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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • nayrmot


    Over the past week, I have experienced a significant decline in my SERP for about 20 high value keywords.  I have worked extensively to build a link profile by the following: 1.  Submitting to directories 2.  Ghost blog writing 3.  HARO interviews and postings 4.  Article submission to blog sites What can I do to try to find the cause of this decline?  How can I determine if it was something google changed with their algorithm  or if it was my SEO strategy that was wrong? I would rather not post my url.

    | nayrmot
    0
  • phatride


    Wondering if this is somehow possible. A site got hacked and created a /data folder with hundreds of .php files that are web pages selling all sorts of stuff. We deleted the /data folder and blocked Google from indexing it. Just noticed in Webmaster Tools that the site has 35,000 backlinks from other sites that got hacked with the same way. Is there a way to block these sites? I am assuming there isn't, but wanted to see if anyone ran into the same problem. It is a wordpress site is that helps.

    | phatride
    0
  • SEODinosaur


    Do Bing and Yahoo look for authoritative sites like google does? Do they punish sites for black hat or spamming? The reason I ask these questions is because one of my competitors was ranking in first place for many great keywords in Google, they have the highest authority out of all of their competitors. They must have been punished by Google because now they are not ranking for any great keywords in Google. However they are ranking 1st in Bing and Yahoo for most the top keywords, getting the the most visibility out of all the sites. I attached a small Graph with latest visibility for the sites with the top keywords from google and then I also included the company that was punished from google they are the green circles on the graph. dIVI4.png

    | SEODinosaur
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  • ilyaelbert


    I was wondering if banned domains pass any page rank, link love, etc. My domain got banned and I AM working to get it unbanned, but in the mean time, would buying a new domain, and creating NEW content that DOES adhere to the google quality guidelines, help at all? Would this force an 'auto-evaluation' or 're-evaluation' of the site by google? or would the new domain simply have ZERO effect from the 301 unless that old domain got into google's good graces again.

    | ilyaelbert
    0
  • ilyaelbert


    Prior to the Panda update we had 1 main site, and 300 or so satellite sites. The satellite sites all had an identical template with identical content. The satellite sites all got flagged, and the main site persevered. We'd like to TRY to get all of these sites unbanned in bulk. My question is...how 'DIFFERENT' should these sites be? I know that a real google employee will be looking. All of these sites will be in the same industry...so how 'different' can the content really be? I am going to try to do this in sets of 10 and purchase a different template for EACH city/satellite site, as well as having varying categories, but realistically how doomed/successful do you think this endeavor will be? Any advice? realistic timeline?

    | ilyaelbert
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  • brianmeert


    Scenario: Company ABC has 50 related domains that are being forwarding to the main company URL. Q1: Would there be SEO value by creating a template landing page for each domain that includes product info, photos and keyword links to the main URL? Q2: If all 50+ landing pages were the same, would that penalize the main site due to duplicate content?

    | brianmeert
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  • SL_SEM


    So I am doing my back link research for the hosting industry and I am running across two different types of link schemes that make it hard to compete with straight white hat techniques. I am determined to keep our efforts white hat to retain long term value, but at the same time I am constantly tempted to slowly add links in the more grey ways. So here are some of the common practices I see a lot of (e.g. 8 of the top 10 sites for top terms use these). Link Buying/Article Links - You know this one well, their link profile has a 10:1 ratio of keyword links compared to brand name links, and the majority of those keyword links are on nonsensical blogs, or on related "tech" sites but obviously labeled as paid links. - I don't like this much, and have even reported some of these. "Hosted by" - So the majority of hosting companies out there have pre-built collections of templates for wordpress, joomla, and other CMS systems, and they have taken the extra step of putting "Server Hosting by XXXXXX" in the footer of those templates. This leads to thousands of small sites being hosted with the keyword backlinks. While I understand this, at the same time I would hope they wouldn't get credit for links all coming back from IPs that they own. While they aren't creating these sites they know the majority of users won't change the template (or know how to). Lastly there are some "Link to us and get discounts" programs going on with customers as well. So, seeing the linking setup this way, would you try to report each instance you see to Google? If so do you think they would really change anything considering how rampant it is among the results? Lets hear some opinions! In the mean time I am going to go work on my awesome content, press releases, and cross-company promotional campaigns ;).

    | SL_SEM
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  • DanDeceuster


    Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.

    | DanDeceuster
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  • jamesjd7


    My site has a pr of 4.  My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques.  I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.

    | jamesjd7
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    I think I may have a problem with someone trying to get me in trouble for paid links. If you look at the following websites, scroll to the bottom and look at the featured links area. There is a link to my website with my keyword on all of them. mercurynews.com contracostatimes.com twincities.com insidebayarea.com marinij.com Now I see a lot of the same links here which leads me to believe these sites are all owned by the same group. Also, 4 of the 5 are Bay Area news sites. The question I have is, are these links hurting me? I did not buy these and did nothing to put them there. I asked the previous owner of the domain who I am in touch with. He is the only other person to own it and he never purchased those links. My guess is a competitor is targeting me perhaps? Just wondering on everyone's take on this. I really can't afford to be getting hit by these potentially penalizing links right now, not when the busy season is starting up. Should I try to get them removed? Does anyone have experience with this or know how it might have happened?

    | DanDeceuster
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  • paulbaguley


    Please view website http://www.staddonsbeds.co.uk. In the footer is the keywords the client is aiming for. These pages have been created separately to the sitemap. Is this tactic and pages white hat seo or is this considered black hat seo such as gateway pages? Could you please confirm Thanks Paul

    | paulbaguley
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  • umtmedia


    I'm about to purchase a domain that has highly trusted links pointed to it. I would like to 301 redirect that domain to point to a brand new domain in the same niche. Some of the links that the expiring domain would take me a long time to obtain so I am thinking to use this method to my advantage. I know that this is not really a legitimate way to go to build backlinks, but surely this is going to give me good serp improvement which is my main concern at the moment. I am going to test this method to see if it benefits me in anyway but I would like some opinions to this please.

    | umtmedia
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  • esendex


    Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value. By this I mean, if you do have links from link farms and bad neighbourhoods, would it effectively pull you down in search engine rankings. Or is it more that it's just a waste of time to get these links, as it adds no value to your ranking. Are google saying avoid them because it will not have a positive effect, or avoid them becuase it will have a negative effect. I am under the opinion that it will not harm, but it will not help either. I think this because at the end of the day you are not 100% in control of your inbound links, any bad site could add you and if a competitor, god forbid, wanted to play some black hat games, couldn't they just add you to thousands of bad sites to pull your ranking down? Interested to hear your opinions on the matter, or any "facts" if they are out there.

    | esendex
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  • CalgaryRealtor39


    I have heard pros and cons on directories forever, just wanted to check in to see what everyone is saying about them currently.

    | CalgaryRealtor39
    0
  • JaspalX


    Has anyone seen this kind of 'hack'? When looking at a site recently I found the Google cache version (from 28 Oct) strewn with mentions of all sorts of dodgy looking pharma products but the site itself looked fine. The site itself is www.istc.org.uk Looking in the source of the pages you can see the home pages contains: Browsing as googlebot showed me an empty page (though msnbot etc. returned a 'normal' non-pharma page). As a mildly amusing aside - when I tried to tell the istc about this, the person answering the phone clearly didn't believe me and couldn't get me off the line fast enough! Needless to say they haven't fixed it a week after being told.

    | JaspalX
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  • Trigun


    Hi Guys, Is there a way in Wordpress to transfer or redirect a category and all posts under it into a sub-domain? Thanks in advance..

    | Trigun
    0
  • casper434


    I have been told that google frowns on paid links yet I see many site charging for advertizing and the advertizing consists of an anchor text link. What is the difference between a paid link and this type of advertizing?

    | casper434
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  • rdreich49


    In June of 2010, we lost rankings for four of our best key terms for our website http://tinyurl.com/6e73q52.  No other terms were majorly impacted, so our assumption was that is was either due to Caffeine or a filter on those terms. We have worked with several companies using various strategies since then with little or no success.  We later found that their linking strategies were less than white hat (I'm being polite) The best advice I was given recently is that we were over-optimized for those four terms (life insurance, life insurance quotes, term life insurance, term life insurance quotes) and we need to balance that out by linking with other terms.  I know this will not be a fast process. My problem is I see many of my competitors in this extremely competitive space using black hat (grey at best) techniques and rising quickly to the first page of Google.  Some of the SEO companies working with my competitors offered help to us, which I consider ethically questionable.  These four terms convert the best, as you would imagine, so it has become very cut-throat in this competitive environment. We want to keep our hats white, as we are interested in longevity, not a quick hit and run (our site has been live and working for 8-plus years, by the way).  I have become extremely gun-shy and generally suspicious of working with a new SEO company, so my question (finally) is: I would like some recommendations and success stories you have had with working with SEO companies (white hat only).  Thank you for listening to my rant.

    | rdreich49
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  • SEOptPro


    A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
    http://seoptimization.pro
    info@seoptimization.pro

    | SEOptPro
    0
  • shabbychicoriginals


    Hi, I'm considering outsourcing some SEO to a company I got a first month trial sweetener deal with. I've not done this before and am a little unsure about what they propose doing, not sure if I'm being a bit paranoid or too controlly. Details of what they propose: Send them 10 keywords we're interested in ranking for. Work they will perform:
    -Submit site to all major search engines
    -Submit 20 social book marks for site
    We'll produce 1 article + 19 spun variations of the article submitted to:
    -30 directory sites
    -10 press release sites and distribution networks Business Submitted to 5 business directories
    5 social networks created Work and ranking report highlighting what has been done at the end of the month. Most of the stuff I've done already or can do myself. The elements that make me a bit suspicious are the: - 1 article plus 19 spun variations? 5 social networks created? What does that even mean? I did get this for about £20 for the 1st month with no commitment afterwards so I am tempted to let them try. But should I be a bit wary it might do more harm than good in the long run? Any advice\opinions would be much appreciated.

    | shabbychicoriginals
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  • Whiteflash


    We have questions about our ranking and would like some advice.

    | Whiteflash
    0
  • Kenoshi


    A client of mine owns a studio space where he teaches yoga and martial arts.  It's a new business and we're deciding how to create the website(s) and which domain(s) to buy. The idea right now is to have 3 websites for each side of the business, and I'm looking for validation of this idea. I haven't been able to find an answer in the Q&A forum that quite applies to our situation. Website 1: for the studio itself. The audience is other yoga teachers, martial arts teachers, or personal trainers. He will rent out the studio space to them and they bring in their own clients. Content and keywords will relate to this. Website 2: yoga classes. The audience is members of the public who want to take yoga classes. Content and keywords will relate to this. Website 3: martial arts. The audience is members of the public who want to take martial arts classes. Content and keywords will relate to this. We will make certain there's no duplicate content on the sites, but it makes sense for them to link to each other because they're similar in nature (personal health and fitness at the studio), and the latter 2 services are offered at the studio, of course. Question 1: (a) is it a good idea to get a separate domain for each site? for example: www.city-studio.com, www.unique-name-yoga.com, www.unique-name-martial-arts.com  (b) Or would it be better to keep it all under city-studio.com and use subdomains like yoga.city-studio.com and martial-arts.city-studio.com?   In either case, the keywords "yoga" and "martial arts" would be in the domain name, which has benefit.  Does that still apply for subdomains?  (c) Or would these services even be considered similar enough that I just use www.city-studio.com/yoga.php and www.city-studio.com/martial-arts..php  There will of course be several pages on yoga and several on martial arts. Question 2: if registering multiple domains, they will interlink as much as possible.  (a) what do we consider when buying the domains?  (b) use a different address for WHOIS of each domain?  (c) can technical contact be the same address (mine, the consultant)?   (d) use a different credit card for each?  (e) ok if the name on the credit card is the same?  (f) can we register them all the same day?   (h) same domain registrar?   (i) same host?   we don't want to appear black hat by having multiple sites, but I think it's very legitimate to have the business split into 3 sites like this just because they're separate sides of the business with different audiences, content, keywords. Question 3: when the domains come up for renewal in 1 year (or more), would it be safe to switch them all over to one credit card then, for convenience to the owner? Question 4: is there anything important I haven't mentioned here? I appreciate any input and discussion.

    | Kenoshi
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  • sesertin


    Hello Everyone, I am from Hungary and i'd like to ask about a Hungarian site: www.viagra.info.hu. (do not need to speak Hungarian to be able to answer) If you type viagra in google.hu this is the first page of 183 million (not bad) with a wonderful number of 6 backlinks, coming before wikipedia and 70000 backlink sites. Additional info: site is one year old:) I can not discover the black hat but surely there is. Any idea? My other question is how they are doing that when looking from the serps below their description tag there are 3 links (their menus) that are not sitelinks? Someone please help me

    | sesertin
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  • 10JQKAs


    New to SEO and want to stay clean, What are white hat incentives you can offer in exchange for links? Giveaway for their readers? Give them helpful advice? Record video of me drinking a gallon of milk within 5 minutes?

    | 10JQKAs
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  • TheLastSeo


    How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?

    | TheLastSeo
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  • CommercePundit


    I want to solve mysteries regarding disabled products on my eCommerce website. I want to give one example for my one product to know more about it. Product URL: http://www.vistastores.com/indoorlighting-patiolivingconcepts-20947.html Product Name: Floor Lamp in Monterey Bronze Finish Before 3 Months, This product was live on my website with In Stock status. Google have crawled that product, added in XML sitemap, added in Google merchant center, added in too many external website during link building campaign. Before 15 Days, This product was live on my website with Out of Stock status. Now, visitor can visit this page but, can not add in shopping cart. Now, This product is disabled from website and not available for sell. I have done lot of work to compile content, image, page rank and many other SEO stuffs to get rank with specific long trail keyword. This product is suddenly disabled from website so, it's shows 404 error and redirect to custom 404 error page. But, I am not satisfy with 301 redirect to set 302 redirect. But, is it really good? Is it require to set 301 or 302 redirect on disable products? I will never sell this product again on website. But, what about my indexing, external links, page authority? This is creating too many up an down in webmaster tools data, merchant center data, xml sitemap data and impression data. What is best solution for it? Can any one share good example for eCommerce website.

    | CommercePundit
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  • 10JQKAs


    Are sites like ReviewMe or PayPerPost white hat? Are follow links allowed within the post? Should I use those aforementioned services, or cold contact high authority sites within my niche?

    | 10JQKAs
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  • scottlucas


    We run an e-commerce website that has been online since 2004. For some of our older brands we are getting good rankings for the brand category pages and also for their model numbers. For newer brands, the category pages aren't getting rankings and neither are the products - even when we search for specific unique content on that page, Google does not return results containing our pages. The real kicker is that the pages are clearly indexed, as searching for the page itself by URL or restricting the same search using the site: modifier the page appears straight away! Sometimes the home page will appear on page 3 or 4 of the rankings for a keyword even though their is a much more relevant page in Google's index from our site - AND THEY KNOW IT, as once again restricting with the keywords with a site: modifier shows the obviously relevant page first and loads of other pages before say the home page or the page that shows. This leads me to the conclusion that something on certain pages is flagging up Google's algorithms or worse, that there has been manual intervention by somebody. There are literally thousands of products that are affected. We worry about duplicate content, but we have rich product reviews and videos all over these pages that aren't showing anywhere, they look very much singled out. Has anybody experienced a situation like this before and managed to turn it around? Link - removed Try a page in for instance the D&G section and you will find it easily on Google most of the time. Try a page in the Diesel section and you probably won't, applying -removed and you will. Thanks, Scott

    | scottlucas
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  • SangeetaC


    All I want to know how google treats RSS fetcher. I want to push my blogs to my own website. Both are there on the same domain . But I want them to be updated automatically on the home page of my website through RSS fetcher if i create it on my blog page. My site name is http://www.myrealdata.com and my blog site name is http://www.myrealdata.com/blog

    | SangeetaC
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  • maty


    Hello Guy´s. Im terrible sad because we make an amazing SEO job for this client: www.medabcn.com And the website was hacked.. Message from the hosting platform: "It would appear that malicious individuals have found a way to upload spam
    pages as well as backdoors to your site(s). We
    have disabled the page(s) in question (via removing their permissions, e.g..
    chmod) until you are able to address this matter." Result: we loose all our SERP Somebody of yours was in a similar situation ? Notes: I was on Google Webmaster an anything seem to be normal. The domain was relative new, maybe a late sandbox efect ? Thanks a lot for your help. Matias

    | maty
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  • MichaelWeisbaum


    "Best Bar In Chicago" - http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar+in+chicago They have only 5 Google reviews, and their local directory reviews are suspect.  One of them goes to rateclubs.com and it's not even a page for their business, while one of them doesn't have user reviews, it's just an editorial review.  The other one at superpages.com doesn't even link back to their site, it links to their restaurants.com profile.  What is going on here? I've been trying to figure this out for a while as their first place ranking has been solidified for quite some time now.  I can also tell you that a few of the bars listed below them have a MUCH higher profile and are better known.  You can see that just by the reviews.

    | MichaelWeisbaum
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  • robotseo


    Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality. Background: This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions. Symptoms: 1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night. 2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again. 3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time. We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?

    | robotseo
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  • willie79


    I am going to be switching my current site from a standard html site to a wordpress site.  I'm kind of paranoid of losing my top spot for the keyterms.  If I keep the content the same, and keep the same amount of image alt tags, the same anchor text etc, nothing should change right? Grateful for any advice. Thanks Will

    | willie79
    0
  • prima-253509


    Hey everyone, I have a fairly specific question on cloaking and whether our integration with disqus might be viewed as cloaking. Here is the setup. We have a site that runs off of drupal and would like to convert the comment handling to disqus for ease of our users. However, when javasrcript is disabled the nice comment system and all of the comments from disqus disappear. This obviously isn't good for SEO, however the user experience using disqus is way better than the native comment system. So here is how we are addressing the problem. With drupal we can sync comments between the native comment system and disqus. When a user has javascript enabled the containing div for the native comment system is set to display:none. hiding the submission form and all of the content and instead displaying it through the disqus interface. However when javascrip is not enabled the native comment form and the comments will be available to the user. Could this be considered cloaking by google? I know they do not like hidden div's, but it should be almost exactly the same content being displayed to the user (depending on when the last sync was run). Thanks for your thoughts, and if anyone has familiarity with a better way to integrate drupal and disqus I am all ears. Josh

    | prima-253509
    0
  • styleblueprint


    I submitted our site, http://www.styleblueprint.com to Google to pontentially be a local news source in Nashville.  I received the following note back: We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this
    time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites
    which are included in the Google News index. Please feel free to review
    these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 Clicking the link, it anchors to the section that says: These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. etc... Now we have never intentionally tried to do anything deceptive for our rankings.  I am new to SEOmoz and new to SEO optimization in general.  I am working through the errors report on our campaign site but I cannot tell what they are dinging us for. Whatever it is we will be happy to fix it. All thoughts greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Jay

    | styleblueprint
    0
  • Robertnweil1


    For link-building purposes, seemingly it was okay to post the same article to multiple sites for links in the past.  However, after the most recent Panda update our thought is that this may not be a good practice.  So the question is, how many times is okay to submit an article for link building purposes.  Should you always only submit to one site?  Is it okay to do more than once?  What is the right way to submit for link-building in Google's eyes? Thanks

    | Robertnweil1
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    A while back I experimented with buying some expired domains that had some PR.  I built a small website on each and created content with anchor text that linked back to my main site. For one of my sites I noticed a significant drop in rankings this week.  At first I thought it was because of the latest Panda update.  But, the drop was slow, not sudden like most Panda hits have been. Then, I noticed that some of my previously purchased domains that had held their PR for quite a while are now PR N/A.  I'm guessing that the latest algorithm change caught on to what I was doing. Probably what I was doing was grey hat.  I honestly think that every SEO goes through a period where they try out some grey or even black tactics.  This makes me even more desiring to be completely White hat now....and build links that are going to last. I was just wondering if any of you guys have experienced anything like this this week?  Would love to hear your thoughts. EDIT:  A second question - What would you guys do with these domains?  They're still in the Google index so they're not penalized, likely just stripped of PR.  Would you scrap them completely?  Remove the links back to my sites?  Do nothing?

    | MarieHaynes
    2
  • BeTheBoss


    For the past few years I have been publish press releases on my site for a number of business. I have high traffic on my site. I noticed that with the Google Panda 2.5 update PRNewswire.com dropped visibility by 83%. Should I stay away from publishing press releases now? Does Google consider Press Releases to be "content scraping" since multiple sources are publishing the release?

    | BeTheBoss
    2
  • charlesgrimm


    A local seo is exclaiming his fantastic track record for a pool company(amonst others) in our local market. Over 150 keywords on page one of google. I checked out a few things using some moz tools and didn't find anything that would suggest that this has come from white hat strategies, tactics or links etc. Interested in how he is doing this and if it is white hat? Thanks, C

    | charlesgrimm
    0
  • flow_seo


    Hi Guys, So, I'm looking at a project to build a series of landing pages that cross map cities with Suname.  E.g. Sydney + Smyth, New York + Fitzpatrick.  On those pages I'll pull in from our directory relevant name based listings and try and display some other tailored / information.  The page itself is the end goal - it is definitely not a doorway in the classic sense of encouraging someone to then go on the main site. I want the user to fill out a form on this page because they realise they've landed on a valuable service. I'm looking at potentially 500 names against 2000 locations, creating 1,000,000 landing pages.  Although some of the content will be repetitive I genuinely believe someone doing the appropriate search and finding our page will derive value from our page as our whole business is designed to answer their needs.  However I'm worried that Google may classify these pages as doorway pages.  Could anyone please shine the light of experience on this for me? Thanks!

    | flow_seo
    0
  • foreignhaus


    I have a client that the only thing I can determine is over optimization of a couple anchor terms which the person no longer ranks for..I tried mixing up with brandname , brandname.com and  a diversity of links but nothing seems to budge anyone have a similar problem?

    | foreignhaus
    0
  • Pooria


    Hi, I am using a plugin in wordpress that make auto link for some certain keywords in my site suppose: My site is example.com My important keyword is: sample and across the domain example.com through out the content if there is the word: sample it is linked automatically to example.com I like your opinion about this practice, if it may carry any kind of punishment by SEs? Thanks.

    | Pooria
    0
  • mcglynn


    Let's say your user-generated content strategy is wildly successful, in a slightly twisted sense: webspammers fill it with online streaming sports teasers and the promise of "Weeds season 7 episode 11." As a result of hard SEO work done to build the profile of the domain, these webspam pages seem to rank well in Google, and deliver nearly 750k pageviews, and many many unique visitors, to the site every month. The ad-sales team loves the traffic boost. Overall traffic, uniques, and search numbers look rosy. What do you do? a) let it ride b) throw away roughly half your search traffic overnight by deleting all the spam and tightening the controls to prevent spammers from continuing to abuse the site There are middle-ground solutions, like using NOINDEX more liberally on UGC pages, but the end result is the same as option (b) even if it takes longer to get there.

    | mcglynn
    0
  • mozalbin


    Hi! I'll jump right in to my question. There's a webpage with the following stats:
    PA 80, mR 4.70, mT 5.00. Pagerank ZERO. Now, these are some beautiful stats for every webpage, except for the pagerank. The reason to why the pagerank is so low is that the inlinks to this site is partial spammy (hidden links and other bad naughty black-hat stuff that I hate). (It's not my webpage, I don't even know whos webpage this is..) I happen to have a backlink from this page. A clean dofollow, in-content link to my site. The total amount of external links on this page is five and there's no spam on the page or hidden anywhere else. My question #1:
    Is this particular inlink to my site harmful? Will I get penaltized for getting a backlink from this site? I mean, Google have figured out the spam factor of the links to the page that is linking to me. But I'm innocent, the link to me is just lying there... (Why or why not?) My question #2:
    IF (and only IF) the link to my webpage is harmful. Are links from my page harmful? (Why or why not?) Thank you very much for using you awesome knowledge to answer this 🙂

    | mozalbin
    0
  • danlae


    Hi What are your thought about donating to get a link. Site is a forum related to developing and programming. It has a PA of 65 and DA of 87 which makes this pretty tempting to me, For my keywords and ranking I know this would mean alot. Is this okay to do, borderline/greyish or is this something i should refrain from doing? I havent been 'donating' earlier. Any thoughts are welcome.

    | danlae
    0
  • Clickwisegr


    This question is related exclusively to few proved spammers who have gained 1st Google search results for specific terms in the Greek market, targeting Greek audience. Why he looks spammer and very suspicious? For instance, the site epipla-sofa.gr, sofa.gr, fasthosting.gr and greekinternetmarketing.com look suspicious regarding their building link activities: 1. suspicious spiky link growth 2. several links from unrelated content (unrelated blog posts forom other markets, paid links, hidden links) 3. excessive amount of suspicious link placements (forum profiles, blog posts, footer and sidebar links) 4. Greek anchor text with the keyword within articles written in foreign languages (total spam) 5. Unnatural anchor text distribution (too many repetitions) So the main question is: Why Google is unable to recognize/trace some of these (or even all) obvious spamming tactics and still these spammy sites as shwon below reside on the 1st Google.gr SERPs. Examples of spam sites according to their link building history: www.greekinternetmarketing.com www.epipla-sofa.gr www.fasthosting.gr www.sofa.gr All their links look very similar. They use probably software to build links, or even hack authority sites and leave hidden links (really dont know how they could do that). Could you please explain or share similar issues? Have you ever found any similar cases in your industry, and how did you tackle it? We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter. Regards, George

    | Clickwisegr
    0
  • zarades


    I had 300 good natural links to my site from different sites and site ranked great for my keywords. Somebody (I suppose my competitor) has hacked other sites 2 days ago (checked Google cache) and now Yahoo Site Explorer shows 600 backlinks. I've checked new links - they all are in the same hidden div block - top:-100px; position:absolute;. I'm afraid that Google may penalize my site for these links. I'm contacting webmasters of these sites and their hosting so they remove these links. Is it possible to give Google a notice that these links are not mine so it could just skip them not penalizing me? Is it safe to make "Spam report" regarding links to my own site?

    | zarades
    0
  • Burkett.com


    "What’s up with these dl.dropbox.com High PA & DA links?" You know, It's frustrating to spend almost an entire day getting a few great link backs... then to find out your competitor has hundreds of cheap & easy link backs for the keyword you are going for with greater Authority [according to SEOmoz's OSE]. So I ran a search on one of our top competitors in Open Site Explorer to gather an idea of where the heck they are getting all of their links. Please feel free to copy my actions so you can see what I see. Run a search in OSE for www[dot]webstaurantstore[dot]com. Click on the ‘Anchor Text’ Tab. Click on the first Anchor Text Term, which should be ‘restaurant supplies’ :: Then it will expand, click on the ‘View more links and details in the inbound links section.’ As you scroll down the list you will notice that they have a bunch of linking pages from dl.dropbox.com, all of them are .pdb files, for their targeted Anchor Text, restaurant supplies. Q: So my question is can someone please elaborate on what .pdb files are and how they are getting this to work for them so well? Also you will notice, on the expanded Anchor Text Page, that their 6<sup>th</sup> most powerful link for this phrase (restaurant supplies) seems to be linked straight from a porn site, I thought Google does not rank adult sites like this? Q: For future reference, does anyone know legitimate websites to maybe file an SEO manipulation complaint? Thanks!

    | Burkett.com
    0
  • anchorwave


    I know some of the basic factors to rank better on Google Places, but I'm looking to see where the priority is and if there are negative factors?

    | anchorwave
    0
  • stubenbordt


    I have a client who is receiving a good bit of traffic from a source that I believe to be AdWare, which is obviously bad.  I didn't commission anyone to do this, so I'm at a loss as to where it originated, but it sends me many unique users per day - of course, the bounce rate is 80%, and the average time on the site is 8 seconds.  If I were to change site servers, would that A) stop the AdWare traffic, and B) change my rankings?

    | stubenbordt
    0

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