Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ray,

our summary is spot on  thanks for your answer,  I was just wondering as the site that link to dropped a lot in the SERP and I was wondering if this could have been one of the reason why that happened.

Btw, I believe you meant  "... but I don't think it is" at the end of your message right?

Thanks Again.

Hello,

I just realised that Google is listing as backlinks, links from swf games that we created and distributed widely. We never used this method to have backlinks but as we create the games and give them for free to other sites, we added a link back to our site, if the user who played the game want to visit us.

But I am worried that this is interpreted as black hat seo, and this affected our ranking badly. Anyone had this kind of issue? How do you think we should be tackling this? Is this could be affected our site?

Thanks for your help on this guys

@vzPro

Thanks for the feedback, but after anlysis it seems that we have a lot of "unwanted" links, even one from a porn site

I feel that it should be a mix of both world, cleaning + going after good quality links. But I am just not sure how google sees that , as I said if we managed to get rid of all bad links and keep only the good ones is it not some kind of manipulation ?

Thanks again for your feedback though

Cheers,

Mounir

Hello everyone,

we are actively working on cleaning the backlink profile of some of our sites. But I am confused on what needs to be done. Now it's possible to find some toxic or deadly domain where our site has been linked from without our approval, but if we remove all those sites, and may be all the site that have a poor domain authority and/or no PR rank (< 1), our profile will look too clean don't you think? . My questions are :

• If we over clean our profile are we not manipulating our links, so Google will not like it?

• Is a natural profile will not be a mix of all those domains (poor and good quality)?

We are trying to see what to keep or try to get deleted/disavow, so we could try to claim some of our lost ranking back

Thanks for your help on this,

Cheers,

Mounir

Jason,

Thanks for your answer, yeah the issue that we have is that the site is a flash gaming site, and as you know flash is not running on Apple and really slow on other mobile devices, so the solution is to give access to only html5 games to our users rather than having huge bounce rates on flash based games.

This said now, if my page /games list all the games for desktop, do you think it will be wise to keep this page and only show the html5 one to the mobile user, but this will give 2 different version of the page to google, or will it be better to create /games/mobile and don't let users that use mobile device see /games that should only be accessible if you are not using a mobile device.

I am like you it will be better to keep everything under one domain rather than going for the subdomain route.

Cheers,

Andrea,

I guess you are right, and I think like you with all the test and experience I have, content seem to have its importance, but it's not the main key for a great ranking.

I am going to spend sometime at looking at the inbound links from our competitor and try to see where we should may be be too

Thanks again to take the time to help, really appreciate it

Cheers,

Hello everyone,

We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going.

We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users.

Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user?

Shall we create brand new set of urls such as :

http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/

Or shall we adapt the main desktop url :

http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/

and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version).

Or even redirect people to a sub-domain :

http://m.mydomain.com/

The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now.

Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so  should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site?

But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience.

Any input on this will be really appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrea,

thanks for your reply,  this is exactly what we are doing, finding other channel to get links but also using good directories, but what is killing me is to see sites ranking better than us and not spending a 10th on content.

Anyway, I guess it will be really hard for someone to start working on a brand new site with a new domain, it may take ages before seeing it climb in ranking.

Any other feedback/experience sharing are more than welcome in this post

Cheers,

Hello everyone,

I know that this question has been asked millions of time, but I am really not getting a straight answer for it. Well the question will be divided in few other questions :

1. Google changed, I get that, but I am reading everywhere, come up with a great content and the rest will follow, stop creating your own backlink and let user link to you ... But I don't know if this is apply for every site on the web, let take the example of a flash gaming site that we manage, we are creating games every day, coming up with great (unique) text for each of them, we are active on social media and stopped backlink from directories. But now we can see our sites losing ranking and seeing some websites that are not having much content on their sites or even active on social medias that are ranking better than us.

We always used white hat techniques, this is why we were so well ranked for so long, but now we see our ranking change on a daily basis but can't explained why.

2. So my question is, should we totally stop directories backlink (even the good directories)? Or we should keep on going and try PR at the same time?

3. For a site that just started how on earth will he be able to get backlinks if it's not using directories in the first place?

So I feel that I am going in circle here and I don't know what else we could do to improve our site.

We even recast the site to bring better experience to the user to see if this will help on us on getting our ranking back. And this help, as the page views and time on the site improved with it, but the ranking is still unchanged (that has been done 3 months ago).

Just to let you know we are aware about the panda and penguin updates

Thanks for your help on this, and I hope the answers will help others

Thanks,

Mounir