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  • qlkasdjfw


    For us, any indian/3rd world linkbuilding vendor - do NOT hire them, they will ruin your link profile. If you give them very specific directions & find the right company/guy they can be decent for guerilla (blog/forum/etc) linkbuilding. What are your experiences?

    Link Building | | qlkasdjfw
    0
  • tadden


    I recently had a Google 60 penalty hit my website. The main two issues were that I had a person helping me with SEO and they bought some links. The second issue is that I own about 90 URL's in the my vertical. I created about 60 one page sites for these keyword targeted domains. I then linked these sites to main site. Big mistake! I kept these URL's all on the same server as my main site. In October 2010 I noticed my site hits dropped dramatically. I started looking for the issue. I didn't know which issue caused the penalty. I fixed both issues in November 2010 and asked Google for reconsideration in early December 2010. I kept link building for my site by finding quality links.I was extremely honest with Google. I gave them all of the domains I own and I told them the name of the person that bought links for me and the websites where those links were placed. As of late February 2011 a Google search for my domain still showed up in approximately the 64th position. I recently asked Google again to lift the penalty. I basically told them that I fixed all of my issues that led to the penalty and let them know I have been waiting for almost 3 months. I told them I have put the past 2 years of my life into this website and begged them to forgive me. I also asked them to let me know if my site was never going to be forgiven? I got the typical canned response from the Google team. As of today the penalty is still in effect. I just want to know when you should give up on a site. I have spent about $20,000 on this site and about 2 years of hard work. I don't want to give up, but I don't want to keep putting my hard work and time into the site if it will never escape the dreaded Google penalty. Do you think I should continue to wait and if so how long? Anything else I can do to persuade Google to release me from this penalty hell? If I do abandon the site and start from scratch what steps should I take? Do I need a new server? What if any content can I take from my current site and transfer to the new site? If I can how do I do this without getting another penalty or lose the credit for the original content. I created about 2,000 pages of original content for this site. I'd love to be able to transfer this content if I have to start from scratch. Any ideas or detailed help plans would be greatly appreciated.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tadden
    0
  • Gyi


    I'm a big fan of Wordpress (.org) as a content management system. However, I recognize that Wordpress isn't necessarily the best CMS for all ocassions. For those of you who don't like Wordpress, I'm interested in understanding your strongest reasons against. So, why not Wordpress?

    Content Development | | Gyi
    0
  • jimmartin_zoho.com


    A client of mine wants to streamline the look of his web pages, taking some of the visible body copy and putting it into boxes that pop up when you hover the mouse over an icon. My understanding is that search engines will index this pop-up text. However, do they penalize pages that have text in pop-up boxes out of concern that those pages are spammy? In this case, the text and the page are perfectly legitimate e-commerce pages. Thanks for any insights you can offer.

    On-Page Optimization | | jimmartin_zoho.com
    0
  • jcolman


    Looking over the discussion of underrated SEO tactics at http://sphinn.com/story/178993/ , I'm curious if folks here have any favorite SEO tactics that they feel are ignored, underrated, or somehow not appreciated by the community at large.  Any thoughts? Among the tactics listed in the Sphinn post: Blog commenting Analytics to identify low-hanging keyword fruit Getting your site set up properly at the server level Unique and relevant imagery Internal links Google Place page optimization Several more... Any others that should be included?  I'd personally add segmenting your keyword traffic into trademark (those that mention your brand name) versus non-trademark segments for more thorough analysis.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcolman
    2
  • theconstructioncentre10_gmail.


    Hi, Not your standard SEO question, but I need expert advice all the same! I am looking to set up an adwords campaign to track several things. I need to track the initial page the click lands on from the PPC advert I then need to track this click to see if they click to  register on the site I then need to track if they fill out the registration form and complete The aim of this is to measure just how many people click the PPC advert, then drop off the site as they go through the sign up process. Can this be done on adwords PPC tracking with the code adwords generates? and if not has anyone done something similar? many thanks all!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | theconstructioncentre10_gmail.
    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.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | castano
    0
  • kpr


    An example is in Google, we currently rank #1 & #2 for "yoga pants" for Athleta and Old Navy.  In Bing, I'm on page 2. Any thoughts here?

    On-Page Optimization | | kpr
    0
  • Darden


    Ben, I have a follow up question from our previous discussion at http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/52837/google-analytics To summarize, to implement what we need, we need to do three things: add GA code to the Darden page _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.darden.virginia.edu']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); Change links on the Darden Page to look like http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/MBA-for-Executives/  and [https://darden-admissions.symplicity.com/applicant](<a href=)">Apply Now  and make into  [https://darden-admissions.symplicity.com/applicant](<a href=)" > onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', 'https://darden-admissions.symplicity.com/applicant']); return  false;">Apply Now Have symplicity add this code. _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.symplicity.com']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); Due to our CMS system, it does not allow the user to add onClick to the link.  So, we CANNOT add part 2)  What will be the result if we have only 1) and 3) implemented?  Will the data still be fed to GA account 'UA-12345-1'?  If not, how can we get cross domain tracking if we cannot change the link code? Nick

    Technical SEO | | Darden
    0
  • seo_ploom


    So I know have seen how my websites have taken a nose dive from the google farmer update most likely with traffic significantly hit.  Example site is callcatalog.com.  What recommendations are there to deal with the new world order?  How can we look at optimizing, changing, modifying our process to improve rankings and traffic?

    Algorithm Updates | | seo_ploom
    0
  • tqinet


    Hello fellow mozzers! One of our clients does an excellent job of providing excellent content, and we don't even have to nag them about it (imagine that!). This content is usually centered around industry reports, financial analyses, and economic forcasts; however, they always post them in the form of pdfs. How does Google view PDF's, and is there a way to optimize them? Ideally, I am going to try to get this client set up with a blog-like plateform that will use HTML text, rather than PDF's, but I wanted to see what info was out there for PDF's. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | tqinet
    0
  • DragonSearch


    They have a caching system where they assign multiple ip's based on location and we are curious how it affects SEO.

    Technical SEO | | DragonSearch
    1
  • seo.unibet


    I cannot seem to access the Pro Discount store? When I click on the link from within my account I get this page eEmTg.jpg

    Moz Pro | | seo.unibet
    0
  • sui


    Hi, I'd like to ask you what should I do in my situation. I've shorted my URLs from something like this: domain.com/module/action/type/id/keyword to this: domain.com/keyword After 301 SERP refreshed and position stayed the same (yea, lucky me :). After 2 days I got some hight PR links (4 and 5). After 8 days my new URL disapprear to one keyword. Now this take 6 days... I've removed these links and still no results. So the question is - what should I do? Remove new url and replace it with old one, get new links?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sui
    0
  • gregster1000


    If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | gregster1000
    0
  • Giggy


    Hello, I have a client who is waivering between switching to an open source shopping platform such as Magento, or choosing a "more SEO Friendly" cart such as BigCommerce.I would love to get an opinion. They would like to control the data (open source) but existing platforms dont necessarily support some SEO efforts, opinions and wisdom welcome. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Giggy
    0
  • Impact-201555


    I know we should be careful of suspicious links, and that google may davalue them or even penalize, especiallysince the latest update. It seems though, however it really hasnt caught up to alot of them yet. And alot of competition is still benefitting from what seems like all garbage links in their backlink profile So could someone give their opinion about links form pages like this, assuming it is a mix of this along with other  "better" types of links? http://www.bmxplusmag.com/index.php/member/4817/ See the bio at the bottom. "At least" it is within copy, and only one link to the page? (Please do not reply with a simple "be careful" message) Also, does anyone have any update, on the benefit of TextLinkAds, since the recent algo update? Thanks Sam

    Link Building | | Impact-201555
    0
  • Boogily


    I am working with a friend on optimizing a site that has a troublesome set of issues. The company has integrated some ERP system that cannot be changed or removed and it is creating goofy URL's. So my question is which URL do I build links to? the www.xxx.com or the crazy URL that it is being redirected to. Site URL: www.nauticalchartsonline.com
    redirect: http://www.nauticalchartsonline.com/n.c/NauticalChartsOnline.html I would greatly appreciate constructive feedback.. Thanks, Jeannie

    Link Building | | Boogily
    0
  • TahoeMountain40


    HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web. I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?" Is content found in semantic sections like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like, or ? </aside> </nav> </footer> </header>

    Web Design | | TahoeMountain40
    0
  • pricefutures


    I understand that good link building is all about the quality of the link / the anchor text attached to it. But, what about frequency? Should I build until I can't build anymore? or create a plan to submit links to a certain # of sites per week/month?

    Link Building | | pricefutures
    0
  • bjalc2011


    My client site has a good one-way link from an authority site (in this case a member directory within the industry association). In order to use some data from the industry association on my client's site, the association has requested a link back to their site. Recognising that this will weaken the value of the one-way link, would it be make sense to no-follow the return link? But is there value in linking out to an authority site? What recommendations do you have for this situation? Thanks

    Link Building | | bjalc2011
    0
  • sichristie


    Hey guys, I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure. We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways: We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
    The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from. We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
    The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
    The trophies link to our partner pages.
    So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
    The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website. So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change? Many thanks, Croozie

    Link Building | | sichristie
    0
  • fares-ajroud


    what is the best strategy for a good mesh inner portion or inheritance of PR to deep pages of a site, such as a real estate site that includes many dynamic URLs following the attendance lists of ads including photos ds property.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fares-ajroud
    0
  • EndeR-


    I'm almost sure there is an article on SEOmoz explaining how to get good traffic estimates by running an adwords campaign but after an hour of research I still can't find it. Some help would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot.

    Keyword Research | | EndeR-
    0
  • GianniCuccu


    Hi,
    do you think that the use of a single 1.8Mb background image sitewide could have a big negative impact and make a website disappear from SERPS? thank you

    On-Page Optimization | | GianniCuccu
    0
  • davebrown1975


    HI all, I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful. I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey.  Lets say the town they are in is Garfield.  What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need.  E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer". The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that. An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms. It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc... I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in.. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown1975
    0
  • mccormackmorrison


    Hello Does the Google traffic estimator include the impact of instant? For example, if I type the phrase "London restaurant", instant may provide a list of search results for the phrase "London restaurant guide" prior to me confirming whether or not I just want to search using the phrase "London restaurant". Is this registered in any way as a search for the phrase "London restaurant guide" (i.e. does Instant impact upon the search volumes presented in the Google traffic estimator)? In addition, is there any up to date assessment on how reliable the revised traffic estimator is? The tool currently suggests that for a well known brand we are working for does not have any search volume (over a whole year) for the brand keyphrase when used in isolation (there is traffic for various combinations of the brand and a generic term). However, as one would expect, our analytics data is showing that there are in excess of 1 million annual visitors that use the brand keyphrase in isolation to access the website via natural search and nearly 1.5 million via PPC. Is anyone else getting these problems? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Rgds Neil

    Keyword Research | | mccormackmorrison
    1
  • mccormackmorrison


    We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below: http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
    http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-title Since this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go? Thanks P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event? Thanks again! Neil

    Technical SEO | | mccormackmorrison
    0
  • vkernel


    Why is blocking the SEOmoz crawler considered a red "error?" Please see attached image... Y3Vay.png

    Moz Pro | | vkernel
    0
  • Hyrule


    Hey guys, What a headache i've been going through the last few days trying to make sure my upcoming move is near-perfect. Right now all my urls are written like this /page-name (all lowercase, exact, no forward slash at end). In the new CMS they will be written like this: /Page-Name/ (with the forward slash at the end). When I generate an XML sitemap in the new ecomm CMS internally it lists the category pages with a forward slash at the end, just like they show up through out the CMS. This seems sloppy to me, but I have no control over it. Is this OK for SEO? I'm worried my PR 4, well built ecommerce website is going to lose value to small (but potentially large) errors like this. If this is indeed not good practice, is there a resource about not using the forward slash at the end of URLS in sitemaps i  can present to the community at the platform? They are usually real quick to make fixes if something is not up to standards. Thanks in advance, -First Time Ecommerce Platform Transition Guy

    Technical SEO | | Hyrule
    0
  • Gyi


    While I'm not a subscriber to the "if you write it, links will come" mantra, there is no doubt that developing link-enticing content is a large component to effective SEO. I have experimented with "Top X Lists", interviews, how-to's, free guide downloads, and other education-based content themes for link acquisition. What content themes have you found to be the most effective link magnets?

    Link Building | | Gyi
    0
  • jcolman


    I'm curious if anyone here running a large, complex, dynamic site has used the Apache server mod_rewrite module  to simplify their site's URLs by rewriting them in a standard format. The chief use of this module for SEO purposes would be to aid in canonicalization and reduce duplicate content.  For example, you could easily convert all of you ALL CAPS or MixedCase URLs to lower case, change all "/index.html" URLs to just point to "/", change all word seperators to hyphens, and so on. Any server-side ninjas out there with stories to tell?  🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcolman
    0
  • Goetzman


    Anyone else buildling their website using Ruby on Rails? If so, are you also using any memcaching? Do you have any tips on memcached concepts, tricks, caveats, and experiences. How are you also doing SEO, any tricks for generating traffic and some Google love?

    Web Design | | Goetzman
    0
  • Goetzman


    Any well known SEO/SEM events in the midwest?

    Industry Events | | Goetzman
    0
  • Goetzman


    Hey Guys, I created a facebook fan page and I created a twitter account. I'm following about 175 people on twitter and 30 people returned the follow. Now what? How can I keep building? Any tools to help me? if you wanna analyze: http://twitter.com/culinitweets

    Social Media | | Goetzman
    0
  • keethgee


    Say a business runs out of a home (so, technically, the address of the business has a land line). But the business owner works outdoors all day long and so really runs his business off his cell phone. Is it OK in Google Places to list the mobile phone as the primary contant number, and list the home phone as a secondary number? Or will Google penalize the business's ranking in local search results for using a cell number as the main number?

    Image & Video Optimization | | keethgee
    0
  • freedomelectronics


    hi, i have way to many 302 redirects, how can i bulk change these to 301 i have started in cpanel but i could be old by the time i finsih

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freedomelectronics
    1
  • digitalarts


    We have an ecommerce site retailing relatively high value products - precious metals - We have a VeriSign SSL certificate for the domain...  Weighing up the advantages of pointing all visitors through https on the domain, there is a benefit of customer confidence, but from a search engine - say Google's point of view, will delivering the site over https have any trust factor or benefits?

    Search Behavior | | digitalarts
    0
  • notebooks


    I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up. 
    Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here? http://notebooks.com

    Moz Pro | | notebooks
    0
  • ShawnHerrick


    Over the last month, our rankings have been in a slow slide - that is until this week, when they absolutely crashed. Here are some example phrases: Phrase 11-Mar 5-Mar bug shields 24 9
    floor mats 25 14
    nerf bars 23 12
    running boards 61 14
    snow plows 25 18 For the life of me, I can't see what would have caused such drastic changes. Our site is almost completely unique content. Some things, like Warranty & Install instructions, are from the manufacturer to protect us from liabilities. We come up with our own feature text, and we have custom written articles, blog posts, research guides, etc. We also appear to be the only one of our competitors being affected in this fashion. Any thoughts would be helpful. Domain is realtruck.com.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick
    0
  • adriandg


    It seems like a lot of our competators are getting lots of link juice from fake/spammy looking articles on squido.  Is it worth the effort to make these articles and add links to them, or is google smarter than that? Example here: http://www.squidoo.com/selfstoragesmyrnatn links to: www.migsonstorage.com who seems to be doing pretty good according to OSE with a PA of 63 and a DA of 56

    Link Building | | adriandg
    0

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