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If you have triggered algorithmic penalty there is no other way to fix it other than removing the cause for the penalty. Only manually assigned penalties can be fixed by submitting reconsideration requests. Google makes the whole thing that much more difficult by NOT telling you what caused it. One of our clients had a penalty of this type assigned and we did the following:

1 - Cleaned up backlinks for paid links
2 - Removed variable driven repetitive text across all pages

It took 4 weeks for re-inclusion. We don't know what caused it, 1 or 2.

Use H tags as they are meant to be used but if you can nicely embed your phrase within that would be great. How to use H tags? Same as you would with indentation structure of a bullet point list. Have them indicate document's topical structure.

For example:

-H1: Vehicles
--H2: Cars
---H3: Sedans
---H3: SUVs
--H2: Motorbikes
---H3: Dirtbikes
---H3: Roadbikes
----H4: Harley Davidson
---H3: Sportsbikes 
----H4: Suzuki
-----H5: SFV650
------H6: SFV650 Engine Specifications

Here is an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXnbBsRbKDA

Likely it's not banned then - just not worth indexing. Chuck some decent content up there and you'll be fine

It should be fine unless that site was banned in the past for some reason, though that's pretty easy to check. If your new website changes substantially in topic Google will likely recognise the change and not factor in domain's history. This is from what Google said at one point, not sure if anything changed since then.

There are several types of penalties (single keyword, all keywords, complete ban...etc). Search for your own brand and if you don't come up with anything than you're likely banned. Same thing with domain, site: command and info:

I have no difficulties, on Chrome with cookies enabled. What are you using?

All in moderation. Google always says "do what's best for your users" but I would stick to a single affiliate link per page to be safe if this was my website. Nofollow is a good way to link to sites you don't trust and I would say it would be applicable to affiliate sites.

Google updates public PR rarely these days... you could have a good site with PR0 for months so not a very good way to judge the risk or benefit that way. In fact if you have a history of buying links with same anchor text from high PR sites over a period of time you could trigger a penalty more so then with crappy little low quality links.

If I understand the question correctly you want to temporarily point people to the old domain while you wait for the new domain site to be launched and stay there permanently.

If the above is correct then solution is:

pre-launch: setup 302 from newdomain.com to olddomain.com
post-launch: remove 302 and setup 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com

This way people who visit the new domain from stationery and printed material will go to the old domain and still get the content they expect while Google will be informed this change is only temporary. After the new site is launched you break the temporary redirect and setup a permanent redirect directive towards the new domain and new site.

Stavros, PageRank can indeed hint at site's strength - many authoritative sites exhibit very high PageRank values and going up against them may be silly in some cases. However it's a workable situation...

If you see a site with PageRank 10 in the results yet their site lacks the phrase you're targeting in essential places such as title tag, content and inbound links (as part of anchor text) it may in fact be possible to beat them.

Basically relevance will beat authority. That's why Microsoft doesn't rank well for "Men's Shoes" despite their high PR.

Also PageRank is a raw importance value assigned to each individual page not to a phrase or other factors and is transmitted through links. One page gives other page it's PageRank by linking to it.

Hope this answers your question.

Positives:

1. More internal links (anchor text)
2. Internal PageRank passing from more pages
3. Collected PageRank from external sources (bigger fish net)
4. Higher number of entry points (longtail searches)
5. Google's perception of your site is different (knows you're a bigger resource)

In reverse, sites with higher reputation tend to get indexed deeper and more thoroughly.

Negatives: Splitting up link juice across many pages.

If this is your only way of link building (especially if you do 301 only) it will start looking suspicious, your site may get penalised on manual review. I am not that sure if Google have algorithmic trigger for this.

Lists of article hosting sites are available online however value of having the link from duplicate content is not as exciting as arranging unique blog posts or articles on different websites. If I was you I would perform this activity once per month and focus on other activities.

Correct. Each time page gets re-indexed pagerank flow will be recalculated.

Observe your natural link profile and you will notice people don't always choose to use exact match anchor text - in fact that's pretty rare when it happens. Google knows this and if you stick to an exact match you will create a suspicious backlink profile which would bite you back later on. My recommendation is to diversify anchor text and mix it with brand and variation of the phrase.

Example:

exact match
brand exact match
exact match brand
partial match
exact match: www. url. com

etc.

We had the same case in the past, rewrote the URL and told Google the old URL was permanently moved. In one week the new page ranked instead. Once you've done this and other on-site bits go and earn some links as that will me a much more fruitful way of getting the page to a better position.

My vote goes to WordPress. We're using it for our own website and it's awesome. The best thing about it is a wide support network and numerous SEO plugins which will make your job much easier than any other CMS platform.

Eric are you using a content management system such as wordpress to run your website? If so then there will be functionality / plugins that handle this for you.

Good SEO practices apply for many search engines so if you do things by the book you should do well in all of them (unless we're talking about specialised ones). Bing and Yahoo run on the same engine so you should see similar or same results in both. Google, however, brings so much more traffic that we're internally not even looking at traffic at other individual search engines and instead treating it all as a) Google and b) "Other search engines".

More specific to your question, a good starting point would be to go through this:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/?rfp=1141441469

Don't get me wrong - We've done both!

Creating satellite assets proved to me a nightmare for us on so many levels it's not funny. From using up resources, splitting up time for creating links across multiple sites to client complaining about the look and feel of all these microsites (they treat them as any other site). I've abandoned the method soon after that and put our resources in link, bait, content and whitehat link building. It gave us the results we needed.

To be fair I recognise some promotional items operators in Australia who have done microsites really well and benefit from it, however most of them have "fed" juice through the main corporate site. To me this is too close to a scheme for comfort.

Another point (this time against the method) is that you're missing out on branding and effectively creating natural links to microsites. If we look at all big brands, their microsites are campaign based. not designed to attract SEO traffic, that's the job of the main site.

There were no detectable inbound links to any of those pages before the pagerank update. What other signals could have affected it... content quality alone? By the way content was written using the same writer and same quality level.

I strictly monitored that there are no inbound links for example and the link profile was clean until public TBPR update at least. Once suspicion I have and was not able to confirm and include in my research was that there was a plain link added to that odd page which has PR3 and it shouldn't. That would basically prove the theory that any external link fortifies the importance of the page to the point of higher indexation/caching. Something like internal link + external link = match made in heaven.

In 2008 we performed an experiment which showed some seemingly random behaviour by Google (indexation, caching, pagerank distributiuon).

Today I put the results together and analysed the data we had and got some strange results which hint at a possibility that Google purposely throws in a normal behaviour deviation here and there.

Do you think Google randomises its algorithm to prevent reverse engineering and enable chance discoveries or is it all a big load balancing act which produces quasi-random behaviour?

Do you get PR people to HTML the PR material or is it passed through designers to do that? I'm experiencing some resistance in learning HTML and even using visual editors to include HTML links.

Which online channels do you use for distribution?

Love the idea, have you got an example of engagement strategy / approach?

You mean to include QR code as part of the press release somewhere at the bottom?

Thanks Nicole those are great ideas.

He also said: "We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves."

This is what I am after, personal opinion from people who have either tested or experienced the effect first hand.

Thanks for your input!

It seems like your vote goes towards all links being treated equally regardless of their location/function. Interesting... I have suspicion that there is or should be difference. Why?

Consider this, Google notices 150 sitewide links that always appear. Wouldn't it make sense for Google to treat page-specific links differently to sitewide ones as that would in fact improve their ranking system (e.g. 150 standard links not diluting the importance of a page specific link given through content).

Thoughts?

I just watched this video in which Matt Cutts talks about the ancient 100 links per page limit.

I often encounter websites which have massive navigation (elaborate main menu, side bar, footer, superfooter...etc) in addition to content area based links.

My question is do you think Google passes votes (PageRank and anchor text) differently from template links such as navigation to the ones in the content area, if so have you done any testing to confirm?

Haha... Google hates this. I admit though... it's worth a shot. However starting on a new test site is just a messy temporary measure and spend of valuable time and money when both are limited.

Reporting them to Google will likely only help feed and improve their algorithm and not directly affect the competitor (unless they get audited manually). Turn grey? What is grey is a very grey question... buying links from known sellers and spammy websites as well as spamming yourself is not a long term solution. Doing something clever, that's a different story for as long as you don't push it too far. Gardening actually sounds nice... lol

Seriously though, I can guarantee you that it's possible to beat quantities with quality so keep that creative hat on and work on those link opportunities.

I'm happy to answer specific questions on link building ideas if I get to know a bit more about your situation / industry.

1. Compile a guide on how to deal with toxic materials (links, references and all) and pitch to gov and edu sites for inclusion.

2. Cross promote with industry operators (builders, painters...etc).

3. DIY guides that people will appreciate. How to fix a simple problem or step by step illustration.

You could spit out 10,000 bad content pieces and earn no more rankings than with one extraordinary item per month. Frequency of content update and adding of fresh content affects search engines signals broader (or different) to the one's impacting rankings alone (look up QDF). How content in a technical sense can help is if it earns links and through internal linking. My advice is not to create content if it doesn't make sense to do so, especially if it's of a low quality and empty meaningful sentences, you'll just end up with a low quality site which could trigger Google's new algo filter.

This could only cause problems if you have google_sitemap_users.xml not equal to google_sitemap_seo.xml - hope that's not the case with you.

Absolutely. In fact I realised that I missed the above after posting but my edit did not register. I hope my editing priviledges are not revoked.

Browse to your .htaccess file in WWW directory and open it in editor (if you're using cpanel) or download edit and upload via FTP (safer option). You can do a find and replace on the file like with anything else. If you are unsure of the syntax create a single 301 in cpanel and see how it looks like when you open up the file.

Good luck!

Youtube currently doesn't spend resources on video content analysis - only on a basic level. There are numerous instances of popular videos being recycled and reuploaded by multiple users therefore "fragmenting" video's true view count. That as far as I know is the biggest nuisance you can bump into (much like having two URLs for the same content page). Otherwise it will be fine.

If all you're doing is adding segments before and after than you might want to use YouTube editor to do this: http://www.youtube.com/editor

See potential users don't see your homepage yet. You're bidding for their click among 9 other organic results on that page

Regarding footer links... Google more or less knows they are footer links and treats them as such. If it doesn't make much sense to have so many links then don't. There are better ways to drill down to crucial content that is not one click away from home page nav in general (e.g. content!).

URL length does not matter, but it's good to have a nice hierarchy for clarity (much like breadcrumbs) - however I have noticed an interesting thing... when you do site: Google (among other things) sorts site pages by URL length, starting from shorter down to longer URLs. Does this impact rankings? Maybe. How much? Probably to a tiny digree if at all.

So far I have not seen any differenece between the two. In one video Matt Cutts did state that full URL can be safer in some situations though, so if you have an equal choice it would make sense to choose that one.

I recommend you review the following page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors as it pretty much contains everything you need to get started.

Title remains the strongest element, internal linking is something people often forget to utilise - and even tiny little things like alt tags on images...

PS: There is a new one coming up for 2011 so keep an eye out for that one.

Could you please clarify your question, are you talking about rich snippets, optimisation of SERP snippet or optimisation of page in general?

If the page you're linked from is linked directly from homepage (anywhere from it, including footer) or any other PR6 page on that site it will likely have PR5 (unless the number of outgoing links is excessive, or PR value is barely PR6 - for example PR 4.6). Worst case scenario is PR4 in the next public update (although pagerank is already received in realtime).

Typically PR drops one toolbar point each link depth down.

Legend. Thank you.

Links from content area seem to be a lot more potent. If you're looking to boost your rankings through internal linking I would find editorial links to be the right way to go if possible. One tip I guess would be to look at preventing double links to same page. For example link from footer goes to same page as link main nav, sidebar and content area.

If you have better links to subsidise with the same money - go ahead. Otherwise leave them as they are. Link is a link, however if it looks reallys pammy than it's worth going through trouble of removal. If this was my site I would try to avoid a massive link drop and remove gradually.