Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Seomoz'ers,

What would you recommend to use as plugins for wordpress when starting a new blog?

Usually the way I go about this is checking to see if the content is duplicate or not.  And then check to see if the content is long enough.

Pages with low content and duplicate content are starting to get dinged pretty hard by the new Panda update.  So I would check out the length of the content and whether its duplicate or not.

"The profile link is a dofollowed link, but it appears to be routed through a redirect on LinkedIn servers -- which seems to retain all the link juice from that link (passing none to the final destination url). In other words, the link doesn't count for SEO (right?)."

From my understanding, if it's a 301 redirect than 90% of it's linkjuice would be passed.  However I'm not sure how LinkedIn performs their redirects.

Well a link from the linkedin Profile is a Followed Link (for now).  However I'm not sure if the followed links from social media profile pages pass much value in the eyes of Google.

You can definitely leverage LinkedIn for better SEO results and reputation management.  It's a B2B networking platform so if your clients are in the consulting industry you could create some kind of workflow where they are active on the LinkedIn Q&A section, LinkedIn Groups and participate in discussions on LinkedIn.  If you provide enough value and are participating on all the appropriate channels on LinkedIn, you can easily establish some kind of relationship with bloggers or other website owners and leverage them for links either through guest posting on their website, or performing an interview article on your website and asking them to link to you, etc.

LinkedIn is a platform where you can establish and build relationships, which can turn into links.

Hope this helps

Agreed!

I have dealt with a competitor like this and have recently finally climbed ahead of them in the SERPS for our keyword.  Unfortunately if you send a spam report to Google that this website is getting spammy links, they will probably put your message in the trash bin.  Don't ask me why, someone bascially told me this and after my experiences with complaining to Google about so and so doing naughty things online, I haven't seen any action taken.

Except for one time, but that's because we were in a large market and this particular website jumped from number 20 to number 1 in less than 10 days.

The way I have combated these link spammers is buy figuring out how they are getting the links and where they are getting the links from and try to mimic them in the most white hat way possible (which leads to some gray hat tactics).

Forexample, one of our competitors were getting many many blog links from the home pages.  So we decided to create a widget and literally sponsored the widget on their home page (this really isn't white hat, but it's close enough).  We have done the same with Infographics, and buying guest posts.

Also we stayed away from any website that screams out spam or irrelevant to our websites we were working on.

I personally wouldn't jump into the spamming methods your competitors are doing simply because you never know is Google's Panda decides to take steroids one day and ruin your website over night like many websites have been ruined from the first couple Panda updates.

Play fair and beware of Google and the dirty tricks they don't like.

Hope this helps

If you want content to go viral it needs to meet the following Criteria:

1. Content must be something Interesting that grabs the attention of a particular market and encourages them to share it with their friends because it's soo awesome, cool, helpful, or interesting.

2. Make sure you have the Share buttons such as facebook like button, tweet, Google Plus, Digg, etc (Don't get too happy with the buttons).

3. Get your content infront of hundreds of folks that would be interested in sharing your content to others.

This goes back to creating linkbait, than promoting the linkbait.  This is going to cost money and time, there really is no quick fix strategy unless you already have over 10,000 facebook fans, and 2,000+ digg followers.

If you don't have a large social following my suggestion would be to use Paid Stumbleupon ads and get your content viewed over 500 times and test your results to see if it has gone viral or not.

Really the best way for anything to go viral is to tap into a large crowd or funnel, so contact the large websites and get them to mention your content some how.

Yea Jacob is right,

Before you start going linkbuilding Happy, make sure your Onsite is legit and optimized.

agreed!

Hey Daniel,

I apologize in advance if this is brutal, so bare with me here :S

Normal Stuff = Is Not Directory submission and blog comments (This is just my opinion)

Also don't worry about "bookmarking the hell" out of your blog posts, I don't care if you even get 500 bookmarks for each one of your blog posts, those back links won't do much at all for you especially after the Panda update.

The Idea behind a social bookmark is to create a large following that would be willing to bookmark your content or whatever you bookmarked to the top of the homepage of that social bookmarking website/platform.  Either way to leverage the power of social bookmarks you need a large following that will pass your info on, and be visible to 300+ users(this number is something I pulled out of the air).

Q&A sites are great, however they take a lot of time from your hands, also many of those links will be a nofollow link(which I am not totally against, but lets get real here it sounds like you want some quality incoming links to improve your traffic and ranking).

Daniel, if you want to generate more traffic and ranking's to your ecommerce website or a specific landing page than you are going to need these two here:

1. Content

2. Links

If you have limited content, than my suggestion would be to create quality content that a large site with a ton of traffic and a large social following would be willing to link too.  This content could be a Infographic, a free app, free tool, video, Poll, Quiz, or an Article that's going to help someone solve a problem or a desirable need (Search Q&A sites figure out what peoples questions are and turn that into an article).

Once you have created this article, than go and find your link prospects (websites that would be willing to link to you), and than start emailing them individually or pick up the phone and talk to them and encourage them to give you the following:

1. Blog mention (link)

2. Facebook Mention (so their large following would be able to see your content)

3. Tweet

This is not an easy process but it's a very simple process that takes time (unless you outsource) and resources (content).

Also, if you are just starting out I would go after the low hanging fruit such as niche directory sites that your competitor's are getting links from, Blog's that your competitors are getting links from perhpas from Guest Posting, etc.

I know it's hard to get a website to link to a product page or a landing page that is asking for a sale.  What you can do is build pages with articles, videos, interesting content, and than get high quality links and internal link those article pages to your landing pages.  This is a strategy many major ecommerce sites are using to get higher rankings.

Here is a great Article from Debra Mastaler for beginning your linkbuilding: http://searchengineland.com/a-link-building-blueprint-the-foundation-62784

I apologize for the rants and the long message, I really hope this helps out

Keep us posted on the Traffic Bumps if you can,  I would be interested to see the outcome.

Buying links or using any marketing tactics that are against Google's guidelines would be considered Grey to Black Hat methods.

Buying a link period from another website to be listed on their home page for an anchor term you would like to optimize for would be black hat.  However there are linkbuilder's out there paying for Guest Posts which can be considered Grey Hat.

Obviously everyone has their own opinion on what Black, Grey, White hat methods really are.

From my understanding in order to improve your Domain Authority score, you need to acquire more incoming links to your deep content pages and have a good internal link structure which will allow you to pass your linkjuice from page to page across your website.

This is just an assumption, but you are probably attracting a lot of links to your home page rather than sharing or spreading that linkjuice across your website using internal links or acquiring incoming links to your deep pages.

Domain Authority in essence measures your entire website as a whole, try to distrubute your links that are pointed to your homepage, and send that link juice to your content pages across your website.

Use infographics, or other great content to attract deep incoming links to your website, than use internal linking to spread linkjuice to your other pages on your website.

Hope that helps:)

Yea as Highland and Marcelo basically said it, if it's Duplicate content than the only thing you can really do is place a canonical tag, or just rewrite the content.

Now I think from what Steve and I are getting from your question is that, you have "similar" content not the "same" content but "similar" content on your website.  If it's similar content than I would simply try to add more content on one of the pages, or just rewrite it, or re-purpose the article.

Hope that helps

For one of our websites with the company I currently work at, our website jumped from zero PR to a PR of 4.  I don't know how legit this "new" PR update really is, obviously as we all know we shouldn't really rely on the Google PR anymore.

Hey Quilbur,

If you don't plan on actively pursuing links or social networking and would like to gain page rankings than the idea here would be to produce new unique content daily, make sure your internal link structure and onsite SEO is well done.

Also, I would ask your current or past clients that have a website to offer a link to your website in exchange for a discount or some kind of value for their business.

I am sure you already know this but the absolute best way to gain page rankings or SERP rankings is to get more links to your website and increase your domain authority.

Hope this helps

Agreed, thanks for the input David.

What is your take on creating Persona's or Pennames to promote content and acquire links for a client?

I think there are two sides to this argument,

I agree with everyone's response on this thread, but I think you also got to keep in mind that an article has a potential to go viral (Top Digg page, Top Social Bookmark Page, Top for Content Syndication Partner), and possibly gain 100+ links in a week.

Now from my understanding and I could be wrong, but if an article recieves 100+ links, but the anchor text is fairly different or is a brand name anchor text and if majority of the links are from blogs or websites that are updated frequently with fresh content, than I don't think your website would get the red flag.

Google understands an article has potential on going viral and attracting 100+ links in a week, I don't think they will penalize you for creating viral content.

However I agree with what Ryan said, if they look unnatural meaning if they all have the same anchor text and seem manipulated than I can see that being a problem and being flagged.

Hey Guys,

So in the past when I would build links for a client I would create a new email account or have them create a new email account for their website which I can use for email outreach for building links.

Also I would try to use their twitter user accounts to get in contact with other niche bloggers for a potential link back or a social mention.

Is this how you guys suggest I should continue going about building links for a client?  Or do you suggest using my email (agency email) or a random gmail account for email outreach?

Thanks

I agree, before you do anything it's best to take some time and asses your current metrics, statistics, rankings, etc in order to determine where your most time should be spent on SEO.

http://dejanseo.com.au/pagerank-update-june-2011/

I haven't noticed any pagerank changes in our websites, but on our competitors I have noticed a small change.

I would focus on creating a stream of unique valuable content on your website, the reason why I say content is because of the following:

• More Content on website helps increase Domain Authority (Links to a better job of this)
• Good Content can be linkworthy (acquire links organically)
• More content gives your website more opportunities to gain the longtail search traffic

Obviously try to use your ideal "keywords" that will convert your traffic into customers or leads for whatever you are selling or promoting.

Depending on how much time you really have for SEO, Linkbuilding should be a priority, without links you are not going to gain the ranking and traffic you would want to have.

So here is how I would rank your priorities for SEO:

1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Linkbuilding/Social Media

Hope this helps

My "opinion" is that the website was slightly affected by the Panda update, and than a week or two later it started to gain back it's rankings or traffic.  This has been the behavior of many large websites after the first Panda update and it's continous updates, you would see a drop in traffic than couple weeks later it will level back off to it's usual traffic numbers before the Panda update that caused a slight drop.

I most likley might be wrong here, but I am just making an assumption from observations I have seen on other websites.  Also from my understanding, subdomains are not as powerful as they use to be and are not really favored as much from the new "Panda" update.  I believe the preferred site architecture now is using sub-folders.

I apologize if any of my statements above are false, and if they are please correct me.

I agree with EGOL,

The specific page that link is directed to will acquire the most benefit or "linkjuice" value.  However your site will also get benefited as a whole which includes your root domain.

Offcourse everyone's SEO strategy should focus on gaining a strong domain authority (strong root domain), and the best way this can be done is through deep inner links in your content pages.  Also good internal link structure to really pass the linkjuice from page to page.

Have you tried using Linkscape?  It's a great tool that can help you distinguish how many blog links you acquired, nofollows, follows, directory links, .edu links, etc.  That is assuming if you know how to use excel.

I could be misinterpreting your question so I do apologize in advance, but the way I usually find a link distribution on a clients website or a website I am working on, I would use linkscape than download the data in .csv and open it in excel.

Than using Distilled's awesome post on becoming a SEO Ninja on Excel http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/, I would break up my links into blog links, .edu links, .gov links, directory links, etc and this would give me a clear picture on what my websites links distribution is looking like, or what my competitors link distribution is looking like.

Hope this helps

Agreed and well said Ryan.  If your performing DJ events, try to ask for a link back from your client or wherever you are hosting your services.  Also you could run a DJ contest for best mixes in 30 sec's on youtube or in a audio format, and target all DJ bloggers/music bloggers and have them send you their audio/video's that will be part of the contest, or have them host it on their website and link back to you.

Either way just be creative in your linkbuilding efforts. I'm sure you'll find ways to build links to this page.

Hope my random comments help

From what I am seeing it looks like the other websites are beating you in terms of incoming links, and the amount of different root domains linking to their website.

If you work on gaining more incoming links from different root domains and improve your domain authority as a whole, than you should see a growth in rankings.

I am not sure how old or new your website is but that may play a factor as well.

That's just my two cents.

Alan Bleiweiss http://alanbleiweiss.com/professional-seo-audits/

My most successful emails have consisted of the following

• Ego-Stroking:  Make them feel like they are important and valuable
• WIFM:  People want to know what are they getting first before you can really grab their attention and negotiate a link/social mention/interview/ etc.
• Personalized:  Obviously don't be a robot and try to be genuine.

Also when contacting other webmasters/bloggers try to find out what kind of person they are, meaning are they humorous, boring, academic, liberal, etc.  The reason why is because people enjoy like minded individuals, so if you find a webmaster/blogger that tries to be funny in their blog posts than try to add some kind of humor in your email outreach.

This might sound like a sketchy method, but I have seen some good results out of trying to personalize my emails to match the webmasters/bloggers personality.