Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No I am pretty sure Vale meant and Yes Jesse is right, its one of the most important things you can have so yes its very important

You said

"I've searched and found a lot of discussion regarding the benefits of using Exact Match Domains"

I did mention "but not always". You have to be careful

You mentioned "www.designcanvaspaintings.com"

Design Canvas Paintings - Does that sound like a brand name or spammy? hard to judge, we are not Google

Maybe "Designer Canvas Paintings"?

Stay away from article directories IMO.

Look at this and study it

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.nike.com

That's what it should look like

If you were placing all the same links on all the different domains then I think that would raise a red flag to Google so I would not suggesting doing that.

Figure out how to make sure the links that go to your other sites are relevant. Instead of a site wide link, link on specific pages that closely relate.

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/emd-update

Exact-Match Domain (EMD) Update — September 27, 2012 - http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012

Exact Match Domains = not good (but not always)

An opportunity has been presented to me to be able to host a forum for a semi popular celebrity. Very excited about that

I have never had a very forum and would like to know what kinds of experienced has anyone had with a popular forum

From what I hear if you can have a popular forum its pretty much a cash cow (adsense) especially if its reputable and is a great long term thing, because of returning visitors and the loyalty you establish with the users.

• Anyone in this boat who can shed some light for me?
• What should I expect?
• Best software/themes for this for user-ability as well as adsense?

Google Analytics is King!

Are you referring to making edits to their website for SEO purposes?

If so most companies will outline in a Doc what they need to do and you leave it up to them to get those tasks done.

No point in doing all the work

Well I know is I did something right since 1.0 because I'm back baby! 

The only thing that kept me scratching my head was the comment Matt Cutts said about "Penguin 1.0 primarily focusing on the homepage only"

Side Note: You only need to submit a reconsideration request if you have been "manually penalized"

You will know this by getting some kind of message in GWT, if you DID NOT get any message then its the algorithm that got you and that means clean things up and Good Luck!

Witness, I've been in and out

clean up your back links

You are never going to learn unless you fail, fix your issues and it will make you a better SEO

Where you hit by 1.0?

SEO and Page Rank are like Investing

Slow and Steady yields the highest rewards.

I thought they were supposed to be cute and cuddly?

nicepenguin.jpg

I lost one, but gained one. It was awesome to see that traffic spike back up after almost a year

Well according to here the definition of Journeyman

An experienced and competent but undistinguished worker.

Wourneyman maybe?

If pages are similar Google reserves the write to index what they want. Yes of they are too similar that is whats going to happen.

Exactly what Tim said, its more about User Experience than anything else. I know top competitors with 70+ and rank well.

Having that ... at the end leaves me wondering most of the time

"Think about this okay. does Coca-Cola remind you of soda because of the branding or because of the way it sounds?"

-- touché

P.S. I corrected your spelling

Ok I edited it, sorry about that I'm tired

Let me give you a real world example of the relevancy of links

In my niche it is semi competitive with tons of revenue from Adsense. Users in my niche tend to use tools for help and use them over and over again which in turn increase the page views exponentially.

The top website in my niche which dominates almost every keyword has a total of 123 linking root domains and 7,683 links back to their site. In looking at the top keyword for my niche the second place website has 41 linking root domains and 238 total links back to their site.

That is a huge difference...

It only proves that relevancy is more powerful than anything else. If anything study the top 10 in your niche and pick the ones with the lowest linking root domains and total links. Then study their back link profile with a fine tooth and comb. Try and obtain those links and I'm sure you will see results.

It's called Google Analytics

Just looking quickly at your back link profile on Open Site Explore and from a outsiders point of view the first thing that stood out to me was all your .edu domains linking to you.

• Most were irrelevant to your business or at least not related (Penguin could have just devalued those links more, than actually penalized you)
• You only have 74 root domains pointing to you, unless you have a list of your competitors its hard to judge.
• Some of the .edu domains are just a bunch of spam comments
• Came up with several 404's on some of the domains so those links are gone

Maybe you just need some more quality back links, its a very tedious process

Is the description associated with each song or right below it?

You could have your code just display a snippet of the description. usually the first paragraph, but then a "Read More" button and with Javascript you can have it display more when they click it. That way Google gets the content on a crawl and your users are not initiated with tons of text.

You could always do pagination as well for huge lists of songs to help keep the number down.

One thing I have learned is having someone else look at my site, check everything over and over.

Look for...

• Spammy title image tags sometimes forgotten
• Repetitive keywords separated by commas somewhere on the site

Also if you were hit with Penguin 1.0 then really study your home page, Matt Cutts pointed out that 1.0 had primarily had to do with the home page. Whatever that meant....

Seems with that much damage you might want to retire the domain

Nope that wasn't me

Yeah I was reading about it and its because since not all the content loads for the Googlebot it is going to miss stuff...ugh

Just curious if anyone else has tried this. I have pages with words that link to definitions. I have A LOT of them on a page and I am starting the process of trying to either do pagination (which I cant stand) or even cooler infinite scrolling where the page loads more words as the user scrolls.

Good Bad for SEO?

The less the better

Wow Jesus has 3,500 Facebook fans? ... Sorry I had too

Are you worried about ranking factors in Google related to your name?

Or

Just the work in getting users to like your other page?

1 301 Redirect = Good

To many could be bad

Fire Bad Too  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr0poacTxp8

I am currently trying to do a massive study on Penguin right now, you can read more about it here if you wish

http://www.seomoz.org/q/my-penguin-recovery-attempt

Anyways I need some data, can anyone who is willing give me a list of known sites that were hit from Penguin 1.0 Only. This can include the 2 Data refreshes after that, but basically nothing from 2.0

I also need a site in the same niche that you are aware of that did not get hit from Penguin 1.0. Possibly the #1 guy at the top would be nice.

So I need

• Domains Hit from Penguin 1.0
• Top Domains in same niche that were not hit

You can send me a message with the domain if you are not comfortable posting it here.

Thanks all ahead of time

I see what you are saying, I was referring to total links. Not domains

I am not competing against those sites, and prior to Penguin I was ranking almost 1st page on some keywords that I lost.

My goal here is to recover the ranking on particular keywords I had that I lost from Penguin 1.0

I do. I have screenshots and stuff already. I will post them soon.

I have many natural earned links, thousands of them actually.

But I do have spammy rich anchor text links as well that I created years ago.

My goal is to analyze every link I have manually by visiting each one of them. I am going to create a checklist tonight of what process I will determine to detect spam. I do code so I might make a tool for myself that can help me find things quicker.

Like the purpose of this endeavor is to see through all attempts I can come up with to get myself out of the Penguin Hold. I am so determined to do this its crazy

I am willing to spend whatever time it takes even if what I do, does nothing. Then at least I know what doesn't work and move on to the next.

So I have decided today to attempt to beat the odds and try and do a full recovery from the Penguin Update. I am going to create a Google Doc in which I will make public and link at the end of this post for all of you to see.

I am going to meticulously go through a massive back link audit of my site and try to see if I can recover from my loss of some of my main keywords back from April 24th.

I want to clarify that I DID NOT get effected from Penguin 2.0, but  I did from 1.0 and have not recovered since. I have to be honest I feel like I have done everything up to now, but I realized I needed to make this a very long journey into a massive audit into my back link profile which contains thousands of back links which I have been honestly avoiding.

I just want to see if I put the work, I will see the results and maybe it can help others

I will document everything I do in detail as well as dates when I do them. I'm sure there will be plenty of coffee fueled nights of Jibber-Jabber...and I apologize for that ahead of time. I hope at the end there is light and can shed some on others.

I am starting with a blank canvas, so keep checking back on my progress. I generally work at night so you will see most changes in the morning.

Here is the link to my Doc - http://bit.ly/11dUkzc

Wish Me Luck

Honestly you are most likely having a Penguin Issue. Penguin is known to affect certain keywords, but not all. I would take that mindset and go from there.

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.nextguru.com%252F

You have recently lost a ton of backlinks to your site this month. 400 roughly since April 23rd especially from swansonheritage.com

Also look at your link diversity

I wouldn't say it simple

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-poll-16162.html

Bad links are going to take some research. What you need to do is find all the back links you currently have, double check the other domains too. Don't assume they are clean even though you just bought them. Someone still could have owned them in the past.

Once can get your back links from several places. Check them all!

• Google Webmaster Tools
• AHrefs.com
• http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ which is SEOMOZ's

Then you should use the SEOMOZ extension for your browser (I prefer Chrome) which can give you an "estimate" of the trust of those links (I say estimate because nothing is certain, visit each link and look at it yourself.)

If it looks like spam, smells like spam...it must be spam - akums razor

No problem, please let me know what you come up with I would be interested to find out