make my shadow page mirror the Flash page, can I put links in it that lead the user to the same places that the Flash experience does?
    3. Can I put "Pinterest" Pin-able images in my shadow page?
    3. Can a create a shadow page for a video that has the transcript in it? Is this the same as closed captioning? Thanks so much in advance, -GoogleCrush

    | mozcrush
    0
  • jmansd


    How should I deal with a 500 errors?

    | jmansd
    0
  • totaldriveways


    Hi all, I've just joined seomoz today to try and further my very young education on SEO. My major problem is i need my site to rank high in local search engines but feel that none of the customers read much of the content as i am a landscaper and feel they just search "landscaping in Newcastle" and are immediatly looking for a contact number to arrange a free estimate. I dont do any online sales, its just to generate  leads. I've spent alot of time building a better site than my local competitors but they still out rank me on alot of keywords i.e. "Driveways in Gateshead" My question is do i keep adding more and more content hoping this will work long term or do i link build with anchor text etc or both? I cannot believe they still out rank me when i feel i have more links more anchor text and a load more origional content and images. I think it may be that my site is still under 1 year old. I feel i am boucing from content to link building then trying something else without any real knowlegde of what i really should be doing or what should be the priority at this young stage for my site. I have managed to get on page 1 of google for most of my keywords in local searches   ( obviously not national) but still feel its been more down to luck and effort than actually knowing what i am doing when it comes to site and offsite optimization Any help, tips etc would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks John

    | totaldriveways
    0
  • entourage212


    Based on the new algorithm changes in Google.

    | entourage212
    0
  • mikescotty


    My firm has been creating content for a client for years - video, blog posts and other references. This client's web vendor has been using bad links and link farms to bolster rank for key phrases - successfully.  Until last week when Google slapped them. They have been officially warned on WMT for possibly using artificial or unnatural links to build PageRank. They went from page one of the most popular term in Chicago for their industry where they had been for over a year - to page 8 - overnight.  Other less generic terms that we were working on felt the sting as well. I was aware of and had warned the client of the possibility of repercussions from these black hat tactics (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-google-makes-liars-out-of-the-good-guys-in-seo#jtc170969), but didn't go as far as to recommend they abandon them. Now I'm wondering if one of our legitimate sites (YoChicago.com), which has more than its share of the links into the client site is being considered a bad link.  All of our links are legitimate, i.e., anchor text equals description of destination, video links describe the entity that is linked to.  Our we vulnerable? Any insight would be appreciated.

    | mikescotty
    0
  • UnderRugSwept


    I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?

    | UnderRugSwept
    1
  • StrategicEdgePartners


    I have recently discovered that one of my clients has either been sabotaged or has done this himself.  In the case that he didn't do anything, how do you go about getting rid of bad links? There is now over a 1000 bad links linked to his site, do I report them as spam or what is the best way to fix this?

    | StrategicEdgePartners
    0
  • StrategicEdgePartners


    In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links.  The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done.  I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out.  Does anyone know how to find this out?

    | StrategicEdgePartners
    0
  • seoeric


    FOR ALL SEO THOUGHT LEADERS...What link building strategies do YOU think will work after the latest 3/29/2012 Google algorithm change? NOTE: My hope is that the responses left on this thread will ultimately benefit all members of the community and give recognition to the true thought leaders within the SEO space. That being said, my challenge is a 2 part question: With the 80/20 rule in mind, and in light of recent algorithm changes, what would YOU focus most of your SEO budget on if you had to choose? Let's assume you're in a competitive market (ie #1-5 on page 1 has competitors with 20,000+ backlinks - all ranging from AC Rank 7 to 1). How would you split your total monthly SEO budget as a general rule? Ex) 60% link building / 10% onsite SEO / 10% Social Media / 20% content creation? I realize there are many "it depends" factors but please humor us anyways. Link building appears to have become harder and harder as google releases more and more algorithm changes. For link building, the only true white hat way of proactively generating links (that I know of) is creating high quality content that adds value to customers (ie infographics, videos, etc.), guest blogging, and Press Releases. The con to these tactics is that you are waiting for others to find and pick up your content which can take a VERY long time, so ROI is difficult to measure and justify to clients or C-level management. That being said, how are YOU allocating your link building budget? Are all of these proactive link building tactics a waste of time now? I've heard it couldn't hurt to still do some of these, but what are your thoughts and what is / isn't working for you? Here they are: A.   Using spun articles edited by US based writers for guest blog content B.   301 Redirects C.   Social bookmarking D.   Signature links from Blog commenting E.   Directory submissions F.   Video Submissions G.   Article Directory submissions H.   Press release directory submissions I.    Forum Profile Submissions J.   Forum signature links K.   RSS Feed submissions L.   Link wheels M.  Building links (using scrapebox, senukex, etc.) to pages linked to your money site N.   Links from privately owned networks (I spoke to an SEO company  that claims to have over 4000 unique domains which he uses to boost rankings for his clients) O.  Buying Contextual Text Links All Expert opinions are welcomed and appreciated 🙂

    | seoeric
    2
  • BobGW


    Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • anthematic


    Hi, I just noticed this website http://www.knobsandhardware.com hosts pages like http://www.knobsandhardware.com/local/hardware/California-Cabinet-Hardware.html that are filled with permutations of products + cities. These pages rank for these long tail phrases. Is this considered white hat?

    | anthematic
    0
  • Morten_Hjort


    We are redirecting our artist's official website to copenhagenbeta.dk. We have two artists (Nik & Jay and Burhan G)  that top ranks on Google (first on page 1), but one of them (Lukas Graham) doesn't rank at all. We use the same procedure with all artists. http://copenhagenbeta.dk/index.php?option=com_artistdetail&task=biography&type=overview&id=49 Doesn't rank but the old artist page still does. Is it the old page that tricks Google to think that this is the active page for the artist?

    | Morten_Hjort
    0
  • Poindexter


    So I've recently started working at a new company where I lead up their SEO efforts. In regards to link building I've discovered that a little over 75% of the anchor text on the links to the homepage (at least of the 10k SEOmoz provides) are non branded keywords. We don't appear to have any penalties, however, in my opinion we have what is an unnatural link profile for our homepage. As I investigated further I've noticed that a lot of these links (not all) are from irrelevant blogs where the link is found in the footer. (Clearly this was the result of some less than ideal get links quick strategy that was implemented in the past.) At first I was overwhelmed thinking that I'd have to try and contact these sites individually to see if I could get the link removed, however, I soon discovered that the site these links are actually linking to is not our domain, but is instead a domain that redirects to our site. So this brings me to my question: Should I remove the redirect from this other site to rid myself of these links. The white hat side of me strongly thinks this is a good step forward, however, a small part of me wonders what the ramifications would be. These types of redirects seem to account for a fairly high number of links, however what value that actually contribute is difficult to know. Any thoughts?

    | Poindexter
    0
  • TheARKlady


    One of the web designers I work with asked me to do a preliminary site assessment on a small business website. The owner of the business had a falling out with his previous web designer and moved over to the one I work with earlier this year. The site has been redesigned but when analyzing the back links I discovered that the previous designer had created directories to create backlinks to the page. The PR 0 links from the site number about 150 and are from unrelated topic pages. So, it made me wonder, how much damage can spammy backlinks do? What is the best practice to deal with spammy backlinks if you find them?

    | TheARKlady
    0
  • FinanceSite


    I just created a subdomain to help our main TLD website. I was wondering if it's smart to create a separate TLD for this subdomain and set up a forward and build links to it. Reason I was thinking about it because it would be easier for people to remember instead of typing in subdomain.maindomain.com. But, I don't want the main website to suffer, since the purpose of creating this subdomain and it's content is to help the main domain. Any inputs on this? Thank you.

    | FinanceSite
    0
  • ErikDster


    Out of boredom, I googled up "SEO Company". #1 result is qualifiedimpressions.com. Taking a look at their link profile it seems they are utilizing anchor text on all their clients' websites.  Moreover, it appears they have multiple sites for each of their phrases (which they cross link). Qualified Impressions - SEO Company WeBuildRankings.com - SEO Service VisibilitySquad - SEO Companies Some of their clients are rocking multiple anchor text links. How is this not any different than what Go Daddy did recently?

    | ErikDster
    1
  • SEODinosaur


    I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite.... These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do) Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words Meta keywords – all keywords Questions begin here... H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages) H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? Bold text – does this matter for SEO? Italic text - does this matter for SEO? Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data? Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO? Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image. the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/ w6AiM.png

    | SEODinosaur
    0
  • b2bmarketer


    I have a few sites where I didn't manage the quality of my vendors and now am staring at some GWT warnings for unnatural linking. I'm assuming a penalty is coming down the pipe and unfortunately these aren't my sites so looking to get on the ball with unwinding anything we can as soon as possible. Does anyone's company have experience or could pass along a reference to another company who successfully dealt with these issues? A few items coming to mind include solid and speedy processes to removing offending links, and properly dealing with the resubmission request?

    | b2bmarketer
    0
  • JarnoNijzing


    I just read this interesting article about a new Google Penalty that will be up in the next upcoming weeks/months about Google making changes to the algorithm. The penalty will be targeted towards websites that are over optimized or over seo'ed. What do you think about this? Is this a good thing or is this not a good thing for us as SEO marketeers? here's the link: SEL.com/to-much-seo I'm really curious as to your point of views. regards Jarno

    | JarnoNijzing
    0
  • devonkrusich


    What are the best practices for getting links to my site indexed in search engines.  We have been creating content and acquiring backlinks for the last few months.  They are not being found in the back link checkers or in the Open Site Explorer.  What are the tricks of the trade for imporiving the time and indexing of these links? I have read about some RSS methods using wordpress sites but that seems a little shady and i am sure google is looking for that now.  Look forward to your advice.

    | devonkrusich
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hi, My very well known and widely respected developer is using multiple H1 tags I see - they like using them in their code and they argue multiple H1s conform with HTML5 standards. They are resisting a recode to one H1 tag per page. However, I know this is clearly an issue in Bing, so I don't want to risk it with Google. Any thoughts on whether it's best to avoid multiple H1 tags in Google (any evidence and reasoning would be great - I can then put that to my developer...) Many thanks for your help, Luke

    | McTaggart
    0
  • filarinskis


    We have been contacted by a free SEO company, who seem to use your domain and create articles for you on your site, linking to other relevant sites, while other relevant sites link to yours. All they ask is a small link on your homepage. An excerpt of the instructions are: Download the attached files in a folder to be uploaded to your server (public_html) folder Set 777 permission to the folder. This allows our script to work on your site Add the "site wide" link on your homepage, as well as on the inner pages, the same way we do in the article section. Implement the "site wide" link following the instructions on the README.txt file Copy the script on the file or you can provide us with a temporary FTP access to your server and we will do it for you. Please note that if you can upload our folder to your site within 48 hours, you will be eligible to receive 20 bonus links for your SEO campaign. Should we tread carefully?

    | filarinskis
    0

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