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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!

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. Remove all of the bad backlinks Create good content within the site 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,

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?

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?

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.

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

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,

I am working with a friend on optimizing a site that has a troublesome set of issues. The company has integrated some ERP system that cannot be changed or removed and it is creating goofy URL's. So my question is which URL do I build links to? the www.xxx.com or the crazy URL that it is being redirected to. Site URL: www.nauticalchartsonline.com
redirect: http://www.nauticalchartsonline.com/n.c/NauticalChartsOnline.html I would greatly appreciate constructive feedback.. Thanks, Jeannie