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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • damon1212


    I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . .  ).  It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense. Does anyone know why people do this?  Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form. I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .

    | damon1212
    0
  • IKT


    Well, i see that we need 200mozpoints to be able to put our Website Link (DOFOLLOW) into our profile in SEOMOZ.. the way i know it, it would be a good BackLink for my site. Here is the questions, please do answer from top to bottom, because if you have answered "NOT GOOD" for the first question, then the rest of the question will definitely be "NOT GOOD" too Every single back link source i used below (for question #2 and #3), comes from a good domain (it is an extremely wellknown website in Indonesia) 1. Is the DOFOLLOW link from my SEOMOZ Profile Page , a good back link? 2. is the DOFOLLOW from http://www.indonesiaindonesia.com/m4g1c14n a good back link 3. is the DOFOLLOW from http://www.kaskus.us/member.php?u=10407 (click the Contact Info), a good back link? okay, only if you answered the first 3 questions with "It is a good backlink, and it will definitely help your SEO Standing for your site", then i ask you my real question.. i was planning to use the service from http://www.monsterbacklinks.com , and i asked them to show me what kind of "High Quality Backlink" they will be giving me, here is their reply, 10 examples of profile they use to backlink to one of their client Domain PR 4--http://www.sanramon.org/user/12548
    Domain PR 5--http://extratasty.com/profile/42069/paulc4312
    Domain PR 5--http://www.bug.co.uk/forums/members/paulc4312.html
    Domain PR 5--http://www.offspring.com/forums/member.php?u=84973
    Domain PR 5--http://www.massify.com/profiles/paulcpaul
    Domain PR 6--http://www.gamezone.com/member/159751/
    Domain PR
    5--http://www.indyarocks.com/profile/profile_vview_main.php?uid=6155724
    Domain PR 6--http://classic.mapmywalk.com/user_profile?u=866130762956343886
    Domain PR 5--http://www.netbookreviews.com/forum/members/paulc4312.html
    Domain PR 5--http://www.thepoint.com/users/paul-c-2/profile
    Domain PR 5--http://forums.cagepotato.com/members/paulc4312.html In my eyes, all of those links are as good as the one link coming from SEOMOZ Profile, hell in fact i have already purchased from them the 750 High Quality BackLink package (cost 197$), but my PayPal is being lock down just now, because i login to my account from both my cellphone and pc (they think my account is hacked)... so will i increase my SEO Standing if i used their service? if they are, i will finalized my purchase tomorrow (after i settled the problem with paypal) Their FAQ Page is also very convincing .. such these 2 questions Will I get penalized for paying you to do my backlinks? There is no way you will get penalized for paying us to do your backlinks. It is possible to get penalized for paying people to put links on their sites but that's not what you're buying from us. When purchasing from us you are paying us to place thousands of free backlinks. There is absolutely no way Google can penalize you for this. Will Google ban/sandbox me for getting so many backlinks? We have never had any problems with getting sanboxed or banned by google. None of our customers have had any problems either. If our methods of placing backlinks were to get a site penalized or banned then we would be sending thousands of links towards our competitors sites. But since our methods work great for increasing search engine rankings, we would never use our backlinking on our competitors because that will damage our rankings and boost theirs. Please enlighten me 🙂

    | IKT
    0
  • stevenheron


    I've been partaking in an extensive trial study and will be releasing the results soon, however I do have quite a strong indication to the answer to this question but would like to see what everyone else thinks first, to see where the common industry mindset is at. Let's say SiteA.com/page1.html is PR5 and links out to SiteB.com/page1.html This of course would count as a valuable backlink. Now, what would happen if SiteA.com/page2.html, which is also PR5, links out to SiteB.com/page2.html ? The link from SiteA is coming from a different page, and is also pointing to a different deeplink on SiteB, however it will contain the same IP address. What would the benefit be for having multiple deeplinks in this way (as outlined above, please read it carefully before responding) as opposed to having just a single deeplink from the domain? If a benefit does exist, then does the benefit start to become trivial? This has nothing to do with sitewide links. Serious answers only please.

    | stevenheron
    1
  • neeper67


    Hello, I have talked to many SEO companies about their services and rates. I noticed that all of them will buy thousands and thousands of links once you first join. That is why they always want a start-up fee, so they can purchase the links. I know the best method is doing it the ethical hard way of asking sites to link to them, but I dont have time to do that. I mainly want to know where the SEO companies buy their links from. I am figuring that them buying the links are not negatively affecting the sites or they would lose their clients if they got into black hat links. It must be good inorder for them to keep their clients. I was interested in buying links, but do not know who to trust. Does anyone have a recommendation?

    | neeper67
    0
  • MartinHof


    Hello, I noticed that this onepage website: http://www.clearpixel.net/ ranks at #11 for web design London so I did some research using SEO Moz Pro. Turns out that alll their links are from Chinese directory style sites. Does this demonstrate black hat SEO? If not, how do I go about getting links on Chinese sites with .gov urls. Many thanks, Martin Hofschroer

    | MartinHof
    0
  • 94501


    I have a friend with a site that has a lot of content. Some of that content has affiliate links with no follows to affiliate urls. Those pages also have a disclosure on them about the affiliate relationship. Now, he's talking about taking some of the existing under-performing affiliate links and renting them out to another site that wants them for the link juice. He says he'd have an on-page  disclosure, a display ad for the advertiser on the page and something in the text like "you might check out our advertiser..." and then some keyword targeted link. He was asking me how risky I thought this is for him and really I don't know.Do you think Google would find this and s**t a chicken over it?  I really don't know, given that I see really blatant undisclosed rented links all the time.Of course, my easy answer to him is "don't do it," but it does make me wonder how risky that is. Also, is that a realistic site-wide penalty kind of thing or it just doesn't pass any link juice to the advertiser kind of thing? So, I'm posting here for others to weigh in on. Thanks!

    | 94501
    0
  • CIEEwebTeam


    I saw an intense drop in non-branded organic search for major pages on my site on April 1st this year. The homepage wasn't affected and it's not an annual thing. I've attached a screen shot showing the drop. I'm new to the company and recently learned that they had hired a pretty black hat company last year and I'm worried that this is Panda...although the timing seems wrong. Has anyone experienced panda effects between the two updates? I'd love to get some feedback!! 1ry2a.png

    | CIEEwebTeam
    0
  • Alexsmenaru


    What is you opinion about scrapebox? I recently used scapebox ... are there any negative effects? My site is more then 1 year old...

    | Alexsmenaru
    0
  • mwoody


    Hi All, In relation to this thread http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-happend-to-my-ranks-began-dec-22-detailed-info-inside I'm still getting whipped hard from Google, this week for some reason all rankings have gone for the past few days. What I was wondering though is this, when Google says- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? I assume my site hits the nail on the head- [removed links at request of author] As you can see I target LG Optimus 3D Sim Free, LG Optimus 3D Contract and LG Optimus 3D Deals.  Based on what Google has said, I know think there needs to be 1 page that covers it all instead of 3. What I'm wondering is the best way to deal with the situation?  I think it should be something like this but please correct me along the way 🙂 1. Pick the strongest page out of the 3 2. Merge the content from the 2 weaker pages into the strongest 3. Update the title/meta info of the strongest page to include the KW variations of all 3 eg- LG Optimus 3D Contract Deals And Sim Free Pricing 4. Then scatter contract, deals and sim free throughout the text naturally 5. Then delete the weaker 2 pages and 301 redirect to the strongest page 6. Submit URL removal via webmastertools for the 2 weaker pages What would you do to correct this situation?  Am I on the right track?

    | mwoody
    0
  • tommythecat


    So, a couple of weeks ago I started my first CPA website, just as an experiment and to see how well I could do out of it. My rankings were getting better every day, and I’ve been producing constant unique content for the site to improve my rankings even more. 2 days ago my rankings went straight to the last page of Google for the keyword “acne scar treatment” but Google has not banned me or given my domain a minus penalty. I’m still ranking number 1 for my domain, and they have not dropped the PR as my keyword is still in the main index. I’m not even sure what has happened? Am I not allowed to have a CPA website in the search results? The best information I could find on this is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465 But I’ve been adding new pages with unique content. My site is www.acne-scar-treatment.co Any advice would be appreciated.

    | tommythecat
    1
  • rajeevbala


    The term "Beruk" which means "Ape or Monkey" in english brings up this page of wikipedia amongst the first page result: URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khairy_Jamaluddin The page does not contain the word "Beruk". External links to the page do not contact the anchor-text "Beruk" Given the above scenario, how is the page still ranking on first page for this keyword?

    | rajeevbala
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    This is one of my competitor's backlinks: http://bit.ly/mMPhmn Prices for inclusion on this page go from $50 for 6 months to $300 for a permanent listing. Do most of you guys do paid directories like this for your SEO Clients?  My gut is telling me to run away...but I don't want to miss a good opportunity if I should be taking it.

    | MarieHaynes
    0
  • razasaeed


    Dear Sir/Madam, We are white label classified platform providers and recently we marked canonicals on all the partner sites pointing to our home site as authority because we thought that Search Engines might penalize us for duplicate content as the classified ads are similar on all site, only theme and layout is different but now we are witnessing a huge decrease in our partner`s classifed section organic traffic. Can you please advise that is it because of canonicals , if yes than what should we do? like should we take canonicals off and if we take it off than how can we handle it legally.

    | razasaeed
    0
  • trickshotric


    Every summer for the past 4 years one of our customer's competitors suddenly has a big jump in Google's (.co.uk) rankings for some of the main industry phrases, particularly "air conditioning". We were always under the impression that they bought links before the busy summer season, as they have these strange massive jumps in the rankings. (for the rest of the year they often drop down) I recently checked out some of the back-links going to their site and noticed something I'd not seen before.  Of the (approx) 480 links that showed up, around 80% of the SourceURL's ended with "?Action=Webring" (see 1st attached image). To me it doesn't look natural at all and I'm surprised that Google hasn't picked up on. Their site is www.aircon247.com. It had been mentioned to me that this may be to do with link sharing sites (which I assume is black-hat) but I'm not 100% sure that they are doing this. They also have an identical long spammy-looking footer at the bottom of every page which is clearly only for search engines to see. We reported it to Google a year ago but no action was taken. Do you think that it is acceptable to have it on every page? (see 2nd attached image) I would be interested to know your thoughts on both of these, and whether this would be a dangerous tactic to try and emulate? Gc5MU.png iXGA9.png

    | trickshotric
    0
  • gt3


    Do you think when Google crawls your page, it "monitors" comments updates to use this as a ranking factor? If Google is looking for social signs, looking for comments updates might be a social sign as well (ok a lot easier to manipulate, but still social). thx

    | gt3
    0
  • outdoorliving


    Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.). Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.

    | outdoorliving
    0
  • bjenkins24


    So I made a big mistake.  I know it was dumb.  I took a chance and got screwed.  I've been researching one of my competitions back links and found that about 7000 of their 12000 links came from one site.  Upon further investigation that site is a page rank 7 and the link looked bought.  My competitions page rank is 6 which I thought was largely because of this one link.  I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and they bought the link pretty cheap.  So I thought... Hey!?  Why not! About two weeks later, today, google webmaster tools finally found the link and my links went from 100 to 7100.  Now that I really think about it, I know it was a stupid move.  I just figured if they got away with it, I could. I'm a white hat seo'er from now on.  I've learned my lesson.  Wake up today and find that all 400 keywords I am attempting to rank for, which 60% used to be in the top 3, are now not in the top 100.  Luckily I am still indexed in Google though, I'm just not ranking for anything significant. Now I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and had him remove the links.  He was pretty quick about putting them up, so I figure they'll be down today.  Is it just a matter of Google realizing that they're gone until I'm back in the SERPS?  Or am I screwed for good?  This is a little scary, I depend on Google for my entire livelihood.  Yeah, I know not something I should be gambling with then. I only spent $125 on the links, but every month of traffic is worth about $3k to me.  Ouch.  If I lose a few months I'm at least looking at a $10k hit.  Please give me some good news 😞

    | bjenkins24
    0
  • robertrRSwalters


    I would like to get peoples thoughts on putting 80% of your anchor text links in just 2 keywords vs a nice spread of branded and longtail keywords.. like I am. recently fell off the first page for a key SERP.. and the site in P10 has gone nuts on just that two keyword's.. I know we have a good site onpage/ conversion / low bounce rate page views etc.. Pretty sure we get more traffic than them. Seems that this obvious bloated anchor text profiling has worked for them though.. What do you guys think/know?

    | robertrRSwalters
    0
  • h2oexpert


    Yelp.com seems to dominate a lot of search results for a lot of reasons. Specifically, I've noticed that their internal search results URL appears in Google for tons of results like "hem jeans new york".  They dominate TONS of terms like this and it's always an internal search result page for yelp that appears in #1 Google. From what I can tell, yelp.com is taking various keyword permutations from their internal search, combined with local city/zip info and creating such landing pages. Here is a URL result for "hem jeans new york" http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Hem+Jeans&find_loc=New+York%2C+NY My question is this...What are the specific causes of their success on this type of local / long-tail / specific keyword strategy?  Is it... 1.  Using dynamic sitemaps to feed Google thousands of URLs with various keyword permutations attached.? 2.  Their domain reputation, inbound links, etc. etc. 3.  Both?  Something else? Thanks for your feedback.

    | h2oexpert
    0
  • BradBorst


    Is it okay to create a landing page with a different url to get additional traffic to my site with ppc?  The purpose would not be for link building; I would only use it for direct marketing with ppc and people would click through to my main site via a no-follow link.  Is there anything wrong with doing this?

    | BradBorst
    0
  • bcmull


    The news about paid link campaigns is so frequent, that I have to ask the question....does Google allow any paid links? Aside from SEO, paid links can have visibility value. Much like an exit sign on the highway, the paid link says "Get off here"

    | bcmull
    0
  • zachc_coffeeforless.com


    I would like to use a redirect through a server based Java script to redirect visitors only referenced from a certain site. So let's say anyone clicking on a link to my site page-A from seomoz.org would automatically be redirected to page-B. All other users as well as direct and search engine traffic  would only see the regular page A. The reason I am doing this is because the linking site is linking to page A which doesn't serve the user the correct content. Rather than contacting the webmaster to change the link to point to page -B, I want to redirect them. Is there any danger of Google penalizing this for cloaking? and how would they be able to tell?

    | zachc_coffeeforless.com
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  • SteveOllington


    I'm assuming it wasn't targeted at just me... I certainly hope not anyway lol: ................................................................................................ RE: sarahudah@yahoo.com Message sent by sarah4u on Yesterday, 04:25 Hello i am sarah udah, i saw your profile to day at (seomoz.org) and became in trested in you,i will also like to know you more and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am my email address is (sarahudah@yahoo.com) (Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life) please contact me here sarahudah@yahoo.com .................................................................................................... It appears inbox spam knows no bounds, even on this sacred of grounds 😜

    | SteveOllington
    2
  • SteveOllington


    I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out). I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this? Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?

    | SteveOllington
    1
  • willcraig


    hi all we recently took on a new client, asking us to improve there google ranking, under the term letting agents glasgow , they told us they used to rank top 10 but now are on page 14 so it looks like google has slapped them one, my question is can google block you permanently from ranking under a keyword or disadvantage you, as we went though the customers links, and removed the ones that looked strange, and kept the links that looked ok. but then there ranking dropped to 21, is it worth gaining new links under there main keyword even tho it looks like google is punishing them for having some bad links. the site is www. fine..lets...ltd...co....uk all one word cheers

    | willcraig
    0
  • docschmitti


    Hi, I found that one of my competitors have zero backlings in google, zero in yahoo but about 50.000 in Bing. How is that possible? I assumed that all search engines would finde the backlinks. Besides that he ranks fair well and better than I do with only a single site and with only one article of content while I have a lot of content and sites. I do not undersdtand why he is ranking better in google, while google assumingly does not see any backlinks of the 50.000 bing is finding. Thx, Dan

    | docschmitti
    0
  • skycriesmary72


    What have your experiences been? Short Term? Long Term? There isn't a lot written about it, and I'm wondering where it falls in the order of things. I was very hesitant to jump in, but have launched a few campaigns, both for local geo targeting phrases, and national accounts. Surprisingly, I've seen a surge in rankings, but also wonder how short lived they will be. I've noticed the links still don't come up in tools like open site explorer, but I'm able to find them when searching for the unique username I used while building the profiles. The sites I'm listing on have no relevance to industry, unless by chance, although the PR's I'm using are all 4 or higher. Is this considered gray hat?

    | skycriesmary72
    0
  • kevin1


    A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.

    | kevin1
    1
  • PerriCline


    We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites.  I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software.  But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.

    | PerriCline
    0
  • CoreyTisdale


    On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page.  The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are  "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.

    | CoreyTisdale
    0
  • AdamThompson


    A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.

    | AdamThompson
    0
  • tjgill99


    http://www.shopstyle.com/product/sephora-makeup-sephora-collection-glossy-gloss/233883264 This comparison shopping engine url shows googlebot something dramatically different than My frustration is that a comp shop takes retailers content and copies and duplicates it and then uses it to capture traffic and send sales to other retailers other than the original provider of the content. Although this is a javascript function and not explicit bot detection does this qualify as unethical cloaking?

    | tjgill99
    0
  • newriver


    We're looking to redesign one of our niche business directory websites and we'd like to place local content on the homepage catered to the user based on IP. For instance, someone from Los Angeles would see local business recommendations in their area. Pretty much a majority of the page would be this kind of content. Is this considered cloaking or in any way a bad idea for SEO? Here are some examples of what we're thinking: http://www.yellowbook.com http://www.yellowpages.com/ I've seen some sites redirect to a local version of the page, but I'm a little worried Google will index us with localized content and the homepage would not rank for any worthwhile keywords. What's the best way to handle this? Thanks.

    | newriver
    0
  • dahnyogaworks


    We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks

    | dahnyogaworks
    0
  • cottamg


    My client offers training from many locations within the UK. These locations/venues are not owned by them, however I see no problem in setting up a different listing for each location in Google Places. At the end of the day if a user searched for “Training London” they are looking for somewhere that they can book a course that would be in their local area. As my client has a “venue” there I think there is a good argument to say that your listing would be valid. What are your thoughts.

    | cottamg
    0
  • YesBaby


    Hi SEOmoz community! I would like to try to give a small (well...) case study of a Farmer victim and some logical conclusions of mine that you are more then welcome to shred to pieces. So, I run MANY sites ranging from low to super quality and actually have a few that have been hit by farmer but this particular site had me scratching my head as to why it was torched. Quick background: Sitei s in a very competetive niche, been around since 2004 initially as a forum site but from 2005 also a content driven site. Site is an affiliate site and has been ranking top 5 for many high-value commercial KW's and has a big long-tail of informational kw's. Limk profile is a mix between natural, good links and purchased links from various qualilty sources. Content is high quality written articles, how-to's, blog posts etc. by in-house pro writers plus UGC from a semi active forum (20-30 posts a day). Farmer: After Farmer, this site's vertical is pretty much same as before with the biggest exception being my site. I quickly discounted low-quality content (spider-food) and focused instead on technical reasons. I took this approach since this site isn't the most well kept site I have and I figured the crappy CMS + PHPBB might have caused isseus. I didn't want to waste my time crawling the site myself so I quickly downloaded all the URLs that Majestic had crawled. Too my surprise the result of Majestic's crawler was over 3 million URLs when the real number would likley be 30-40k and Google has about 20k indexed. After scanning through the file with URLs I knew I had issues. Massive amounts of auto-generated dupe pages from the forum and so on. By adding around 20 new lines to robots.txt I was able to block millions of pages from being crawled again. My logic: Ok, so now I think I've found what caused the drop. Milllions of dupe pages and empty pages could have tripped the Farmer algo update to think the site is low quality or dupe or just trying to feed the spiders with uselessness. My WEAK point in this logic is that I can't prove that Google even knew about (or smart enough to ignore them). Google WMT tells me they've crawled an average of around 10k pages the last 90 days. Given this I'm doubting my logic and if I've found the issue or not. My next step is to see if this gets resolved algorithmically or not, if not i feel I have a legitimate case to submit a reinclusion request but i'm not sure? Since I haven't been a contributing member to this community I'm not looking to get direct help with my site, but hopefully this could spark some discussion about Farmer and maybe some flaming of my logic regarding the update 🙂 So, would any of you have drawn similar conclusions as I did? (Sweet blog bro!)

    | YesBaby
    0
  • shoffy


    I presently have a number of whitepapers that bring traffic to our site.  If a visitor elects to download the whitepaper they are taken to a lead form with an abstract of the whitepaper.  The abstract is present because the visitor may or may not have come to the lead form directly. I imagine this would be a "no no," but how do you feel about placing a canoncial tag on a whitepaper that points to the lead form w/ abstract? The obvious idea being to take the umph of a whitepaper to direction search visitors directly to the lead form.

    | shoffy
    0
  • summitseo


    Rands slide deck titled 10 Steps to Effective SEO & Rankings from InfusionCon2011 on slide 82 recommends content syndication as a method for building traffic and links.  How is this any different than article marketing?  He gave an example of this using a screenshot of this search result for "headsmacking tip discussion." All of those sites that have republished SEOmoz's content are essentially autoblogs that post ONLY content generated by other people for the purpose of generating ad clicks from their organic traffic.  We know that Google has clearly taken a position against these types of sites that offer no value.  We hear Matt Cutts say to stay away from article marketing because you're just creating lots of duplicate content. Seems to me that "syndication" is just another form of article marketing that spreads duplicate content throughout the web.  Can someone help me understand the difference? By the way, the most interesting one I saw in those results was the syndicated article on businessweek.com!.

    | summitseo
    0
  • jeff-rackaid.com


    While I've seen a lot of news about Google cleaning up content farms, link farms, and similar spam, I've also seen some companies start ranking very well for niche terms using these same practices. Question: Does Google completely discount links from content farms and similar sites or simply give them low value? Observation: I've seen a company start ranking well (top 3) for several terms when they used be on page 2. When I looked at their links, they are from article farms, directories, do-follow blogs and similar low-vale sources.  Relative to others, they have about 10x the volume of links with the precise anchor text they are targeting. I wonder in absence of other information that these spammy links still count for something.  Given the low competition for the term, this is enough to boost their rank. Just thoughts some thoughts as we are working on long-tail strategies for some key terms.

    | jeff-rackaid.com
    0
  • BonsaiMediaGroup


    I have a client that wants a Google local listing in a town he serves but does not have a physical location.  Is it an issue to share an address with an existing company?  Is is it better to use a P.O. Box? or is there a forwarding address company? Is this considered a black hat Local SEO tactic?

    | BonsaiMediaGroup
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    So I am working on a potential new client and they run several very well established and well ranking ecommerce sites. They have 1 site which is new and underperforming which they want me to "start" on as a trial. The idea being that if they like the progress I would take over SEO on the other sites. After a little research I am concerned that this site may be have a penalty. The site is www.discoverhookah.com The MOZrank and MOZtrust are actually pretty good considering the site is 6 months old, but if you look at the links they are ALL junk. They seems to be some reciprocal linking as well. I believe this is something they have done on their other sites and been ok with because they are 10+ years old and very trusted, however for a new site this link profile worries me. I do not have their analytics yet but looking at their traffic in compete.com shows a HUGE drop off shortly after the site went up (like from 2500 to under 100 visitors). I dont really trust compete.com's numbers outside of being and good indicator for trends, but it has me concerned. The client did tell me they are getting virtually no traffic. I am waiting on the crawl report to confirm its not a crawl or onsite problem but i dont think it is. I have 2 concerns: 1. I am taking this site on the cheap in order to establish a successful project, so I can work on their other sites, and I dont want to walk into a losing situation on the cheap! 2. I believe their webmaster is following some misguided SEO strategies but she has been with them for a long time. I dont think she wants to do theor SEO anyway, as she is very busy with maintenance and development, but if I could prove a penalty it would go a long way in helping me win the whole account from an SEO standpoint.

    | BlinkWeb
    0
  • 13375auc3


    http://www.jewelry.hyper-info.com/ This website has no backlinks reported on google, but loads of backlinks across the web. It also doesn't even rank top 50 on its topic keyword [Jewelry Tips]. I would be very wary of building a link on a site like this, but thats my opinion. How would you rate this websites link based on this data?

    | 13375auc3
    0
  • fleurya


    Hi, I need some help. I recently got some help with an seo project from a contractor. He did 50 directory submissions and 50 article submissions. I got good results, going up about 20 places (still a long way to the first page!) on google.co.uk on a tough key word Since this project I learned article marketing is not cool. So I am wondering about what I should do next. The contractor has proposed a new bigger project consisting of the elements listed below. I don’t know which of these elements are ok and which aren’t. If they are not ok are they: 1) a waste of time or 2) something I could get penalized for? Let me know what you think?? Thanks, Andrew 100 ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS [APPROVED ARTICLES] -> 1 article submitted to 100 article directories 50 PRESS RELEASE SUBMISSIONS [APPROVED & SCREENSHOTS]-> 1 PR writing & submissions to top 50 PR distribution sites each 150 PRIVATE BLOGS SUBMISSION [APPROVED ARTICLES] -> 1 article submitted to 150 private blogs submission 100 WEBSITE DIRECTORY SUBMISSION -> 1 url (home page) submitted to 100 top free web directories 50 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING [CONFIRMED LINKS] -> 1 url of site submitted to top 50 social bookmarking websites 40 PROFILE BACK-LINKS [CONFIRMED LINKS] -> 1-3 url's of site submitted and create 40 profile websites 50 SEARCH ENGINES -> submission to all the major search engines 20 NEWS WEBSITES -> Ping all links from reports to news websites

    | fleurya
    0
  • noork


    How does the community feel about Free Mass Traffic Software? Is this a scam or what?

    | noork
    0
  • christinarule


    What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?

    | christinarule
    0
  • castano


    My first question at SeoMoz: Recently my gambling site has been experimenting a subtle yo-yo effect for our most sought-after keyword. A month ago we legitimately added a PR-6 inbound link with that keyword (tragamonedas) from an institutional site of our own development. We are worried that google might have regarded that move as an illegitimate link acquisition, since those apparent troubles with our keyword appear to have started right after that link was processed. Is it too late to change the anchor text, in case that action might deliver positive results? Also, we might have focused too much on the very same keyword in our link building campaign. Can a constant repetition of the same anchor harm our indexing reputation? Thank you in advance and good SEO luck, Andi.

    | castano
    0
  • jcolman


    With our new knowledge -- yielded from J.C. Penney, Forbes, Overstock, content farms, et al -- that the link graph/link profile can be algorithmically mined by search engines to uncover non-natural patterns of links occuring over time, is there any level of link-building that is safe to engage in? If so, then what are those "bright white"-hat tactics that are 100% safe for a site to use?

    | jcolman
    0
  • naffhampton


    Lets face it, it's the corner stone of SEO, reverse engineering sites to guess at what big G does. It would just make sense they did the same to learn all our tactics.

    | naffhampton
    1
  • yifang0123


    Like this way, if I build a blog and in some situation, the blog is punished by google as some reason I don't know, all the rank dropped and got the -30 punishment. If I put a outbound link on the sidebar, or footer position. what it'll be for that link? A is punished, a link is put on the A website and link to B website what that link means to B punished got many ways Thank you

    | yifang0123
    0
  • Gyi


    It seems pretty well-settled that massive reciprocal linking is not a very effective strategy, and in fact, may even lead to a penatly. However, I still see massive reciprocal linking (blog roll linking even massive resource page linking) still working all the time. I'm not looking to cast aspersion on any individual or company, but I work with legal websites and I see these strategies working almost universally. My question is why is this still working? Is it because most of the reciprocally linking sites are all legally relevant? Has Google just not "gotten around" to the legal sector (doubtful considering the money and volume of online legal segment)? I have posed this question at SEOmoz in the past and it was opined that massively linking blogs through blog rolls probably wouldn't send any flags to Google. So why is that it seems that everywhere I look, this strategy is basically dismissed as a complete waste of time if not harmful? How can there be such a discrepency between what leading SEOs agree to be "bad" and the simple fact that these strategies are working en masse over the period of at least 3 years?

    | Gyi
    0

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