Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In theory yes. Great quality content will pay off in the long run, people will find it and share it and some of them will convert but thats mainly down to your overal marketing mix.

There are many reasons you dont get traffic some of which i can think of right now;

1. Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything
2. The content myth - Content is great for marketing but will not rank you for any commercial term (which is why white hat appraisal posts and Matt Cutt's worshippers never have examples of commercial terms ranking without links - cause they cant rank without links). You need to use it as a "sticky marketing" weapon rather a ranking/SEO for primary keywords weapon. People will find it, like it, bookmark it, come back for more, then when decide to buy a service they will remember you and you will be one of the people they get a quote from.
3. You have optimised your content but use wordpress with default settings which is an overoptimsied nightmare and need to amend some settings to make it rank higher.
4. you have a poor social media presence or not aware of other online properties where people will be looking for this kind of content. Posting it on your site is one thing, distributing it where people are looking for it, another.
5. you dont have rel=author set up.

Thats from the top of my head, I need more info to provide a more sufficient answer. In order to check the overoptimisation problem try and google the exact title of your post. If you are not in top 200 3 days after your initial post then you are over-optimised and you need to do more onpage work.

Hello,

The answer to your question is No. Reconsideration request applies only to manual penalties and not algorithmic ones. What you need to do is to go clean/disavow your profile from most toxic links or links you acquired close to the date you got the penalty and wait for the next update or a Google algorithm refresh.

As you already pointed out, every time you upload a disavow file it replaces the old one. That being said if your new file contains a bunch of new links only and not the links you included in your original file then Google will take into consideration the new file and ignore the first one.

If you want to keep the old file and add the new links you found then download the old file add the new links and re-upload. That is the best way to do it

Ofcourse if google has already taken into consideration the old file then it doesnt matter as the links are gone, but better to play safe.

Hello adulter,

A small clarification here. As Ted said in general software link building techniques must be a no-no for anyone who is building his/her brand on-line. you need to follow the build-content root and stick to it and high quality links will come your way. If however you decide to submit links allow me to suggest you do this manually and not via a software.

Now in regards to seomaximus I will disagree with Ted to a slight extend as the web page you visited is showing as an example a "money web site". Money web sites are normally affiliate web sites, MNS (micro niche web sites) with 1000 searches per month and low competition or sites that are built with a purpose to rank for 2-3 months (for example a xmas shop), get some cash in and then get abandoned. This is their target audience, it is stated on their advert (for those who know about affiliate sites its pretty obvious) and it works really well. If your profile belongs to one of the categories I just mentioned then sure software will do the work. If you are going for a long building strategy as Ted already mentioned NO and STAY AWAY. You will get banned sooner or later and then all your efforts will be abandoned.

When it comes to online marketing people think it must be cheap due to internet's free nature. This is a mistake and a no no. you get what you pay for, same with offline marketing. The more you spend the bigger audience you reach, the more results you bring etc.

Hope this helps

Hello Prime,

Do your business a good favor and do not sigh up for this directory. good thing your competitors are tbh as Google doesnt like directories and all these will be penalised soon. Even black hatters dont sign up to directories anymore, they go for high PR blog post pages. Even 3 years ago I wouldnt recommend this as it seems weak and spammy. Also the site might be PR1 but the listed pages are PR 0 thus no link juice at all and only troubles in your head.

Hope you find this answer helpful

Hello,

I had a quick look at your link profile and it seems that you had a big spike in link building activity from 17 of July up to 24th of August (mostly from directory submission). Then it goes quiet again which looks unnatural.  You have used contextual anchor texts around "software development" keyword which covers pretty much 80% of your profile making your web site vulnerable to Penguin and my guess is that you got hit by the latest refresh/update.

I would suggest you make your anchor texts look more natural and remove all those directory links you got between july and august by using the disavow tool. Then monitor if you move up to SERPS and report back.

Remember that you might not move immediate results, sometimes the algorithm needs to refresh before you see any noticeable changes.

Hello Ionut,

Since they are subscription profiles (and thus there isnt a link value concern) a 302 might be a better option at start.

The way I would do it is set a rule of permanent user expiration and say once someone does not renew for lets say 6 months or 1 year then I make a permanent 301, until then I leave it as a 302. The length of the month may vary but that's something your analytics will tell you.

Jesse I think personal appearance is totally irrelevant with someone's skills in an area and I do not think that can be much of an argument (or appropriate).

In regards now to what the article says as opposed to the MoZ one I can see both points. Rand goes by the book (his tweet reply confirms this) and i agree with 99,9% of everything he mentions, it is definitely what SEOs should be doing these days. But that does not cancel million cases where there is simply not a reason for someone to rank. I mean NONE - Keyword stuffing, cloacking, 10,000 site wide links pointin in 1 page for 1 anchor text, sites with a non-content default wordpress theme ranking on page one due EMD, domain 301 redirects with affiliate directories to other domains for link juice passing etc etc and all this in 2013. And yes I know google will ban them/penalise them one day, someday.

I think that what the blogger tried to say was that the abovementioned techniques unfortunately bring results too and some times faster or easier with what Google dictate us to do. Either we like it or not black hat SEO works in many cases, especially if you are working on low competitive/profitable keywords.

Hello there,

These are forum links, 99,9% sure from article spinning as I am on a soft penalty case for a new client as we speak and came up with the exact same links. The first one in an online gaming community for world of warcraft, totally irrelevant with your product and I highly doubt organic as you mention. Same goes for the 3rd one.

In regards to the yahoo forum, even if it was placed there organically, it is a nofollow link (<a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="</a>http://www.visualwatermark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.visualwatermark.com/ ) so whether they remove it or not it doesnt really matter as it passes 0 link juice.

Hope this helps!

edit: I do not want to panic you by saying I am on a "soft penalty" case. The reason for the penalty was site wide links and in particular one domain pointing to one single page 250,000 times and not the links mentioned above. I see only good in removing these links.

Hello,

First of all and as an advise I would use 301 only to good/high traffic pages and not to every single page. I suspect you run an ecommerce site and I have  bad experience by changing url structures to similar sites, specially the ones that uses widgets for products so the less the better (if ofcourse that is the case).

Shortening your URL length will definitely help you and I see no harm in it. Matt Cutts in particular said that if there are more than 5 words "[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

In regards to the depth, the closer your keyword is to the domain name the more weight and important it will be considered by google. So for example if you are selling running shoes and right now your url is

www.website.com/catalog/ID/running-shoes then you should make it
www.website.com/running-shoes

I am not an expert with ID though so maybe someone else can jump in and give us insights but I think the example above will be a good change.

Hope this helps

It helps Google understand what your page is about and ofcourse they do help but try to avoid a "from top to bottom" tactic.

Besides if you have more than one anchor text pointing to a specific page, Google will take into consideration only the first one and ignore the rest so if you place more than one that points to the same page do it if you feel that there is a benefit from a user experience point of view but I would generally avoid it.

Hope this helps!

Everything lies in the last paragraph of the post

"I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. "

Hope that helps!

Go with Serpbook or rankchecker...I was furious to receive a report from Moz today telling me that around 50 keywords went from Rank 1 to rank nowhere. after they brought me back from my heart attack incident (sarcasm) I decided to check SErobooks and a free tool called rankchecker and my keywords were fine and where they should be ranking wise.

I do not trust Moz on rankings at all tbh

Hello,

Yes it does hurt your SEO in terms of creating an authoritive web site. Wordpress is an over-optimisation nightmare if you leave the default setting on. It is a small issue you can solve by changing some of the setting in Yoast SEO plug in. have you installed this plug in? If not, do it and once you have done this do the following:

On the general setting: Tick the box "Noindex" on the sitewide meta setting 
On the post type setting: tick noindex/follow on the Meta Robots under the MEDIA section
On the taxonomy setting: tick noindex/follow  on the meta robots under the TAGS section
On the author archive: tick noindex/follow and Disable author archives under the author archive section. Tick ONLY the noindex/follow under the data archive section

On the XML SITEMAP setting:

tick media on "Exclude post types" - tick tags and format under the Exclude  Taxonomies section.

You should be ok after that!

ps. by tick I mean select

Hope this helps!

Hello,

Please try the following:

• deactivate all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find which one causes the problem.

• switch to the default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.
  Question: Did you update to Wordpress 3.6? If so that might be the problem since most external plug ins have not yet upgraded for this version. I never update Wordpress the first week as it causes problems with 3rd party plug ins.

Dont put me on the same line with this guy cause I mentioned I have seen examples. You can find my blog by googling my name and find posts proving bad techniques that rank on page one (with screenshots etc) for more than a month, its not that hard. Also I did not say that I CAN SHOW YOU THOUSANDS of examples of successful business rankings. I said in pure copy paste " But that does not cancel million cases where there is simply not a reason for someone to rank". I also say And yes I know google will ban them/penalise them one day, someday, so again your "long-haul" claim (which you claim, i didnt) does not put me to a different direction to what I truly believe or what most people say in this post. Thanks

In regards to branding, ofcourse black hat will never work. To me black hat is a popular practised to micro niche small web sites that makes revenue from adsense and amazon for keywords that are low competitive and the owner is lucky enough to own an EMD or do good SEO because he actually cares. But even in this case in the long-haul as you say I am pretty sure they will be beaten.

Hope you find these clarifications useful.

Use http://www.plagspotter.com/ I am sure you will find it useful.

Make sure you select search for multiple pages and not just your main domain. You can also use the sitemap.xml link to make sure it track everything.

Hope this is helpful

I can partially answer your question and safely say that business2community do not accept anchor text links anymore and huffington post need proper journalist application before you contribute content. Not sure about the rest but I suspect it is going to be the same as they have a very high PR and obviously will not allow just random guest blogging.

Not sure about PR, maybe someone else can advise.

Your pages are overoptimised, good move to remove the tag. I will assume you havent edited wordpress at all and left it by default. Wordpress is an overoptimised nightmare unless you edit it the right way. Your site is constructed in a very "keyword specific" way and all your landing pages/blog include the same keyword with location variations. That makes your page start with a 1%-1.5% optimisation on the main keyprhase thus your page will not rank.

If you write a blog article and you dont rank for its title within 2 days you have over-optimised and need to bring down the % a bit. Also try to add more content, aim for 700words at least instead of just pushing internal pages with blog titles that cross link with each other.

My £0.02

very well said...even in the micro niche area now affiliate marketers say "BUILD CONTENT" and treat your money site like a business. Industry is changing, google ban web sites with lots of amazon affilaite links etc. Content is king, period.

btw i assume he is not an affiliate marketer either. i have no idea if thats the case. I just put on my newbie glasses on and remember back in 2000 how I was trying to find a good software to rank me high after my onpage SEO was done lol

If I may add up, your competitor has an exact url match for the search term you wish to rank and I have seen many many examples where very poor pages rank when they use similar practise. For what is worth, they wont last there for long by only having this box ticked!

The idea in engaging with people in forums is to drive traffic, become a source of information and eventually achieve sales. been there done it.

Do not focus solely on link building, SEO now is more of a complete digital marketing package than link building.

Unfortunately I do not remember the source I saw this but I am 99,9% sure that signature links might be penalised by Google so i wouldnt go with that direction (should you insist in pure link building ofcourse).

Will try to give you an example.

Consider for a moment that you start a blog about "local bands whatever" and "band hire whatever". You have 3 categories including hire and LSI similar keyphrases. You name your blog "band for hire bla bla bla". Your tagline name and description got it as well". You write articles that all have the keyword with it and are all similar named. You've got a recent posts widget on the bottom of the post which names each article by name. Every article has a tag of your keyword in it or something similar anyway.

Lets assume that you start a fresh post right now. Before you even start writing:

Every page has "local band" "band hire" once as blog name in title, plus articles all have "local band, nind hire etc" ... meaning each title has the term twice in it.

There is the "band hire" in the blog title H1 tag.
There is a "band hire" in the blog byline.
There are 2-3 categories with "band hire" in it.
There are 5 articles in recent posts with "local hire" in it.
You had a few tags on every page showing the keyword but you have now removed it.
Your url already got it another 2 local-band-hire-surrey-hire-local-bands-surrey/

• I am not even toughing img alt tags, RSS etc

Count them up, that's roughly 15 "band hire/local hire" keywords on every page, before you even start writing. You would need a 2250 word article that will not mention your keyword ONCE to balance that and still might lose.

Hope that helps.

Hello,

i hate to sound pessimistic but I want to save you time. Buy a Wordpress template or so a bespoke design and move away from Joomla.

I had the exact same problem, 10-15 links a day exactly like yours. I did everything in my powers to fix it. Bough the plug in the community recommended, did redirects, I just ended up with hundreds of links every montH.

If someone else has a solution go for it but again your best bet is to move away Joomlart

it is one of the many signal factors Google uses in order to decide if the site deserves a high rank or not. Definitely not the deciding factor. There are hundres of reasons you might not rank better than them apart the url keyword I mentioned above but I see this happening too often lately and when i read your question i thought to mention it so you know you are not alone out there

In regards to your second question the answer is yes, using the keyword to you url structure can only have a positive impact for various reasons as stated here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url

Hope this helps!

Hello, I agree with Lesley here. Google stated recently that: “Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices.“

take a minute from your time and read this article, am sure you will find it useful http://www.atladasmedia.co.uk/blog/why-google-loves-responsive-design/

hi Scott,

Is it possible to grab a screenshot of that note? Is it from Google? Or some other SEO agency/advertiser you got that message?

I recently had to deal with an identical case but I would never be able to tell you for sure unless I have a look at your google webamsters and google analytics data. Go and have a look at your site impressions, visits per and avg.position drops. Make sure that you have comparison on so you can see how your pages and keywords respond to last months.

Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much (have seen web sites with more not being penalised so this is not a rule) and it would be good to keep it a bit lower around 5-6%. That goes for your contextual anchor text links which in your case seems to be 80-90% of your profile.

All these ofcourse are guesses and speculation based on my experience, only your data will tell what happens but what Jonathan suggests above wont harm you, quiet the contrary it will improve your link profile.

Yup, they go where the market is. from one hand I am extremely annoyed by this (and by the horrible ranking track tool), from the other they are a business and they got data which tells them where to invest and why shrug

It's been a VERY long time since I did a web site on Drupal but I  will give this a go. To start with can you please list me the modules you use on your web site? Most importantly do you use "Pathauto"? If yes I think there might be a conflict with your URL aliases. Let me know. Also is this Drupal 6 or 7?

Thanks Thomas,

This was very helpful. I would love to see a few more comments making a solid case for Genesis framework over the traditional way of themes.

Dan.

Hello,

Do not fall to the trap of reporting your competitor, spend your time in being productive by focusing on your online brand building instead, find out what are people's concerns when looking for activation codes and create beautiful content that will make you differentiate in the market. Thats how you should be spending your time. Black hat SEO refers to money making sites. Its how much you spend VS how much you make till you get caught as most people said above. This is why most of the high PR links they have are rented and not permanent and they pay $100-$200 for them to be there. He can rank temporarily (yes temporarily, he will get hammered soon - SAPE links were finished last week and took all the web sites with them) but he will be gone/sandboxerd sooner or later while you will always be there. Sustaining your ranks and reputation will benefit your business much more than a rank one on google and if your boss cant see that, maybe he should join a quick marketing course

Hi Christopher,

I think the answer is pretty obvious,the rule applies to anchor texts of specific keyphrases that are non branded. Google allows a higher threshold of brand name anchor texts because that's how people would naturally link to you. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice (way before Penguin release).

In the case of our friend here we have an EMD and 80-90% of his overal link profile with exact and contextual anchor text links. Also the exact key phrase he down-ranked is around 10% of the profile. I am pretty sure that there is not a rule set in stone with % for NON-branded keyphrases but **from my experience (thus not necessarily a  rule) **in the sector I work at when I had to deal with penalised sites this was one of the common features I dealt with.

Again, the answers are within his data!

Regards

Again check this with your developers as its been a while but I think it has to do with your setting on Pathauto (I cant log in to be 100% sure of what you've selected there). Did you install Pathauto after you manualy changed the url? or were both generated via pathauto? Also both pages have canonical urls set on those 2 different urls. Is this intended?

Sorry for blasting you with questions but as I cant see your dashbaord I am trying to get a clear picture

Hi Luke,

I have used footer links a lot and I have never ever experienced a penalty. However there are a couple of things you need to be aware which might resulted in your ranking drops / re-recover.

1) footer links are bad for SEO when linking to other sites or when other sites link to you. There is no harm if you link to your internal pages/landing pages and besides search engines tend to ignore footer links 
2) Your main page is the page with most domain authority. The more footer links you add the more link juice you pass to those pages. If you added too many you might  over-dilute the home page link juice meaning an overall drop in rankings.
3) You have to remember that only the first link on the page to a specific URL is counted. So if for example you have on the main menu or content a link to product X as "product X" anchor and then you have on the footer a link "best product X 2013" with both links to the same product x page then google will ignore completely the latter as it's worthless.

In your case it is possible that you had many footers and passed all the juice to lets say 10 pages meaning no juice thus downrank vs pages with higher authority.

Just a guess, hope it helps!

Sorry for the late response, got hooked up with work

Try the 3rd option please which you delete old alias once you create a new one. Select the desirable URL as the new one and save.

Let me know if that solves the problem.

ps. If the old url is indexed and ranked you might want to set a 301 redirect just in case

I agree with Federico if we are dealing with a "manual penalty" case which seems to be the case since he is mentioning reconsideration requests. You have to remember that there is not a one size fits all solution for penalised domains, each client is a unique case that needs a unique action from your part.

For example:

1. Is the cost of your extra hours of work and the time he is going to lose in order to revoke the penalty less thanbuying a domain, uploading the site and rank it again.
   2) Is the domain a branded domain? If so you need to try and clean it, if not maybe worth changing it?
2. Does the client have referral web sites driving good quality traffic to the site? This is extremely important. For example one of my clients who got penalised (manual penalty) was getting 6000 visits a month from a referal web site Google pointed out as against their "quality guidelines". Needless to say I did not disavow the site and carried on cleaning the rest of the domain. Few months later the penalty timed out and client got back all his rankings and traffic, also impressions got increased on google webmaster tools.

Up to date everything seems fine.

Hello Andy,

To my experience if the amount is low there is no harm in paying them to remove the links, in the end of the day they will do some admin work and noone wants to work for free (plus they didnt put your links there - you or your SEO guy did). Google wants to see that you are doing effort in getting rid of all the spammy links and they expect that some people would ask money. make sure you include this to your reconsideration request document, at least I did.

A quick advise. Make sure you remove EVERYTHING that is spammy. That includes even one single article you spinned. Once you submit the reconsideration request they will dig in to see if you have any further faults.

A client contacted me recently and I removed roughly 80% of his link profile before submitting a reconsideration request. Google came back and pointed out an article from a spin blog which is not your regular wordpress spam crap rather a very high reputable authoritative site. While other people hosting articles do not have a "link warning" or "manual penalty" Google still says it should be removed.

Best of luck!

HI mate, sorry for the late response.

It should and I agree with you but Open Source was never perfect Drupal is more time consuming and complicated than Wordpress and there is a reason it refers to more "Geeky" people if I may say than the average WP user.

However the end sites are 20.000 times cleaner than any wordpress site and definitely worth the effort and time put into it!

Very constructive reply, I am sure you made him wiser for coming over our Q&A.

I will give it a go though:

There isnt a ratio which can be classified as standard SEO practise. All this is theory.

It makes sense that a company which run an active blog with loads of content, will NOT have an 100% homepage ratio cause that way you exclude your deep content from the link value and you wouldnt want to do that.

Assuming this is a ranking factor or a signal for identifying legit link profiles you would be looking for something natural such as 60-40 or so but that would depend on the domains that link to you.

For example I would expect web2.0 such as blogger and wordpress or article sites to link more often your articles than your home page while a donour page or a sponsored seminar page etc to link your main page than an article. I would expect the same in blog comments. Naked URLS of your articles.

See how many things come to acquisition?

Just to everything naturally and you will be ok. What I like to do is get high PR 5+ links for my articles and then pass link juice to my money pages via internal linking.

Thats not necessary an industry practise., Just what works for me and the niche I am into

Not a problem mate, happy i helped.

You are in a good shape and do not need to do anything, Google will noindex those pages sooner or later. Just carry on with your onpage/off page SEO

Agree with Robert that it is not a good SEO approach, however disagree on the 1% factor. EMDs (especially .com and .net) still DO work but it comes down to keyword competitiveness and keyword research. Its an awful approach but the easiest way to rank products with low competition hence you see them everywhere when it comes to location marketing (for example pest control XYZ) or Micro Niche sites (bestknifeguide.com etc). I ranked 2 web sites with EMD this year as part of my annual SEO tests which help me understand Google better and to my surprirse they do the job just fine. People will say "yes but not for long" but I;ve been hearing "not for long" for lots of techniques similar to EMD since 2006 so in general I lost my faith a bit when it comes to articles from people who replicate all day what Matt Cutts says. To me the biggest advantage of an EMD is that you can do anchor text link building by simply using the domain name, keeping yourself away from penalties since the url serves as an exact anchor.

Apologies if the article I shared was not clear but in sort NO there is no SEO benefit in using the new domain over a .com EMD nor a disadvantage. At the moment 40-60% is related to your link building so it doesnt really matter if the industry you are going after is hard compettitive industry.  However if you do want to do it and buy the exactkeyword.company domain and want to redirect it allow me to suggest to set an iframe to the new domain than redirect. it works better with rankings at the moment and I can prove it as I set an iframe and a micro niche page of the same product with the same content and EMD on both and the iframe destroyed the proper page by 20+ rankings.

There might be other reasons than your on page optimisation that led to your rankings.

Firstly I agree, leave a bit more time to pass by before jumping to conclusions. Some of my clients' keywords dance up and down in serp for few days without any particular reason so give it a week or two until Google decided your page's rank.

BTW from onpage optimisation you mean META (at least that is my understanding) changes. Did you also change url structure? How about your internal anchor link text? Did you change that too or left it with the old keywords? On page is much more than just MoZs report

HI,

Just to add my 2 cents. As already mentioned, links are THE most important factor in rankings. You only have to see who and what Google is after with penalties to make that conclusion or run your own tests. Having said that your SEO company is right but it also means that if they dont do it properly or abuse it or focus too much only on building links and doing nothing else, you will probably end up with a bunch of links from their netword (or some rented) and that wont do any good to you.

Hope it helps

I can bring you in touch with a good one tbh. Is there a contact number/form to send more details?

It depends from which pages they are coming from. 302 redirects do not pass any link juice to the new URL as Google treats is as "temporary" and not "permanet" (which is 301).

Is your site newly launched? Can you give a bit more information? You might be suffering from a 302 redirect infinite loop