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I have a competitor who consistently rans #1 or close in SERPS for keyword phrase "uncontested divorce lawyerser.  in analyzing his site he doesn't seem to have anywhere near the links, domain authority or page authority that would justify this preeminence Is this a black hat situation or what? His site  is www.uncontesteddivorceny.comhx thx Paul

I have an old cluny site that has been around for about 56 years. It is on the homestead platform. I want to  move the site to a thesis theme 2.1 wordpress platform without losing my links. I would prefer not to do 301 redicrects. With thesis I can specify the URL for each page of the wordpress site, however the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site and the other problem is that wordpress adds a back slash that is not present on the old site. I can, however add .html to the URL's for pages on the wordpress site to conform to the URL's on the old html site. Will this work? thx Paul p.s. the URL for my old site is www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com

After having one of my sites trashed by penguin, I rebuilt it on a new domain. Pretty much everything was the same except for the look of the site plus I decreased the keyword density and did a few other things to avoid future Penguin penalties.  I created a small number of directory links. My site is now maybe 6 months old, doesn't get much traffic, however I wa suprised to see that my main keyword " uncontested divorce lawyer" is now ranking number 1 in google in US ! This despite the EMD update. The domain name is www.uncontesteddivorce-lawyer.com .  Like I said I still don't get a lot of traffic on this site. I have another site which until recently was driving over 500 visitors a month, since November it has declined to 350 a month. This site is over 4 years old and was unaffected by all the updates, until recently. It too is an EMD but has more links. Not co complain but can anyone explain the #1 rating? Also it would appear that links are practically irrelevant. I have read and heard that practically no one is linking to content, instead they are sharing, liking, etc. Any comments

I have read a lot about how it is a good idea to build links with your "brand name" as the anchor text. I am somewhat skeptical about all this. I suspect that the only thing that you need to do is have a wide variety of anchor text, some no follow links, and some links without any anchor text at all or just your URL. IDoes anyone have an opinion on this? Also I am somewhat confused about what a "brand name" is anyway. Obviolusly it applies to words like "Apple Computers" or seomoz but can I "make" my own name, i.e. Paul W. Matthews,  into a "brand Name" aulby putting it in the title of my home page and just using it a lot as anchor text? If yes, is this a good idea? thanks, Paul

I had 2 websites. One of these I trashed as it took a pretty big hit from Panda and was virtually wiped out by Penguin. The other site is over 4 years old and until this month had miraculously remained unaffected by all the changes. In fact, my traffic this October was better than it had ever been. This month my traffic is way, way down. I don't know if this is related to the hurricane (my business is in NYC) or if it is just a factor that web traffic to any site can fluctuate considerably from month to month, or if  there is a more insiduous reason. Most of my links are directory links, including some good ones like DMOZ and  BOTW , and the most high quality directories I could find. The site is www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com. . Does anyone have any ideas? thx Paul

I have 2 main sites for my business. One is a creaky homestead site about 4 years old  Another is a much more sophisticated wordpress site now almost 2 years old. That site's traffic steadily increased until May of 2011 when it suffereed a 25 to 30% decline probably due to Panda. I did all of the recommended fixes with little effect until about 3 months ago when its traffic started going up again and had almost a complete recovery until last week when my traffic is down about 95%. I strongly suspecct the penguin. Interestingly, my old site has been virtually unaffectted even though bost sites are fairly similar, on both sites I started with a lot of directory links including DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW, some strong lawyer sites like NOLO.COM, Lawyers.com, and others not so strong but I tried to get the best directories I could find. Then I started getting a lot of natural links but some of these aee pretty junky sites and scraper type sites. I am curious if anyone has any thoughts on why www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com was hit so hard while www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com  is unscathed. The newer site has, accoring to majestic seo and market samurai, around 35, 000 backlinks, while the older site has around 3500. Thanks, Paul

I have noticed that the sites in my niche that were at the top of the SERP's are still at the top of the SERP's after panda. I have also heard people theorizing that links are no longer important, its now all about bounce rates, time on site, etc. Is there any consensus about how important links are after Panda? thx Paul

I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up? Thx Paul

My two websites were unaffected by the original and 2.0 panda updates, but istring in June my traffic has been down around 30%. In analyzing it appears that my long tail searches have been greatly impacted. So it looks like I am a victim of the mighty panda.My main site, www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com  is in my opinion a decent looking site, with unique content and no ads, etc., but for whatever reason it has been negatively affected. There might be some duplication of content between certain pages and also my links are all or practically all directory links, though a lot are pretty heavy duty directories. I see a lot of stuff written giving advice on how to recover from Panda. Has anyone actually done so? How did you do it? thx Paul

I was looking at a blog site and the owner is claiming a very high number of hits per day, I forget maybe it was 200,000 a month or something like that. His site is about "self improvement" so it is a general interest site, so I understand traffic is high for this type of site. The interesting thing is that he claims that he gets only 1.5% of his traffic from Google. The rest is mostly referred traffic that he gets from other blogs and sites where they have posted his link and people actually click on it. NOw while a lawyer site is unlikely to ever be popular like that, ithe idea of having an internet marketing strategy that is not subject to the vagaries of Google , the Panda and other algorithm changes, etc is quite interesting. This guy said that he has totally emphasized having great content and not SEO tactics or marketing tactics. Would this concept make sense on a lawyer site? Does anyone have any thoughts? thx Paul

Although my site is a  wordpress site it presently has about as many static pages as blog posts. The site has a lot of directory links and is doing pretty good with a PR3 after about a year.  When I first put the site up I had a well known blogging expert help me with the permalinks and a couple of other things and he said that with a blog there is no need to build links, it can all be done through natural link acquisition off of the blog posts. I was skeptical at the time because it seemed that a lawyer's site was something not a lot of people would be interested enough in to link to it. Now I am thinking about trying his stragegy, as 1 of my blog posts that I put up on a very topical subject immediately got about 15 backlinks. My questions are: Is it reasonable to try to build links just by posting frequent topical blog posts? If yes, should I have links in the blog posts to my home page, to internal pages, or both? \ Paul

I have some listings in lawyer directories some of which have very hig PR , links, traffic, etc. For example, www.nolo.com,  I know that Google has more or less recently devalued a lot of directory links. I would assume that a monster site like nolo would not be one of those, but does anyone know any way to tell? Paul

there has been a lof of discussion on this forum and elsewhere about over optimized anchor text, partial match anchor text vs exact anchor text match, etc. I am wondering iwhether or not exact anchor text matches are good or bad for internal links? Does anyone have anythoughts, or better, any studies? Paul

I know that one of the things Google looks for is fresh content. My main site is a wordpress site where I have optimized about 12 static pags and I also do blog posts. Assuming I continue to blog, do I need to give my pages a periodic "face lift" or is enough just to keep blogging and add a static page from time to time? Paul

I have signed up for some rather expensive lawyer directories that have  very high domain PR, 's  of 6 or 7 . Some of these allow you to make blog posts or articles on their site which should be good for SEO because of the high domain PR. I understand that if I do a lot of posts on one of these blogs with links back to my site, I should rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns because they are all coming from the same domain. Therefore, I plan to mix up my blo posts betwee several of these sites and also rewrite them and post them on my own site's blog. My question is this, if I post on any of these sites and I link back to internal pages of my site, and not to the home page, does this offset the "diminishing returns" factor? Paul

I thought I was really starting to understand SEO, especially after finding this site. But I must be missing something. BAsed upon linkscape I am  head and shoulders above www.georgiauncontesteddivorce.com  a competitor site to my site www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com.  But his site outranks mine for the keyword uncontested divorce lawyer. Well he beats me with 10 facebook shares versus 4 but on every other domain metric and page metric I am much higher. My site is only about a year old, but I can't imagine that this is what is going on. Anybody got any ideas? Thx Paul

I  am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text  I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in  with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul

I have noticed that some of my competitors have set up "mirror" homepages set up for different counties, towns, or suburbs. In one case the mirror homepages are virtually identical escept for the title and in the other case about half of the content id duplicate and the other half is different. both of these competors have excellent rankings and traffic. I am surprised about these results, does anyone care to comment about it and is this a grey hat technique that is likely to be penalized eventually. thx Diogenes