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You could not possibly do any good by building your own link network with 12 domains you purchased. Google will figure it out, and your links will either be devalued completely, or you'll get a manual penalty placed on your site.
There are legitimate use cases for site wide links (like in the footer) but it's best to nofollow these links to be safe.
As Chris stated above, it does look like a Google Penguin hit.
First plan of action would be to log into Google Webmaster Tools and see if you have any notifications from Google regarding manual penalties. If so, take the necessary steps to resolve these issues.
Second, it does look like you have some really spammy links coming in from spammy sources. I ran an OpenSiteExplorer report on your page and I see the same "cialis" links that Chris alluded to above. You may want to look at disavowing links like these to make your inbound link profile look more organic.
And finally - update your site! If you had somehow managed to make it through Penguin 2.0, you would have eventually lost your rankings anyways because other sites will be coming in and taking advantage of absence.
Hope this helps!
You'll want to use a rel="publisher" tag. More info here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1708844?hl=en
[Find us on Google+](https://plus.google.com/yourpageID)
I am not aware of anyway to determine if a site has implemented Google Webmaster Tools or not, as they could have verified it with by uploading a randomly named file, or through Google Analytics. I would say if they are fairly large site and have Google Analytics (which you can determime by viewing the source code of the site) they probably have GWMT as well.
To determine if Bing Webmaster Tools are in use, you can go to http://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml (replace the domain name) and see if the file exists. If it does, then they activated Bing Webmaster Tools. If the file does not exist, it either means that they never activated Bing Webmaster Tools, or they did and were smart enough to delete the file from their server.
Hope this helps!
Looks like you missed "http://" in some URLs so the browser is treating them as relative links. There are more.
On this page: http://www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/?Tag=Business+Leader and others like it, I found several URLs that start with "www." which is your problem. This page has a relative link on the anchor text "keep on improving"
Building links and authority organically can be, unfortunately, a long and frustrating journey - especially in boring niches. When I pull up your blog posts, I don't see them as blog posts (much like Peter above) but rather as promotional material disguised as a blog post.
The problem you are facing is one that I've seen time and time again. Online businesses in boring markets with little to no audience are really hard to get off the ground. You have to be extremely **creative. **
When you are writing your next blog post, I would suggest browsing through Pinterest to see what popular items come up for "storage bins" or something similar. There are probably a bunch of "life hacks" and instructographics that you can gain inspiration from to write a blog post. Then share the heck out of it - share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, you name it.
I know you are facing a frustrating challenge, but if your task was easy, then people such as myself would be out of work 
I think using an intermediary page with a redirect script is the way to go. This allows you to modify the redirect (301 vs 302), the server header, and the destination - after the fact.
Ideally, you could do this going forward. For your current affiliates, you could reach out to them and provide a new affiliate link, or ask them to nofollow the link. This part isn't ideal, but if you had the intermediary redirect page you could handle this without contacting the affiliate.
I disagree that SEO should be taught in colleges, or that there should be certifications for it.
SEO requires constant learning, testing, and adjusting. By the time you finish a 4 year degree, the tactics and guidelines you learned in year 1 may be completely obsolete.
Each SEO is different. Everyone has their own opinions and techniques. That is the nature of the industry, and why it's so interesting. There is no one right answer, there are many different ways to get to the top, and even more that make it harder to get there.
SEOs also use an ever-changing set of tools, which also is adapting and changing with the industry. The tools you learned while at University are probably outdated or obsolete by the time you graduate.
I personally think that a degree in Marketing or Communications will set you up for a great start in the SEO field, but the majority of the leg work to learn industry standards, tools, techniques, etc., should not be taught in school.
I encountered this problem today with a brand new campaign I created yesterday. I double checked the settings page but there was no where to connect or reconnect the connection - so since the campaign was new I just removed the connection and reconnected it - this probably isn't a good option for you however.
I initially thought that it had something to do with me going between Moz Analytics and back and forth to the old Moz Campaign Manager. Perhaps someone from the team can comment?
Why not try to avoid the problem altogheter? I assume the below line is site-wide:
If you remove the index, follow meta tag, your pages will still be indexed and followed. Then allow your authors to decide on a post-by-post basis if they want to noindex or nofollow the page.
Facebook Page Likes are not the same as the Facebook Like number that OSE shows. The Facebook Like number that OSE shows is for "Likes" for that specific URL.
For example, if you put a Facebook Like button on your site - it would increment the number of likes for that URL, not the number of likes for your Facebook Page.
If your Facebook Page is set up with the correct URL, search engines will associate the two with one another.
It's not Penguin. As Jesse stated, the link profile doesn't really set the site up for success. I count 8 unique linking root domains.
1 of the links is on a "links" page.
3+ of the links are some form of a on a directory page.
Another is on a members profile page.
Another is on a Free Advertising forum.
The Flash on the home page probably isn't helping either.
The site needs content (like Jesse said), and content that others in that niche would be genuinely interested in.
Think of some creative marketing campaigns you could do with "concrete repair." Maybe run a video series on the dangers of degrading concrete, create an infographic on the degrading process that concrete goes through, write a post about how to keep moisture out of concrete (or other general concrete maintenance), etc., etc.
Also - if the company would consider it, I would suggest they do a site-wide redesign. It looks like it's been a few years.
OpenSiteExplorer only returns the social sharing data for the specific URL you entered. If you entered your root domain (http://example.com) it will only return the number of shares for that specific URL - not the entire domain and all sub-pages.
Likes on a Facebook page will not show up in OSE, because the number of Facebook likes returned is the number of times people on Facebook liked the specific URL you entered into OSE.
So in short - the social sharing data that OSE is returning is accurate, it's just not what you are expecting to see. Hope that helps!
For #1, you should choose whether you want www or non-www, not both. Set up a 301 redirect so that search engines don't confuse your the two and think you have duplicate content.
If you are running an Apache server, you can use this .htaccess 301 redirect to only have a non-www version of your site (entering www will redirect to the same page without www.)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
The "Home" page doesn't need to be named home. Check in Settings > Reading to see if you already have one set. f you don't, your theme files will dictate what is generated for your home page.
As Jon stated above, create a new Page (perhaps call it Home to avoid confusion). Add your content there, and/or set your template file. Then go into Settings > Reading, check "A static page" and select Home from the Front page dropdown.
I personally would avoid CommentLuv. Off the top of my head, the cons would be:
The only pros would be that it increases your exposure slightly and you will most likely get an increase in comments - but if the commenters are self-serving and coming simply to drop a link (as opposed to actually being interested in what you have to read) then is that really a good thing?
On top of all that, I personally think that CommentLuv is just kind of....cheesy....and doesn't belong on a professional website.
I would suggest Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARRP), but since your main concern is performance - be wary of large sites. This plugin can be resource intensive on large WordPress sites, in which case it is to your advantage to use YARRP Experiments to control the cache and throttle.
My understanding is that the Mozscape index is unique every time it's generated. Each time a new index comes out, it is a new craw of your inbound links, and the old index is trashed. At MozCon, it was alluded to that the development team was looking into ways of determining which pages are updated less frequently, and re-crawling those pages less often - allowing the Mozscape index to complete faster and use less resources.
In short - everything you see in OSE was crawled recently (in the 30 days leading up to the last index update).
Does most of the traffic come from referrals or from organic search?
If you are targeting organic search, you would probably be better off using the acme2013.com domain as a redirect (for those that want to go directly to the site, easier to type in) and hosting the content as a subdomain of your main site. You can piggyback off the domain authority you've built with your main domain to gain added exposure in search engines - as opposed to starting from scratch with a new domain.
If you aren't concerned with search traffic, it might be easier for people to remember a shorter domain than a longer domain, so creating a new domain each year would be the way to go.
I don't believe that this will affect your mobile search rankings. It's a common practice in responsive design to hide some elements on smaller screens. Google knows this, and they take this into account.
Lots of sites have large sitemaps in their footer, and this doesn't really translate nicely to mobile screens. You could consider creating a jQuery dropdown menu that includes the sitemap - this way the content is still there, accessible, and usable, but it doesn't take up any screen space until you click on the "menu" button. Just a thought.
The only thing to be careful of is to make sure that you are not hiding keyword intensive objects. It's hard to say, but it's possible that Google could interpret this as abuse. I wouldn't leave it up to Google to try to interpret what you are doing.
If all you plan to do is drop your links in social bookmarking sites, you're probably just wasting your time. It's not likely that these links will be worth anything to search engines - even if they are followed links. The time you spend building these links could be spend developing great content, or working on other link-building opportunities that would be more worthwhile.
As far as blog comments go - if your goal is to get backlinks, it's not a good idea. These links are nofollowed and too many of them will look spammy to search engines. If you are commenting to engage with the content author, that's a different story. I often comment on other sites to engage with the content author and start a conversation. I sometimes choose to include my website as a reference, but I often choose to leave it out.
I would tell your client to not worry about it. I didn't know that GoDaddy was in the SEO consulting business now?
I found this as an explaination of what a GoDaddy SEO Checklist Stop Word means:
Words that are common do not help search engines understand documents. Exceptionally common terms, such as the, are called stop words. While search engines index stop words, they are not typically used or weighted heavily to determine relevancy in search algorithms.
It sounds like more of a warning to me. I wouldn't worry about it.
You can get a pretty complete list from Open Site Explorer by changing some of the filter settings.
Set Show to only 301 Set **links from **to only external Set pages to pages on this root domain
This should show you a significant portion of your inbound short URLs.
The number of categories you have on your WordPress blog should accurately reflect the content you write about. If you have a legitimate need for 50 categories, then by all means, 50 categories it is. If your content all falls under 5 categories, then that is all you should need.
Essentially, let your content dictate how many categories your blog has. Remember to look out for duplicate content, or pages with little to no content. It's possible that you have a single blog post that is tagged to two categories - and those categories have no other posts attributed to them. The category pages will then show short excerpts of the content (little to no content), and be essentially identical because the same post is tied to them (duplicate content).
Looking at the graph you posted the traffic from May doesn't look like it dropped all that much, especially given the variability of your traffic over the past few months. Your post is unclear if the graph is overall traffic or organic search traffic - so it's hard to say what exactly is going on, but it could just be normal fluctuation as some posts get more attention than others.
The traffic for June is low, but it's only a weeks worth of traffic. If you average it out over the entire month, it will probably be similar to May's.
I would run a quick Open Site Explorer search on the site to see if your inbound link profile looks fishy at all. If it does, you may have been hit by Penguin. If you see any fishy links, you can consider disavowing them.
I understand what you are referring to about having to hide certain elements on smaller screens. Sometimes not everything fits or flows correctly.
When this happens, however, I try to hide design elements as opposed to text or links. I'm also OK with hiding images. If a block of text or a link seems out of place or doesn't flow properly, I will build a dropdown for it. I'm sure you've seen mobile sites with dropdown navigation menus.
I wouldn't leave it to up to Google to interpret what you are doing. Don't hide any links.
I would suggest using URLs without file extensions. It's cleaner, and easier for users to remember.
Because http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs is essentially http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/index.html (if you don't use Apache to manipulate URLs), you'll need to have a redirect set up to avoid losing any visitor flow and incoming link juice. If you run an Apache web server, you'll want to do this in .htaccess.
Companies that offer services like Moz Analytics, Majestic, Raven Tools, and others probably aren't helping the situation for individuals
I have found it much easier to find projects and clients when presenting myself as a web developer/designer with a strong knowledge of SEO and marketing, rather than just a developer or just an SEO. For me, SEO is just another tool in my belt.
I think that it will become harder and harder to get strictly "SEO" work, as companies with access to the plethora of online tools (free and paid) will begin to bring a lot of that work in-house.
SEOTools for Excel has Google Analytics capabilities.
Here is more info on it: http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/functions/googleanalytics/
Moz has published a lot of posts on Link Building: http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building most of them have some solid advice.
As Chris stated above, the page is certainly there. Some CMS' will create duplicate pages and it might be as simple as determining where the page is coming from and removing it. I couldn't find any inbound links for this page, so you would probably be ok removing it.
On the other hand, 301 redirecting the page would probably be a cleaner option. If you are running an apache server, you would write a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file like below.
RedirectMatch 301 /extra-services/transportation--car-rails--146.html /extra-services/car-pick-up-service-146.html
This should take care of the problem, and GWMT won't bother you about it anymore.
Local directories will help you with expanding your reach for local search. Having a listing on Google Places, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, FourSquare, etc., will get your brand in front of potential customers faces. Isn't this the ultimate goal? Whether or not this helps you rank in search engines, you still want to turn leads into sales.
If you are looking at local directories as your sole source of inbound links to improve your SEO, you should probably look elsewhere, but if your interested in getting your brand out there for people to see, local directories are essential.
You can change the domain and keep your historical data. In Google Analytics, when you are ready to make the change, go to Admin, then click on the appropriate Account, click on the appropriate Property, then click the Property Settings tab.
Rename the Property at this time, and change the Default URL to reflect your new domain LTD.
You're going about it all wrong. You said that your goal is to drive traffic to your automotive site (pun intended), but then why are you concerning yourself with link building?
Building links for the automotive industry will be extremely difficult in the first place. How many different blogs could you guest post on? Probably not tons, right? Submitting your site to directories won't help you in the Search Engines, and certainly won't drive much referral traffic. Why bother?
You should focus on building a website that is easy for people to consume and navigate, create content that is worth peoples time, build a social media presence, and focus on customer service and improving your product/brand.
This might seem like a daunting task, but it's the only sure-fire way to "win" on the internet in the long run.
You might think that since you're in a traditionally boring internet niche, that it will be difficult for you to generate buzz about your content to earn links. That isn't true. I submit to you an article that Matthew Barby from Wow Internet put together on "link building" on a micro-budget. What it comes down to is that money isn't as important as creativity.
Good luck!
If you're not great at HTML, then perhaps you should consider having your site converted to WordPress. The initial cost will definitely be outweighed by the long-term benefits.
WordPress will allow you to edit and add new content with little or no HTML/CSS knowledge. You'll be able to use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to add text and style it however you see fit.
If you install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, you'll be able to update the title tag, meta description tag by post, set up open graph meta tags, the meta robots tag, and much much more - again - all without any HTML knowledge.
I would first confirm that you have authorship set up correctly by using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.
If Google shows you that everything is set up properly, then you shouldn't need to worry about it. It's possible that Google hasn't updated its index since you added the authorship link, so that could be why some people don't see your Google+ picture in the SERPs, but Google also could just be choosing not to show it for some reason.
I've seen some of my own pages with authorship set up properly on not display my Google+ picture in SERPs before, and I was logged into my account as the author. I'm not sure what causes Google to choose to not display the image, but it does happen sometimes.
I'm not sure that I've ever got a false notification before, but I got the exact notification you are describing a while back. It seemed as though there was a problem with the robots.txt file. Turns out the domain didn't have a robots.txt file, so rather than guess Google decided to stop crawling it until I created one.
If your site doesn't have a robots.txt file, make sure you create one. If the site already has one, look over it for syntax errors that Google may be tripping over.
It's hard to say, and I admit that I would have also expected them to reindex the pages by now.
A while back I was working for a client who accidentally turned on noindex, nofollow in their WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin site-wide. I didn't catch it for a week, and after I turned it off it took an additional 3 weeks before a single page of the site was reindexed. Granted, this was a low ranked site, and it probably wasn't high on Google's priority, but it did take much longer than I hoped to recover from.
Unfortunately I think you just have to wait it out. Just keep doing what your doing, creating new content, etc. Maybe if you build a new link to the page, Google will recrawl it then?
Listings like Yelp have continued to increase their traction in SERPs in the past few years. Yelp is a very trusted source of information, especially on a local scale. Broad-match keywords like "local diners" will most likely give you Yelp or Google Places results, as opposed to individual websites.
When considering SEO, most people will focus their efforts on driving organic search traffic to their site. Really though, we should consider our online reputation as a whole. If you get a customer to walk in your front door, does it really matter if they found your webpage, or if they found you on Yelp or FourSquare? As marketers, our ultimate goal is to generate leads and convert them to sales - it does not matter how we reach the end result.
So in short - you shouldn't be alarmed by this, and shouldn't even feel threatened by it. Use these platforms to manage your online reputation, receive feedback, and engage your potential customers.
If you have old pages that still exist but are no longer relevant - you'll definitely want to 301 redirect them to the new page or new content. Check Open Site Explorer to see what type of inbound links these pages have, so you know what type of Page Authority you'll have pointing at your new page.
If the pages no longer exist (404 as Mike suggested above), there will be no benefit from 301 redirecting them to new pages, as Google has long since removed these pages from their index. It won't hurt you, but it won't benefit you either, so it's probably not worth the time.
Egol,
In my experience, scrapers and feedgrabbers are usually server-side scripts that won't register in Google Analytics because they won't have Javascript enabled.
Of course - the server logs will definitely show scrapers.
You can ask Google to crawl your page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276
Ask Google to crawl a page or site:
- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, under Health, click Fetch as Google.
- In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
- In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
- Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
- Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
- To submit the individual URL to Google's index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
- To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.
It's probably just Google slowly making their way around to re-crawling these pages. I would fetch the page, and just wait a little while longer.
I think it comes down to the branding requirements of the new product. Is this a major product launch, or just another product amongst an existing product line the company has had for ages?
The advantages of having the new product under the current domain (as a subdomain, or a subdirectory as Kurt pointed out above) would be that you could piggy back off the existing brand and online presence, and it would be easy for new customers to find the product, even if they weren't looking for it.
If the product is new, your company is investing a lot in it, and it deserves it's own branded presence, than a new domain might be the way to go. Search Engines and Marketers have been moving towards "branding" for a while now, and if this product warrants it's own name, personality, or community - this would probably be the way to go.
If the structure is identical (I'm not clear on that from your post) then why not do a global redirect from the old content to the new content
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This should redirect old pages to the same structure on the new domain, including images.
I don't know why you would want to 
Go to https://moz.com/users/xgrade and click Cancel Subscription.
I'll look at the page from a technical standpoint. You may or may not have the ability, resources or time to make these improvements, but here are my thoughts:
I'm a fan of using this CSS for responsive images:
image {
max-width: 100%;
}
I personally wouldn't be a fan of running a check on the user-agent and serving up an optimized image because you would probably negate some of your load time optimization from shrinking down the image by running unnecessary server processing.
Also - by optimizing an image for mobile, you should actually be increasing the DPI because of higher resolution screens (Retina). Shrunken down images might look awful on iPhones.
Just my .02
