Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Research & Trends
  3. White Hat / Black Hat SEO
Log in to post

Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • diogenes


    there has been a lof of discussion on this forum and elsewhere about over optimized anchor text, partial match anchor text vs exact anchor text match, etc. I am wondering iwhether or not exact anchor text matches are good or bad for internal links? Does anyone have anythoughts, or better, any studies? Paul

    | diogenes
    0
  • ShoutOut


    Hello , I am launching a new website which would host user generated content . Based on my brandname i have purchased a new domain . In order to improve SEO  rankings i was considering to purchase a good quality domain (have gr8 link backs)  and then perform 301 redirection of the domain to the new brandname.co.in domain . Does this work ?  Is there any harm in doing this ? . Does the Link juice pass naturally ? Warm Rgd

    | ShoutOut
    0
  • FrontlineMobility


    Let's say I were to start a company.  Of course, I want to be indexed, crawled, and pulled up in the search engines.  So I start using black hat seo techniques.  I comment spam, keyword stuff, spin articles, hide text, etc.  I publish hundreds of articles per day on well know sites with excellent page rank.  If I am doing all of these unethical techniques, what is going to happen to my website?

    | FrontlineMobility
    0
  • Alex-Harford


    I noticed a few strange crawl errors in a Google Webmaster Tools account - further investigation showed they're pages that don't exist linked from here: http://404checker.com/404-checker-log Basically that means anyone can enter a URL into the website and it'll get linked from that page, temporarily at least. As there are hundreds of links of varying quality - at the moment they range from a well known car manufacturer to a university, porn and various organ enlargement websites - could that have a detrimental effect on any websites linked? They are all nofollow. Why would they choose to list these URLs on their website? It has some useful tools and information but I don't see the point in the log page. I have used it myself to check HTTP statuses but may look elsewhere from now on.

    | Alex-Harford
    0
  • IanTheScot


    So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?

    | IanTheScot
    0
  • PeterAlexLeigh


    Anyone used the Mech Turk for SEO purposes? I've heard and thought of various uses for it ranging from genuine credible uses to greyer areas, but if anyone's got any real experience, suggestions or ideas about it, I'd love to hear them!

    | PeterAlexLeigh
    0
  • Melia


    I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.

    | Melia
    0
  • AnthonyMangia


    I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal. When I initially read this article, I was happy.  It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again.  The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz. Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue.  There seems to be a few different opinions: The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued. The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility. The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor. Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about.  I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point.  It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that. What do you guys think?  Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other?  Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another?  Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept?  I'm curious to hear your responses.

    | AnthonyMangia
    0
  • BelfastSEO


    Hi I've been rather silly and been linking out to other websites for reciprical links.  I added about 20 and just discovered some were bad neigbourhoods.  On Sunday my rankings tanked but the page was only cached the following day on the Monday.  Just wondering if there is any connection. I genuinely did not know that linking out could was bad and have removed all reciprical links as a precaution.

    | BelfastSEO
    0
  • AnnemiekevH


    Hi, In the Netherlands, the SEO competition for terms like loans is very competitive. I see a website in this industry that seems to be doing very well based on links with good anchor text from sites that seem quite worthless to me, such as: http://www.online-colleges-helper.com/ and http://www.alohapath.com/ My question is: is it worth pursuing this type of links? I assume these must be paid links, or am I wrong? I'd really rather not go down this route but I don't want to be outranked by someone who is using these types of links... Many thanks in advance for any type of insight! Annemieke

    | AnnemiekevH
    0
  • robertrRSwalters


    About 3 months ago I implemented a massive URL structure change by 'upgrading' some of the features of our CMS Prior to this URL's for catergorys and products looked something like this http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=OX09 I made a few changes but din't implement it fully as I felt it would be better to do it instages as the site was getting indexed more thouroughly. HOWEVER... We have just hit the first page for some key SERP's and I am wary to rock the boat again by changing the URL structures again and all the sitemaps. How much pain do you think we could feel if i went ahead and optimised the URL's fully? and What would you do? 🙂

    | robertrRSwalters
    0
  • reeljerc


    I have multiple domains with the same registrar.  Is there an SEO benefit to create complimentary blogs on blogspot, wordpress.com or other "free" blog sites and forward these domains with the purpose of backlinking to the main site?

    | reeljerc
    0
  • augustos


    Hello folks, How is google dealing with those clever peoples who decide to buy a famous place on internet( domain ), to be their domain name. For example if someone buy a very well ranked domain name for some keywords in their niche, is there any punishment? Whats the bad things about buy a domain? Thanks.

    | augustos
    0
  • pbhatt


    We are considering purchasing an existing website in our industry with a domain authority of 52 and 20K inlinks and redirecting it to our new website with a domain authority of 26 and 1,000 inlinks. Would this be the best way to improve our new site's authority and inlinks? Would Google penalize us for doing that or would it effectively transfer the old sites authority to us?

    | pbhatt
    0
  • Storitz


    I am looking into buying traffic for a website and I'd like to know if anyone has had a positive experience doing so.  What are the best companies that sell traffic? I also want to buy video views.  This is a trickier question.  I upload the videos to YouTube and use the embed code on my website.  I want the paid video views on my site so I get the traffic and YT gets the video view. Any suggestions?  Thanks

    | Storitz
    0
  • Martin_S


    So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.

    | Martin_S
    0
  • AkshayaPatra


    How to Optimize our website in terms of onpage optimisation,  how relavent the onpage should be to that of the search engine. will onpage optimisatrion will help us to rank better in organic search results.

    | AkshayaPatra
    0
  • diogenes


    I  am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text  I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in  with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul

    | diogenes
    0
  • iJeep


    When looking at my competitors in Open Site Explorer, I see that most of them have hundreds of links from articles that are meaningless to a human with one or two links to their site using keywords in the last paragraph. My guess is that these companies used an article creation/submission service since the article isn't 100% related to the link, but it is close. Should I do this as well?  Is it spam? All of these sites rank higher than me for all terms and have higher scores in the competitive analysis.

    | iJeep
    0
  • jbloggs


    Hi all been looking at the keyword research tool , phrase is dog beds site at number 10 is **www.ideas-4-pets.com    ** opened site explorer http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.ideas-4-pets.com%2F Took at a look at linking root domains ths guy has some huge linking domains , so thought I would take a look at how they managed to get links from sites like Samsung , the UN , Php.net, Linking Root Domain Domain Authority Linking Root Domains *.parallels.com/ 97 129,927 *.php.net/ 97 201,007 *.dmoz.org/ 94 80,621 *.swsoft.com/ 92 24,586 *.samsung.com/ 89 54,125 *.oreilly.com/ 88 48,350 *.undp.org/ 88 21,578 I cant understand how he has got links off psd files or on page assets like embedded swf files. Anyone know how they are dong this , is this pure Darth Vader black hat >>??? Thanks in advance May the Google be with You

    | jbloggs
    0
  • diogenes


    I have noticed that some of my competitors have set up "mirror" homepages set up for different counties, towns, or suburbs. In one case the mirror homepages are virtually identical escept for the title and in the other case about half of the content id duplicate and the other half is different. both of these competors have excellent rankings and traffic. I am surprised about these results, does anyone care to comment about it and is this a grey hat technique that is likely to be penalized eventually. thx Diogenes

    | diogenes
    0
  • theChris


    I suspect something possibly black-hat is going on with the amount of inbound links for www.pacificlifestylehomes.com   ( http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ) mainly because they have such a large volume of links (for my industry) with their exact targeted keyword. Can anyone help clear this up for me?

    | theChris
    0
  • PaulKMia


    The following site ranks #1 in Google for almost every key phrase in their URL path for almost every page on their site. Example: themarketinganalysts.com/en/pages/medical-translation-interpretation-pharmaceutical-equipment-specifications-medical-literature-hippa/  The last folder in this URL uses 9 keywords and I've seen as many as 18 on the same site. Curious: every page is a "default.html" under one of these kinds of folders (so much architecture?). Question: How much does stuffing keywords into URL paths affect ranking? If it has an effect, will Google eventually ferret it out and penalize it?

    | PaulKMia
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    I set a little bit of time aside for each client to comment on blogs for backlinks, but it just seems like a waste of time at this point.  Most blogs have comments turned off, or won't allow links.  Obviously making your name a keyword and making that a link is very spammy, and alot of blogs are using Disqus or making you login with your facebook account to post a comment.  What's the best way of going about this these days, or is it not even worth the time?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • kynop


    i want to have a funktion which shortens text in categorie view in my shop. apple is doing this in their product configurator see the "learn more" button at the right side: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC915LL/A apple is doing this by adding dynamic content but i want it more seo type by leaving the content indexable by google. i know from a search that this was used in the past years by black had seos to cover keywordstuffing. i also read an article at google. i beleive that this is years ago and keywordstuffing is completly no option anymore. so i beleive that google just would recognise it like the way its meant to be. but if i would not be sure i would not ask here 🙂 what do you think?

    | kynop
    0
  • JerDoggMckoy


    Hey, I have an opportunity to get listed in a themed directory page, that has a high mozRank of 4+ and a high mozTrust of 5+. Would it be better to just have one link from that page going to one of my internal product category pages, or take advantage of the 'sitelinks' they offer, that allows me to have an additional 5 anchor text links to 5 other pages? I've attached an example. sitelinks.jpg

    | JerDoggMckoy
    0
  • whorneff310


    In other words I'm wondering if someone built up an internet presence for their company through multiple websites over the years and then decided to move to another part of the united states, would it work to change all the keywords to the new location? Would that work toward getting them ranked in the new area or would you have to create entirely new websites? Thanks guys.

    | whorneff310
    0
  • tomypro


    Dear SEOMOZ Community, Our portfolio of around 15 internationalized web pages has received a significant, as it seems IP-wide, Google penalty starting November 2010 and have yet to recover from it. We have undergone many measure to lift the penalty including reconsideration requests wo/ luck and am now hoping the SEOMoz community can give us some further tips. We are very interested in the community's help and judgement what else we can try to uplift the penalty. As quick background information, The sites in question offers sports results data and is translated for several languages. Each market, equals language, has its own tld domain using the central keyword, e.g. <keyword_spanish>.es <keyword_german>.de <keyword_us>.com</keyword_us></keyword_german></keyword_spanish> The content is highly targeted around the market, which means there are no duplicate content pages across the domains, all copy is translated, content reprioritized etc. however the core results content in the body of the pages obviously needs to stay to 80% the same A SEO agency of ours has been using semi-automated LinkBuilding tools in mid of 2010 to acquire link partnerships There are some promotional one-way links to sports-betting and casino positioned on the page The external linking structure of the pages is very keyword and main-page focused, i.e. 90% of the external links link to the front page with one particular keyword All sites have a strong domain authority and have been running under the same owner for over 5 years As mentioned, we have experienced dramatic ranking losses across all our properties starting in November 2010. The applied penalties are indisputable given that rankings dropped for the main keywords in local Google search engines from position 3 to position 350 after the sites have been ranked in the top 10 for over 5 years. A screenshot of the ranking history for one particular domain is attached. The same behavior can be observed across domains. Our questions are: Is there something like an IP specific Google penalty that can apply to web properties across an IP or can we assume Google just picked all pages registered at Google Webmaster? What is the most likely cause for our penalty given the background information? Given the drops started already in November 2010 we doubt that the Panda updates had any correlation t this issue? What are the best ways to resolve our issues at this point? We have significant history data available such as tracking records etc. Our actions so far were reducing external links, on page links, and C-class internal links Are there any other factors/metrics we should look at to help troubleshooting the penalties? After all this time wo/ resolution, should we be moving on two new domains and forwarding all content as 301s to the new pages? Are the things we need to try first? Any help is greatly appreciated. SEOMoz rocks. /T cxK29.png

    | tomypro
    0
  • Osanda


    My client's Website http://countryfeelingholidays.com is experiencing a huge drop of its rankings since Aug 1st. It was at 2nd on 1st page on google.lk for the keyword Holidays Sri Lanka . But When I checked it last it has gone to 20th page. I really cannot find a reason for this drop . Only thing that comes to mind is that we put a comment on a blog but finally it appeared on all pages because of top commentator plugin . huge rise in backlinks in oneday . from next day we lost its ranking on google.lk but on google.com it is still at the same position where it used to be . What would be the reason for this ? Could it be a penelty ? What should we do now to get its ranking back ?

    | Osanda
    0
  • JamesBSEO


    I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!

    | JamesBSEO
    0
  • getrightmusic


    Hello, I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I was wondering how a websites search query keyword string url can rank above other page results that have stronger backlinks. The domain is usually strong, but that url with the .php?search=keyword just seems like it doesn't fit in. How does Google index those search string pages? Is it based off of traffic alone to that url? Because those urls typically don't have backlinks, right? Has anyone tried to rank their websites search query urls ever? I'm just a little curious about it. Thanks everyone. Jesse

    | getrightmusic
    0
  • Benj25


    Or will it affect our ranking positively or negatively at all?

    | Benj25
    0
  • James77


    My site works a bit like a directory, so say I have a page called "Ice Cream Vendors" - on that page I would talk a bit about Ice Cream Vendors, then I will have a list of Ice Cream Vendor Locations. My list of locations can be quite big depending on the product and the amount of locations they occur in - when you click a location, it goes to a page showing all "ICeCream Vendors" in that location. So Currently I will have a table on the page a bit like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
    New York
    Miami
    Las Vegas This is all perfectly nice, simple and usable - BUT it is not producing perfect keyword links - for perfect keyword links the list should be like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
    New York Ice Cream Vendors
    Miami Ice Cream Vendors
    Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Now I have my perfect anchor links - BUT it looks rediculous and is NOT user friendly. So What do I do?
    1/. Build it for users and not have perfect anchor links, and loose in SEO?
    2/.  Build a perfect SEO links and make it less usable and looking spammy? OR 3/. Deliver the search engine the perfect SEO links, and the user the userfriendly version? In this I mean I could do the following:
    SE's (and screen readers I think would see):
    ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
    New York Ice Cream Vendors
    Miami Ice Cream Vendors
    Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Users would See
    ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
    New York
    Miami
    Las Vegas Now in my view I am doing nothing wrong - I am mearly giving the user the most userfriendly version and I am giving the SE more information on the link, that the user doesn't need. So - In my view I am doing something that is honest  - but what are your thoughts?? Has anyone tried to do this? Thanks

    | James77
    0
  • BoulderJoe


    I ran a report on my site (www.rentscouter.com) using OSE and it is reporting some very strange inbound links like: anchor text = Megan http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/mmnr/smr/Paul_Henderson_Interview_Full_Clip_REVISED.f4v?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=蒲田・大森・羽田周辺 http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/mmnr/smr/Paul_Henderson_Interview_Full_Clip_REVISED.f4v?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=熱闘！甲子園%2F高校野球ゲーム http://www.hawkeyesports.com/photos/schools/stan/sport/m-baskbl/04-05action/Thumbs.db?pages10=10&size=9?pk=1 anchor text = Alexa's Mom http://www.lg.com/it/products/documents/LE8800.epk?action=view&pageId=214&start=69164 http://www.michigan.gov/documents/techtalk/SEM-0601_191695_7.dot?blogname=mahdid&sub=5&tpl=0 anchor text = http://fansofdavid.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/4v5sh3k1.htm?seccion=busqarag_s&busq=Huesos&?seccion=basearag_c&id=3&?seccion=busqarag_s&busq=Huesos&?seccion=basearag_c&id=3&_pagi_pg=596 However, none of these seem to show up in my Google Webmaster account.  And generally when I go to some of these links I can't find any reference to my site - is the OSE data bad or are these really shady links someone is building to knock down my site? What is showing up in GWT are a bunch of growing crappy links that redirect to some advertising site - does anyone know of a way to get these removed by Google as I doubt I'm going have any luck trying to contact the owner(s) of these sites: | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/252213-best_penis_enlargement_methods.htm |
    | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/252426-plumbers_and_gasfitters_needed_urgently.htm |
    | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/252451-the_importance_of_plumbers_and_more.htm |
    | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/253039-football_betting_systems_can_they_be_profitable.htm |
    | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/253131-my_teen_wants_to_know_how_sex_was_and_is_for_me_what_do_i_say.htm |
    | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/254364-why_marriage_counseling_is_good_for_you.htm |
    | http://harleydavidsonjacket.org/article/254449-herpes_dating_service_what_is_it.htm | Yes, I know Google will theoretically and maybe eventually "ignore" such links, but that will be on Google time 4 weeks or 4 years - who knows.  Plus, with a younger site with a thinner link profile - anything like the links above can't be helping me...... I'm trying to figure out why my site keeps bouncing between #5 and #255 for specific keywords and determining if I have a google penalty which is being discussed in this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-with-diagnosing-google-penalty

    | BoulderJoe
    0
  • BrandonC-269887


    Using Open Site Explorer I was reviewing a sites links. This site happens to appear at position 2 in Google for a key-term that I am targeting for one of my sites. Most, if not all of the links appear to be coming from some very questionable sources that have absolutely nothing to do with their sites content or business. Some of the page titles are : Free Music - Free Music Tampa Bay Florida Fishing Guide Free BDSM and Bondage Sex, BDSM XXX, Fetish Por... LAX Car Rental Reciprical Links Page - Add Your Link Casino More Links Is this practice going to end up hurting their site and catch up to them at some point? From what I have read, these are not the type of links that you want to be going after.

    | BrandonC-269887
    0
  • 94501


    Hi, I have a client that makes products that are accessories for other company's popular consumer products. Their own products on their website rank for other companies product names like, for made up example "2011 Super Widget" and then my client's product... "Charger." So, "Super Widget 2011 Charger" might be the type of term my client would rank for. Everybody knows the 2012 Super Widget will be out in some months and then my client's company will offer the 2012 Super Widget Charger. What do you think of launching pages now for the 2012 Super Widget Charger. even though it doesn't exist yet in order to give those pages time to rank while the terms are half as competitive. By the time the 2012 is available, these pages have greater authority/age and rank, instead of being a little late to the party? The pages would be like "coming soon" pages, but still optimized to the main product search term. About the only negative I see is that they'lll have a higher bounce rate/lower time on page since the 2012 doesn't even exist yet. That seems like less of a negative than the jump start on ranking. What do you think? Thanks!

    | 94501
    0
  • SunuPhilip


    Google Panda update has brought about so much changes in Google search engine algorithms. I like to know what sort of link building is considered good for SEO in the present scenario? Is article marketing, directory submission, blog posting, web property creation, video submission, press release submission etc still relevant? I like to know your valuable opinions.. I am hearing conflicting responses to this question. So I thought, I will ask here and know what really works. Thanks in advance.

    | SunuPhilip
    0
  • marcusuk-304105


    Hi, A few weeks ago my homepage - http://www.linearsky.com dropped out of the rankings completely for a keyword I was promoting  (web design staffordshire). I was thinking that one of the reasons could be a sudden link spike. The reason being is that I have been doing some development work (for a client) on one of my sub-domains. Now this is a Magento site with thousands of products, with my keyword rich link in the footer. From looking at the Google webmaster tools, it seams that alot of these pages got indexed accidently. Could this sudden link spike be enough to be penalised by Google? Apart from that the only borderline black hat stuff I have been doing is some reciprocal link swapping with a few websites in my niche - http://www.linearsky.com/misc/links.html I also bought a paid link on http://www.iwebtool.com/browser_details, (that I have now asked to be withdrawn) to see what kind of boost it would give me. I know this is unethical, but a number of page one competitors were also using this said link. Also it was only indexed for a few weeks. Could Google really pick this up so quickly? Any ideas of how to resolve this? Many Thanks Marcus

    | marcusuk-304105
    0
  • themegroup


    Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'. Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions. I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full. Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.

    | themegroup
    0
  • JetBookMike


    Hi At our company we decided we wanted to reach out to a more global audience. So we bought a bank of domains for different countries, e.g. ".asia". Some are our company name, others are things like "barcelonaprivatejets.com." We then put up single page websites for each of these domains, which link to our main .com site. However, I don't know if this is good for our SEO or bad. I've seen so many different things written but I cannot find a definitive answer. The text will be different on all the pages, but being only one page, and the "design" being the same, will we get penalized in some way or another? I've also added links to 2/3 of them in the footer of our main site but now I'm reading that this is bad too - so should I remove these? If anyone also has any ideas of how better we could use these Country-specific domains I would be welcome to suggestions to that too! I am not an SEO person really, I'm a web developer, so this is all completely different to me. P.S My name is Michael not Andy.

    | JetBookMike
    0
  • Thos003


    If I want to better target my audience so I would like to be able to address the exact query string coming from the search engine. I'd also like to add relevant sections to the site based in the geo area they live in. Can I customize a small portion of the page to fit my visitors search query and geo area per the IP address? How much can I change a web page to better fit a user and still be within the search engine's guidelines?

    | Thos003
    0
  • Ron10


    There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture.  (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text.  They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.   Is this a good idea?  is it black hat?  are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm?  It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.  Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases? Thanks in advance for your opinions! Ron10

    | Ron10
    0
  • IKT


    Such as, if i wrote a ymoz, and suddenly the articles is accepted, will the link to our site coming out of that Article Post increased our SEO Standing? Another example would be http://active.tutsplus.com , yesterday i have successfully pitched a tutorial idea, and they told me to write it so that they can published it , and they also promised that i will be able to put my site link (dofollow) ... But will these link be a Good BackLink that will increase our site's SEO Standing? The last one is exactly the same link , but this time coming from a News Site , such as http://teknologi.kompasiana.com/internet/2011/06/09/website-full-flash-dengan-inovasi-hebat-karya-indonesia/ , in this article (kompasiana is a very wellknown site news in Indonesia, in fact KOMPAS is the biggest newspaper firm in Indonesia) , our site is being featured , there is a link coming out of that article (DOFOLLOW), but will that link make our site much more SEO Friendly? Again please enlighten me 🙂

    | IKT
    0
  • RodneyRiley


    A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market. My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!). This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty. Ideas? Thoughts? All help appreciated

    | RodneyRiley
    0
  • Jingo01


    I have a website which is on a .co.uk TLD and is primarily focused to the UK. Understandably I get very little in the way on US traffic, even though a lot of the content is applicable to the UK or US and could be made more so with a little tinkering. The domain has some age to it and ranks quite well for a variety of keywords and phrases, so it seems sensible to keep the site on this domain. The .com version of the domain is no longer available, and the current owner does not seem inclined to sell it to me. So, I am considering registering a very similar .com domain and simply using it to drive some traffic to the .co.uk site. To do this, I would have the same category pages and the same (or similar) list of links to the various pages in those categories. But instead instead of linking to a page on the new .com, it would take visitors to the existing page on the .co.uk. I would make this transparent to visitors ("Take a look at these pages on our sister site bluewidgets.co.uk") and the .com would have some unique content of its own. Would this be considered some kind of Doorway site/page (content rich doorway), or is it simply bad idea which is unlikely to drive any traffic?

    | Jingo01
    0
  • MyNet


    We have just started in on an SEO campaign after a year or so break from engaging in active SEO efforts.  Our rankings and organic traffic seems to be increasing but we just dropped from a PR 5 to a PR 4 after being a PR 5 for probably a couple years.  We are not doing anything black hat or sketchy and try hard to make sure all of our links are relevant and quality links.  Does anyone know why this might have happened or if it is an indication of anything?

    | MyNet
    0
  • 94501


    Hi, I have a client who is thinking about selling ads on one site they own via something like textlinkads.com. Do you think they run any risk of exposing their other sites to scrutiny, penalties  or problems?

    | 94501
    0
  • RyanKent


    Until now I have been building websites either from scratch or with a template. Recently I decided to learn Adobe Dreamweaver. At the end of the first "Building a Website using Dreamweaver" lesson, the author notes the site is done but an H1 tag is missing. The instructor advises "The page doesn't have a top-level heading ( ). The design uses the banner image instead. This looks fine in a browser, but search engines and screen readers expect pages to be organized with a proper hierarchy of headings: at the top of the page, ..." The instructor then walks readers step-by-step into creating an H1 tag and using absolute positioning of -500px top to cause the tag to not be visible. My initial thought was the instructor was completely wrong for offering this advise, and users would be banned from search engines for following these instructions. I had planned to contact the writer and suggest the instructions be modified. Prior to doing such, I wanted to request a bit of feedback. The banner image's text in this example is "Check Magazine: Fashion and Lifestyle". The H1 tag that is created and positioned off-screen uses that exact same text. In an old blog comment, Matt Cutts shared "If you’re straight-out using CSS to hide text, don’t be surprised if that is called spam. I’m not saying that mouseovers or DHTML text or have-a-logo-but-also-have-text is spam; I answered that last one at a conference when I said “imagine how it would look to a visitor, a competitor, or someone checking out a spam report. If you show your company’s name and it’s Expo Markers instead of an Expo Markers logo, you should be fine. If the text you decide to show is ‘Expo Markers cheap online discount buy online Expo Markers sale …’ then I would be more cautious, because that can look bad.”" I would like to get some mozzer feedback on this topic. Do you view this technique as white hat? black hat? or grey hat?

    | RyanKent
    0
  • dmn02


    Hi, I am thinking of redirecting all mobile (iphone, cell phone, etc) to an advertiser (so completely different content than my site). Is there any risk of getting banned from google (etc) for doing this? (this is for an adult site)

    | dmn02
    0
  • RyanKent


    Either there is some amazingly good SEO work going on here, or Google has an amazingly large hole in their metrics. http://nottowait.com/ http://www.ucdavis.edu/index.html The "nottowait" page has a PA of 85?! and a DA of 82?! The page is HORRIBLE. The page itself is an image of another page. The nav bar does not function, nor does any of the "click here" links. At the bottom there is a paragraph of keywords and broken english. This page is pure junk and should simply not have any value at all with respect to DA nor PA. It has a ton of incoming links from various sources which seem to be the source of all this value, which it passes on to other pages. This page really is an affront to the "content is king" concept. I suppose I should ask a question but all I can think of is, what is Matt Cutts' phone number? I want to ask him how this page has gotten away with being ranked so well for so long.

    | RyanKent
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.