Welcome to the Q&A Forum

http://bit.ly/YGOCNr

This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive.  We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing.  We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank.  We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly.

Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO.  The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us.  Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found.  There was about ten of them from places such as:

sharklinks.info
bookmarkingforseo.com
compasslinks.info

We don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools.  Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc.  I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.

We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks.  As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy.  We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name.  There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed.

My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites?

If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links?  Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong.

Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today.

http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options

There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping.  All of them look pretty much identical to this.

Thoughts?

If you are not changing your domain, I dont think you have much to worry about.  If the new host is faster, it should help both your SEO, and more importantly your users experience.

Also wondering this myself.  Has there even been an update in awhile? My site that has been up since April is still showing 3 backlinks while we have a lot more than that..

We have a page which is outranking another page for a keyword that is very important.  The page that is lower in the rankings has far better content. I think this is happening due to links as well as the url structure.

domain.com/ranking/notranking

Here is the page we want to rank: http://bit.ly/1vqhSoZ

Here is the page that is higher in rankings: http://bit.ly/1vA1wXQ

So I think I should just move the content over from /notranking, to /ranking.  The content is clearly better on the lower ranking page but I think due to links the /ranking page is higher in SERPS.  So I guess my question is, would it be wise to move all that content over, and then 301 redirect the old page? Or leave the way it is and hopefully Google will get it right over time?

Any advice on how to get this to stop? Seems like it could be a never ending problem that will take a lot of time to combat if it doesn't stop.

Yea I agree with you, if this is how you try to compete then its shows a huge flaw in your business practices.  Regardless, I have to try and see how to prevent this in the future as BING was unable to prevent it.  Would appreciate feedback anyone can offer!

I just sent in a support ticket .. Extremely frustrating especially when you are on a mobile device often, and have a long email address

Hello everyone

I have started a new small business which currently we do only PPC marketing.  We are spending roughly $1,700 per week in this medium, and would rather invest this money into getting ourselves organic.  I am trying to figure out how we can best invest what money we have without stopping the PPC campaign, as we are only a month old with a limited budget ($2,000 month to spend on SEO).

Our website right now has a fair amount of content, and we are blogging 3x a week at around 700-1000 words average per blog.  We have zero backlinks at the moment, or at least from what I can see on opensiteexplorer, and of course this is expected.  I have used seomoz to optimize my pages, and keyword tool to figure out which keywords we want to go after.  Some of the better keywords available seem like it would be very hard to get on Google first page as most of the links are authorative .edu/.gov links.

So we dont know exactly where to invest now.  All our pages are optimized well via the seomoz tool, we get an A on all our pages for certain keywords.  It seems to me the next step would be back links building, but I want to make sure and hire a reputable company (going to use the SEOMOZ recommended list) so we dont have issues in the future.

Before doing so I was hoping to get some input from everyone here as to what might be the best path to take on a limited budget.  What are my priorities lets say if we could rank them? I should probably mention we are on facebook with 50 likes and about 50 shares via the blogs.

We are ranking on some of our keywords (only one first page on bing/yahoo, none on google), but I take this as a good sign for only having this website up for about 10 days. We have another website at first put up really quickly by a friend, then went to our new site.

Thanks for the help

Hey all, I am a bit stumped here so looking for some insight.  Our site was starting to rank well for many keywords, and we were getting roughly 25k visitors organically per month.  Now we are down 30% over the last thirty days, and I am trying to figure out why. This downtrend started I would say about mid August.

1. No messages in webmaster tools.
2. Our linking building is very good, no spammy links, never black hat.  We did have someone attempt negative SEO on us back in July.  We disavowed those links as soon as we saw them. Basically all our links come from link baiting to quality content.  Many .edu links
3. Content is good and fresh, always adding new stuff to the site.

When I look in webmaster tools and look at my search queries for last thirty days, our impressions are down dramatically, but the change in average position is increasing.   Our top 25 keywords we saw 15 rise in average position, 5 fall, and 5 unchanged.  This makes me think there is just a reduction in the amount of people searching for what we offer, though maybe that's wishful thinking? Is there a way to see search volume this month vs last month?

What should I be looking at here? Hoping to stop this downward trend ASAP.

We are currently browsing around to have a new site built for us as we are not happy with the current one. I checked out webdevstudio and it looks like they build quality sites, but they told me they aren't taking on small projects like mine currently.  So browsing around I found this designer from the Ukraine with a nice site and nice portfolio.  I am wondering if anyone has worked with him, and maybe to get some opinions on his work?  I don't want to make the wrong choice here..

What do you guys think?

http://www.jayhafling.com

I am not certain if my authorship is working or not.  If I go into google incognito, and search for my exact  title of a new article, or any of them that are over a week old, then I will see my image and 'by My Name' which tells me its working.

When I go to structured data testing tool and I enter the URL, I will get:

Authorship Testing Result****Page does not contain authorship markupNow on my webpage NEWS section, it has a 'by My Name' at the top, and if the user clicks it it will bring me to my G+ account.  When you go further into an actual article that link no longer works.http://bit.ly/14k8Zys you can see here.So is my authorship working or not? Seems to me it is or I wouldnt find myself when using chrome incognito, but I find it wierd that googles tool is telling me authorship is not working