Welcome to the Q&A Forum

it's 5 years using their historical data

Again, it depends (lots of answers in the SEO world is like that lol)  It depends on what type of penalty you have but one thing is for sure, you have to remove bad links you've done before (if it's indeed a link penalty) or you need to clean up your site structure .

just noindex them and move on.

You have more use for your time vs worrying about wordpress pages.

is the code showing on the source of the homepage ONLY? or for both?

Take a look at that. You could check the plugin as it also has the ability to assign an author profile to the homepage, like yoast SEO.

For easy niches? Yeah you could do it and it could get you to rank. For harder niches, I'd go with new content and stick with the big PR sites only. The free PR sites usually just scrape it off them anyways. Either that or they are just article directories dress up as "press release" sites.

BTW, Prlog ranks pretty well on it's own, it'll probably beat prweb in terms of referral traffic to you.

majesticseo.com

it gives you all your lost backlinks as well (like ahrefs)

Link research tools can easily do this too.

you could start with an incentive. (maybe thru email marketing or social) or maybe a run a contest.

It's really not that easy to get people to leave reviews unless it came from a targeted organic keyword (aka a superfan of the product that just wants to leave a review)

You could pick 2 of your top pages and do 1 test each to see what brings you the best results

1. inner pages could be more relevant

2. your homepage might have a penalty, where only about and inner pages (or even privacy pages) rank and the homepage can't be found at all

3. Content on the homepage is flash (longshot but it happens)

You need to know the reason first so you have to look at your site and analyse what could cause it.

keep it simple. The work and how much your rankings will change (usually just temporary) will be dependent on what you focus to work on and how big the site is

Just do things one at a time.

• Make sure you fix all errors ASAP (images, internal links etc)
• Redirect the old urls to the new urls
• Make sure the speed of loading is the same of faster.
• Basically, just do things quickly and optimise.

Run screaming frog after and fix all the remaining errors. Youll probably see more errors in webmaster tools once your site gets recrawled but those will probably be easy fixes.

Remember, just focus and get it done ASAP and youll be fine.

Oh, I think he can also analyse & translate "Ancient Alien" vocabulary with his right eye.

http://www.mozcationlima.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ROGER-chanchan.jpg

Like Brad said, just try to retain the URL structures as much as possible unless you are really aiming to make it more seo friendly.

Do the migration quickly and make sure to minimise broken pages.

It'll usually affect your rankings, but you'll recover. Just do cleanup quickly and have your linking plan ready

ouch that's going to be hard unless the client is really open to talking to you and actually wants to trust you.

They usually are guaranteed something when it comes to "services" like that vs traditional seo where you offer audits, "long term", "outreach" and words that tell them that it's going to **"take time" **

What I would do is just tell them that it is their decision if they want to go with them and you as a friend, would like to ask him to check out these (then name articles about it penguin or penalties)

Ask them if they are willing to change their domain in the future once they get dropped by google.

And if their site gets destroyed by google, then they will have to pay you 4 times the amount to help them recover which isn't always guaranteed.

Worked for me, should work for you.

If there's no message, then you should look at your links (find over optimisation problems) and onpage (duplicates, canonical problems, engagement, 404's) and the exact date when traffic started to drop

There's really not much for your to look at beside those.

1. Identify the date = correlate with past penalty dates. If it's recently (with all the serp changes happening since 2 weeks ago) then you probably got hit by a panda.

2. Fix your onpage first and get it out of the way. Fix every suggestion in webmaster tools.

3. Dig through your link anchors then grab all the links that point to that anchor. Gauge if they are quality links, if most of them aren't, then you better start adding URL only quality links

4. Time. All you can do is wait for it to recover. All the while, you should be building other sources of traffic and probably start another site just for backup.

it means you have a lot of links on that page. Sometimes, you can just ignore it. Depends on what your site has.

Fix both since these are still returning 404's

I suggest that:

1. Start with GWT and clean out those links. If these are broken backlinks and are WORTH it, then fix it. If these are worthless links, ignore them.

2. Mark as fixed.

3. run screaming frog. Make sure you are getting 404's and not dns or maybe the site went down because you crawled it too much

4. Export the 404's and check them one by one

5. If it's fixed, then you are done with those.

just make sure your redirects are good. Fix those asap and make sure the site doesnt have any crawl issues. Check out your page speed since you just moved to a new platform. Get the onpage stuff done asap to start getting the traffic back

the sites that have tag pages ranking usually have onpage problems or a penalty. Instead of the page, they usually show that tag page....or the privacy page....or maybe the keyword is just not competitive and google has nothing better to put there. Ive seen all these cases.

It's up to you, you can noindex them or whatever you want. As long as you dont go crazy and put 1000 tags on your post and spam links to those tag pages, they shouldnt be a problem. At least in my case.

my take from my experience:

if you are already ranking for that key term, then you redirect it to a related topic, you'll rank on that spot within a week.

lasting on that position is a different story especially if you stop linking. You can drop within a month or 3 months down the road or you can stay put for years. Not really something I can predict as it is a keyword to keyword, niche to niche basis.

I would totally recreate the exact same url and put an update about how the company has changed and stuff like that

Id make it super professional and a bit long to make people believe it (if ever, somehow, someone finds that old link)

A link is a link and Ill take it, especially a great link that is "easy"

look at this site. They blog, a lot. It's probably getting them the most leads/sales since the content gets passed and linked to alot. So yes, I would highly suggest that you start your own site and do it there. Then start promoting it

youll have a hard time getting a substantial number of video sites to make it "work"

If you see the low quality ones, you either cant get a link or it will just go down within the year due to bandwidth spam problems.

If it's good ones, you usually cant submit your niche due to strict rules.

Just consider it as part of your overall SEO. Dont just rely on it. The referral traffic you get, the link you get (for variation and trust) and other benefits will always be good for long term seo related ROI. If you do seo on the video page you'll get traffic in the long run and if you put it on your site (self hosted) you can also rank that hence taking another spot.

webmaster tools did a clean up on links they show

they used to show a lot more but now they lowered the number of links so that's one reason

Another reason is that the links is probably very old. Ive seen very old links on inactive sites disappear from GWT.

If you use majestic seo, you can see those links in historic mode. In fresh mode, you wont. It's almost the same logic.

I suggest making sure if that is really your problem.

Fix the minor details, alt tags, remove your meta keywords, fix your sitemap

Dropping to Top 20 doesn't really look like a penalty, more like there are other pages that are better than you.

Take a look at your webmaster tools first for problems and fix those.

Check your keyword average rankings in there and look at your impressions on when you dropped

I also suggest looking your links...its a mix of Russian and sape links

I have like 8 shared servers with them.

It depends a lot on how bad the people you share with are. LOL

I have faster ones and slower ones. It really depends.

I would suggest cloud hosting with rackspace. Account is pay only for what you use

WP engine is also good as well as wiredtree.

here's from my personal experience since you already used the disavow tool

Try to explain what you did, why it's bad and why it's not going to happen again

Tell them that you made a mistake, and that you added more links to the disavow tool (include even clean looking web 2.0 properties and article directories. Basically, once you use the disavow tool, you have to have a mindset that you are starting over, treat it like you are starting over with a new site.

You dont usually get it in the first try.

On your second try: maybe

On your third: very likely

I've done a lot of cleanups the past year so that's my take

Hello Umer

I would suggest that you not rely on other people to analyse your site and come up with a link plan for you.

You are here on moz for a reason and that is to learn. There are blog posts daily about it, you can go to blogs that focus on link building to learn strategies.

Fellow mozzers could only help you so much.

Keri mentioned a great link to start with. Search for Paddy Moogan posts. Jon Cooper, Jason Acidre and others have their own blogs that talk about link acquisition strategies and stuff like that.

You can search in http://inbound.org and find gems in there, as well as in Twitter.

You can create your own plan, just remember to not over use your anchors.

I could see that you really want to rank for those words but resist the temptation of just hammering the same keywords over and over. Use your brand as part of your anchor texts.

Continue to build each month without just thinking about the next directory you can submit to.