Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1) At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?

Tiny acorns grow into mighty oak trees.

Keep in mind that domain authority is not an accurate measure of quality or potential.

If the Pope launches a new site would you "get rid of a link" from it while its domain authority is less than 10?

2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?

Take the energy that you are putting into links and put it into creating content that people will want to share with one another.    If you can do that then all of your effort will go into producing assets for your website... and the people who see it will spread the word for you.

What is your domain and what SERPs were you targeting?  Which google?

If you plan to get a website that big indexed you will need to have a few things in order...

First, you will need thousands of deep links that connect to hub pages deep within the site.  These will force spiders down there and make them chew their way out through the unindexed pages.  These must be permanent links.  If you remove them then spiders will stop visiting and google will forget your pages.  For a 10 million page site you will need thousands of links hitting thousands of hub pages.

Second, for a site this big.... are you going to have substantive amounts of unique content?  If your pages are made from a cookie cutter and look like this....

"yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada SEO job in Paris yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada send application to Joseph Blowe, 11 Anystreet, Paris, France yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yadayada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada"

.... then Google will index these pages, then a few weeks to a few months later your entire site might receive a Panda penalty and drop from google.

Finally... all of those links needed to get the site in the index... they need to be Penguin proof.

It is not easy to get a big site in the index.  Google is tired of big cookie cutter sites with no information or yada yada content.  They are quickly toasted these days.

The people who answer the telephone.... the people who work the sales floor....

.... they know the words that new customers use to ask for the items that are sold.

I would go to an attorney and talk about trademarks.

I don't do local search because all of my sites compete nationally.

If I needed my sites to rank for local search I would hire Miriam Ellis, Moz member and Moz associate (if she is available) to help me get set up properly and begin promotion.   I don't think that the cost would be that high and I would have it done quickly, properly and efficiently.   This is too important to take the chance of an improper set-up - at least that is my opinion.  This could probably be done via gotomypc or other computer sharing - so you can see what is being done.

Change title tag from this....

<title>Home - Home Care Grand Rapids Michigan - Health Care Associates</title>

To this....

<title>Home Care in Grand Rapids Michigan - Health Care Associates</title>

I believe that google is seeing the first instance of "Home" and associating that with "Homepage".

================================

THEN....  get your target query  "Home Care in Grand Rapids" in the text of your homepage - preferably in the prominent text at the top of the page.

=================================

This will be an improvement but I doubt that it will be enough to fix your problem.   I don't think that your links are competitive.

================================

If I owned this website I would put my big effort into local search.

If they are kickass quality articles then post them on your own website.

If they are crappy then give them to your competitors.

If they are in between then improve them to kickass quality.

I would place the widget on my site and and anyone who finds it useful can like it, tweet it, link to it.

Make these widgets awesome and make your website the "go to place" for these calculations.

If you ask me....   Waste Oil Heater is going to be used by most people for a small portable device.... Waste Oil Furnace is a larger device used to heat a structure.... Waste Oil Burner is a component part of a Waste Oil Furnace.

You could make unique photos, instructions, articles and diagrams for each.  Some people will use these terms interchangeably but I view them as distinct.

oops was typing as other people replied!!

No problem.  When a tribe of people reply with similar advice it is all good. 

I have a retail site in a niche like this.  Nobody has written the articles.  Nobody.

I write articles and they rank well for LOTS and LOTS of long tail keywords.  However, there is not a lot of search in this niche.  The typical article pulls in only 5, 10 or 15 visits from search per day.  But, these articles have a good conversion rate.

So, I do a "good" job on these articles - but not a great job like I do for a site that competes for much higher traffic in much more difficult SERPs.

I have access to analytics for two different sites that rank for the same keyword. Strangely, the site that ranks on page 3 gets three times as much traffic as the site that ranks on page 1

Obviously then have other sources of traffic than the keyword you are looking at.

Never assume that there is a single source of traffic.   Dive deeper into the analytics.  You will probably learn something.

Also, it is possible that the rankings that you are looking at have been composed by google "for your eyes only".

I find that the line width in Q&A is so long that when viewed on my smartphone at full line width the text is too small to read.    Enlarging and then pushing the screen right-left is very slow reading so I have almost stopped visiting on a smartphone (iPhone).

It sounds like you’ve never gone down this route yourself.

I have never given my content away... but lots of people have given their content to me.  I have one of the stronger sites in my niche and when they give me their content, my site then usually ranks above theirs for all of the keywords targeted by the content that they gave to me.   And my site is then going to rank above them for these keywords Permanently.

Giving your content to a stronger site is not good if you are competing for the keywords in that content.  However, if your goal is simply to "get a message in front of as many people as possible" then giving your content away - even to competitor sites will increase your visibility overall.  Those are the types of people who usually want me to publish their content.  If I rank above them they are OK with that even if I cut off their traffic.

Don’t you think that Tom’s opinion about guest posting can be useful for online relationships between websites of a similar subject...

I am not out to build "relationships" with my competitors, I am out to beat them.

If you are simply trying to "get a message out" then relationships are fine.

If you have really good content and you want to get traffic then expose it to social media.  If your content is really that good it can be like tossing gasoline on a fire.   But, if you give that same article to your competitor... you have just tossed gasoline onto his fire.

...maybe Google is not as keen to reward this kind of activity regarding links in the article but I’m not sure if that’s true.

Lots of people right now have Penguin problems from all of the guest posting that they have done.

That makes sense, I would still make a counter point that if done correctly and in the right ratio of how much you spend time on guest blogging vs  blogging on your own site, it could still work to your advantage.

You might be right...   I am not going to try it... because if I am wrong I will have to shoot myself.

If you do not want to give away "content" then why do you post so much content here?

A couple of people have asked about this....

My websites have nothing to do with SEO and my postings here are simply participation in a public discussion.   I don't consider it publishing.  It's like friends talking over coffee or beer.

In the areas where I do business.  I am not sharing my content.  I spend a lot of time on every article and publish them only on my own domains.

Why?  I don't want to feed my competitors and create new ones.

http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php

Guest blogging is one of the activities I’ve never undertaken only because I went down the avenue of thinking if you go to the time and effort of producing great content why would you want it to be on someone else’s site when it could be on yours.

Absolutely.   When I write an article in the topic areas of my website I do not give it away. Much too valuable.  Giving your content away feeds your compeititors and creates new ones.

Have you got any experience of Guest blogging recently?

A guy, well known in my industry, wants me to publish one of his articles.  I decline.  I tell him that I don't want to compete with him.   He bugs me again so I say I would consider it.   He sends me a nice article.  I like it.  Its really good.  I tell him that if I publish it on my site that my site will move into his SERPs and compete with his site.  He says OK and gives me the article.

A few days later I am taking his traffic.  A few weeks later he complains that my site is in his SERPs - above his.  He does not ask me to take the article down (we spent a bit of time creating nice images and making a great presentation of the content) but I know that is what he would prefer.   I don't take it down because I spent time and money to present it nicely.

Today that article is still on my site, ranking well, bringing in thousands of visitors per month in an area of investing.  His site is gone from those SERPs.  He gave lots of articles to lots of people.  Lots of them went to ezine and other popular syntication sites.  I bet the Penguins got him.

**Would you spend your precious time writing for your own website or spend some of that time guest blogging on good quality related websites? **

I write only for my own sites.  My goal is to build my own business. Not to build a business for someone else.

I have not given away an article yet.   I have no plans to do that.   I might write a guest blog for the Pope or someone like that if they ask me... but that isn't going to happen.  If Joe Blowe webmaster, asks for an article my answer is..  "Hell no."... but I would word it nicely.

Those pen offers are very very similar.  Identical product descriptions except for perhaps number being sold or color or width of the tip.

If these were on my site they would all be on the same page.  One page to concentrate/conserve the linkjuice.  One page to make thicker content.   One page to present all of the options to the customer at same time.  (PITA to click between lots of pages to make up your mind as a shopper).   One page to make maintenance easy.

I am being locked out too.  Frequently.

FireFox and Chrome.

I think it's obvious that these links are harmful to the smaller sites that are being linked to, but it's hard to convince others of that...

but I don't have much control over the sites that are linking out....

If this is your situation it will be difficult for you to help the company.

It seems that you are responsible for waging war but they will not allow you to pick up the sword.

I would make an internal page where you link to other company properties.  This could be done on an "about us" page.

I might also have a small number of relevant links, in content, where it makes 100% sense to the visitor.

That is what I do on my sites.  I don't have a lot of links between them.  Where I do have links they are usually domain names for anchor text.

If you plan to attack with a five page website then it is going to be pretty hard to cover these keywords.  However, if you are attacking with a blog and lots of diverse content in this niche then you just mix up the terms but strongly favor the one that produces volume and conversions.

This site is dead meat until unique product descriptions are written.  Thousands of other people are using the same product descriptions.

Check here... thousands of duplicates.

Lots of other problems:

--- lack of targeting good keywords to products

--- poor title tag writing

--- purchase buttons out of site

--- "coming soon" pages create thin and duplicate content

So, my bet is that you are trying to learn this as you build it.   Lots of people do things that way but it takes a lot of time and you have to learn from lots of mistakes.  My suggestion is to hire someone who knows how to build a successful retail site, pay them to study your site and coach you through getting it up and running.  Then you will be working for wins instead of guessing.   The cost is about the same.  You can pay for mistakes or pay for actionable advice.

How many sites are involved?

If you have two or three sites and each of them has a few relevant links to the others I don't think that it is a problem.

However, if you have 150 sites and they are all linking to each other or all pointing to a single domain then you are going to have a problem.

One day I heard Matt Cutts tell a guy (who like a dummy with a big grin asked... "How many sites can I link together?".)....  Matt told him...  "If you can't quickly name every domain involved in this linking then you are probably stepping over the line."

About two years ago I did a page-by-page redirect of Domain A to KeywordDomain B.  Nothing changed on the site but the domain name and the logo.  Nothing.  NOTHING.  Every page was redirected to an identical page with 301s that worked properly.

Rankings and traffic immediately tanked.  I was really surprised because that domain had held the #1 position for the exact match keyword for ten straight years - although based upon an analylsis of link metrics it should have been #2 for that entire time.  I had redirected other domains and never, ever had a problem.

Now it was #2.  Crap!  I blew a load of dough on that domain and now my income was damaged.

I didn't do anything.   No linkbuilding, no new content, no nothing.

A few months later the rankings and traffic came back.  My personal opinion - and lots of people might disagree - is that Domain A was getting thousands of domain queries, type-ins and social media actions every month.  When we switched to KeywordDomain.com it was getting ZERO domain queries, etc.  Slowly people began typing the new domain in their queries and when a few thousand a month were occurring that is when the rankings came back.  Maybe coincidence, but that's what I want to believe.

Thanks Doc!

Always good to be reminded that google often changes their mind on how they handle these things.

I think I am going to try it.  If things don't work or if things change I can yank it off of the secondary site.

Thank you for the report, Linda.

Glad to hear that it seems to be working.

I would simply say...

If I owned a business like yours I would not build 150 different one-page websites.   I don't think it is going to be a good use of your time and money.

If he wanted me to work on them I would decline.

Has anyone been using rel="canonical" to attribute content that has been republished on Domain B... back to Domain A, which is the original source?

The videos  below say that this should be working...  I am asking to hear from anyone who has done it.

Has it worked as you expected?   Did Domain A get the benefit that you expected?

Thanks!

==========   Source Videos   =============

Matt Cutts (April, 2012)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA

Matt Cutts (April, 2010)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8XdFb6LGtM

Rand Fishkin  (August, 2012)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8drPXudZZc

I would hire someone who really knows their stuff about Penguin and Panda.... and has lots of experience getting penalized sites restored in the SERPs.   That person might know what can be done about your situation.

It might not cost as much as you think

Thanks for the comment.

I picked those words because so many people think that blogs are magic bullets and an extremely effective way to serve content..

Yes, they are efficient, but I don't believe that they are the most effective.

Anyone, such as you, who is thinking about using pages instead of a blog has the potential to move up to a superior way of presenting his content..  That is using your brain and your creativity to make a presentation that can be much more engaging for the visitor and much more effective at accomplishing your goals.

Most people just slap up the blog and don't think about the possibilities.  You are thinking about them and that is a good thing.

Maybe you will decide to use the blog to publish but build great presentation pages by hand.  Or maybe you will build great article pages and promote them with quick messages on the blog.  There are many ways to do this well and RSS feeds can be used with both.

Good luck.

Lots of people would just slap them into blog posts.    That's the way to go if you are lazy or uncreative.

If you post them on pages and then build nice category pages to present them to your visitors in an interesting way, the engagement can be much higher than what you will get with the chronological presentation of the typical blog.

Of course, you can still build the presentation pages if you use the blog format, if you do it that way then nix the category pages.

When you are in a high volume area there is going to be a lot of scraping, spinning and mash-ups.  Lots of sites get millions of links from this type of activity.  It's not negative SEO... its just script kiddies flexing their skills.

So, before you point the finger at the "white knight" are you sure that you don't have a Panda problem caused by thin content or duplicate content. Are you sure that you are not bouncing visitors and that is the root of your problem?

If you are getting hit by link spam your rankings drops are likely to occur on dates where lots of other people get hit by Pengin problems.  Did you get an unnatural link warning in webmaster tools?

I hear your concerns but am not convinced that you have a link spammer hitting you.

What have you done to rule out the more likely situation that the problem is not caused by a saboteur?

I am in desperate need of a starting point.

You start by doing what most other ecommerce webmasters are not willing to do....That is..... Write Unique and Substantive Product Descriptions.

I don't want to lose link juice!

Absolutely!  And wasting content is even worse.

I would do #5.

5.  Assess the content to determine it's value.   Value to me includes....

-- are there links pointing to this content?

-- is there traffic arriving through these pages?

-- are visitors who arrive at my site through other pages consuming this content?

-- the quality of the content

After I assess the items above I will take different routes depending upon the findings.

A.  If content does not have links, does not pull traffic and is not being consumed I will probably delete the content and redirect the page to index.html

B.  If content has links, traffic and consumption then I will decide if it merely needs a few edits.  If that can be done I will keep the page.  And, if that can be done I will look to add improved images, special interest boxes, "Did you know?" boxes, links to other relevant pages on my website.  KICK IT UP A NOTCH!

C.  If content has links, traffic and consumption, AND THE SAME TITLE IS STILL A GREAT CHOICE...  but the article is really outdated then I will rewrite from scratch and post on the same page, always trying to kick content, images and message up a huge notch on  this successful page.  Then I will promote this major rewrite on my homepage, in feature boxes around the site, in my RSS feed.

D.  If content has links traffic and consumption, and the old title is no longer a good choice, then I will rewrite from scratch, publish on a new page and create a boldface roadblock link to it in the first few paragraphs of the old article... and do the full onsite promotion.  Eventually when traffic to old page starts dying then I will redirect.  I want to keep the traffic from that old title flowing in because some noobs, old farts and out-of-date people will still be searching for those out-of-date terms.  Conversion rate on these people can be good because they are looking for help or a book or someone (like you) to be their guru.  Also, with this choice you now have TWO pages pulling traffic for different search queries.

You see, there is no generic answer to this question.  You must assess on a case-by-case basis.  Be careful not to abandon the noobs, old farts and out-of-date people.  They can be valuable traffic.

Thanks for sharing that.

I have thought about opening our news to visitor submissions.  Right now we do it all ourselves (about eight to ten items per day).

I worry that visitors will submit a lot of spam and self-promotion that will decrease our quality.   If weeding takes a few hours per day then we are better off doing it inhouse.

Thanks again for sharing.

I've put back the /news items as "noindex, follow" and as well as some internal links.

Yes.  I think that is an improvement.

ps. All of our external links are nofollow.

I didn't realize that.  Good idea on a blog where users can submit items.

pps. I had to put some disallow rules in our robots.txt to remove the news category and pages. I'm guessing i still have to keep those rules in place correct?

I allow the category pages on my blog to be indexed.  They bring in thousands of visitors per day.

Last question... would you also keep pagination as "noindex, follow" or open it all up?

On my sites the pagination is noindex follow.

A couple questions for you...

Do you receive a lot of user submitted news items?

Do you think that you get a lot of spam submissions?    How much time do you have to spend weeding the spam?

I have a similar section on one of my sites and I believe that it was part of a Panda problem in one of the early Panda updates.   I used noindex / follow on those pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.

On that site I have about 150 category pages and they pull in a ton of traffic.

Your posts seem to include some UGC and they appear to be receiving followed links.  Perhaps linking to bad neighborhoods is an important concern.... and a lot of your internal links are nofollowed.   If this was my site all of the internal links would be followed and the external UGC links would be nofollowed.

http://goo.gl/GkgUr

If you post shortened URLs in a forum a lot of people will not visit them because they are uncertain of their distination.

... just sayin'

You have certainly done a lot of analysis.

Before considering what you have posted my suspicions for a site that has 2000 products and 70 visits per day are....

---  your product descriptions are duplicated on other sites and your site has been hit by Panada or the age-old duplicate filter

---  you are working on a nascent site that has no links and that nobody is tweeting, liking or citing

---  you have a bad link profile and have been hit by Panda

So, what do you say about the three items above?

Also, those 70 visitors.  What are their referring domains, or where are they coming from?

OK... you say that you have....

-- GREAT domain

-- Great rankings

-- Valuable keywords

-- Tidy link profile

-- horrible website

That gets my blood pumping...  I would be sniffing this site to see if I can do these...

-- improve the SEO and triple the traffic

-- redesign the site and make it twice as easy to use and double the conversion rate

-- create new content to make it more credible and go after new keyword that will double the traffic

-- reformat the product pages and double the income

-- so, after you triple the traffic from SEO, double conversion rate, double the traffic with new keywords and double again with better product pages.... this site will be making a fantastic amount of money

This, to me sounds like a candidate for a flip.  A 301 redirect might be selling a champion racehorse for horse meat.

If this site was under my nose I might be grabbing it and taking away the sales from everyone else in that niche.

(No guarantees on the above... depends upon the attributes of the site you are starting with, your skill set and how hard you are willing to work)

The number of categories on your blog can grow over time if you write about a diversity of topics.  To justify a category you should have a few existing posts in that category or anticipate generating a few posts within a reasonable amount of time.

Extremely active blogs can support, and probably should have, a large diversity of categories simply to organize the content better and gain keyword reach in the search engines.

Another factor is the power of your site.  If you have a new site without a lot of power then busting out 100 categories could be like dead weight on your entire site.

I have a blog that over the past several years has received 25 to 60 posts per week.  It has over 150 categories and each post goes into at least two categories (one for geographic location and one for topic area).  Most of the blog's search engine traffic flows in through category pages because they rank well for high traffic terms.

The other thing is that I was also achieving good SERPs for these and other brand related keywords but I seem to have dropped off the face of google for them

Give us a detailed list of the things that you are doing and we might be able to say why you are not getting the performance that you expect.

Do what Stephen says...   then...

Go look at the backlink profile of people who come in here cryin'.

In short, the answer is....

It is impossible to accurately say why Google changed the rankings.

Anybody who says that they can do this is full of BS.  There are hundreds of variables.

Most happy people are heading out for beers. 

They will not be posting here.

See how simple the answer is?   Why spend time on analysis of other sites?