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Thanks, Federico. I understand your logic. And I'm not arguing it - I just tend to try to "read between the lines" whenever Google makes a statement. I certainly can see the logic of nofollow on a link while a PR sits on PRWeb or another PR site. But if the NYT or Wash. Post decided to run that story (yeah, I know... pretty unlikely ) I have difficulty understanding how Google would hold it against a site if the paper left off the nofollow.

Thanks for the response!

Federico, I'm familiar with the fairly recent statement from Google that links in press releases should be nofollow. In searching for it, I can't locate where it was, but I found this on the support blog: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
This only refers to anchor text rich links, however. Do you have a link that will clarify this?

I ask because my impression is that they only need to be nofollow on the PR distribution site. If a journalist picks up the release and runs it, my impression was that it needn't be nofollow then, (unless, of course, we see it's on a low quality site).

Thanks!

Hi, Travis-

I wouldn't be concerned with "diluting" any pagerank that you already have, if that's your question. You may be setting up new pages in competition with existing pages, if they're going after the same terms, though. The longer the existing pages have been out there, unmodified, the easier a new page may outrank it, all other things being equal.

Unfortunately, without seeing the site, it's impossible to even render a guestimate. For instance, how's your crawl budget? if it's limited, QDF could possibly allow newer pages to push older pages into the shadows. You might check out this post: http://www.algohunters.com/building-solid-index-presence-optimizing-crawl-budget/

I think I disagree with a couple of assumptions:

Saying that 5,000 out of 7,000 links isn't a huge number seems unrealistic to me. Over 70% of a link profile being any single link type is too heavy, IMO. 80% of them from one site is definitely concerning. I'd suggest some immediate diversification/pruning efforts to achieve a better balance.

I agree that nofollow is certainly a good measure, though. In fact, I'd put that at the top of my ASAP list.

The hierarchy of headers would require an H2 to be a subheading within the more general topic area of the H1. I can't imagine there would be any requirement for content between the H1 and the first H2, although, from the users' standpoint, it might help them to better understand what the page is about and how the H2's content applies.

David, I've done a couple of proactive pruning jobs and it beats waiting 'til you've been slapped. The comments on that video are mostly uninformed, in my opinion. Disavow has worked for my clients.

You might want to watch this short hangout sponsored by Arnie Kuenn, on the topic. We discussed proactive link pruning as well. http://intrinsicvalueseo.com/googles-disavow-process-and-penguin-recovery/ Feel free to give me a shout if you like.

Just as an afterthought, a slightly related issue... linking between your related blog and your ecomm sites shouldn't be any concern, unless you're dealing with several sites ("several", as in a LOT) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0-jw_PfwtY

1. I agree with Simon, and Matt C. did one of his videos in May of 2011, where he stated that excerpts, linking to the entire post is perfectly acceptable. He also said he does it on his own blog (and he still does).

2. I can't see that it would make any difference at all.

I'd agree that sitewides should be avoided whenever possible. It sounds as though you may be flirting with disaster. If it were me, I'd nofollow them, at the least.

Good catch, Anders!

Charles, I wouldn't be too concerned about this. Assuming you're adding pages with quality content, the value they add to the site should outweigh any dilution effect, if any exists. To be a little safer, though, rather than adding 100 pages to a 100 page site in one go, can you phase them in gradually? That big a jump all at once could conceivably cause a temporary drop of the existing pages, I suppose, although I would expect any drop to be short term, with an overall gain once the new pages are picked up.

Brian-

1. In a hangout two or three months ago, John Mueller said that 301s can pass a penalty. Whether or not a 302 will do so as well, I don't know, but I'd be hesitant to bet on them not doing so. We've never tried redirecting in a penalty situation. I have spoken to some colleagues, however, that say they've had clients come to them that had 301'd and the penalty showed up on a new domain shortly thereafter.

2. Did your drop-off happen to coincide with a Penguin update? At one time, Matt C. had said that the results of cleaning up a link profile wouldn't really come into play until the next update (for an algorithmic slap). But others and I have seen instances in which that seems to no longer always be the case - 2 weeks to two months, with no update, is showing evidence of removed dampening.

Michael- You're definitely facing an odd situation here... makes no sense. Have you tried posting an inquiry on the Google Webmaster Help Forum? I'd say there's a good chance you can get a Googler's attention there and maybe get a hint as to where the problem lies.

Odd... the first time I pasted the URL you gave in your original post, it took me to lawyers.thelaw.com
but the second time, it took me to thelaw.com. As you said, lawyers.thelaw.com and the many pages I checked had TBPR of 0. But thelaw.com shows TBPR of 2.

By the way, lawyers.thelaw.com hasn't been de-indexed.

Spencer, I wouldn't expect that they would see it as cloaking, no. And I would think that your markup would carry through.Seems like there's a better way to handle that than nodisplay for mobile, though. Can't you just drop that element, according to what your media query reports?

I've never seen breadcrumbs called in the head before. Just curious... why would you want to do that?

I would disagree with only one aspect of Kurt's comment, Stephen, and only because I tend to try to err on the safe side. I would remove/disavow any links from questionable directories. There are still a few good ones out there, but I believe the majority carry a nasty connotation.

Kurt is absolutely correct when he says that "recovery" of previous rankings by no more that link removal is a pipe dream... ain't gonna happen! The equity that you lost by any links that were devalued before removal is gone forever and will have to be replaced with new activity.

Since it seems that a major portion of your losses are focused around "nuts and bolts" and "bolts and nuts", you might also try changing your anchor text on a significant portion of the links using that anchor text, at least on any source sites that seem worth hanging onto.

I made the assumption that the chicken wings were free. If not, I agree that it would change things entirely, Mike. As for the review/link request, the question says: "... you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki."

On one hand, there's no mention of asking the review be positive, but I think that asking for a link, if the wings were free, is risky.

I'm going to give two responses to each, one being what I suspect might be Google's take on it, the other which is my take.

Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying?  Assume all links are do-follow.

• You're a local business.  You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year.  In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• One of your clients is a college bar.  You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings.  Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab.  Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon." Google: paid; Me: paid

Scary! Turns out I agree with Google on those... purely coincidence

Thanks, Phil, I'll go check those out, as soon as I put out a couple of fires.

Another option is to ask webmasters to change your anchor text. But you'll have to do that on a link-by-link basis, in order to provide anchor text that is relevant to both the source and target page.
Also, we've seen a lot of luck changing some portion of your profile to generic anchor text like "read more", "more info" or "website", as well as others using the destination page's title as the anchor text. Finally, you can resort to raw URLs in some, as well. What we try to do there is use a raw URL where we can use either the brand name or the destination page's title in the same sentence.

Kyle, if you have done a domain level disavow, there's no need to do another URL by URL.
We are seeing disavow take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to take effect. Wish I could offer better news, but it looks like you're in a hurry-up-and-wait mode.

Hi, Phil-

Your points are well taken. Certainly, a CDN will handle the BW concerns, if a site owner is prepared to go that route. The alternatives you mention will certainly work, too, with the added benefit of not having to content with a 5 second ad on the screen.

But I think your concerns regarding YouTube doing poorly doesn't really hold water. If you self-host, either via CDN or on Vimeo, you'll undoubtedly be promoting the video in some fashion, on and off-page. Presumably, you'd do the same if embedding a YT video. So I see no difference in terms of traffic generation. Perhaps if you're depending upon YT for your traffic, but really, how many people do that? As for YT outranking the content, I would say if that happens, the content probably either went viral or there wasn't any meaningful promotion of the webpage undertaken.

We did a hangout the beginning of July, and embedded the YT video on our website. Our page is in the #2 slot, while the YT version is on the bottom of page 2. Aside from a couple of social mentions, we did very little to promote our page. http://www.google.com.mx/?gws_rd=cr#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&ei=GJYGUtuzOuiqyAHr7IGIAQ&fp=7a8e48b9e5b6684f&hl=en&newwindow=1&pws=0&q=matt+siltala+on+infographics&sa=N&safe=off&start=10

Granted, the views it garnered are hardly noteworthy, so the example is far from definitive. But I'd wager that even if it had gotten 1,000+ views by now, we'd be able to easily outrank it. 30,000 might be a different story - 300,000 probably pretty tough.

My point is, while I accept that your options are good ones, and quite likely, are better in some circumstances, I think YouTube is still worth thinking about for some circumstances, too.

While we can never really quantify how much benefit a given link affects rank, we do know that a link can convey equity both for the link itself and for the anchor text. Google has indicated that a "safe" method of protecting ourselves against an impression of over-optimization is to use anchor text like "read more", "more info" or "click here", as well as using the target page's title for anchor text or a simple raw URL (as I recall, it was John Mueller that told us that in a Hangout some time ago).

Personally, I see the question of link quality as dealing with the quality of the source page and the relevance between the source and destination, and I evaluate links first by those criteria. I see anchor text as a separate issue, considering relevance and diversity. We have successfully cleaned up trashy profiles where the same anchor text had been overused, by mixing up KW anchors with generic anchors, page titles and raw URLs, and have gotten penalties lifted.

That said, your last point: "While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?" makes me wonder exactly what you mean by "spammy links". That, to me, sounds as though the source page is either low quality or not sufficiently relevant to the destination, in which case, I'd say it's an ill-advised practice.

I know it will work fine without the extra '.' as that's the only way I have ever done it.

Phil makes a good point about holding your customers by self-hosting. I would say that it is something you should consider very carefully, though, as bandwidth issues could be a bear if your hosting isn't right for it. You need to consider the size and number of videos you'll be hosting, and the traffic they'll be receiving.

If self-hosting isn't the avenue you opt for right now, then I would recommend YouTube. They offer more traffic, as was mentioned, as well as decent tracking ability.

I don't think 50-100 KW is that much. I'm rarely targeting less than 30 on a very small site of 20-30 pages, and on an ecomm site, 1000+ KW is nothing out of the ordinary. Resources, as you say, are the governing factor in determining how many KWs you'll be going after simultaneously. I'm usually only focusing on a handful at a time.

Hi, Egol-

From what they say here, I don't read it to indicate that schema markup is required.

As for ranking articles losing their spot by submission as In-Depth Articles, I see that as unlikely. If you want to play it safe, you could submit one and watch its rankings in SERPs after it pops up in the In-Depth index.

If you're unable to get the webmasters to remove the links, I would definitely disavow them, by domain. They may be unwilling to remove the articles, but as long as you're not using them on your own site, the links are really your only concern. If they're showing your author profile on those sites, then I do think it would be a good idea to have that removed, as well, since Google still stumbles occasionally on attribution issues. That wouldn't have any effect on your link profile, but it could conceivably muddy the authorship waters.

Generally speaking, I would agree that validation is often too strict.

Google seems to handle this well, however. In fact, I seem to recall Matt C. once saying that the VAST majority of websites don't validate. I think he may have been talking strictly about HTML, though.

Validation isn't a ranking factor, of course, and most prevalent browsers will compensate for minor errors and render a page, regardless. So I really wouldn't be too concerned about validation just for validation's sake. As long as your pages render in most common browsers and neither page functionality nor user experience is adversely affected, I'd consider it a non-issue. As to whether a bot could be fooled into thinking the head had ended and the body had begun, I suppose it's possible, but I've never seen it happen, even with some absolutely horrible coding.

I changed to Wordpress SEO by Yoast. I had some issues with both Platinum SEO and Ultimate SEO, and have never had a problem with Joost's plugin.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

The only limit that I'm aware of is that you shouldn't use more than one H1

An indexed page is simply any page that has been crawled and then pulled into the search engine's index of web pages (Google's, in most contexts). Until a page is in the index, it can't be returned in the SERPs for any search query. Pages that haven't yet been discovered by Google, or that are somehow blocked for indexing (such as by a noindex directive or a robots.txt file blocking the bots), won't show up in the index. In the Google search box, you can enter "site:yoursiteurl" (without the quotes) to see the pages that are in the index.

Branden, I used to use Platinum SEO and occasionally had some quirky behavior like this with custom pages. Since the Blog page is basically an empty page importing recent posts, it might be playing poorly with PSEO. Have you tried turning that plugin off for a minute, doing a hard refresh and seeing what happens?

As Mat said, you could be risking more scrutiny, so if you submit a recon request, be sure you can endure the attention your site will get.
However, I can see no possible gain to doing so. So why bother? All you'll get out of it is a message saying they found no manual action against your site, and advising you to check for other possible causes of a loss of traffic, yada, yada, yada...

I agree with Tim... I'd even say that I seriously doubt that 302s had any impact at all in moving a site up, given that Google has stated many times that a 302 passes no link equity.

Hi, Stephanie-

Googlebots read as raw code. But in the example you give, it would see those links, as well. What remains as a question is whether it recognizes the nature of those links and therefore pays them limited attention. Personally, I doubt Google ignores them, as it's a valuable source of data for them for both the link graph and the Knowledge Graph.

It's difficult to say whether you may have been smacked, from a superficial glance. But I will say this: your homepage copy is keyword stuffed and full of grammatical errors of the type that even algorithms can spot. I would certainly say that your site is a possible candidate for a Panda slap, judging just by the homepage.

To me, your approach seems like a sound strategy, assuming that none of your present sites are suffering any penalties which could be transmitted back to the new site.Sure, you'll lose a small amount of equity in the redirects, but compared to starting over from scratch, that's negligible.

The consideration, I think, would be in ensuring that the new folders for individual countries/cities are afforded the optimal opportunity to rank in their respective regions. Utilizing hreflang attributes is probably sufficient to accomplish that.

I'd say you covered all the bases, Brad. I don't know what you could have done to protect yourself any more. Sean, I think your client is playing a dangerous game. My advice would be to first cull any of those additional sites that aren't highly relevant to their own. Write them off as a bad investment. One thought that occurs to me is that rather than setting a 302 from all the remaining sites to the client's site, maybe you could redirect them to a selected site from their recent acquisitions. Then redirect THAT site to the client's site. Using 302s is still safer, IMO, while you go through the process of requesting changes on link destinations. Relevance is obviously the key... stretching that is treading on thin ice. My approach to that is, if it needs any statement of justification.... it's not justifiable.

I'd agree that it's a bad idea, particularly at that scale. If relevance of the redirected domains is high, and it's just a couple of domains, I imagine it wouldn't be a problem. The fact that they're using a 302 will afford them some protection, but how long are they planning to leave that "temporary" redirect in place?

That's correct, Gina. Eliran, you need to set rel="publisher" on your home page and tie it to the company page on G+. Using rel="author" set to a company page won't work (it may check out as okay on the rich snippet testing tool, but it won't appear in the SERPs, and it won't tie the G+ page and the site together in the Knowledge Graph)

Takeshi is right, James- you gain nothing by adding nofollow to internal links. In addition, if you attract attention with a lot of it, you could even incur a penalty. Matt Cutts has stated more than once that nofollowing internal links isn't advisable, except perhaps in limited special circumstances, such as to a contact form or privacy policy. If you get carried away with internal nofollow, it could look like you're trying to sculpt pagerank, and that could cause you problems you don't want to have.

Gina is correct, Eliran. rel="author" is intended only for personal G+ profiles. You would need to set up your company's G+ page as the publisher and embed the rel="publisher" tag on your site, then use rel="author" for each individual author. You can review the procedure here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844

Ben, I'm hardly what could be called a code monkey, but I've never heard of a method of noindexing just a portion of a page. Certainly there are ways put certain content within a container and keep it from being indexed, but I'd have to wonder if it could be done without creating a risk of being seen as cloaking. Hopefully, someone with deeper coding knowledge than mine (which won't be difficult) can offer a solution, and we'll both learn something.

Great, Gina! There's nothing like that feeling of satisfaction when you recover a site's positions. I wasn't around when you had your issue, but I do know what you mean about the value of the community. There's a lot of talent here, and many of them dedicate a lot of time to helping people learn how to do things the right way. You can't put a price on that. Congratulations on your success... now pay it forward.

Odd, at first glance. The first thing that comes to mind is the history behind both sites. It would seem that neither of them has had any real SEO effort yet. Alcovy is apparently in need of a good bit of help, judging by their meta data (which may end up being to your advantage, since it seems that Google is forced to extract a description from the page, as a result). I see they both have a presence on Yelp, but Alcovy has mapped a large service area, while BD&F just plotted their location. The competitor also put up a number of pictures there, whereas your client has none. That would only affect leads and traffic, though, not rankings. I guess what I'm getting at is that Alcovy seems to be more aggressive, They may have published a lot of articles, gaining decent links and citations, they have quite probably sought listing on other trade and review directories, and seem to be generally more active and aggressive in promoting their business. If it were my client, I think I might do an audit on Alcovy and see what they've been up to... you're likely to find some opportunities there.

Absolutely, Jonny. This week, Google introduced a change to this (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077) which allows a default setting. But I've been doing this for a couple of years, with just one or two pages of a foreign language, placing idiom-specific hreflang attributes on those pages, and none at all on the rest of the pages, which are all in English. It works just fine, so I really don't know exactly what the x-default is supposed to accomplish, other than perhaps avoid having the rest of the site bracketed with a foreign language page.

Godad, there is really no way to keep others from stealing your content via copy/paste. You can prevent right-click, but that is easily circumvented. Setting a canonical will, however, signal the SEs (Google, Bing and Yahoo all observe canonicals) that your version is the original. which affords some protection, at least in terms of attribution. Dealing with such copy theft is just an unfortunate issue we have to face. Google, at least, is pretty good about being able to determine the original version. As far as copied versions being able to outrank your original page, there can be many other factors in play, beyond the copy itself.

I think the OP is referring specifically to Penguin, Francisco. I have seen quite a lot of fluctuation yesterday and today, as well, particularly with my US clients. (AU seems quite stable). Given the amount of variance, it wouldn't surprise me if something was going on. Maybe we'll see some confirmation one way or the other tomorrow. Barry S and Danny S both usually put the question to the folks at the 'Plex.

I have to agree with Francisco... mentioning Android in your copy or even a title, is generally accepted practice (although technically, it must be followed by the symbol the first time it appears on the page). You can see more on this here: http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/brand.html