The link title element is not known to be a significant ranking factor. In fact, stuffing this attribute with keywords might even have the opposite effect.

This is one of those cases where you ask "what's best for the user?"

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the detailed answer. Some good advice here, but I can't say I agree with everything. In particular, it's a pretty broad statement to say that Social marketing has nothing to do with SEO. We know Google uses social media to discover new content, social shares are highly correlated with rankings, and Google has incorporated many SEO-like features into Google+ that have implications across the broader algorithm.

Also, social signals are greatly incorporated into personalized results and local SERPs.

There's a few other points. But I guess we both agree to learn as much as you can and question conventional wisdom. We agree more than we disagree.

I'd also recommend performing a site audit. A good resource would be: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

Also, our Learn SEO section is a good place to start.

Are you looking for domains that link to the root domain golffacility.com? If so, be sure to filter for "pages on this root domain" in the linking domains report. Here's the link:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?page=1&site=golffacility.com&sort=domain_authority&target=domain

...which shows over 600 linking domains.

Or individual links here:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=golffacility.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=domain&group=0

Now, OSE will only show you up to 25 links from each domain. We've found that beyond this number, the value of each new link you find doesn't add much value. (often these are caused by sitewide links)

By comparison, if you search ahrefs for links to just the homepage, they list 14 links, consistent with OSE:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains/exact/golffacility.com

Yes, sorry, Fetch as Google: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587

Hi Edward,

You might have already done this, but:

1. Crawl as Googlebot to your homepage - submit all pages and all linked pages to index.

2. You said you submitted your sitemap. Submit it again.

3. Hopefully this will resolve in a couple weeks. Tough to wait it out.

Here's an answer straight from Duane Forrester of Bing:

"It means that those parameters may be causing Bing to think you have duplicate content issues.  If your content can appear on two individual URLs, that can be an issue, as we don't know which one you want indexed, ranked, etc.  So, the tools we offer allow you to control this by telling us to ignore a parameter.  We can suggest parameters we find, but it's your choice on if you want to tell us to ignore them (and the attendant URLs) or not.

For example, if you have a /print/ folder on your site, you can tell us to ignore everything under the "print parameter".  By entering "print" as the parameter to be ignored, we'll skip indexing the content held in the print folder on your site."

Duane doesn't say so in the article, but you can adjust your parameter settngs in Bing Webmaster Tools. Info here:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/ignore-url-parameters-d7496c65

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Darin,

Let me add my 2 cents:

If it makes sense from a usuability standpoint to have the author bio on the page, then by all means leave it there.

What's most important, from a search engine point of view, is that the unique content on the page is the most important.

This means placing the paragraphs about the print description front and center on the page. Since Panda, Google seems to treat page content using more of a Reasonable Surfer model in a similar manner as they handle links. That is, the higher up and more prominent the content, the more likely that weighs into their calculations to what the page is "about."

Matt Cutts has previously said it only takes 2-3 sentences to make a page unique, but personally I think closer to a couple hundred words is a safer number.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I'm not an expert here, but it sounds like your server is configured to resolve wildcard subdomains.

Unfortunately, I'm not nearly technical enough to even begin to tell you how to solve it. This is generally configured in your hosting account cpanel, with a subdomain set to *. ( I believe there may be an .htaccess element to it as well.) Since there are so many different server configurations, my best advice would be to consult your hosting company and seek their advice.

Otherwise, proper absolute canonicals (with full URLs) on every page should act as a backup safety solution.

There are many types and degrees of penalization. Very very few penalties result in total de-indexation.

Most of the time, if you are penalized, your rankings will simply drop for most keywords, but Google will often keep most of your pages in it's index.

Additionally, Google will only send messages about unnatural links via webmaster tools if it's a manual penalty. Algorithmic penalties, like Panda and Penguin, usually are not accompanied by manual notices.

Here's a really good article from Ryan Kent about the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

There's one final possibility: Nothing is wrong with your site, but for some reason Google is devaluing your backlinks. This sometimes happens when your site is fine, but the sites linking to you get hit with a penalty. Happens more and more these days.

Hi John,

You hit the nail on the head when you asked - "What's going on?"

My big question is: do these links actually exist? You said they are coming from one of your other sites, so can you actually visit those pages and find the links?

If you can't, and if other reporting tools don't show those links, then it's possible it's a fluke with the Majestic crawlers. Almost all crawlers (including SEOmoz and even Google) sometimes have trouble parsing javascript or other pieces of code on a site and create phantom links and URLs. Usually these get sorted out and are of little consequence, but occasionally a few slip into reports.

I highly suspect something like that is going on in this situation. I would check both Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to see if they show these links. Most likely you have nothing to worry about.

Also, since these links don't appear to come from real pages, there's no value in redirecting them.

Let me know what you find. If these are indeed real links worthy of saving, then we can start to discuss redirecting them.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Eada,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. I won't go over the same ground that the others have already covered here, but let me offer these suggestions.

Google often serves results from different data centers, and those data centers refresh at different times. Also, rankings can fluctuate greatly even throughout a single day. For this reason it's not unusual to occasionally see huge swings in rankings from hour to hour as the SERPs adjust. But let's try to get to the heart of the problem.

1. If you're site was hacked, this could be a strong signal to Google to not show you in search results.

Check in Google Webmaster Tools under "Health > Malware" to see if they have detected Malware on your site.

(I stated the next 2 earlier, but here they are again)

2. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

3. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

If Google has trouble fetching your homepage or any other page, it could indicate other problems you need to address.

4. Finally, we need to consider the possibility that this has nothing to do with hacking or .htaccess files, but instead there is the possibility that you have indeed been penalized and Google has dropped your rankings.

Have you done any questionable link building? Recieved any messages of unnatural links? If so, this may be another area you want to explore.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Eada,

There's 2 things you want to do here to "help" Google re-crawl your site.

1. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

2. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

An engineer at Google suggested #2 to me after my own site was hacked and I cleaned it up. It's a signal to Google to take another look at those pages.