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Yeah I was talking about desktop when talking about the sidebar, but in mobile it does move just below the main content and is still visible.

Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain).  In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are:

6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website).

So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page.  Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static?

Thanks!

I have a page that's ranking pretty well, and driving sales.  That page is starting to get 10+ comments per day and is starting to get quite long.  I was wondering if there is a point where I should disable the comments?  My gut tells me that people interacting with the page, and Google seeing responses with the users SHOULD be a good thing not bad.  But, then I think that a majority of the content of the page is no longer the article, but the comments.

All the comments are good, non spammy and directly related to the topic.  People just asking questions, etc.  Good engagement, I should be happy right?

So this morning our website started to go crazy with hits all coming from Facebook, and I am trying to figure out how I can see who was talking about us? All the traffic landed on one page specifically.  When I look in analytics it just shows social, and then I can drill down to see they are coming from facebook, but that's it.

Jack I will send you his email via private message.  Take a look there

I know a guy that does really good email outreach for a good price compared to most link builders.  He's over seas so the price is good, but the quality is just like an US SEO can get.  Manual outreach via email only asking to link to good content.  Sent you PM

Backlink profile isnt spammy at all actually, and June/July were our best months ever in terms of organic search so I do not think we were hit with payday loan update. We started losing organic traffic in August. Are you sure that penalization requires a manually review?

Didnt think about this, but i think you are right.  It does look like all these sites have been hacked

Back in July I had posted here that I thought someone was doing negative SEO against us.  We monitor our links on a daily basis, and a lot of toxic links came in quickly within a few days.  So we were pro-active and ended up disavowing those links soon after we saw them.  Shortly after that our ranking start to drop and we lost a good amount of traffic, though I do not know if its really connected since we only disavowed those toxic links and we weren't ranking FROM those links since they were disavowed so quickly.

Now, its happening again.  20 new inbound domains linking to us from complete crap websites with crap content and not done by us.  I want to disavow them, but I am thinking that maybe the first time we disavowed the links, it hurt us, and maybe disavowing now will hurt us further?  I think Google should be able to filter out this crap but who knows, too much depends on this being handled correctly.

Here are some of the crappy links:

http://optibike.com/?home.php=page/loans/student-loan-without-a-cosigner-2.html
http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?index.php=finance/loans/loan-for-you-3.html
http://www.nuvivaweightloss.com/?index.php=article/loans/300-loan-today.html
http://ecommercesalesmultipliersystem.com/?home.php=board/loans/fast-loan-with-monthly-payments-2.html

They are mostly duplicate content across a network of sites. How would you guys handle this?

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?

I thought this might be the case, and it could be.  When I run a semrush report, we went from ranking 1,400 keywords in July to 1,600 in Sept. So something is on the correct path, but obviously if the ranking is lower on aggregate for these keywords then we could be going backwards.

I am getting mixed signals I guess from the reports I am running and the actual traffic.

Are you referring to some sort of tool that will show you exactly "whats changed", or if I just took a look at the difference between the periods?  I know that our top 20 traffic generating keywords stayed roughly the same in SERP positions, maybe an overall minimal drop when you take an average of them.  We rank for some 1,600 keywords so cant manually check them all.

Is there an easier way of comparing now and then? I am importing into excel both time period and then just manipulating the data.

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.

Thanks Chris for the response.  I agree with you as well, I think the links are coming only because its a legitimate scholarship opportunity from a business that focuses on helping people with their student debt issues.  If Google see this as spammy, it seems to me they would be making a mistake on how our particular business should promote itself.  I dont know what can be said about our commitment to the student loan disaster than "We really do want to help our users, to show that here's $2,000 to help pay for school".

A couple larger universities shared our scholarship on FB and Twitter and got us a lot of traffic and new links as well, seems pretty authentic to me and I believe google should look at this way as well.

Thanks for these links.  Lots of useful info I should have searched first i guess.  I agree with your take home message.

The organization revolves around helping people with their student loans.  We offer resources on how to avoid student debt, how to take action on student debt, and other tips for college kids.  The scholarship is something we would have done whether we got 5000 links to it or zero, so we arent doing it for the purpose of getting links.  That being said, its a really nice side benefit because we are getting some good links from it.

The scholarship helps promote our business and out commitment to helping address the student loan crisis in the USA. We could request the links be no-followed, but that seems to be drastic unless its clear Google penalizes this, no? Its not as if we are an auto repair shop offering a scholarship.

We work in the student loan debt industry, so providing a scholarship for our viewers makes total sense for our business.  Would links to this page be seen by Google as buying links? Does this fall anywhere into gray-hat tactics?

My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do. The scholarship really synergizes with our business model, but who knows..?

Content for the page is really where we are having a problem because we really do have most relevant topics covered.  As far as blogging, that's not a problem we can always find new "news" to write about in the industry.

So I guess I am talking more about the content, and not blogs.  If we aren't adding new content on a typical page, is that ok?

Lets say the website you are working on has covered most of the important topics on your subject.  How important is it that you continue to add content to it when there really may not be much that is so relevant to your users anymore?  Can a site continue to rank well if nothing new is added to the site for year but continues to get good quality links?

Yea thats what I am trying to figure out.  Are we losing organic clicks due to seasonality, or is it something else.  From what I can see based on that our position in the SERPS on average has gone up, then I imagine its seasonality but was hoping someone can provide some better insight.

Is there anyway to run a report on a list of keywords and look at searches performed through google last month vs this month, etc? More recent trends than say the last 2 yr period.

The company sells a service not retail products.  Here is the website.

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.

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.

Thanks for the great replies everyone.  Its much appreciated.

Another question or something interesting I just noticed is that almost all of these bad links are nofollow, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing negative SEO, no? So either the person doing the negative SEO is really lost, or there is some kind of bot scraping info and reposting it over a network of websites?

Any idea why these would be nofollow links? Only three of the links are dofollow

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.

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?

Im having trouble separating our organic traffic vs our PPC.  When I go into Analytics>Traffic>Sources>Search>Organic, its giving me numbers that are not accurate.  I believe whats happening is that its not able to distinguish our bing organic/ppc.

Is using Webmaster tools Search Queries a more accurate way to determine organic search volume?

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..

Are there any negative effects on getting your blog posted on alltop? Good SEO value or not?

Great so there really isnt much to be lost as long as the redirects are all done properly, thanks!

My company is thinking about rebranding and moving over to a new domain.  While we dont have a lot of backlinks, we do have some very valuable ones that we hate to lose.  That being said, I think we are in such an infancy that the backlinks we have shouldnt prevent us from rebranding if thats what we choose to do.

I am just trying to get an idea of how moving to a new domain will effect the domain authority if we redirect all the pages?  Is the best thing to do simply re-direct, or should we reach out to our most valuable links and let them know the domain/link has changed and hopefully they change their link to us?

How much is lost by simply 301 every page? We are getting around 70 organic clicks per day and would rather not start from zero again

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!

This morning a competitor of ours decided to go on a PPC rampage against us.  Basically our budgeting money was spent within the first hour of going live on bing.  Its pretty obvious whats going on as we had a tremendous amount of clicks all from the exact same keyword within a short period of time.

Obviously first step was to contact bing and they are going to refund me a credit once they go through their process, but they didnt really give me confidence about the future.  It seems they may not be able to prevent this from continually happening.. ?

The attacker used some sort of IP spoofing as the clicks were all from different IP's which is probably why it snuck pasted Bing.  Wondering what have you guys done in the past to prevent this or combat it?

Thankfully it didnt happen on google

Yea that's what I figured.  I haven't paid anything to the developer so will wait for his response to removing that clause from the contract.  The contract states he will license it to me, which makes no sense to me.  Why would I paid you to program something for me, then it gets licensed to me.  Then at anytime you can stop the licensing and hold my site hostage.  Makes no sense..

In development of a website, is it typical for the developer to retain rights to the CSS, Markup and other Coding? If so, why is this done?

I have the same issue

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

Thanks didnt know that existed in WMT.  Yea I do have authorship on all my articles, thanks!

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

Anyone else with some feedback?

Bradley thanks for the response.  When you say 'he has a working knowledge of SEO', you mean the new designer, correct?

Hello everyone, I've asked a few questions in here regarding website design, etc.  So first I want to thank you guys for the responses, and second I want to apologize I hope I am not boring you guys.  I just feel like this is a forum of qualified people and I value your opinions greatly.

Now to my question, I am considering a redesign as we are not happy with our current site located http://www.studentdebtrelief.us/.  We think it feels outdated, not structured well, no good call to actions, ten different fonts, blurry images, does have good integration with social media, boring and bland news page, etc.

I just wanted some opinions on these other sites that were designed by the fellow we are considering hiring.  I've gotten some feedback from a friend that he doesn't think they would be an upgrade from our current site, which I totally disagree with. Though I am the first to admit design/creativity is not my strong suit, so I don't value my own opinion on this very much either, lol. I am hoping I can get some insight from you guys here.  Do you think the designs below are of higher quality than our current site? Would you be more inclined to continue reading these sites than our own? Is there one in particular you think is the best?

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/archive.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/zazachat.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/jetpeppers3.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pbs_9001.png

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fidgetfeed.png

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/haute.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/worketc-732x1362.jpg

Thanks for the help

Thanks I will take a look at them as well.  So you wouldn't recommend a page being developed without using a theme?

Thanks for all the information.  Is there a reason to be using Genesis -vs- not using a theme at all?  This designer Jay Hafling doesn't use any themes and develops the site from scratch.  Is this good or bad?

I took a look at Greg Reindels site but there isnt much to make a decision on from his website.

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

Thomas thanks again for the information.  I took a look at those sites and it looks like webdevstudios does build nice wordpress sites.

Why do you recommend those hosts rather than anyold host? I dont get the reason.  We currently use godaddy and are satisfied with their service.  Is there some benefit of using a WP host that I am not aware of?

Thanks Thomas and please, we welcome real feedback and that means negative as well  The funny part is the guy who designed this for us is a regular on 99designs, but yeah it may be better to see lots of options rather than a few.

Maybe its time for me to think more about a complete redesign (we just built our current page one month ago for $1,250).  We aren't really happy with the way it came out we want a more professional feel.  Its difficult figuring out who to hire for something like this.  Guess thats going a bit off topic for now.

Thanks for the feedback Tim.  We would love to try to split test though we don't currently have a webmaster that can help us with that and our budget is pretty low (new company, only a couple months old).

I was hoping to get some feedback from you guys regarding some banner redesign we are working on for our website.  We are currently using the blue one, but we werent happy with the logo we had of the hat and hands shaking.  So once we started working on a new logo, that logo doesnt match at all with the current design so we were messing around with the banner and came up with these ideas.

Id appreciate some feedback good or bad

edit: sorry guess [img] doesnt work in here

Current Banner

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/banner_zpse92b853f.jpg

New 1

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/21-03-banner_zpsfc224501.jpg

New 2

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/19-03-banner_zps17c3f2f1.jpg

New 3

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/20-03-banner_zps966bb780.jpg

I am looking to hire a company to start a backlink campaign for me.  In my search I have stumbled across one which essentially charges a good amount of money to secure backlinks on .edu and .gov sites ($500 per link).  This would be in context links.  This company is an SEOMOZ recommended company so I am thinking the links will be well earned and not simple paid for to the university as to prevent future issues.

My question is, how can I put a value on these links for my website? Like lets says I have a DA of 1 right now, and I get one backlink with DA of 70 PA of 70, how will that effect my DA? How can I quantify how many .edu .gov links I will need before I start to place? I realize I will need some more mixed up there so it does not seem unnatural, but my business has a lot to do with universities and government entities.

I am trying to figure out how I can calculate the value of these links to me