Welcome to the Q&A Forum

we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise?

www.site.com/word-word-word/   or
www.site.com/word_word_word/

i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue??

Thanks

You can use this script, it will redirect all pages on the old domain to a new page in the new domain. this works is you are going to keep the same site structure and not change URLs.  If you do change URLs then i would suggest to 301 each old page to a new corresponding page on The new domain.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [nc]

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.olddomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

Our site is has content in English and in Spanish. The spanish side was translated by me, Spanish is my first language, so i know that the translations are good and its original content. We were Pandalized/Penguinnized pretty bad earlier this year. We have completely cleaned our site of anything that could be considered thin content or grey hat techniques. An associate is telling me that we need to put the spanish version of the site on its own domain, does this make sense to anyone?

The spanish side of the site gets only about 5% of the visitors, bu i still don't see the logic in taking all those pages and putting them on a different domain. Would this help recover from Panda/Penguin.

Thanks

I'm trying to dilute the link profile for a website. But have a couple of questions on the best way to achieve this.

Current link profile, www.mysitename.com

1. Keyword 1
2. Keyword 2
3. Keyword 3
4. Keyword 4
5. Keyword 5
6. Keyword 6
7. Keyword 7
8. Keyword 8
9. Keyword 9
10. Keyword 10
11. Keyword 12
12. Keyword 13
13. Keyword 14
14. Keyword 14
15. Keyword 15
16. mysitename.com

Desired link profile, www.mysitename.com

1. mysitename.com
2. www.mysitename.com
3. http://www. mysitename.com/
4. My Site Name
5. http://mysitename.com
6. Click Here
7. my site name
8. More Info
9. mysitename.com/
10. www.mysitename.com/
11. Keyword 1
12. Keyword 2
13. Keyword 3
14. Keyword 4
15. Keyword 4
16. Keyword 5

Questions

1. Do you think Google looks at this on a domain level? Or do you think this needs to be done with every page on the site?

2. What would be a good way to build links fast to the pages, need to build lots of links to be able to dilute the profile. I was considering Dripable, or a similar service, but decided i really don't want to create more spam.What would you do?

3. What would you say the % threshold for anchor text is, i have read on different sources that at least 40% - 60% of links should be branded, url, or generic anchor links. Do you think this is accurate?

Adam,

What would you suggest if after everything you suggested you realized that your top 20 anchors are exact match money keywords? How do you recommend diluting the link profile if the site is an old site (12 years+) and has a large number of links.

Thanks for the response, that is what i thought too, but don't know what else to do. The top 20 anchors are exact match keywords. the first occurrence of a generic anchor or url anchor isn't until about 21-25 depending on what tool i use to check the link profile. I need a large number of URL links in different variations mysite.com, www.mysite.com, http://www.mysite.com, click here, etc, etc. I have already removed all links I could, contacted 100s of webmasters to remove links, most successfully,  some never answered. i have detailed this and sent in a reconsideration request and google replied that they STILL saw unnatural links. What would you do in a situation like this? I'm running out of ideas and would appreciate some good advice.

Thanks for the response. I guess i was hoping someone had used a service like the ones i mentioned and had some tips or experiences with them to share. I realize that i should not be spamming, but i really don't think i can build enough links to dilute the link profile without some service like this, and the site is completely out of google's top 50 for all the money keywords, and supporting keywords. Traffic is down from 1500 visitors a day to about 200, need to get some traffic ASAP. Don't have to much time left to wait for some signs of recovery

Joel,

Thanks for the response. We used to rank very well in a highly competitive vertical, all the websites that used to compete with us are in our same position, we were in such a highly competitive industry that everyone who used to rank was doing AGGRESSIVE SEO campaigns, not necessarily black hat, but very aggressive white/grey hat . We probably were guilty of some other on page grey hat techniques, which have been fixed since. I believe that we are being penalized for excessive anchor text optimization and I'm hopping some generic or URL links might help us dilute our anchor text distribution enough to get below the exact match % limit and get out from the penalty. does this make any sense to you??

One of my sites has a very spamy link profile, top 20 anchors are money keywords. What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to help dilute the link profile by building links with URLs, Click Here, more Info, etc.

I have been building URL links already, but due to the site age(over 12 years) the amount of exact match anchor text links is just very large and would take forever to get diluted.

One of our client's sites got hit by panda/penguin. after careful investigation we found that the site had 6,900 pages indexed out of which about 300 are actual pages (pages with quality content and add value to the user). Needless to say we had to remove all those pages. Most of the thin pages were on the blog section of the site so we removed the WP which was on www.mysite.com/blog/. My question is how can i speed up the process for Google to realize that i have taken all those this pages down.  i have fetched the homepage and all linked pages via "Fetch as Google Bot" on WMT. is there anything else i can do to speed this up???

If you are worried about having that many links on a single page, use JavaScript to link them.

I have changed Domain Registrars on a couple of domains that were ranking for not too competitive keywords with no change in rankings. I can't imagine it would affect any rankings IMO. Having a private registrations is nice to avoid spam and hundreds of call from people calling you as if they knew you trying to sell you their services.  As far as it affecting your rankings i doubt it does.

have you tried Godaddy.com ?

Tolod,

Did you get any messages on your GWMT? Any messages on Unnatural Links or not meeting Google Quality guidelines? That might help in figuring out why you were penalized.

I don't recommend doing that, Google can see it as a black hat trick. Black Hat SEOs have been doing 301 from good ranking articles on blogs as well as 301 domains in order to boost their rankings. Are the domains you want to forward to your main site brand new (meaning you bought them the first time, not a domain that you bought after someone else had dropped it)  i ask this because if the domain has been dropped by someone else before you bought it, it could potentially have some links pointing to it that might now be from the most reputable sources and it would be EXTREMELY hard for you to know that you were penalized for a bad link to that domain since all links to the parked domain would show up as one link coming into your main site from the parked domain.

read this to get a better idea of what i mean,
http://blog.majesticseo.com/training/unnatural-links-investigations/

hope it helps

From what i have seen they don't display videos, but i might be wrong. Have you checked to see if your video folder is accesible to google bot? i had some trouble getting some images to show on google instant preview and this was the cause.