Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. If the SEO company has the ability to easily remove those links then you don't want them anyway.
2. Sadly, you may experience a slight drop, depending on your overall link profile.
3. On a positive note, you likely have a much cleaner link profile now.

So what's the search term that you used to make that screenshot? I have a few guesses but best to confirm with you.

If it makes sense to have them there then leave it, however if you feel there has been a traffic drop then it may be worth investigating if it was these 1700 indexed articles that have caused it.

Next step: Check your backlinks for unnatural anchor text distribution.

Panda still runs in installments, not continually. Rewriting content sounds like a massive task, hope it's worth it (e.g. is it better to write new stuff instead?). Have you got any pagination present on the site or indexable search results? We are under assumption here that you are certain that the problem is caused by Panda filter and not other factor and that your page layout and ads are not the cause of the drop or that the problem is not link related. I see no problem with 301 of pages with duplicate content to a new better content page. Sounds like something users might appreciate as well.

Submit a reconsideration request explaining the situation in as much detail as you can. Worst case scenario you will find out if it's a manual or algorithmic penalty. If no manual action has been taken then you will have no other option but to try harder to remove the links from dodgy sites.

My choice with be a rel canonical, however have you considered using rel prev and next?

Here are a few footprints which Google can use when evaluating your links (some are algorithmic and some manual if you are under audit/review and some are cross-referenced):

• Time of the link placement and any related groups of links generated within the same timeframe
• Link location (blog roll, footer vs content and navigation)
• Pattern of buying from known link sellers
• Strict use of exact match commercial terms in anchor text
• IP address / C-class
• Author name in article submission
• Open calls and invitations for link exchanges, selling, buying
• Widget anchor text manipulation

Or anything else that can be seen as a link scheme.

I would focus on local citations as much as possible and until all relevant places have been covered. While you're at it you will score links as well so probably the best way to start as it's easy and ROI is fairly good. Next step is identifying best branding channels - a very broad and difficult question - I guess your client's budget will be the helping factor and you'll have to decide what to attack first in line with budget size.

Prioritisation is not easy and you will no doubt hit the wall many times before you find the right solution.

You're about to target a multitude of potential search terms. What needs to happen is series of prioritisation activities. Your work starts of course with on-site review and understanding whether site architecture and the way home page cascades down to other sub-units passes link equity to other pages and if that arrangement is optimal and in line with your priority research.

Tools like GWT can be used to easily extract the highest ranking page for any number of terms. Pages with multiple phrases in serps or in reverse terms and which pages that rank highest for should be the starting point in understanding how to model the site structure - naturally with common sense and user in mind.

Once on-site is sweet, based on whether the content is linkworthy enough you may choose to work on link building towards key pages. Again, you almost never have time and resources to do all at once so prioritisation is the key thing here.

I hope this makes sense.

Looks spot on, and how do you extract value figures for these terms (e.g. search volume, CTRs, conversion rates and values). Do you rely on Google keyword tool only or use any other tools?

What process did you use in phrase research? (tools, steps, sorting, selection criteria...etc)

If you are in their circles they are more likely to +1 more than one thing you post in the future. That's a good investment to me.

If they have problems ranking for phrase with their own brand name, even knowing it's a destination tells me that the domain is probably not as authoritative as it could be. Knowing this I would work on content and link building. I am assuming the KW is in the domain? Your question is quite broad so it's hard to give more specific suggestions. Is destination actually related to their offer, are they product or service based?

Sorry this gets me upset. What a load of bull*#& about .edu links. The only thing that's resulted from this myth is increased rate of spam on educational institutions around the world. I wish people would stop doing this.

Yes .edu domains tend to have good trust from search engines, but that doesn't mean that if you create an empty profile and whack in your link Google will factor this into their link graph, especially if you use duplicate or no content at all. Same goes for forum/comment spam.

To get great value from .edu domains (like with anything else) you would have to have a nice editorial link connected to another page or home page, pagerank and not 1000 outgoing links to viagra and payday loans. To get these types of links you would need to earn them through contribution, engagement or become some type of sponsor. Either way it isn't simple, quick or cheap.

If you base your link building on tactics like the one you describe above you're giving Google search quality team something to penalise you for if they get to review your website at some point in the future.

There are better ways to make money from your site. Worst case outcome? Manual action by Google. Best case scenario? Algorithmic PageRank reduction where your toolbar PageRank goes down by 1/3. e.g. PR6 -> PR4 making it less appealing for link buyers.

Indirectly by linking out to random sites can put you in a bad neighborhood and reduce your websites reputation and trust by search engines.

I would like to add one point many people forget - disclosure. Google is pretty forgiving in terms of linking of own websites if the disclosure is clearly stated and it doesn't look like an SEOs attempt to manipulate link signals.

My suggestion is to link to your other site via a specific page on your first site and explain their relationship. This is a good practice in general, not just search engines.

I can comment on pagination as Google has released very good guide for this in light of their support for prev and next rels: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

This is not blackhat, but definitely Panda food. Unless they have a very high authority domain I don't see this technique working for them well (or at all) in the future.

Reference: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

"One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content."

How do you post your comments, by hand or automated?

Assuming I am not creating a link scheme but link building through content and outreach to webmasters, what are the odds that I will create a link on the same IP address twice?

Your idea of link building may be very different from mine. Why in the world would you need to rotate proxies while link building? Please help me understand.

Maybe it's due to personalisation of your search (sequence of searches, login, location, google.tld etc) other than that just keeping it slightly random as Google tends to do with most things.

Copy the site, set it up on a staging server and run http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ on it?

No way. Create one account and add www and non www to it. Don't create two accounts for each canonical version of your domain.

Yes. Very nice and simple interface.

Just downloaded and installed. Very excited to try something new!

You're welcome to test drive it after we release it as an alpha.

You will find this article interesting: http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/10/googles-exact-match-domain-name-patent-detecting-commercial-queries/

Majestic is great for research just like OSE, however it doesn't offer link building management capabilities.

I literally just published a study which analyses link building process in attempt to solve the management of the entire process: http://dejanseo.com.au/link-building-software/

Soon there will be a followup article of all link building / SEO software we've trialed so far including: raven, ontolo, linkdex, diyseo, wordtracker and a few others that we thought were pretty good. Stay tuned!

Here's a great article by Denis Goedegebuure: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/dennis-goedegebuures-thoughts-on-the-changes-in-google-analytics/35143/

It's not an entirely bad idea to start paying more attention to Google Webmaster Tools data. It seems like they want us to use that as a central point of understanding website's health, traffic...etc. Far from what we really need in the SEO industry though. No doubt Google is pushing for their social network and various other products and more people will be logged in in the future.

I'd agree that this phrase is long-tail enough to rank without difficulty. His title tag for example is the best match from all other results I can see - that would be a significant factor.

Oh! Yeah I can see that... I was looking for it in the black nav Very interesting - that layout reminds me of Facebooks new design. I wonder who copied whom?

I am a big fan of building a strong brand. An if you want to capitalise on a keyword loaded domain then make sure it's an exact match or as close as you can get to it for a search terms that you know carries relevant search volume. Set it up as a fish-net site which (again in your brand) captures that slice of the traffic and focus on the big picture with your main domain.

I have observed some strange switches between home page and landing page on our site which kind of goes towards your theory. However I am not convinced that Google consolidates PageRank in any other way then simply by following links and mathematically assigning it throughout the site. All duplicate pages flow PageRank and pass it to the rest of the site in the same way they receive it. Sometimes Google will block a page which is seen as duplicate. That page will not show or pass any PageRank or anchor text value to other pages (dead end).

I have seen one interesting solution for this in retail/ecommerce industry.

Knowing that iPhone will evolve in different versions webmasters name their pages:

domain.com/iphone (not domain.com/iphone4)

The version is contained in changeable elements such as title tag, meta description and content.

Another thing you can do is merge various page of similar or same content into one canonical version (using rel="canonical").

When pages expire it would be a good idea to take users to the next best piece of content - to maximise SEO value you would redirect them using 301 if the change is permanent or 302 if you anticipate the job to come back at some point in time.

By recycling the same URL after job re-appears you will be preventing creation of disposable URLs and runa  cleaner site. Any old links pointing to those pages will not be going to a 404 page but to the old URL thus capturing the much needed link juice in the correct place.

External anchor text (in combination with your content) would iron any misconceptions Google may get from internal link anchor text. Internal anchor text is of course a significant hint but I think you are safe and this is why... Google treats boilerplate and navigational elements with less editorial value (footer, navigation, sidebars) so if your article/content based anchor text is correct you will end up with those single letter links simply passing link juice around and editorial links passing meaningful tips to Google about your content.

This behaviour was confirmed by Matt Cutts in one of his recent videos on YouTube.

I am seeing this page as #1: www.rpgdicas.com.br/builds/diablo-3/wizard.html

I just went looking for it and can't see it. Perhaps it's country specific?

Yes agree there are other more pressing issues to debate but I don't think this question is out of place. I welcome people to post any type of SEO question here no matter how silly they think it might be. We're all on different stages of learning, but more than once I have been inspired by a naive question to look up something which lead to a discovery of immense value and interest to me and others in the SEO community.

Brackets from what I can see do not represent a significant element, in theory they can act as a separator of different logical units of a URL (though there are much better ways to do that such as using hyphens). I would personally not use them and not sure if they represent a problem in way crawlers interpret URL structure.

Best practice in your case would be to implement URL canonicalisation (rel="canonical").

Watch this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 (contains explanation and examples)

In addition to this try to prevent page duplication form happening in the first place, though this may need to be done on a programming level.

It seems that string such as "6_129_130" appears based on the category and navigational path. For example if user browses from outdoor and home decor and arrive on the same page the URL will have different number.

In addition you may want to remove "zero products" pages from index and not link to them as they are not good for users or search engines.

Have you tried http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

We do a fair amount of guest blogging at the moment and try to find websites which are as closely related to the industry. Authority is a secondary concern and only helps in sorting and prioritising of already found opportunities. There are other factors such as traffic, social reactions and citations of the content you publish. However if we stick just to authority (since that was your question) I personally treat it on a sliding scale. A 40% as you say may be authority in one industry and 80% may not be enough in other. Compare: stamp collecting hobby websites against nuclear physics research labs.

It's better to sort out the problem in the source rather than patching it with rel canonical. One thing you can do to help the situation is to teach Google about your URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools:

url-parameters.PNG

Test Results: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-test-site-command-url-length

Ensure you're present in all the meaningful local directories and join the relevant Australian industry organisations. Make sure your customers can contact you through Australian numbers and include your address or PO BOX if possible.