Welcome to the Q&A Forum

ha ha... right.... if you have a press release about baloney sandwiches... in your "about us" you should be saying how you are eatin' them everyday. 

You have a big bug in your bonnet about exact match domains.  

You think that they are helpful for ranking a website and I agree.

But, building a site on those domains is not black hat or manipulation.  It's simply a good idea.  It is no different than buying a great piece of land on a high traffic highway to build a store.

Anybody can own these domains.  You simply have to be willing to pay the price.  I've paid an obscene price several times and it has been a fantastic investment in the long run.

You can do it too.

But owning those domains will not automatically get you rankings.  You still have to do a lot of work to make that happen in valuable SERPs.

Building a great website is the best way to dominate a niche.   If you do that traffic, links and rankings will all improve over time and you can make a lot of money tending to just the basics of SEO.

I would not work to remove them, yet.

I think that you are getting great advice from Marie.  I would listen to her opinions.

Some of my sites have lots of backlinks from trashy directories and mash-up sites.  I had nothing to do with getting these links.  They are gifts from people who are making spammy websites.

I think that most websites acquire lots of these links over time - especially if you have a website that ranks well in popular SERPs.  If you had nothing to do with placing them then I would not worry about them unless google sends you a  warning.

Nima, Mine are on  YouTube.  Here are the reasons...

-- after google.com, youtube.com has more searches done than any other website

-- YouTube videos work reliably on a range of browser versions

-- Easy to embed

-- good statistics so I know what is popular

-- engagement metrics so I will know what part of each video performs well or loses viewers

-- YouTube videos frequently appear in google.com search results

-- I can link to my website in the video description

-- my website can be associated with my YouTube channel (maybe that influences SERPs??)

-- my videos show up as "related videos" on competitor view pages

-- I can earn adsense revenue from my videos

-- views for videos embedded on my website count as views in YouTube popularity

Good luck with your site.  Great domain!

These days you can still hire cum laude English graduates who will be really excited about earning an SEO salary after they acquire a little experience.

They are superb writers, they will excel at KW research, they are great communicators and they can quickly and easily learn the rules of the code THE WAY YOU WANT IT DONE (not how some hack has taught them).

With a little training you can give them just about any job in the house and they will be great at writing content.

Keep in mind that great content can defeat SEO over time and crappy KW research is a waste of good SEO..

Toss an ad up to Craigslist saying that you need a great WordSmith to become an expert on writing and tending websites and watch what comes in.

Thank you!

I see that now.  That looks great.  Visitors can get to all comments but pageload time is saved.

This is what we do.  Keep the content on your own site... but share where only a signpost pointing to your site will be present.  This earns links, brings traffic, and reduces duplicate content risk.

I would paginate.

People who leave comments may come back a couple days later to see the comments left after theirs.  I think that it would be disrespectful of these dedicated visitors to show only some of the comments.

Take care of these people.  They are your most important asset.

"Give the people what they want and Google will give you to the people"

Thanks... that's a great saying!

I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there?

Google finally realized that merely "discounting" the links was resulting in a continued vandalism of blogs and forums as linkbuilders deposit their rubbish.

Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?

I think that they have "stuck" with their use of links for way too long.

Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources.

A method to try would be to place 100% of your effort into building content and allow the links to slowly build on their own.  This will start very slowly but will build to a rate that reflects the value of your content.

The only method that I use is to write articles and post them on my websites.   Lots of people will say that this is a very slow method of getting links and I would agree.  However, I spend zero time on any linkbuilding effort and instead put all of my time into building assets for my  websites.

This will not work for everyone.  For it to work you must be able to create content that people will want to share with their friends.   You can help this along by adding social share buttons in an obvious location on your site.

If you do this for a few years your site becomes larger, has more pages pulling traffic and by that time you have a steady flow of traffic.  Your site also by then has a lot of momentum and that drives your progress at a much faster rate.

We received a few dozen links on a PR7 page.  Each of those links went to a different page on our website and each of those pages shot up the SERPs almost immediately - and held that new ranking.  So, multiple links on a single domain - or even on a single page can be very beneficial - if they hit different URLs on your website.

However, footer links and blogroll links, all hitting the same URL on your website are known to deliver a fraction of the value compared to the same number of links on different domains.

What are these "direct" visitors doing on your site?

Hitting a specific page?  Loading an image?  Robots crawling?  Robots checking pages for change?

I am suspicious that these are not genuine human visits.

Some details on infographic promotion....

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=how+to+promote+an+infographic

In my mind the article that will accompany the infographic will have all of the kickass details.  With results like you are showing, everybody everywhere will want to learn as much as possible about the nitty gritty details.  That is what will earn traffic and links.  The infographic is promotion for the article IMO.

This sounds great.  Great.  Really good.

Great for marketing and with a detailed article should earn some good links.

You shouldn't tell people such good ideas.

You better do this fast before others beat you to it.

You 'never, ever' give your own content away? You have several posts on YouMoz... I'm confused.

Good question! 

I guess I do give SEO content away.

However, any content that I write on the topics of my websites (which have nothing to do with SEO) goes on those sites.

Maybe....  if the Pope wanted to republish one of my articles on his site I might allow it.

One more thing to add....

When you hire a linkbuilder his job is to go out and acquire 100 links or whatever you have contracted for.  If you don't have tight specifications on link quality then he is going to go out and get the easiest links possible so he can finish your job in a minimum amount of time.  He probably doesn't know about Penguin and doesn't give a damn about the health of your website.  He simply wants his money.

When you hire a quality SEO, you should be hiring someone who will look after the health of your website and he should know that his continued employment by your company depends upon delivering success.  He is going to be panicking if he sees activity that will put his success in jeopardy.

Thanks for the information.  Now I understand your situation.

Our SEO company have advised we ask our link builder to stop posting articles to these sites as Penguin will penalise us because of it

One of the most dangerous things that can be done these days is to build crap links into a valuable website.  Lots of people are seeing their rankings and customers wiped out from Penguin penalties over spammy links.

Your SEO is probably worried about this.  He / she might also worry about being blamed for damage done by an overseas linkbuilder who builds spammy links.

I have only just taken on the job of looking after our SEO and am leaning towards stopping our linkbuilder and adding the budget to our SEO company.

This is what I would do.

My worry was that when our SEO company used a scare story re the linkbuilder's links they were pitching for business rather than providing solid info.

Possibly.  But, if a linkbuilder was posting my content to the sites that you listed I would put a stop to it fast.

For my own sites I never do article marketing and never will.  I believe that it has both penguin and panda risks.  It also creates new competitors and feeds existing competitors.   I accept some unique guest articles that are very high quality... but I never, ever give my own content away.  And I would never hire a linkbuilder to post on the sites that you mention.

Let me see if I understand....

You have an SEO company but you are also contracting a linkbuilder to post content on a bunch of public access sites?

If that is correct then my question is...... Why do you have an SEO company?

It might be the plugin.  But google is doing this to some of my pages and they are in hand-coded html.  Google is also doing this to my adsense.

Google has taken to monkeying with our title tags.

They are stinking up my message and changing my carefully considered marketing.

If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition.

This is what we do.   We have a blog that gets six to ten shout-outs of news every day - mostly pointing to other websites in our industry or on news sites that have a relevant article (this content is not evergreen).   Our own content (which is evergreen) is place on an article page and a blog annoucement is used to get the word out - because we have a nice list of people who subscribe to the blog feed using Feedburner RSS or email.

We also have a retail site with a blog.  It gets lots of "how to" articles that might have 1000 works and a few images.   Although these are published through a wordpress blog the posts are organized by interest level on category pages on our website - not in blog category format (which is by date).

Though with a small budget it's really hard to do much else to get links..

I don't worry about links.  I create lots of very good content for keywords that have modest competition.  These can succeed with just a few links that will arrive naturally in the first year or two that they are on the web.  The key is in creating best-on-the-web content and patiently spending your time on more content while links naturally arrive.

If you are trying to sell something, don't build an ecommerce site.  Instead, build an information site with a store.

I don't think this would be an issue on a small scale..

I agree.  On a small scale, no problem.  Nothing wrong with an author sharing his work.  I don't think that a few dozen of these posts would be a problem.

The only caution that I would take is to avoid keyword anchor text links and duplicate copies of your articles on other websites.

A few people give me occasional articles.  Any links in those articles use their domain or the author's name as the anchor text.

I don't do guest blogging myself.  I think that my content is best placed on my own site.  I don't want to feed my competitors or make new ones.   Most of the people who give me articles are doing it because "they have a message to get out" rather than because they are looking for a source of links.

Attack where you can produce content that is better than anything that currently appears on the web.  If you can do that then do not fear other metrics.

When I consider topics for new articles I pay zero attention to PA, DA, PR, links, likes, etc.  I go straight to the SERPs and look at the content published on the top ten sites.

Also keep in mind that where there is competition there is also usually a lot of traffic, a lot of money changing hands and a lot of longtail queries.  This is where to exert yourself if you want to win big.

If you feel that you are a reasonably smart person with talent the biggest mistake that you can make is to not bet on yourself.

yep... Adwords discussions generally center around keywords and budgets... if the bidder is not diligently tracking margins, costs, conversions and bidding my bet is that he is losing his shirt and doesn't know it.

Lots of people who are doing that math quit doing Adwords because they discover that the competition is insane.

I don't fear keyword cannibalization.  I attack it.

If I want to rank for a difficult term - "widgets" for example, I prepare a comprehensive page (a few thousand words and lots of images and data) about that topic.  Then, based upon keyword research of what people are looking for and my own knowledge of what they need to know, I prepare many detailed pages for the really important second and third level keywords.

Each of those topics are explained on the comprehensive page and presented as a subheading but much more detailed information as well as more images, data and graphs are on the second and third level pages.

After this is in place Google should see that my site has everything that anybody anywhere is asking for about widgets and the presentation is rich with data, photos, images and deep content.

So, which do you think will rank higher  --  what I described above or your puny page?

For my labor I will also attract an enormous amount of long tail queries.

==========

If you prepare a few narrowly-focused pages about a topic you can run into cannibalization problems because these pages compete against yourself.  However, if you plan a broad saturation of the topic region you can actually achieve double listings for lots of the secondary and tertiary keywords.

Probably a Panda problem.

The site has thin content:  Lots of the pages have close to zero content.

The site has duplicate content:  Content was stolen by your client or others stole it from him.  Look here.

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

The title tags need work:

<title>woody-coloring-pages-002 - Coloring Pages ABC Kids Fun Pagetitle>

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

The site has a huge intellectual property problem.  There may be DMCA's against the site.  Rankings could be reduced by the Emanuel Update.

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

Potential Penguin problems:  The site solicits "link exchange" and "link partners".

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

My advice to client would be to abandon this site unless he has rights to the images.

<title>woody-coloring-pages-002 - Coloring Pages ABC Kids Fun Pagetitle>

2) Homepage itself is bare content due to nature of photography niche (though, my title tag and header focus on keyword and brand). I'm sure everyone will recommend that I increase homepage content, but virtually all competitors have a similar lack of homepage content so I don't understand how I rank so low given my page/domain authority.

Yep, that is what I am going to recommend.  I wish my competitors were more married to design than to making money.  I would be kickin' ass and takin' names.

I'll take all of the thumbs down that people want to give me on this.  You are choosing not to be competitive.

There could be creative methods such as dropdowns or an accordion page format that would get text into this page and become visible with a user action.

Maybe something like this that enables you to show multiple images and place text below them.  I think that multiple images are a step up.  http://themes.swiftpsd.com/?theme=ability

Here the action arrow at bottom of page could be clicked to reveal a lot of text.  http://themeforest.net/item/plento-a-fullscreen-responsive-ajax-template/full_screen_preview/2313859

I really like Ryan's reply.  My only difference is that I would replace the word "tools" with "knowledge".

IMO, the more "tools" you use the more your performance will trend towards "average".  When there are only ten positions on the first page of Google with a million competing, "average" is failure.   You win by doing "better than the tools".

I have a little different point of view.

If you are a very smart and very motivated person I would join SEOmoz for a few months and  get all of the learning possible here.  EVERYTHING.  At the same time I would start a website and start experimenting with what I have learned.   (Do not do  this on a site that a business or employees depend upon!)

Ask lots of questions here in Q&A.  Not general questions.  Ask very specific questions about what you don't understand.

Then, after you have learned a lot and have a site working to the best of your ability, hire an SEO for consultations on your site.  Have him/her look at what you have done and recommend on how it can be better.  Keep working on that site.

I believe that this study, work, and consultation will yield really good results and give feedback on a practical project.  And since you have skin in the game you will work harder and see practical benefit than simply working through a course that might not be directly relecant.

blogspot.com and youtube.com rankings should fall through the floor!    They host an awful lot of stolen content.        

It looks like some other people are already doing this as I did a query for the first two sentences in quotes.

And if you are linking to the same content on their site then there is a very good chance that at least one will be filtered - and it will probably not be springer.

If you have lots of these pages on your site you could be hit with a Panda problem that could reduce your rankings site-wide.

I would not place these abstract pages on my site unless they were noindex, follow

I would not blame that on authorship.  I would blame that on an increased level of piracy.  Eventually they can strangle your appearance in the SERPs.

I understand.  Those weasels do it with my content too.

When they copy I often use DMCA complaints.

It might.  It might not.

Content syndication has both Panda and Penguin risks.

And, you have the competitor problem.

They will still have a relevant title tag, and relevant content.

(add this to my original reply)....

The best way to get filtered from the search results is to have an article on another site linking to identical article on your site.

This happens because the other sites that post your content have more authority and that gives them a higher ranking.  What can you do to prevent this?

-- only syndicate to sites that have less authority than you

-- create different content for syndication that what appears on your website

-- stop syndicating

This is just one reason why I do not syndicate anything.  It creates new competitors and feeds existing competitors.

We have sites that have never received linkbuilding and "here" is one of the top anchors for each of the sites.

I agree with Nakul.

These types of links are dangerous.

It is probably best to start backing out now, working to replace bad links with quality.

Ryan is the most active member in SEOmoz Q&A.   If you watch Q&A very often you will see lots of his very generous posts.

http://www.seomoz.org/users

I think that we are members of the SEOmoz community and the discussion of topics initiated on SEOmoz should remain here for community participation rather than be diverted.

There is nothing wrong with creating a post here and then refining it for use as a blog post on your own website.

If I did that for every question that I answered here at SEOmoz, I am willing to bet that people wouldn't like it.    They would view me as creating sign posts to siphon traffic.

Is it link spam?  Maybe not in some people's opinion if a link is placed once in a while but to make that a matter of practice, my opinion is that it would be link spam.  I believe that it would be abusing the SEOmoz community.

The perspective of this can be argued.  People who receive the links have a whiter hat view than the community they are using.

This will work until they figure out that your posts are nothing more than "sign posts" to siphon traffic and spam them for links.

We have an FAQ page that links out to lots of blog posts which address... product comparison, how to select, how to repair.  Links to these blog posts are also added to product pages.

Since these blog posts address long tail keyword topics and are optimized for the, they are much more valuable IMO than words at the bottom of another page.

Sure, if you are producing great content.

Look at the feedburner list for SEOmoz.....   104,000 subscribers.

I don't have that many but it has been growing for several years.  Almost every day the number gets higher.

Once you have a track record of producing content that people like you can use Feedburner to offer an RSS feed and email subscription service.  That allows people to be notified about new content on your site.  The subscriptions will start growing and then you can have thousands of people who will tweet, like, share and link to your content as soon as it goes live.

You can also scrape that feed and republish it as an include on every page of your site, or process it and post includes of relevant (by category) posts on similar topic pages all over your site.  Then, as soon as a new post goes up, all visitors will be informed of it and you can have thousands of pages on your own site pointing to that new content.

If you place these "masterpieces" on your site and your site has very little traffic you can still get visitors into them if they are submitted to sites like slashdot and reddit.  If you have really good content it could get some traction there and be shared widely.

If you have that "masterpiece" content you might ask a couple bloggers in your niche if they would consider mentioning them, or share them with a few people on facebook, tweet to your friends.  This should get some traction if your content is really that good.

After you have several great pieces of content out there a little momentum and cross marketing can begin.

It's not easy.  It's not guaranteed.  Most people who try to do this can't produce content that is successful.  And, it will not work in every niche and only in small corners of some niches.

I agree with Marcus about doing the writing.  In the meantime I would NOINDEX, FOLLOW.   The FOLLOW will allow pagerank to flow through these pages into the other pages of your site.  If you use NOFOLLOW that pagerank is lost.

I have some syndicated content on one of my sites and some thin content that have  NOINDEX, FOLLOW.