We have a situation with the domain www.curadebt.com where 90% of the links are no follow.

[onlinemktg1]

We have a situation with the domain www.curadebt.com where 90% of the links are no follow.

See http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.curadebt.com%2F  .  If we use UAW and submityourarticle.com with spun articles of high quality, could that help solve? Any other ideas for solving to get follow links? Thanks!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Eric,

Keri has a really good point. I'm looking at this page in particular:

http://www.curadebt.com/settlements/letter7.asp#.T7yRpL89bvg

... These pages seem to be literally unending, filled with 100s of links that all look the same except for the last few inches at the bottom.

Additionally, you have a page here for El Paso

http://www.curadebt.com/debt/debt-free-debt-help-el-paso.asp#.T7ySd789bvg

...which is almost identical to this one for Huntington Beach...

http://www.curadebt.com/debt/debt-free-debt-help-huntington-beach.asp#.T7ySeb89bvg

If you ran these pages through the SEOmoz PRO Web App, they would be flagged as duplicate content.

I'm not saying this to be harsh, but Google is undoubtedly penalizing you for pages like this. So here's my advice.

1. Set up an SEOMoz PRO campaign. If you can't afford it, sign up for the free trial.
2. Run your first campaign on your website and fix all the major errors that you find.
3. Read this article by Dr. Pete - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
4. As for link building, follow the advice of John and Keri above

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[onlinemktg1]

Keri,

Thanks!

Ok, we are ruling out any spun content.

To get the links back in balance, what would you recommend? Many of the state and city pages offer some information about the locations and cities and as we add more content should be more valuable.

Outside the plan at the top (excluding the spun articles), anything else you would recommend?

Thanks!

[DesignbysoapLtd]

Hi Eric,

As I say this is only my personal opinion, but my advice would be to stay away from article spinning services altogether. You might find some benefit by posting a question about article spinning and see what other members of the community think, but I would never use it for our clients.

And yes, that's essentially what I'm saying : )

As far as the nofollow issue, just start on your link-building plan and you should be able to soon outweigh them - there may be so many nofollow links due to a lot of commenting on blog posts, which are regularly marked with the nofollow attribute.

Thanks Eric, anything else just give me a shout!

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Eric,

As others have said, you don't want spun content. Spun articles and high quality do NOT go together. You end up with articles about alcoholism that read "think before you beverage".

Look at some more of the Open Site Explorer metrics than just the home page. When you scroll down to the other two metrics on that page, you'll actually see followed links at 98%, but that counts external and internal links. For the entire domain, OSE sees 51k followed external links, 67k total external links, and over 5 million  total links.

OSE is also showing 1,098 linking C blocks for 67,128 links.

Looks like a lot of your links are internal, with pages like this http://www.curadebt.com/settlements/letter147.asp#.T7rB98WuCIw. Tons of pages like this, and I don't think they add too much value to the user.

[DesignbysoapLtd]

No problem at all : )

That sounds like a much better plan of action - one quick thing, although I would recommend chasing competitor links, don't do this exclusively as you'll always essentially be one step behind your competitors, you should also aim to highlight and target links that they_ don't have. _

For me personally I would avoid the two URL's you mentioned and any kind of spun content altogether, it's honestly not worth the effort when there are so many more beneficial link-building activities you could be engaging in. You should be thinking long-term wherever possible rather than short term - do a Google search and look what happened to Build My Rank as a pertinent example, it worked for people in the short term and then resulted in almost complete de-indexation and a poor backlink profile.

As far as the web 2.0 properties goes, there is some minor value to doing this but again there are so much more valuable and beneficial ways to spend your time - in the time it takes you to gain one fairly low power link in that way you could commission an infographic and promote it and gain yourself numerous stronger links. That kind of 'link wheel' link building is something that feels a little outdated to me, and without wishing to be disrespectful (not my style), it seems as though those recommendations may have been made by someone a little out of touch with recent happenings in the industry.

Hope that helps you Eric, and I wish you the best of luck with your campaign : )

[mytouchoftech]

Thanks for the lead to myblogguest.

Your plan sounds good too.  I'll second the no spun articles concept.  There's such little benefit to them.

[DesignbysoapLtd]

Hi Eric,

Don't use spun articles whatever you do - sure it creates a lot of links with relatively minimal effort but the links aren't worth getting (in fact they're likely to hurt you in the long run). It doesn't matter if it's 'high quality', as you can guarantee the articles submitted by other people won't be, which will bring the domains they're being published on down and make your links more dangerous and worthless than they already are.

Instead of high volume, low authority links, aim for the opposite. It's far better for you to gain high quality links and I would always choose one relevant and high quality link over 100 links from spun articles.

Link-building this way isn't easy, but that's part of what makes it valuable - content based link-building is an excellent way to go; produce high quality onsite content and promote it well and you'll encourage natural links, something I refer to as 'link magnetism'. Infographics are excellent for gaining high quality links (assuming they're well designed and well promoted) and guest blogging on high quality sites can be a great way to build some strong dofollow links.

Here's some links that might help you (seem to be sharing these links a lot lately!):

Jon Cooper's superb list of link-building strategies:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Michael King's excellent 'Noob Guide To Link Building':

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

and my own in-depth guide to content creation:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic

Hope that helps Eric, read those posts and you'll be much better armed for your link-building campaigns : )