Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Yes tom thats correct.

The idea of a press release is that you use it to reach your audience and not for link building. The fact that someone found that press release and decided to post/link it to his blog is totally ethical and you pretty much earned that link due to the "quality content" strategy you decided to implement.

In regards to your original query I jsut did a quick back  link profile check on your web site and the term you mention is at 8% of your total link building profile. I checked the domains and they are mainly article directories and link submission web sites. While I understand this is a necessary evil I highly doubt you will rank for such a high profitable and competitive keywords "holiday lettings" by jsut doing that, you will need high authority web sites to link to your content. If you ask me my advise would be to carry on writing quality content, use contexual keywords along with your targeted keyword and things will pick up naturally. For example you must have data from your clients as to how your special works on particular seasons or top countries brining traffic, or high referal sites..You could maybe do a white paper based on this report. use google analytics not for keywords but to drug out intelligence data. 5 Ws keywords that generated good traffic or page depth visits is one example. See which content works best and capitilise on that

Hope I helped a bit!

please make sure that the links in your press releases are Nofollow as google recently stated that the links on all PR sites should NOT pass any link juice. Check with your agency!

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.

"If you answer a query in the meta description and then you give the person who clicked on it exactly what they wanted, you are going to do just fine with ranking at some point and probably some point soon."

Plus one and thumbs up!

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.

Hi eyepaq and thanks for your reply, much appreciated

The reason I do not want to use the disavow tool is because

1. Google sent on the message that "took targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole", meaning they took care of the problem 2) Ranking and traffic looking solid
2. I have seen a lot of cases where people used it and lost rankings (some never recovered).

My thoughts were to block the spammy links and monitor if the traffic will be affected (which I doubt as it seems most of it is for branded searches). If then I face de-index, drops then use the disavow/reconsideration request.

What do you think?

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

Hello all,

We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site.

I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool.

Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method?

Would appreciate anyone's immediate response.

Kind Regards

Agree with Sam...if you can give me your competitor's web site and the keywords he is ranking with I might be able to provide you with some further information.

In the meantime you might find this post useful as they list 5 unusual reasons you might be getting beaten in SERP http://www.atladasmedia.co.uk/blog/5-seo-reasons-you-may-be-getting-beat-in-rankings-by-websites-that-are-no-better-than-yours/

Is your competitor using any of the techniques mentioned?

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 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.

Hello Robb,

I would love to jump at the chance and do an in-depth analysis on this. I work as an SEO analyst for 2 different Digital Agencies. How can we discuss further?

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.

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

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/

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).

Do you happen to use the same keyword and by mistake having a capital(s) letter? (example: xxxx xxxx london and xxxx xxx London?) it happened to me once and I got different reports and different ranking positions.

Maybe a glitch or indeed Google sees it as a different keyword. not sure

Hope it helps!

I agree with all colleagues above, I cant see how your web site will be penalised due to lots of pages uploaded at the same time.

However Adding Too Many Pages Too Quickly May Flag A Site To Be Reviewed Manually. This means thought that you will add hundreds of thousand of link a night. Here is the related via by Matt Cutts:

http://searchengineland.com/google-adding-too-many-pages-too-quickly-may-flag-a-site-to-be-reviewed-manually-156058

Hope you find this useful!

Hi Nathan,

Not sure what you mean by the "place to get them at a reasonable cost"? there are plenty online QR code generators where you can create as many as you like for free.

In regards to your question there is no one-size fits all answer as to if it "worth the time". It depends the product, the market and how creative you are.

For example I have see QR codes on the train stations that have been very useful for train delays etc and have seen some random ones on building roofs which I am sure the only reason I notice them is because I am an on-line marketer, otherwise I would have probably just passed.

Hope this helps!

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!

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!

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.

Thank you all for your replies. yes it was re branding. I advised what you both recommended but I am afraid it is a little too late. Oh well

Hello all,

I checked a lot fo blog posts about 301 redirects but wanted to double check with you all.

I got an email from a potential client who want to do a re-brand of his business and decided to buy a new domain name.
His old domain name is PR 6 and his new domain obviously PR 0. I tried to check his old web site but it is too late as he has redirected everything to the new one. What it seems he has done though is redirect everything from his old domain (whether it is a sub category link, a blog link or a specific product) to the new domain index page.

So for example if someone linked to his old product page www.xxxxxx.com/product/product_1 or his blog post www.xxxxxx.com/blog/11-21-2013/xxxxxxxxx.com in both cases it will take em to the new domain index page www.xxxxxx.com as he has not created product pages, blogs or anything than just a 4 page web site.

I know that ideally he should have created same folders/subfolders, get his blog posts up and set up proper re-directs to the new pages but as I was not in charge of this process nor know if he has kept the old web site yet I wanted to know how bad is this for SEO and if his old PR 6 will pass value to his new domain.

Yiannis

yes I realised it a bit later, not a good idea to respond on Q&A in the morning

Trespass pretty much sum it up for me in terms of local searches, hope it helps!

Hey Gaz,

One way to do this is make location based landing pages based on the keywords you are optimising for. Let me give you a rough example. Lets say you target people who are looking for social media training and you have offices in London, Cardiff, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds.

Assuming you optimise your web site for a keyword such as Social Media Training UK you can then create footer pages which lead to landing pages for keywords: social media training cardiff, social media training london, social media training liverpool etc.

Each of these pages should be optimised separately, try to avoid copying the same page and just change the location on the content, title, H1. I am sure that each location has different trends, price ranges, competition etc.

Keyword planner (while atm to me is nowhere near keyword tool) can provide you very specific location based keywords (you can use post codes and google maps to target the area) and give you an idea of what people are looking for within the areas you are targeting.

Don;t forget long tail keywords which can also be used as intelligence/insights for local trends. You can then use these keywords to create engaging content.

Hope these are some good starting pointers.

Hi Tom and thank you very much for your swift response.

I understand completely the "link within the content of a page" concept and totally agree but if you see the first link I posted there is NO content at all just a list of long tail keyword anchro text links.

Same goes for the second page but that looks more natural to me than the first example and with only 10 links as "quick footer links"

You think that having them on page even without content is still better than footers?

Thank you very much in advance!

Hello all

I was wondering if someone could advise me on a link building question. If you wish to create a couple of landing pages for different locations with anchor text link building etc is it better to have a page like this web site here: http://www.acorncommercial.co.uk/commercial-property/development-sites/

or quick footer links like this web site here?: http://www.robertholmes.co.uk/ (click on quick links at the bottom).

I would like to know if there is a difference from an SEO perspective or if they are considered black hat. Your advise would be much appreciated!

Yiannis