Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Rand. Anyone ever tell you you're awesome?

I just did. Thanks bud

I'm perplexed about a couple of things.

Google says that scraping keyword rankings is against their policy from what I've read. Bummer. We comprise a lot of reports and manual finding and entry was a pain. Enter Moz! We still manually check and compare, but it's nice having that tool. I'm confused now though about practices and getting SERPs in an automated way. Here are my questions

• Is it against policy to get SERPs from an automated method? If that is the case, isn't Moz breaking this policy with it's awesome keyword tracker?
• If it's not, and we wanted to grab that kind of data, how would we do it? Right now, Moz's API doesn't offer this data. I thought Raven Tools at one point offered this, but they don't now from what I've read. Are there any APIs out there that we can grab this data and do what we want with it? (let's day build our own dashboard)?

Thanks for any clarification and input!

To me, this depends on a couple factors. How much effort can go towards this project, and is the content essentially the same, or does it vary per country.

If the content varies, and there is enough manpower to manage multiple sites in multiple languages, then have separate websites optimized for their unique content in their respective domains.

If the opposite is true, keep it all in one domain and use the /en, /fr, etc language settings afterwards. Obviously monitor anything that could be flagged as duplicate and use canonical accordingly. Keep in mind it could take more effort to get that site ranking around the world. That's my $0.02 at least, hope it helps

Just an update, the penalty was FINALLY lifted. Our client soared the rankings. WOOT

We have gobs of spreadsheets. We wanted to keep the good backlinks, so we disavowed all of the "dodgy" ones. It was a disavow on the domain level and it totaled to over 50% of all incoming domains.

As for manually checking the remaining links, the ones that we chose to keep on the spreadsheet are from relative, authoritative niches with minimal exact match keywords, so we chose to keep them. We did manually check every single one too.

We will continue to press on, and I will update here in a month to note progress if any.

Do you know of any way to see if the disavow even took? Is there a way in WMT to see what you have selected for Google not to use when looking at backlinks? http://moz.com/community/q/why-does-gwt-still-show-some-links-from-a-disavowed-domain That link doesn't give me much confidence in finding out if my disavows are even taking effect. It's almost like I have to do it, and throw my hands up in the air and who knows.

Here is the latest update.

The rankings have still not recovered. The pages that do rank in the 60-170 SERP for the bad terms are not the pages that are built for that keyword.

So, I dug even further and used ahrefs (great tool). An "ah-hah!" moment came when I noticed the % of incoming anchor text seemed to directly correlate with the SERPs that have been negatively effected. Long of the short, further proof that Penguin has stomped on this site. Those nasty anchor texts have been disavowed a long time ago obviously.

Funny, we have an old Penguin recovery post on this from our site. But we followed that to a "T", and appeared to do the right steps. We can't really disavow anymore, and the link profile that we did not touch is a good one. This site just seems so far down the rabbit hole that at times it feels like we are wasting a lot of valuable time and money. I wonder how much more time we can invest in it (Creating content, getting higher quality links to it).

Has anyone encountered a Penguin attack that they couldn't recover from? Or one that took over 10 months or something like that?

Also, to reassure you I've used the Moz on-page grader for all pages and they all rank at about an A or a B. WIthout stuffing of course.

Thanks for the tip though,

Hey Michael,

The big slam occurred in late march. It coincides with Panda Update 25. The only other thing that occurred around that time is that the site had a graphic overhaul, getting a new template on the CMS and new graphics. The content stayed the same. The site on the Moz pro dashboard continued to show no errors and a few warnings, nothing major.

For scrubbing on page content, accessibility, etc I use WMT and Moz Pro tools like campaigns, crawling, on page keywords, etc.

Are you having an inkling that there is something else at play? Please let me know, I'll take any help I can get.

Thank you,

Thank you so much for the thoughful response Wiqas. The thing is, we've done a good amount of good link building as well. There are quality links from relative industries that are just branded (no keyword insertion). There are a lot of government sites, edu, even Harvard (a small no-follow but still).

I apologize for leaving that nugget out of there. With Matt Cutts and his stance on Guest Blogging, we are treading very very carefully. She's in tons of local directories now too. This effort was done right away, and the client surprisingly had some decent backlinks as well, in which we kept.

We continue to press forward for link building, but not sure if that will lift the algorithmic choke hold that is on this site.

Thanks again,

Thank you for the response Eric. I may have mistyped, there were lots of links through hundreds of domains. It's still a smaller local client in a field with a bad stigma (attorney), but other than OSE and WMT I'm not sure what else I can do to grab all of the incoming links.

If you're suggesting that I should force Google to recrawl the nasty links after 6 months, I'll try anything at this point. How would you recommend doing that?

Thanks again,

Hi there. We inherited a client who didn't receive a manual penalty, but holy cow they have a good sized algorithmic penalty on their site. Here is what we have done since receiving the client:

• Client arrived with a bad backlink profile and an algorithmic penalty. We knew this, but underestimated the effort in removing it.
• We researched great forum posts like http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover http://moz.com/community/q/penguin-2-1-how-to-recover
• The researched great blog posts like http://moz.com/ugc/what-a-penguin-recovery-looks-like http://moz.com/ugc/recovery-from-google-penguin-tips-from-the-trenches http://moz.com/ugc/a-theory-for-preventing-recovering-from-a-google-penguin-penalty

Outside of Moz, we researched a lot as well. We felt armed that we needed to do 3 major things.

1. Remove all of the bad backlinks
2. Create good content within the site
3. Fix any unnatural on page SEO tactics (keyword stuffing, etc)

Here is how we tackled it step by step

Step 1: For step 1, we contacted over 100 of the bad backlinks. Many of them wanted a fee for removing the backlinks. They were from sites that were literally like "freeseobacklinks.org". Crazy bad ones. But we only got a few removed. The rest either ignored us or wanted some money.

Hence our round(s) of disavow. Our SEO manager at the time of the first disavow only did 50 domains on the disavow. She was extremely thorough, followed the guidelines to a T, and performed it. We actually fell back in ranking afterward, even though I didn't think it was possible.

With nothing to lose, besides lots of time and budget, we went through thousands of links and manually compiled an extravagant spreadsheet for our next round of disavow. Again, limited to no response from site owners. So we went ahead and pushed forth with nearly 300 domains for the disavow. By this time, the site was in the abyss, so it couldn't hurt anymore. We kept all of the great links, which surprisingly there were a fair amount.

Step 2:
Our SEO manager and our content writer began to write for the website. Our graphic design created an awesome infographic, and a good slideshare too. We've been putting 3-4 articles / posts on the site monthly. Typical word range is 750+

Step 3:
We did a full site analysis and removed all unnatural location based keywords. There wasn't a ton of unnatural on page SEO going on. The bulk of the damage must have came from the bad backlinks.

Summary:
On top of this we have been doing this for at least 6 months. All of the pages that are hit by the penalty are just gone. Nowhere to be found on Google, unless you search with the site operator or search for that exact page.

We seem to make zero headway with all of this. I'm not sure what else we can be doing. We even optimized for conversions and longer time on site, as well as page speed. We've confirmed that there is no manual penalty. I'm starting to feel as if the site is permanently deemed bad or something. I also don't want to keep wasting our writers and manager's time on this one.

Any ideas on next steps? Can anyone restore my confidence in this site? Thanks for the long read and any response,

Have a great day,

Thank you Kevin. It's always fun to clean up other people's messes.

Are you thinking that's the reason for the tanking?

The home page for this site (http://bit.ly/4m1eXy) was ranking between #1 and #3 for the term "Minneapolis criminal defense" as of a few months ago. Now the home page has dropped to #23 for this keyword, and the only changes we've made should be enhancing its ability to rank - through on-page optimization, cleaning up site errors, and ensuring good, quality content. The thing is, the sites who rank ahead of our site have lower domain authority and page authority, and their content, quite frankly, just isn't that great. Some of them are definitely doing SEO but they aren't necessarily targeting "Minneapolis criminal defense" like we are for the search term.

Before our company started doing SEO for this website, they hired a company that generated a large number of backlinks that Google would probably now see as spammy. The previous company also used to direct traffic towards the home page for the keyword "Minneapolis DWI laywer" too - and we have since stopped doing that. So I'm wondering with all of Google's algorithmic updates if this is the reason we're seeing a drop for this term, and if Google's confused. We're pretty confused, too, though, since the sites ranking ahead of us don't seem to be doing squeaky clean SEO by any means.

Advice for us? We're stumped. Would anyone consider Google's disavow tool for the bad links?

Sounds like a decent plan, but the main focus shouldn't be on disavowing, but rather getting the new, good, quality links earned back to your site. At least in my opinion. Best of luck

If you see your rankings dropping, chances are you have some backlinks working against you. I wouldn't go hog wild and disavow everything, as the link profile could have some spots that help you. I can't be specific without looking at it.

The best thing you can do, in my opinion, is spread the good news about the new site and redesign, and not "build" links from it, but "earn" links. Share your awesome new content and get people to like it so much that you earn some new traffic and links. You are on the right track by learning how to do it right (versus the old, shoddy SEO company that didn't do much good), but now you have to put the work in and do it right.

There are plenty of good methods that work for getting you some good, organic, quality traffic that will help your SERPs. If you feel you are over your head, there are plenty of people on here that would be more than willing to help you out.

My opinion, the page speed doesn't effect ranking. It does effect what happens after they are on your site. Waiting for a website to load can be a huge turnoff, so optimizing for pagespeed is important not for rankings, for conversions.

I'll just accept that the previous link building that was done was crap and the links are too deep.

I get that there are some bad links or links from too deep into some sites, but I've even seen some links with not much value show up on OSE, such as the bookmarking one that is credited.  Also, then OSE doesn't show links from larger directories such as Yellowbook, Yellowpages, Facebook, Angies List, etc? If you think that the other 73 root domains and links are just too deep, and this is a case of the previous link builder building links that are so bad that OSE won't consider them, then I can accept that. I was / am just worried that there wasn't something more technical going on, like something being flagged from Google.

A lot of these links are all over 1 year old, and not many have even been made in the last 60 days. I quickly listed a few big name sites, a source related and a random forum post one.

http://www.yellowbook.com/profile/spine-and-sports-chiropractic_1820959785.html

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spine-Sports-Chiropractic/122260357799431

http://www.yellowpages.com/saint-paul-mn/mip/spine-sports-chiropractic-22853231

http://www.angieslist.com/companylist/us/mn/roseville/spine-sport-chiropractic-reviews-2098534.aspx

http://www.findhealthpros.com/index.php?cmd=show&id=2081

http://www.scsuhockey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1611&start=45

It should have been mentioned right away, but Google Webmasters Tools shows 80 linking root domains, and OSE shows 7. I understand that linking from good sources is the best and should be the only technique, and believe me there are a few good links in there. I am just confused to why OSE only shows 7 vs. the 80 in Google Webmaster Tools.

In the Pro account, it shows it as an error, but when looking at the live version, it redirects like it should. Must have been a hiccup in the crawl

Okay, I get that a link from the portfolio would not carry much weight. Understood. People aren't going to search for Roseville Chiropractor, find the portfolio and think "Eureka!"

I wasn't expecting this link to be anything big at all, it was just an example of a bunch of links that never got picked up by OSE. Maybe that was a bad example, and I should have chose a link from a directory that never got picked up by OSE.

I'll accept the answer that if it potentially carries little to no weight, OSE will not consider it. I was under the impression that if a site that has at least a little page authority has its pages crawled, then the backlinks would be indexed. I know the backlink wouldn't offer much value in this case, just was looking for more of a technical answer to why.

Thank you. It never surfaced until this week. I'll throw a redirect. Thanks

I've had what has ended up being a nightmare SEO campaign. We have sunk a ton of time into link building for the site and saw little to no traction. Just as a test, I have the site on our portfolio as a site we designed years ago. The link to the site is old. Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit.

http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html

The backlink, and troubled campaign is www.spineandsportschiro.com

There should be a few more links too that aren't getting picked up, especially the ones I have noticed using Whitespark local citation tool. Has Google got picky with all of this? How come this site seems to be getting no credit?

Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?

Thank you Ann. Didn't expect to get a response from you personally, but what a nice touch. Your detailed response really cleared some things up for me.

I am hiring a content writer for my blog posts, and I will make sure he goes off of the checklist. I am hoping that this works out well, and now I feel I have a more clear understanding of your site's functionality. Thank you for your quick response

I saw the post

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-valuable-link-building-services

and saw that MyBlogGuest seems like a good link building service, so I signed up. It really is confusing though, it almost makes me think I have to install WP Blogs on my sites which primarily run in Joomla, so linking directly to the blog is not an option.

Okay, fine, so I'll just skip the part about putting in offers on other people's posts. I really signed up for the link building part of it anyways.

So, now, I just write content in the site-used article generator? Then, go in and offer it manually to people? Doesn't really strike me as some super powerful method of linkbuilding, but there's a good chance I'm missing something.

If this is the case, I'd assume I'd have to write content that is relevant to the site that I am trying to build links for, and then place links back to that site, so basically I want my posts on competitors sites and that will help out with backlinks and authority?

It's really confusing. I just want to have my content writer write good content and get links from it, and this method just confuses me. I'd appreciate any insight from anyone who has used that service or can recommend something easier or better.

David nailed it, from what I have researched. Long of the short, it carries little to no value on national campaigns, and a little value on local campaigns. Since it is so easy to do, and if your campaign is local, might as well use it.

I've been reading conflicting reports that social bookmarking is really useful and that social bookmarking is a complete waste of time that passes no real juice.

My gut tells me that every answer will tailor around "make your content spreadable" and then bookmark socially, which seems to be the right answer. 2 part question -- what if the content is really hard to make exciting (i.e. for chiropractor, funeral director, etc)? Does this mean that just linking to the site with a cut-and-paste paragraph will do nothing SEO wise?

I just need to know if it is even worth looking into or if I should invest in other areas.

I have worked on a website and organically it is starting to do fine. The website itself is on the right track. Now, the places page, could use a little improvement.

I did make sure it has the right categories, has all unique pictures and videos, it does have a good amount of reviews and even citations from other local directories, and even the website links to it. It does show up for some local searches but I would like it to dominate more.

I've heard that if I've built links to that Google Places local page from other sources, it would rank higher and perform better. Is that true? Any other tips and tricks to make it perform better?

Thank you

Never tried the geotag, I will give it a shot. I am redesigning the HTML format, to try and better fit it into Panda's regulations. So, if it looks a bit "wonky", that is why.

I appreciate the advice. I still don't know why it plummeted down so fast, but I will certainly implement your techniques.

Lastly, another tidbit of info, I performed a lot of social bookmarking and other forms of link building in August, September, October...  I have yet to see ANY backlinks from the work I have done on SEO Moz or in any other 3rd party tool. Don't know if that sheds any light on anything

Even after studying the latest Panda algorithm, which frowns upon templated looks (kind of odd), I have been doing some thorough research trying to find out why a site I have been optimizing plummeted. It was hovering around 10, and fell to 37 in one to two weeks. After I read all about the Panda update, I assumed it was that. But the site falls in line and shouldn't be affected. I used that 3rd party duplicate content checker and the content checked out okay.

I looked on my SEO Pro campaign and noticed that the on-page report got an A grade, hitting on all factors except having the keyword in the URL. So, I have a site that loads in good time and should be fairly well optimized, and falls in line from what I can tell with Google's guidelines, which I read through. So why the drop?

I'm not saying this site is 100% perfect couldn't be any better, optimized to the hilt. It was designed a few years ago, but still, I am just having a hard time finding out why this site got slammed the way it did.

www.spineandsportschiro.com

Target Keyword(s)

• Roseville Chiropractor
• Roseville Chiropractic

I welcome any on-page critiques, but mostly would like to know where to look or have some kind of insight to why the rankings dropped, so I can try and fix them the right way. Thank you,