Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well, there are two categories of SEO and you are covering both already: onsite SEO and external SEO.

If you are looking for a third classification of SEO, you won't find one. If you are looking for more ways to get links, do linkbait, and so forth, SEOmoz actually has some fantastic articles on this:

1. Get links giving stuff away
2. Get your community to build links for you
3. Encourage link building from your linkbait content
4. General advice for tough industries
5. More SEOmoz goodness

...and that should keep you busy! I hope I understood your question correctly.

Cheers!

Put yourself in Google's shoes: doesn't your website structure and content look familiarly like a content farm? I'm not saying your website is one, but it gives the vibe for several different reasons.

First, the domain is clearly overly-targeted towards keywords. That's a big giveaway that the website is probably not a legitimate business. If you are an attorney, you should instead have a domain registered for your company name. Have branding.

You are using a free WordPress theme. Content farms largely run WordPress because it's so easy to install across many different domains and manage them all with little effort. Content farms grab free themes because, well, they are free. Shouldn't a legitimate business have it's own web design?

You don't have a business listing in Google. When I search for your address I don't see your domain come up. Create one and verify your business number.

Give your website a more personal touch. Your admin name is uncontesteddivorceny. Create an author bio if you plan on having multiple authors, but at the very least use your real name.

To sum up the onpage stuff: it looks like you tried too hard to game the system. If I saw this listing in Google when searching for an actual attorney, I would quickly press back and block your website from appearing in my results again. I mean this criticism constructively.

And then of course there is the external SEO. I only took a brief glance, but it looks like all of your links are from directories, video channels, and comment spam. None of this looks good. Get endorsements from any organizations and websites you can that are actually authoritative. I don't know your industry well enough to give specific advice on this, however.

To answer your question, yes people recover from Panda. But if you are doing SEO right you never had to recover in the first place. SEOmoz has great articles to help you out if you aren't sure where to start.

Cheers.

Emphasis on keywords in the domain name was actually reduced. You definitely don't want to switch domains, as that alone comes with a lot of SEO problems.

I would instead suggest focusing on keywords that have less competition than 'fabric.' You can still focus on the keyword while doing other campaigns. You'll find as you build more links ranking for the tougher goals becomes much easier.

If you Google your brand name 'Beverlys' and look at the cached page, and then switch to text view, you see that a lot of your homepage content is links. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the lack of content is working against you.

How are you handling link building? I didn't look at the OSE data, but just using PageRank as a quick metric, the #1 result for 'Fabric' has a PR8, while you are PR3. Look at OSE data for ideas on link building, as well as looking at the link building section of the SEOmoz blog.

Here is a particular link building with eCommerce article I enjoyed:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites

As an addendum to that, focus on getting customers to build content for you with reviews. Decide how to create a community around your niche and build it. You would be surprised at how willing customers are to give you free content.

It's not blackhat SEO, and it's very common to create separate domains for the means of SEO. You can even use the same IP address (so you don't actually need a new host or new IP) and the benefit is still there. While it does help if the domains are hosted at separate locations, it isn't necessary.

Any of the articles that do belong on your company blog should be on your company blog. Everything else can go on the secondary domains. Just be sure that you develop the domains as you would your flagship website: with quality and attention to detail. Otherwise they serve no purpose other than for your SEO (no value to visitors) and they could be considered as grey/black-hat SEO.

Your secondary domains also become guinea pigs. You can test new services or link building ideas on them, and if they lose their rank, it certainly isn't good but it's not going to hurt your main domain. It's a layer of abstraction that will both protect your main website's SEO and allow you to start building case studies.

Personally I like to get whoisguard to mask the registrant of the domain, separate them all on different servers, and try to make them as unique as possible. (Tough in a specific industry, though..) I'd recommend you did the same.

Let me know if you have questions about this! Cheers.

In FireFox you are getting personalized results. Make sure you are logged out of your Google account and try again.

I'm getting the same result (page 4) in both browsers.

Alternatively you may turn off these settings as detailed here:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048

A notice is just a notice. If it was a warning or error, that's when you start getting worried.

There is nothing wrong with the amount of links in your navigation. In fact, it's perfect. You can do a lot worse.. I've seen big names have well into the thousands of links per page because of navigation items. (This, too, is OK because of their higher authority)

So at this point you have nothing to worry about: notice or navigation-wise, anyway.

If you are asking that question, the best way to get started is to look at what your competitors are doing. Find every backlink they have in Open Site Explorer (group by domain, external links only). Usually you can find a lot of gold, like awards and sponsorships you weren't aware of, that your business can apply for. Do this for every competitor.

Beyond that, link building is often done through link baiting. You can get some traction through a small amount of comment link building and directory listings at some of the major directories. Guest posting is probably the most actionable form of white-hat link building you can do.

Once you feel comfortable enough, you can start contacting related websites about adding a link to your website. This might come about as an incentive (a discount in your store, if you have one, as an example) or be paid outright. You can get these for free, I've found, if you engage the website owner in conversation first.

Here is a good post on contacting website owners:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/outreach-letters-for-link-building-real-examples-14902

Well I'm fine giving broad answers to the question (guest blogging, agreements with webmasters, social/forum associated link building.. etc) but anything more than that is unnecessary.

I had a client recently that wanted to know exactly how many hours I worked, a spreadsheet containing every link I built, and the list goes on. This was after we had signed a contract stating that I price based on value and that reporting like this would not fit into the contract. Instead I offered a guarantee on rankings and a broad idea of the links I build (white hat only).

When you outsource SEO you aren't just buying links. You are buying the case studies that came from the consultant or company as well. They know what works. It doesn't make sense for them to divulge every detail. Alan Weiss states that at the very least, reporting like this should cost extra. A lot extra. (I agree)

As long as you check out the references, portfolio, and case studies you will be fine outsourcing to a reputable company/consultant. It just might not be affordable like the OP requested. (And by affordable, I mean not initially affordable. All SEO projects should give a return to the client, even counting your fees, within one year is the general stance I take.)

More importantly, why are you getting a 404 when viewing Site.com/widget? That doesn't make sense. If Site.com/widget/ resolves, so too should Site.com/widget.

The page has authority because it's getting linked to. If someone is linking to your page they aren't going to add a slash unless they know they have to. You will need to properly setup your rewrite rules so that the URLs resolve correctly.

Once you make that update the page authority will transfer correctly, and yes, it will help.

Pros

Shared hosting is cheap. Really cheap.

Shared hosting is manged - you don't need to be a trained systems admin.

Cons

You don't have much control over the server environment. Some applications won't run, others might not run to their best ability. Did you hear about how cool node.js is? Too bad, you probably can't sandbox it.

You have no control over fixing downtime. You put in a ticket and hope someone takes care of it soon.

The server will be slow when anyone on the server hits a peak in traffic.

Support is generally subpar for shared hosting providers.

If the host hasn't secured the server, there could be security issues where others on the server could get access to your root directory or database.

Scaling? Ha, more like, when you grow you have to find a new server to migrate to and hope the process is fast and smooth. (It probably won't be)

Inevitably, many cost effective hosts will not be in your time zone. Or those near yours.

Suggestion

Shared hosting at the major hosts isn't too bad. If you can't afford the money (remember, this is tax writeoff material) then stick with them.

If you actually need the performance and such, find a way to pay for the upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated. A good dedicated server will be $100/m. You'll need to know basic sys admin stuff, but just knowing Linux in general and being familiar with the services you run (apache, mysql, postfix, php) and how they are configured is suitable.

Also if you are using a panel like cPanel.. your goal should one day to admin your own server without it. You'll be intimidated at first, but quickly find that you are more quickly able to do anything you need over command line.

Hi Ryan.

Hitting the 100-link warning is usually best ignored if you are an eCommerce store. Stores often can't help hitting the limit with large navigations, sub-menus, and then product images/titles. This is fine.

For a blog this is less common. I would be interested in knowing why you are in excess of 100 links. Personally I would work towards lowering the link count because it divides the strength the page gives to each link.

Matt Cutts does not recommend using tag clouds. There are several studies on the matter that prove Matt isn't lying: do a quick Google search to get a few of them. When you think about it, they don't really offer the visitor anything. I would suggest removing the tag cloud.

Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg

Why not keep Buddypress, but disallow search-bot traffic to the root directory where it resides? You can easily do that in robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /buddy-press-directory/

I wouldn't slow the crawl rate. A high crawl rate is good so that Google can keep their index of your website current.

The better solution is to reconsider your hardware and networking setup. Do you know how you are being hosted? From my own experience with a website of that size, a load balancer on two decent dedicated servers should handle the load without problems. Google crawling your pages shouldn't create noticeable overhead on the right setup.

Not necessarily unproven.

The Google Webmaster Tools help article on URL structure still says to use dashes instead of underscores.

Matt Cutts' article from 2005 is dated, but also mentions to use dashes.

By definition an underscore is used to link words, and hyphens are used to join words or break them apart.

Why anyone would use underscores is beyond me, personally.

Easy: noindex the search results so they don't appear in Google.

I realize you want the traffic and are attempting to skirt around the issue, but it's something Google warns against:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

It's not a penalty, but rather an algorithm change.

I'd be interested in hearing about your link building / anchors. You came out on top in the end - broad keywords are better in the long run.

You should have both. Keep the paged navigation at top, but keep the infinite scroll. Now you have the best of both worlds.

Although, I don't think the infinite scroll would end up 'delinking' thousands of pages. How often do you see store.com/category/page/6 in results, anyway? If it's a popular term, it's going to be for the main category landing page.

Serving up different content to Google is always a bad idea unless you have a good reason. This problem doesn't qualify.

Yes, Google does not use them for anything. The Bing team also said they have used it as a spam signal.

Sorry no source on the latter fact, since that was a random video. But there is this:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Can you recommend any reputable company thats affordable?

You really have to pick if you want reputable or affordable.

I would recommend that you do the process yourself because it's much cheaper than outsourcing in most cases. Any time I have outsourced SEO I ended up getting burned in some shape or form, so I don't have any companies to recommend. Sorry.

If you give more details about your project perhaps the community may give you advice on doing the task yourself.

Giving away free SEO is a bad idea. You should never really give anything substantial away unless it's a non-profit organization receiving the 'donation.' If you want to go this route, the most I would do is give a free consultation (these cost around $1k where I'm from, so it's good value) so you aren't bound to a project you aren't getting paid for.

My opinion would be that giving money or credit away is bland. Why not brand something and give away a lot of them? For $250 you could give away small branded items to many followers, and now suddenly many people have a reason to remember you.

Just some thoughts. Best of luck.

All seem wordy to me.

I personally don't like duplicating a phrase more than once in titles. The SEOmoz suggestion bot does say to include the keyword phrase in the title, but in your case I would shorten it to make sense somehow. Oasis and Allure of The Seas  or a variation would have my preference.

In addition I would work in a call to action into the title so users viewing the SERP feel compelled to click your listing. I would focus on discount related words, and also use consultant or planner in place of expert. Anyone that calls themselves an expert automatically trips my BS alarm.

Good luck

Hi John!

Are you using IIS Manager to administrate your server? If not, that's probably why the details you listed would not apply.

If you come from a Linux background and just want to modify a file, like you would with the .htacess file, you will be editing the web config file. Microsoft has a knowledge base article (albeit short) on this at the following:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wenlong/archive/2007/09/18/how-to-redirect-a-url-in-iis6-iis7-and-in-asp-net.aspx

Let me know if you have questions. I would be happy to help further.

Cheers!

Check the subcategory you'd be listed in, personally. Does it have PR? Is it indexed? Any backlinks? Then yes, it's a good spend of money if the price isn't too bad.

Honestly I'd even be fine if it was only indexed and didn't have the other two qualifiers. Google really came down on directories, but only the SEO directories that only existed to boost rank. An easy giveaway was that all these directories used the same script and appeared to be the same markup, with minor differences.

The directory has good stats. I'd say go for it.

I ran into an issue with malware once and Google was very responsive during the process. Each time I asked for reinclusion the request was responded to within 24 hours.

I say "each time" because this particular piece of malware infected random files across an entire dedicated server hosting a great deal of websites. After I became aware that the problem was impossible to solve manually, I wrote a script to detect and remove all traces of the malware. At this point it was my 5th request I believe, and there was no problem with Google approving my request.

There are scanners you can use but during my look at them, I didn't find any reliable free ones. Hopefully you got it all and won't need to pay for anything.

Wonderful people, these malware creators. Best of luck.

That's great! I just wanted to let you know I'd personally be wary of clicking a listing in Google with the word 'expert' in the title. I'd mention certification in the title, personally.

You're essentially asking if sitewide links are OK. Yes, they are.

Marcus makes a good point: if any of the pages are poor in quality, you'll notice a decline in value. Your priority should be ensuring all of the pages are high in quality, or at the least noindexed. The problem with WPMU was that they can't control the quality, so they just took the links out. Sounds like you are in a position to keep the links, but do a bit of cleanup.

Ask for a link in exchange for allowing websites to embed your graphic.

Check out Creative Commons licenses and pick the one that works best for you at the following link, and make sure the websites are made aware of the license:

• Creative Commons Licensing

Make the link modest so that the websites don't mind keeping it. Also consider asking that the image links to your website instead of a caption text, or give the website an option to do either.

Crawl your infographic or widget with a GoogleBot simulator if you aren't sure if Google will pick up the link. Although, you shouldn't have a problem doing what I described.

You can hide a link behind the image, but you really shouldn't be trying to hide links. Just stick with my advice and you should be golden.

Good question! Cheers.

It's a waiting game at this point. If they don't find problems then ask for reinclusion again. Wait 24 hours between asking for reinclusion & seeing if Google reports new problems.

Yeah a page like this should be noindexed. You can do that in robots.txt, which you should be able to modify within your CMS or at the very least upload via FTP.

Nofollowing the links will not doing anything for you.

Unless the layout was changed or things went wrong, no. I've migrated maybe 50 websites over the past year with no ill effects. Any that did, occurred because something went wrong (htaccess issues, extended downtime) or because there was a design change. In the case of the latter, rankings return any time between a few days to a few weeks. (Assuming the markup/content is still good)

Highly unlikely. Why would a CTR matter at all, in Google's perspective?

I'd even wager that CTR of actual Google SERPs isn't used. The CTR doesn't really tell you anything without providing false positives.

Google didn't condemn comments. Or comment link building.

Fire and brimstone comes when you use the likes of ScrapeBox to submit to hundreds or thousands of blogs, in a small timeframe, with not many varying phrases.

You're fine adding your domain. I'd even consider it an opportunity lost if you didn't.

The first might not be ethical. You could try your tactics on a website you are associated with, and already is an established domain. As a personal example, I created a Magento extension to handle administrating category attributes. For my own case study I wanted to try out, I pointed links at the Magento Connect store that hosts the plugin page instead of a blog post or store page I developed. Some probably have ethical problems with this. One downside is you don't have access to Analytics, but tracking keywords shouldn't be tough.

The next is to grab up domains and start testing away. This is how I got started back in SEO around 6 years ago. Grab whoisguard to protect others from seeing domain registration information if you are worried. Personally, I wouldn't be. After all, who really cares that you are testing SEO out on a domain that no one cares about? (Although, I will say, your guinea pig websites often graduate testing status and become worthwhile websites without you intending)

Hope that helps. Maybe others have more ideas.

It's against the Google TOS. Source

That being said, there are many offenders. I'm not sure if Google lets any of the big marketing companies do it, or even give them API access in some shape or form, but I know for the smaller guys that it's frowned upon.

To my knowledge there has not been a case of Google pursuing action against someone who has scraped search results.

Scraping Google requires a proxy network because they do indeed block requests that appear like scraping bots. There are temporary bans and captcha tests put in place, but switching out an IP address works just fine until the test no longer appears.

When it comes down to it: no, not legal, but you also probably won't get in trouble for it.

(Would love to hear from official SEOmoz staff on this one...)

Mr. Thomas is correct - BMR was no better than any other article marketing service.

They didn't do spun content, but they let anything through the review process. They also had extremely poor support for creating an article with any type of media or custom styles -- they set themselves up for disaster. And their special 100-word  blog post service was by definition a grave SEO mistake.

I canceled my membership six months before they bit the dust because they ignored my suggestions to fix these simple items.

To add, I also would not call this a private network. Anyone with $67 could get into the network. That isn't very private is it?

So is article marketing dead? No. You just have to focus more on guest posting unique content and participating in networks that require quality content. Even Unique Article Wizard was hit but isn't completely dead. They still practice spun content though, so I'd suppose it's not exactly still a long term solution (although they got through panda just fine)

The owner of One Hour Backlinks made a comment a few days back about his service, recommending it as a supplement to your link building campaign. Maybe commenting on auto-approve blogs worked for him, but I'd strongly recommend staying away from this.

SEO is quickly becoming synonymous with marketing, building PR, and networking. Rand did a post on this not too long ago I believe.

Perhaps the better solution is to check referrer data in the header of your new domain, and show a brief note at the top of the page if it's from your prior domain. This has the benefit of not annoying your visitors with a wait time (a big deal) and you don't have to count on a workaround being fine with Google.

Simple to do in any web language, let me know if you need help.

This has always been common for me over the past five years. It's definitely nothing new. I've never seen anyone from Google acknowledge this phenomenon or explain why it happens.

It's likely something technical with the algorithm that won't get explained. Perhaps the next time there is a QA session with Cutts one of us can ask him for a simple explanation

In my experience, yes, these are still valuable links. Although for BOTW I first check the subpage, because their entire directory isn't always indexed.

In general, any directory that has a good index rate, a good link profile, and visibility for the subpage you'll be listed in is an excellent purchase. It still takes some selective choice to weed out some bad eggs, but you'll still find great value from directories.

Again, this has been my experience (even recent!). I see Mr. Andrews' opinion but I'm not sure if that's just an opinion he's heard or experienced firsthand. Maybe he can chip in

You won't shoot yourself in the foot. I saw Matt Cutts comment on this once in a video years ago. The reasoning is that if you have hundreds of domains all registered in your name and on the same server, with little value, then yes Google will likely flag that as suspicious.

I have around 10 large personal websites for years that do well on the same IP.

If you can get an IP address cheaply and easily, sure why not. You'll be fine either way, though.

20 Miles is too insignificant to warrant the need for two separate profiles. If you planned on doing community outreach and the offices were in different states, that'd make sense.

Just put your main office in the address field and be sure to list the second address somewhere in the information page.

You make connections with editors any way you are able. Following them on social media websites, commenting on their blog, and in this case you'd be very interested in this:

http://www.wired.com/services/feedback/letterstoeditor

Of course, they probably won't appreciate spam. Only get in touch if you are genuinely sure what you want to promote is worth their time.

It's more of a proactive cause, than retro. Don't expect the editor to add in a link post-publishing unless it's critical.

Disregard page strength, acquire links.

...as long as the page is relevant. The fact that cheaper forms of SEO like article marketing are still effective proves that poor page strength shouldn't sap your efforts so quickly. I use page strength more of an indicator of where on my priority list I should put acquiring a link, if possible, and also assuming the page is relevant.

I understand not wanting to be associated with bad neighborhoods. Page strength is not a strong indicator of a bad neighborhood. One common SEO tactic is to create contests, correct? One recent contest I developed required participants make a review of a product, and naturally that meant linking to the client website. Most of these reviews came from personal blogs and general websites that did not have a lot of domain authority. Yet it was still a boost to rankings and domain authority.

Use your own judgement by looking at a website and determining if you want to be associated with it. Don't pick and choose based on the website popularity alone.

Yes this is a potentially significant problem. The easiest way to troubleshoot is to do the 'site:' command again, and go to the last page of results. You should be seeing pages that aren't in your sitemap. Very likely duplicated content.

If you are having a rough time troubleshooting, post a link and I'll be glad to take a peek.

I've never understood the argument that category pages should be noindexed. They have always been an excellent source of traffic for me, too.

It's said that it could be considered low quality content. If you treat your category pages as just another page in your website (a healthy category introduction/description does wonders) it can be a nexus for broad search terms.

As an example of where this works very well, I have one category in a computer networking blog I have about TCP/IP. It's part of a series that explains the protocol, and the category page essentially is the 'guide' page, linking to each step in the guide to learning TCP/IP. I have the excerpts used only in category pages, so each category page also has unique preview content for each post.

Your specific worry is that you have posts in multiple categories. The thing is, there won't be the same posts in every category page so there will be a mashup of content. Some duplicate content is not bad. In addition to the category description, you'll be fine so long as you don't have synonymous categories.

You're fine in keeping them indexed. I would think you are crazy if you did otherwise