After a quick look at that directory's back links, I'd recommend simply disavowing the domain. Here's what Matt Cutts has to say on that type of thing: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-common-disavow-link-tool-mistakes-162804
Posts made by Chris.Menke
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RE: Decent SERP site sending 1000's of links to your website?
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RE: Inches or " Feet or ' Does Google translate the symbols?
Joshua,
It's my experience that Google disregards punctuation of that sort, however, I'd use both of them on the page. I'd use "inches" in your written description of the product and the " in the technical spects of the product.
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RE: Is This A Reason To Move Content?
Here's another way to look it it Ian--if, after just two months from launch, you're already considering re-purposing your content, you might already be running out of steam on the project. If that's the case, you need to make your next step a motivation-building step, in order to come up with a way to keep your momentum going for the year + more of work that you're likely going to have to put into it before it gains traction.
To me, it seems obvious to leave the category content where it is and write new content for the blog--and for the product pages themselves. In creating that content, you want to keep in mind that "authority" isn't about the content, the number of words in it, or whether the content is on the category pages, the blog, or the project pages, it's about who's reading, sharing, tweeting, commenting, +1ing, and linking to it. Today's successful website is about knowing who your audience is, reaching out and engaging them with the kind of content they enjoy consuming, and giving them a reason and an opportunity to express their opinion on your content (and/or product).
The tree you should be barking up is the engagement tree and this video is a good place to start to get an idea what that tree looks like. A Manifesto of Content Marketing - Moz
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RE: Identifying Keywords - Longtail
EJD,
Maybe you've read it already but if not, be sure to absorb the info available here: How To Do Keyword Research - The Beginners Guide to SEO - Moz
In answer to your question, generally, the more words in your target key phrase, the fewer other websites you'll be competing with in the search results, as most marketers tend to focus on the top tier words. By definition though, the further out you are on the "tail", the fewer searches there are being performed for that phrase. Less competitors means it's easier to rank highly but less searches means there's less traffic for you, even if you are on the top of the results.
You'll find that your list of keywords will vary in their competitiveness and as there aren't any good/easy keyword tools out there for doing long tail keyword research for terms with very small amounts of traffic, some amount of your traffic is going to be acquired by experimentation. As a learning experience, I'd recommend that you go ahead and optimize a page for the "online dyslexia test for children" phrase and build your pages and your knowledge from there. While you're in between optimization tasks on that first page, take time to become very familiar with the rest of the optimization guide, as all of that info will be helpful in coming to terms with your keyword research.
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RE: What makes high quality content?
Keep in mind EJD, that content is but the means to an end--it is the visitor interaction/engagement that you (and Google) after and content is the catalyst that makes it possible. What makes good content? As Alan says, it's content that is being linked to and clicked on, as well as shared and commented on on websites and social platforms. How do you create "good content"? You study the needs of your audience, then create content that addresses those needs and finally, strategic networking with audience and influencers to make them aware of that they will then engage with.
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RE: How Would You Market A Photo Of Jay-Z Wearing Your Client's Apparel?
If it does, or if it depicts something obvious, I'd certainly be getting that pointed to from any of the niche related forums out there. In whatever comments being made it would be nice if some unique terminology could be seeded regarding the description of the shirt he's wearing or regarding other aspects of the photo and include that unique word or phrase in the description of the garment on the client's site. That way, if someone does a search that includes that seeded word, it would help your client's site show up in the results for that search.
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RE: Links and how they count?
A fair amount of value would have to do with the relevancy of the sites/pages with the links to the pages they're linking to. If they're not relevant to each other, I'd say all bets are off. If they are relevant to each other, then the answer is easy--it's another toss up.
The authority of the branded links from the better (thematically relevant) sites will certainly help with the authority of the page they're linking to but if that page isn't optimized well for a particular keyword, the additional authority may not help it rank better for a hoped-for keyword--if it is well optimized the link could help quite a bit.
On the other hand, the relevance provided by the anchor text from a link on a thematically relevant page could certainly be beneficial but it would depend on how exactly the anchor text matched the target keyword, how many other back links also contained the exact same anchor text.
On a site with 120 back links, 5-10 of them with exact match anchor text is a pretty obvious footprint and if I had my choice today, I'd prefer the authority links over the keyword links.
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RE: Can too many NoFollow links damage your Google rankings?
In the sense you're talking about, yes. Google won't count those nofollowed links against you.
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RE: Can too many NoFollow links damage your Google rankings?
You don't want to nofollow every outbound link from your site but even if 99% of them are nofollowed, it won't hurt your rankings and I wouldn't consider that to be holding back your recovery.
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RE: How Would You Market A Photo Of Jay-Z Wearing Your Client's Apparel?
Does the sweatshirt say anything?
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RE: Noindex user profile
The gain would be that you don't index a bunch of URLs on your site that contain essentially similar/thin content. I wouldn't necessarily count those that do bring in long tail traffic as ones you'd want to noindex. Things will return to normal once you remove the noindex, but unless you have decent links pointing to those profiles, it may take up to numerous months to for them to be recrawled. I'd weigh most heavily links (followed or no followed) to the profiles from decent sites, as well as activity that shows on the profile page. The rest I wouldn't consider in the threshold calculation.
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RE: Effect Of Restoring Old Website After Implementing 301 Redirects
- I'm not getting a sense that you dealt properly with the transition from the old site to the new one. Did you look at the old site's back links and the search traffic it received and make decisions on the 301s that had to be implemented? If not read these:
- Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help
- Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz
- 301 Redirect Relevance
The things you're talking about aren't the typical topics involved in transitioning from an old site to a new one. It may be best to relax a bit, make the decision to move forward with the new site and begin the process of learning the SEO process. The benefit of using a wordpress site is that you can do most everything you need to do yourself, where your Drupal site wasn't that friendly. Still, you'll have to understand what's what, as far as SEO, and proceed in an orderly fashion. A good place to begin is with The SEO Guide From Moz. You can still evolve the site into the one you want it to be but that won't happen by accident--you're going to have to develop your search marketing knowledge and apply it wisely--it's what your competitors are doing, you've just got to learn to do it better than they are. Moz is a good place to figure out how to do that.
If I've misunderstood, and you're more advanced than that
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RE: Effect Of Restoring Old Website After Implementing 301 Redirects
Kingalan,
If you had reason to leave the old site behind, those reasons will still be there if you return to it. Without knowing any more than what you've said, I'd lean towards keeping the new site, making sure all the transitional SEO tasks were taken care of when you moved to the new site and just press hard on optimizing/marketing the new wordpress. Did you make sure you followed through on all the SEO that had to take place when you moved from the original site?
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RE: Opinion on Duplicate Content Scenario
Yep, that's duplicate content. Two different URLs with essentially the exact same content = duplicate content, regardless of the architecture behind the URLs.
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RE: How does the use of Dynamic meta tags effect SEO?
Bryan,
If you go to google's cached version of one of those and don't see a title or description in the source code then for sure google isn't seeing it. In that case, Google will create it's own meta date for the page based on the page's content. While this isn't actually the worst case scenario, (creating bad meta data yourself would be the worse case), it means that you're giving control of that data to the search engines and not being specific in what you want the page to rank for or how you want to present the snippet to the visitor.
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RE: How does MOZ assign a keyword to a page in the On Page Grades by Keyword Ranking
nuash,
You'll notice if you hover over the little "i" icon next to the column heading "URL" with an explanation of how those URls are populated. The URL and page title in that column reflect the search result for a keyword you've chosen for your campaign. So, you aren't able to map a new keyword to the url unless you reoptimize or better optimize the URL for the keyword you want that URL to rank for.
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RE: How often does "HTML Improvements" refresh?
It can even take months to update, if you're looking at a page that has low authority.
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RE: Why isn't my Facebook page showing up in search results?
Jess,
As Takeshi said, Google may still be digesting your URL change. Also, your /imageworkscreative URL shows quite a bit more engagement than your new one yet does--with 1992 likes vs. 119. So, in the mean time, be sure to work on building up those engagement signals around your new url, it's likely to help.
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RE: YELP: Legit, or is it wearing Prada's with a black hat?
The attorney should have dealt with the matter in some way other than suing Yelp. Law suits can be a double edged sword, as this lawyer is witnessing.
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RE: Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
Fisher,
Google deals with both with / and without / as though they are the same thing so I wouldn't worry about redirecting those. If visitors normally get a trailing slash, canonicalize that, if they don't canonicalize on the URL without the slash.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
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RE: Track effects of content changes on specific page SERP
Chris,
You can track it in a couple of ways--via the ranking for the keyword(s) the page is optimized for and/or via the search traffic that the URL generates. For tracking it by the traffic generated by the URL, you'd click on the traffic from search link in Moz Analytics and then on the URL tab. For tracking via the keyword rankings for the page, just click on the Rankings tab in your keyword rankings report. By documenting your starting position and traffic before your make your changes, you'll be able to see the impact of the changes you make to that page as the optimization takes hold.
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RE: Is there a way to tell Google a site has duplicated content?
As Chris said, you can rel=canonical pages on the small sites to pages on the portal site--but only if they're identical. If they're not identical you'll need a temporary (302) redirect will tell google that the page has been moved temporarily but that the new location shouldn't get any of the SEO value of the old page -- or permanent (301) redirect which tells google that the page has been moved and that Google should add the SEO value of the old page to that of the new page.
Be sure to read through these before you decide what to do.
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RE: How do i actually use the canonicalization rule for Apache?
Stewart,
The canonicalization tag identifies the URL where the one true version of content can be found. The tag used on the one true version AND all on the copies of the true version are exactly same tag because the copies will point to the true version and the true version will point to itself. Often the version you're going to set as the one true version is that which has the shortest URL or the one without any parameters added to the end of it.
The whole purpose of the canonicalization tag is to be able to say "Hey Google, I know I have a bunch of URLs that have the same content--I know it's not ideal but there's nothing I can do about that. So what I want you to do is only count this specific URL in your index so all the others don't count against me as duplicate content."
Here's more detail on the topic: Canonicalization and the Canonical Tag - Learn SEO - Moz
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RE: The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
And keep an eye out for sweeping generalities--there's not much in SEO that is 100% black or white.
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RE: The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
Often, a panda penalty reflects duplicate content issues and as you mentioned, you did have such issues--how bad they were or how well cleaned up they are you hadn't made clear. If content that you've had published on other sites is not also published on your own site, then of course, that won't be an issue for you but such couldn't be ruled out that from your question. You might look through these articles for
- The 10 Days of Google Panda - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
- Are You Making These 7 Panda-Punishing Content Mistakes? | Search Engine Journal
Something to think about--domain authority tells not the whole story of the quality of a link coming from that domain. If you're getting a couple of links a week from one domain over a long period of time, there's a lot more you should know about that site than just the DA (I'm not saying that you don't, but only that you should) and that you may not be able to rule out a penguin issue.
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RE: Maybe a silly question but do Moz write guest blogs? If so, who do I ask?
theinternetworks,
To submit your post to Youmoz, go to your MOZ profile and beneath your profile information is a link beside "Write your first YouMoz post" and from the following page you can submit your post.
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RE: Does having a few URLs pointing to another url via 301 "create" duplicate content?
Loan,
It seems like you're asking two different questions here: Do multiple 301's pointing to a single page create duplicate content--and Is it better to point 301's to your home page or a more relevant internal page. Is that right? The answer to the first question is no, you don't have to worry about duplicate content being caused by your 301 redirects. As far as the second question, it's usually best to point a 301 redirect to a page on a site that is the most relevant to the one being redirected. However, if the page you're thinking about redirecting isn't getting any search traffic and/or doesn't have any external links gong to it, your redirect won't really have an impact on your SEO
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RE: Long tail keywords / Close variations of keywords / Duplicate Content
Muhammad,
If a page targeting multiple keywords has enough authority it may certainly rank for them--especially if they are as closely related as the ones on your list. In the example you give, I would optimize a single page focused on "used honda civic for sale" (and maybe include your city name) and work on building its authority. With a little time and effort, that page should be able to rank for all of those variations.
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RE: Question about best approach to site structure
You may take a look at how the other guys are doing it--the ones that are ranking at the top of the search results. Also, be sure to allow options for other means of finding the content (on your site and via search) e.g. destinations with similar histories, architecture, food, gifts, days of the week, nearby things to do, kid friendly, distance from specific landmarks, etc. Doing those things are what's going to set you apart from competitors in the search results.
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RE: URL Keyword Variations?
JABcchetta,
I'm interested in knowing what convinces you of the ongoing significant impact of keywords in URLs in your niche when in most niches, it's satisfactory to simply throw something keyword related in the url and be off to spending time on other aspects of SEO. If you've done testing to that effect, it would certainly be valuable information for the rest of us.
I think that in most niches, the difference in value of using keywords in the various ways you describe is negligible. I'd recommend to keep up the testing and do some niche-specific verifications on which of your choices work best. As for the stop words, I never put any value in that concept.
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RE: Is it possible to extend my crawling date in SEO Moz?
Hi Ritesh, I know this is something that's often asked for but isn't yet possible. Your crawl date is set based on your campaign start date and can't be changed.
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RE: What does moz trust means?
Tadbir,
MozTrust is Moz's global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank, but rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources with inherent trust—such as the homepages of major university websites or certain government web pages—is a strong trust endorsement.
The help page on MozTrust is over here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/moztrust.
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RE: I'm new to Moz, where can I find something that explains the basics of everything?
I recommend starting with Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO. I think that will help you get a grip on the when and why of the tools.
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RE: Google Sitemap - How Long Does it Take Google To Index?
Hi James, I assume that Google indexing your sitemap isn't the ultimate goal. Rather, Google indexing your individual web pages and ultimately, your pages showing up in the top of the search results is the ultimate goal, is that correct?
Your sitemap is only a suggestion to google that you have pages you would like it to index. Google may or may not crawl pages just because they're listed on a sitemap. Roughly, its the authority of pages to be indexed that determines frequency of google's crawl--and that even includes the sitemap. The greater the authority the more often they're going to be crawled.
The last time your sitemap was revised, it may have been later in the crawling cycle and this past time, it may have been earlier in the cycle (or you domain could have lost authority). Ultimately, social networking, link building, and building authority is going to be what speeds things up for you. In the mean time, be patient, you're on Google time, now.
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RE: What are the solutions for Crawl Diagnostics?
Charu, I went through one of my campaigns and it looks like you're right on that.
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RE: Blogging/content strategy
The kind of content I'm talking about would go on the company blog, primarily, and the rest on quality publishers' sites within your theme via outreach.
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RE: Redesign Troubleshooting Help
If you're pages are actually out of the index (homepage too?), have you looked at your robots.txt file to be sure that's not the cause of the problem? The multiple 301s won't harm you. Of the items you mentioned, your 2nd point could really gum up the works as far as indexing and I'd say you're better off having removed the rel=canonicals until you figure that issue out. If that was your issue, I could certainly take a few months for google to get you back in the index. Some solid authority building should be among your priorities at this time.
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RE: Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Thanks for the clarification Everett.
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RE: Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
Don't worry about any "major damage to our domain authority". Those sites/links as you described aren't helping any and in light of a potential penalty, you're better off removing them.
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RE: What are the solutions for Crawl Diagnostics?
404 errors will usually mean that there are active links to pages on your site that don't exist. You need to find those links using OSE or a tool like screamingfrog and then you need to remove or revise those links.
Duplicate content--add a rel=canonical tag to the header of the www.abc.fr/signup.php page that shows that it is the canonical version. The duplicate versions will then carry the same tag, indicating that the original is the canonical version of the content. While that's a good practice for the search engines, it won't stop those pages from showing up in Moz's reports as duplicates--they will continue to show up as dupes if they get crawled.
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RE: When to note Keyword improvement/decline?
A single week's change of less than 10, give or take, especially with new pages is not something to get upset about. Trends are what you want to get upset about. on a newer page, a downward trend of two weeks is cause for attention, of 3 weeks--cause for alarm. Even an older page can go through ranking upheavals of numerous ranking positions for multiple weeks and then pop back up.
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RE: Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
C3,
Let's see... if those sites have no inbound links, what value are they to the main domain? If they have no inbound links, how is Google going to find them? If you submit the urls to google, google will see 100 new new sites that were all registered at the same time (and maybe to the same owner), all with the same content, and all with links only to your site.
This attempt at manipulation is very easy for google to recognize and you're putting your main site in jeopardy by following this tactic.
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RE: How to separate your - keywords - and | Brand name in the Title Tag
Switch,
Your title is best if it's short and readable, brand name towards the back, primary keyword to the front. With 70 characters to play with you really don't have much room to be talking about other keywords. If you feel you have to use some sort of separator, the title's probably not as readable as it should be or it's running long. If you're thinking separator, think separate page for the keyword, instead.
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RE: Free websites that are good for seo
Daniel, the tactic you're going for won't serve you well. Using free domains in order to create thin, keyword rich content gives your domain a footprint that looks a lot like spam and takes you away from practices that will help you better over the long run. Fast and easy methods like that don't provide results these days.
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RE: How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
Jess,
There are a number of processes that need to take place in your move and the time frame you mention allows for all of them to take place and still not see results yet. Perhaps you could list the steps you've taken so far so we can see if you might have missed anything. If not, here are a couple of resources for you review what needs to be done.
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RE: Blogging/content strategy
If the owner isn't already actively blogging and been doing so for some time (meaning that he likes doing it, is accustomed to taking the time to do it, and is likely to continue doing it for a good deal of time into the future), hire a writer/ghost writer, instead. Map out an editorial calendar based on the kinds of content that will be acceptable to the highest quality sites you're able to get articles published on have the owner add a bunch of expert bullet points under each article topic and have the writer go at it. This way, your effort will be much more sustainable.
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RE: Recovering from index problem
Blink,
It sounds like you've done all the right things but if you wanted to, you can request removal of a cached page via google webmaster tools--it might help. Otherwise, just keep waiting, It'll go away. Have you looked at your server logs to see if googlebot's crawled those pages recently?
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RE: The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
The easiest fastest thing to do may be to noindex those posts on your site that have copies showing on other sites and then just work on creating new content.
If you take a 10-word chunk text from each of your posts (or posts that have stopped receiving traffic) and do a search for each chunk in Gooogle within quotation marks and someone else's site shows up for that search above yours, then you should either ask the other site to remove your content, ask them to link back to your site with a followed link, or noindex that page on your site.
I know it's not fun to have to give up on content you may have worked hard at creating but when you let stronger sites than yours publish the same content that's published on your own site, they're often going to win out and yours will appear as the duplicate content to google. As EGOL said, don't do that.
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RE: Block bad crawlers
Ariel, you could start with the list shown here and tailor it to fit your needs if you're having problems with others: http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4579553.htm. There's info there on using robots.txt to block them and you should also read this for info on using robots.txt file: Robots.txt and Meta Robots - SEO Best Practices - Moz