Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I use semrush for this. It can only go back a few months but does give you some incite.

Hi guys,

I'm working on a project and I need to identify any on-site issues that may be affecting this website:

http://www.jerseystamps.com/

If anyone has any thoughts, I would be more than happy to hear them.

Thanks guys

Last week my website (www.cooke.co.uk) started PPC advertising with Google. This has been successful in increasing the amount of overall traffic to the site.

However, since we started the PPC advertising, our traffic from organic search has decreased significantly. Our rankings haven't changed dramatically enough to warrant such a decrease.

Has anyone else been in a situation where organic traffic has dropped as a result of launching a paid campaign? What did you do to rectify it?

Thanks.

Hi Akhilesh,

In theory it sounds simple - you create great content on your site so your visitors will naturally share and link to it. However, that's easier said than done.

Cheers.

We have recently updated our website www.cooke.co.uk and twice webmaster tools have reported an increase in 404 errors.

However, these errors are not for normal pages, they are things like http://www.cooke.co.uk/?post_type=crown_enquiry&p=1045

I have used the redirection tool in WordPress to redirect all these links to the homepage but does anyone know why this is happening since it is the second time I had to do it.

Thanks.

Hi guys,

I'm conducting a link analysis for one of my websites and I have found a few potentially damaging links. However, there are some people who I have contacted about removing links who have said that they will not remove my link because they are using data that is publicly available.

Is there anything I can do to get those links removed rather than diavow?

Thanks.

Does anybody know if a link on an expired domain affects your SEO?

I'm just asking because the SEO agency we used before used to create websites and then link to our company - very spammy.

We have since ditched this agecny, however they wanted an extortionate amount to remove these links. Therefore, we decided to wait until these domains expired and then the links wouldn't exist.

However, I am now completing a link audit and some of these sites are still appearing in the results (obtained from Link Research Tools) but I cannot access the links because the domains have expired.

Can anyone help?

I'm using a variety of backlink toolsl; OSE, SEM Rush, Link Research Tools and Google Webmaster Tools.

On some occasions the tools are telling me there is a link to my site on a certain page, however when I open that page I can't see any mention of my company.

I have run all these reports today, so I think it is unlikely that Google is using old data.

Does anyone know why this happens and if I should still be concerned about links that I cannot see but backlink tools are telling me are there?

Thanks guys.

Hey y'all,

I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case.

The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site.

Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google.

It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low.

If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are?

Thanks guys

It does say noindex, follow

When I tried to check if it was indexed that way, it didn't return any results

I can access the category page on their website.

However, when I go to Google and type the cache:..... it returns a 404 error.

I'm just getting that 'Error 404 (not found)' page with the picture of the broken robot.

They may have just no-indexed the category pages, I didn't know that was possible.

I have recently given some content to another site for a link. When I originally checked the site, it was indexed by Google and seemed ok. However, when I tried to check that the catergory page that my content was posted on was indexed, I received and error message from Google, however the homepage is still being indexed by Google. Is that the sign of a penalty or not?

Thanks for your response.

For example, the link we have on Yell is saying that it is a 'Deadly Risk' because it looks 'highly unnatural'. From reviewing all our links, i think that LRT classifies all links from directories as 'Deadly'. However, we receive a lot of enquiries from Yell, so it would be silly to remove it. Perhaps it should be changed to a nofollow?

Is anyone else here a user of Link Research Tools?

I recently completed a Link Detox for my sites. However, it is saying that links from high quality press release sites are deadly and should be removed. They are also saying the same about the links from the Yellow Pages.

Obviously I know these tools are automated, but does anyone know why they are showing these links as 'deadly' and should be removed?

I have tried contacting LRT about this issue but am yet to receive a reply.

I have a quick look at the all the sites you have suggested but there doesn't seem to be one that actually tells you in black and white whether your backlinks are good or bad.

Does anyone know of any sites that provide that?

Does anyone know of a good tool that analyses backlinks?

I have already tried Link Research Tools and found it very useful but it is very expensive. Does anyone know of an alternative that does the same thing, i.e. will tell you what links are causing harm to your site?

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for your response.

I didn't know it was typical. Someone told me that we had a duplicate Google+ page and I was trying desperately to remove it and couldn't find a way. But if it's normal, I will just leave it.

Thanks

Does anybody know how to connect Google Places to Google+?

When my company name is searched in Google, the Google+ page appears on the right hand side like it should. However, under the meta description of the first search result there a link saying 'Google+ page' which links to a Google Places Local account.

Does anyone know how this can be sorted?

Google is definitely taking your location into account when delivering you search results.

As every Google user is going to get different result I don't think there is any point targeting a national keyword because everyone's search results will be based on the area they are searching from. My advice and this is something that has worked for us is to create unique pages for the areas you would like to be found for. As far as I am aware Google considers 'local' to be a 30 mile radius. So I would say pick the biggest towns/cities in every 30 mile radius and create a separate web page for them. For example, one page for Christchurch, one page for Auckland etc.

This is an example of one:

http://www.splut.com/cgi/visit.cgi?type=search;phrase=danfoss oil pump;id=24a4

Does anybody know how long it will take for rankings to improve (if they do) once the links have been removed?

I have managed to contact the website and they said they would remove the links.

Hi all,

I just wanted to check with you all about removing links from spammy directories. We have 100s of links from directories like this http://www.groundanchors.co.uk/ all the same layout and registered to the same person.

I just wanted to know if our rankings will be affected in any way by removing these links - bearing in mind there are 100s of them.

Many thanks.

Hi all,

I just wanted to ask you all about backlinks that redirect to your site. I recently used Link Detox Tools to carry out a link analysis. However, some of our backlinks are redirecting to our homepage. Is this ok? Why is this happening?

Thanks guys!!!

Hi Keri,

I've used Small SEO Tools too, and have found that it doesn't pick up on everything. Copyscape and Duplichecker are the 2 best in my opinion. I think it would be good if SEOmoz have a duplicate content checker for PRO members.

Does anybody else here use the Guest Blog It site?

I have tried submitting an article but it's telling me that it's 47% duplicate content. I have ran it through 2 plagiarism checkers and they both said it was 100% unique. I have tried contacting the site directly about this but as of yet have had no response. I was just wondering if anybody on here knows what they use to check for duplicate content so I can take a look and amend my article.

Thanks

Yes, if you have a good page rank then you should be able to compete for the most competitive keywords. However, you will need to optimise your site for these keywords correctly.

Does anybody know if Google makes allowances for duplicate content from press releases? If you submit a press release to a press release distribution service, does it have to be different?

Any help would be much appreciated.

The best thing to do is to each page of your website targeting at different keyword. Use the keyword tool in Adwords to tell you discover how popular keyword terms are and their competitiveness. As a rule I would never target keywords with less than 300 searches per month, as they're unlikely to give you any decent traffic. Unless your site has a PageRank of more than 5, you shouldn't be targeting keywords that are highly competitive, you should build links into your site, increase your PR and then target those keywords.

I've been doing link building for the past 2 months for a website. I've put together some blog posts and submitted them to some sites. However, I don't want to repeat the content on other sites or use the same sites again for links. The problem with this company is that nothing is happening. The last press release they issued was in 2010 and in the 4 months I've been working for them nothing has happened. I have found a few good quality websites in our niche which I could approach for links, but I want to have good content to put on them. Does anyone have any ideas as how to create content that would be suitable, bearing in mind this a B2B company.

I have found a blog in my niche that accepts guest posts. However, the site is quite odd in that the homepage has a PR of 0 and all the other pages have a 2. I just wanted to check if it is still worth posting on this site as it looks suspicious to me.

Thanks.

I'm already using Yoast SEO plugin. The thing is that I'm useless with code. I really don't understand what anyone is saying, so may have to break it down in easy to understand terminology.

I'm using WordPress for my website. However, whenever I use the post section for news, I get a report back from SEOmoz saying that there's duplicate content. What it does is it posts them in the Category and Archive section. Does anyone know if Google sees this as duplicate content and if so how to stop it?

Thanks

I've been trying to get backlinks for one website for the past 2 weeks and it's proving almost impossible. Initially I drew up a list of websites that would be suitable to have a link on and tried e-mailing a contact on each. However, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Most are coming back saying I can add some content but they will charge. However, we don't have a budget.

I've analysed competitor backlinks and they didn't reveal anything interesting.

The website doesn't have a Twitter account. So I can't look for links that way.

Another problem is that the website has a very niche audience and probably not the most active online.

Does anyone have any other tips that would help?

I have created an infographic using easel.ly. I want to upload this to my blog but I'm just concerned whether Google will see it as an image or will it be able to read all the text that is on it.

Any thoughts?

Does anyone know if it is possible to connect 2 separate Twitter accounts? The marketing department in my company set up the official Twitter feed. However, one of the employees took it upon themselves to set up another one and built up a good following. Now a lot of people are getting confused to which one is the official one. It would be great it we could merge the two, but I've been looking all morning and can't seem to find a way.

Any help?

I've set up a blog on one of my websites, however it doesn't open in a separate window. I know from looking at other blogs that they usually open in separate windows. Is that good practice? Will it make any difference to your SEO performance?

I've got 2 questions regarding backlinking.

1 - I recently watched a webinar saying I should never get backlinks from any sites lower than a PR 3. However, I have found some relevant websites to our niche that are lower than that. We have recently set-up a new website that currently has a PR 0. Bearing that in mind do you think it was still be good for SEO to try and get links from the lower PR sites to build up our own PR?

2 - Has anyone found out what Google thinks of gaining links from domains hosted in other countries? For example, our websites are hosted in the UK, does it look suspicious to search engines if we have links from USA or other countries?

Thanks

I just wanted to know if you have a Google+ page, should your page be displayed on the right hand side of the SERP when someone searches for your company name.

We currently have set-up a Google+ page but it doesn't appear when someone searches for us.

Any help?

From using webmaster tools, the highest proportion of our links comes from blogspot - rubbish blogs linking to us with relevant anchor text. From what I see there are only a few domains they created with links on them.

Am I correct then in assuming they will delete the links from the domains they set-up but there is nothing they can do about the liks on sites like blogspot?

My company has been using an SEO company for a while and have built up our pagerank to a 6. However, we have noticed that they're involved in link pharming - they're buildng extra websites and linking to our site on them. We are not happy with this as we know it will only be a matter of time before Penguin hits us. The contract with the SEO company is coming up for renewal soon and we're thinking of cancelling it. However, we are not sure if the company will delete all our backlinks, which will probably decrease our PageRank too.

Has anyone here ever had a similar experience? What did the SEO company do when you cancelled the contract? Does anyone here work for an SEO company and what do you do when someone cancels your service?

I've been looking at putting some of my companies on Google+ but I've just done some quick research and it doesn't seem like many of our competitors or even any in our industry is on there.

I have heard that by having a Google+ presence it will help your organic search ranking. However, I'm not sure how true this is.

Is it worth setting up a Google+ page if it's likely that you're not going to get much activity on it?

I haven't come across it but I don't see why it would be bad for SEO, if anything you should be rewarded because you are making things easy for the user.

Just as long as you follow the usual SEO techniques, i.e. no duplicate content I think you should be fine.

I know branded keywords are variations of your company name. However, my company sell a number of exclusive products that have been trademarked so no other company can use that name. Is that counted as a branded keyword?

Hi Jennifer,

It depends on a number of factors such as keyword competitiveness, how well your on-page optimisation is for those pages, if your site is new or not, the quality of your backlinks and most importantly the quality of your content - is it educating the reader about that particular product?

If you're new to SEO I would suggest you read the SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to become more familiar with how SEO works.

Does anyone have any effective strategies about how to backlink for a new website. I'm just really cautious of this new penguin update and don't want to submit to too many directories or do anything that will get penalised, seen as the website is new.

I've created a pinterest board, which kind of serves as a blog also as it tells people how they can save money on their heating bills this winter.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to promote it as a backlinking opportunity? Would it be good to also feature the content on our website? Guest blogging?

Any suggestions would be welcomed.

Thank you.

The main reason we do social media is for SEO. I believe that the social triggers have an impact on SEO and that's why we want to be there.

At the moment, I'm putting up relevant news stories and because we supply oil, this time of year is when we sell a lot of home heating oil - so I'm trying to push that. I have come up with a few ideas like 10 ways to save on your heating bill but I don't want to put a lot of effort into something that won't work.

Contests are not really suitable for us because the vast majority of our business is from B2B sales. Unless someone has a good idea, I don't see the relevance.

I was thinking of giving away company stationery for likes, but I think the problem is directing people to the page in the first place.

There is an energy saving week coming up in just over a week, but it's a bit late for us to organise something and promote it properly.

The main reason we do social media is for SEO. I believe that the social triggers have an impact on SEO and that's why we want to be there.

At the moment, I'm putting up relevant news stories and because we supply oil, this time of year is when we sell a lot of home heating oil - so I'm trying to push that. I have come up with a few ideas like 10 ways to save on your heating bill but I don't want to put a lot of effort into something that won't work.

Contests are not really suitable for us because the vast majority of our business is from B2B sales. Unless someone has a good idea, I don't see the relevance.

I was thinking of giving away company stationery for likes, but I think the problem is directing people to the page in the first place.

There is an energy saving week coming up in just over a week, but it's a bit late for us to organise something and promote it properly.