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My approach to this is very different.  Instead of writing articles and distributing them out to get links, I publish all of my content on my own site.  This makes my site the link magnet instead of creating other sites that will compete with me.

If your method of getting links is to publish content on other sites then you must sustain that effort perpetually to keep your link count growing.  However, if you publish all of the content on your site then your site grows and grows in mass and as it grows there are more link targets and the velocity of your link acquisition grows over time with the same level of effort from you.

There are two risks with this method.  1) it has a very slow start, and 2) you must be able to produce linkworthy content.  If you can't you will fail, but the better you are at producing that type of content you will have velocity and something more important... acceleration.

Finally, although there are some good PR firms out there, many of them are nothing more than spammers who wear suits to work.  Be careful if you go that route.

I have about 20 related topics we can publish articles on in order to try and get some higher rankings from a few key word phrases.  Is 4 a month okay?

Who are you trying to defeat?

Let's say that your competitor is moving at 200 miles per hour and you set out in chase going 10 miles per hour.  Will that be effective?

If you chase at 202 miles per hour can you sustain a 100 hour attack?

The above were very simple.   You say that you are out to get the "big guys" in your industry.  That statement communicates that they also have a head start.

You see, the answer to your question is not one of "how many".....  Instead it is one of different starting points and relative velocities.

We had a site that republished government documents.

After the Panda update we decided that we wanted to keep some of those pages on the site for visitors but remove them from the search index.  So we added this to the head....

name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

There were other pages that we decided to delete. So we removed those files from the server and added a 301 redirect to an .htaccess file in the folder where they were located.

In a blog post titled "Beating Google's Panda Update - 5 Deadly Content Sins"..... Cyrus says.....

"Remember, Panda is a site-wide penalty, not a page penalty. So if a certain percentage of your pages fall below Panda’s quality algorithm, then the whole site suffers. Fix enough of these pages and you may recover."

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda

If I had an ecommerce site, I would not want links to developers and design shops on my pages - especially if they are keyword anchor links.  It sounds like their are multiple links here and I think that is also excessive.

In my opinion, the developers and design shops should be linking TO their clients rather than trying to siphon from them.

I don't use Joomla, so it would be best to check the documentation or ask someone who is experienced with that system.

If these were my sites I would remove those links completely.

If the blog is in a folder on your primary domain then any links earned by the blog will directly benefit the primary domain.  If the blog is on a subdomain then links that it earns will benefit the primary domain but the effect will not be as strong.

All of my blogs are on folders of the primary domain.

In late 2010 I redirected a couple of popular subdomains into folders of the primary and the rankings of the entire site went up.

These might not work for piano movers but for small professional office here are some low-hanging fruits that I can think of for links.

- landlord (some brag about their tenants)

- chamber of commerce (often link to members, write blog post, become an officer for profile link)

- community directories (they feature local businesses, write blog post)

- professional associations (link to members, write blog post, become an officer for profile link)

- clients (write a blog post for them)

- suppliers (often link to local product vendors/customers or write blog post for them)

- professional schools (often link to successful grads, write blog post)

- license boards (link to licensees, write blog post)

- other local businesses with synergy (write blog post, become one of their "recommended")

- local newspapers (write article for online edition)

- local BBB (get in directory, write blog post)

- write for professional journal online edition

- local city government/organizations (directory, blogs, supporters, volunteers)

You are showing up in the SERPs.  The number of visitors that you get will be determined by your position and how well your title tag elicits clicks.

Your site would not be a good one to offer "free beer" in the title tags but if you can discover words and phrases that elicit clicks then your traffic will go up.

Also, as your site becomes better know you will have likes and links pointing towards it and people will start asking for it by name.   As these things occur your rankings will rise.

I write an article and a couple months later it appears on the second page... but a couple years later it can be #1 or #2.  If you can produce content that is "Best-On-The-Web" in your niche it generally rises to a nice position.

WP vs traditional site?

Both are good.  Both perform well in the search engines - if they are set-up properly.

Most of my sites have been built with Dreamweaver and server-side includes that are controlled by perl programs.  Most of these sites also have a blog that is powered by wordpress.  I use wordpress because it is quick and easy to make short posts.

I use Dreamweaver because I make a lot of different page formats and I like to have complete control over it.  I like to build finely-craft arrows rather than cookie cutter pages.

how is it that I am not seeing all my traffic?

I don't know.  Are you seeing any Google visits from GetClicky?  I am betting that you will see visitors coming from many sources - so you know that I am not the one you are seeing.

You are going to make an enormous investment of time into this site.  Don't  be afraid to invest in it.

The biggest mistake that I have made is not betting on myself sooner.

1)  Yes, I did a few logical searches and saw your site in the SERPs several times.

2. You are working really hard on this site.  That time is worth an awful lot.  You can probably get a smart someone to set-up a wordpress site for you, duplicating your "look", moving the content, and applying quality SEO for... I am guessing a few hundred dollars.  The key is not getting the wrong person.

You could probably set up your own wordpress site.  Lots of people do it.    When I need a wordpress site or a blog I don't set it up myself.  I get an expert so I know that its done properly.

3. If you hire an experienced person to set up a wordpress site for you they will probably know a good place - where they are very familiar with the system.  My sites are at a host where outside software, including wordpress, can be very hard to set-up.  I think that they make it that way to avoid problems.

in one week, it shows that those links have gotten close to 1,000 views.

So analytics, I assume, is properly installed.

I am absolutely, 100% confident that you are getting search traffic.

The following is just what I would do... this isn't "advice"... just saying what I would do...

I don't know the history of your site, how much you have invested there, how hard it would be to move and what can be done about redirects, etc.

But, most likely,

I would find a quality host and and install wordpress.

I would use "pages" for my website and "posts" for my blog.  The blog would be on my primary domain.

I would use hosting that does not offer "unlimited bandwidth"... because those that offer unlimited bandwidth usually throttle your success by limiting your processing, database connections or some other metric that is invisible to most webmasters.  (Most people never notice a problem but if you get up to several thousand visitors per day the throttling usually begins.  I want a host who will charge me for everything that I use because that way they will want me to be extremely successful.)

If I was really serious about this site I would get a person who is experienced in SEO and wordpress to set it up for me.  That way it would be done properly and that person's experience would save me a lot of experimentation and possible mistakes.

After that I would attack with a steady stream of great content.

Are you sure you have NO search traffic?   I see your site in the SERPs.

What analytics are you using?    If you don't have any then toss Getclicky.com or something easy on for a day and watch the real time data.

Also, you seem to be putting a lot of work into a blog that is on a different domain.

Yes, this would be a good way for webmasters to confess that they have purchased links and turn off their value.   If that is what Bing wanted this tool to be used for they should say that explicitly.

Instead they say.....

Use the Disavow Links tool to submit page, directory, or domain URLs that may contain links to your site that seem "unnatural" or appear to be from spam or low quality sites.

.... which has a very different meaning to me.

Bing is full of BS.

They can't do their job on links and they can't communicate.

I am not going to spend a single minute of time on this.  Not one minute.

Links happen, right?  So how can you protect yourself from malicious link building?  How do you tell the engine you just don't want to associate your content with "that" site?

Busy sites will have thousands to millions of links that were created by spammers and garbage site builders such as updowner.

Bing is making this because they can't do their job.

I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions.

Diagnosing panda and penguin problems on a site with many years of history and deciding what to do about them is really really difficult.

One of the dangers of asking in a forum is people tend to shoot from the hip with BS and partial knowledge and not enough time to..... study the site thoroughly,  ask you all of the necessary questions needed to understand the SEO history of your site, write the book that is needed to educate you about the problem, and then give all of the advice needed to give you a shot at fixing your problem with no guarantees.

Penguin and panda are complex problems.  Expert advice requires a lot of careful work done by a person who understands them.    That is why you see very little "expert" advice in forums for fixing panda and penguin problems - at least that's my opinion.

In my opinion, the solution to your problem is going to involve detailed consulting and serious painful work on your part to get it solved.  You could be advised to do the near impossible work of cleaning a link profile or the heartbreaking work of dumping (or noindexing) reams of treasured content.

If this site is important to you I would recommend hiring a professional who fully understands panda / penguin problems, can spend the time needed to understand your site and has the guts to give you advice that will make you wince.

It sounds like you are paying very close attention to the consultants recommendations and applying common sense.  I usually don't recommend specific people but if I owned your site I would ask Ryan Kent to do a paid consultation.

He just authored a Youmoz post on link problems and has been helping people with Panda and Penguin problems. Your April 24th drop could be related to Penguin as mentioned in his article.

I don't know if he can help.  He is a busy person.  But you can ask him if you are interested.

Did you ask this person  WHY?

I am just going to take a guess....... they think that images will cost about $1500 each to post and $50/each per month for bandwidth.

Some "expert" cousin told her some BS that you need to debunk.

Diagnosing panda and penguin problems on a site with a 13 year history and deciding what to do about them is really really difficult.

One of the dangers of asking in a forum is people tend to shoot from the hip with BS and partial knowledge and not enough time to..... study the site thoroughly,  ask you all of the necessary questions needed to understand the 13 year history of your site, write the book that is needed to educate you about the problem, and then give all of the advice needed to give you a shot at fixing your problem with no guarantees.

Expert advice requires the above.  That is why you see very little "expert" advice in forums for fixing panda and penguin problems.

In my opinion, the solution to your problem is going to involve detailed consulting and serious painful work on your part to get it solved.  You could be advised to do the near impossible work of cleaning a link profile or the heartbreaking work of dumping (or noindexing) reams of treasured content.

If this site is important to you I would recommend hiring a professional who fully understands panda / penguin problems, can spend the time needed to understand your site and has the guts to give you advice that will make you wince.

Can anyone tell me if I need to rewrite the content on the original site?  That is the only way I can think to make that not an issue.

I would do more than rewrite.  I would rewrite and make the new content ten times better.

A partial list of a domain's assets are...

-- content

-- traffic based upon keywords associated with that content

-- links

To take advantage of these you should do analytics on the domain to see what content pulls traffic, what content pulls links.  They see if there is a way to keep that content active and pulling traffic from the SERPs.

When I have purchased sites I have kept or rewritten lots of the content to avoid traffic loss for its keywords.  Then post that content on your main site and redirect the pages on the old site to hit that content.

This work might take a few days of study and repurposing for a small site but the traffic preserved and the strength of combining authority can be worth the effort.

..... and, as you suggest, keeping the site up and linking conservatively from it is an option... but if you get aggressive there is risk.

In our industry we have noticed a lot of competitors have been creating info sites and plugging them with content, then linking back to the site they want to push higher in rankings.

You are really lucky that these guys are not so smart.  When they build an info site with a store you better start prayin'.

The problem with my industry is the whole idea of link bait isn't very lucrative. There are no bloggers either, so guest blogging also isn't a very good option. Seems to me like the best thing I can do is just publish content!

I like these types of niches where there are very few sources of links.  So, when you do earn a link it is really really valuable!

That's where I use a content attack and create "how to use it".... "how to select it".....  "how to fix it"....   posts for lots of different products.  Competition might be numerous but they are usually weak - and typically none of them have what it takes to do the substative writing needed to make their site stand out.

My retail sites generally have more information pages than sales pages.

**So, publish a lot of quality content? LOL, sounds like that's right up Google's alley. **

Yep.  Some people have been doing this for years.  And lots of people wish that they had done that too.

Where do you publish your content.

I publish it on my site.  I don't give anything that I write away. Far too valuable to give away.

Anyone who is an author should want their personal Google+ page to be credited with their writing.  Then if they leave Employer A they can carry any prestige that they have earned to Employer B.

Although I am an employer and would like to see the company hold credit for work that they have funded, I think that employers who try to block employees from getting personal credit for their work are operating in low form.

Employers who allow employees to receive this type of credit may gain enormously in the future if that former employee does outstanding work and wins honors.

Also employers who hire authors of stature can benefit from the past work and fans of those individuals.

If you have excellent authors on your staff, treat them well, pay them fairly, allow them to be honored for their work and you have a good chance of retaining them.  For many authors the opportunity to earn recognition for their work is nearly as important to them as their rate of pay. So, if you cut that off, how do you think they will feel... and what will they think about you?

From what I have seen on sites that do not have active linkbuilding efforts - links arrive at a random pace, except for occasional spikes which are randomly distributed through time.

Yep.... That surprised me too.

If I owned this business I would not have to think about this question very long at all.

I would build the kids products into the current site.  There are many reasons why I would do this, and SEO is one of the lesser reasons.

With one site you can have fantastic cross selling.  Mother visits the site looking for her own costume and decides to get the same costume for her kids..  Now you sold three of them instead of one.  Same could happen the other way... mother looking for kids costume and decides to buy same for herself and maybe dad.  Now you sold four costumes to one customer.

You know how much more profitable the large shopping cart sales are compared to small shopping cart sales.

Also, you only have one site to maintain, one product database, one hosting, one security certificate, lots of savings of money and time.

This is wayyyy stronger branding.  Everybody talking about one great site instead of a couple small sites.

For SEO your current domain has great rankings and authority.  I guarantee that new kids product pages added to this site will rank immediately better than same pages on a new site with zero authority.

For popularity... mom shows photo of kids costume on facebook or her blog.. this gives a link or a "like" and spreads the word.  All of this attention is focused on ONE SITE not divided between two.

So, I say that you should DO THIS TODAY and stop spinning your wheels.  You will be making a lot more money right away!

Consider moving these identical, but different size items to a single page.

It sounds like you have some good content.  If if is original then move it to a new domain if you can't get rid of the bad links.

**It appears we're a little top heavy with 32% & 11% of are keywords containing 'coupons' and 'promotion codes' respectively. **

You understand the basic problem...  but you are sugar-coating it with the words "a little".  Get rid of all of these links or move any worthwhile content to a new domain.  After you have done than then stop "building links" and start earning them.

Adsense has worked everywhere for me.  Some better than others, but if I experiment with placement and appearance I can improve the yield.

If I had a page that really sucked with Adsense then I would be looking for a pay per impression network such as Burst or TribalFusion.

Thanks!

Sure you can make money.

You can make ad money.  Some ads promote political candidates - they want them shown to anyone.  Half of the people in this country want to weigh less - and weightloss ads can make money...  I could make a huge list here.

You can even sell product on your site that are impulse buys.  The conversion rate will be really low but you can still make money.

They get natural links very slowly.  Maybe 1 natural link every week.

Double the content.  They you get more traffic and 2 natural links per week.

Kick up the content with humor, video, great photos, useful stuff, higher quality... then you get 4 natural links per month.

The social media evangelists are going to give me the thumbs down.

For a B2B rat killer / bug man I don't think that a restaurant owner, hotels, bed and bath shop, clothing store, or just about any biz  will want to be chattering on your FB page.

Seriously!

However, I like the attitude that makes them want to do this.  IF they were my client I would instead try to channel that enthusiasm into website content.

If they think that FB is important thing to do then go to some of their competitors FB pages to see if they are using it effectively.

Kenny,

The rankings history chart is broken.  It can not be viewed.

If I go to http://ranktracker.seomoz.org/ and click on a keyword and then click "ranking history" a pop-up window appears.  However it is empty.

I have done this in firefox, IE and Chrome.

This charts are fantastic if they work, however, they have not worked for me for the past few months.

If you google any of the text on this FAQ page you will see that google has it indexed.

http://irbigbreak.com/faq/

That is really funny.

SEOMoz needs a 10x button for thumbs up.  I am going to spam Rands email until they give us one.   They should also have a 100x thumbs up that a member can only use once per year.  I would have used it today..

Thank you, Marcus.

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

Seriously.... too many people see that a domain is registered and don't track down the owner to make an offer or ask what he wants for it.  Anybody who registers www.I-wanted-whitby-jet-but-this-was-all-that-was-left.com without getting in touch with the owner of whitbyjet.com needs a kick in the pants.

Great to hear that you are going to be "The Man" for Whitby Jet.

Owning this domain will give you immediate credibility.  From my experience, this type of domain can have a much better conversion rate and fetch higher prices than selling the same product on a jewelry site.

If I was going into this business I would have paid $X000 - maybe more for this domain.

It is a one time cost.

I don't know anything about the market for Whitby Jet but I would pay $300 without flinching one bit.

I've paid many times that amount for domains.

Having the proper domain gives me enormous mental energy.  It makes me want to work on the site and make it the best in its niche.  If I bought whitbyjet.com that would make me "The Man" for that product and everybody else in that niche would be in deep trouble.

Mental energy and enthusiasm are valuable weapons and when used properly will defeat powerful foes.

Are you going to be "The Man" in this niche or what?

(paying for domains in a private sale and transferring domains can take a while... I would not be panicking after one week)

I have tried to use it several times over the page few months using firefox. IE and chrome.

It does not work for me.

Thanks for the report, Roy.

I am still not seeing anything on my sites.

So far, Google + is not worth the time.

If you have thousands of articles that are not pulling search traffic, dropping them from your site allows the PR that's trapped in those pages to flow into the rest of the site.

Great question, Doug. 

We file the news blurbs into folders by date (year or month).  When we abandon a folder we place an .htaccess file in that folder with specific redirects as the first few lines and then a wildcard redirect as last line.

Looks like this....

Redirect 301 /blog/2010/story-1.shtml  http://mysite.com/blog/2012/replacement-for-story-1.html
Redirect 301 /blog/2010/story-2.shtml  http://mysite.com/blog/2012/replacement-for-story-2.html
redirectMatch 301 ^/blog/2010/ http://mysite.com/blog/

My bet is that the people who do this bookmarking don't give a hoot about your site.  They are only doing this as a task... and the only traffic that you will get from these bookmarks is the person who visits your site one time to make them.

I would not call these spam links.  I would call them dangerous spam links.

Its great to know that your client has domain.com.  Excellent.

However, almost everyone with that type of domain faces competitors who have domain.net and bestdomain.com and an unlimited number of other variants.

The best thing for you to do is to keep working hard on the client's site to be sure that these other domains stay below you.

If your client owns domain.com that makes him "The Man".   Use that to full advantage.

We put out at least a thousand very short news blurbs per year.  These are mostly for events that have almost no value to visitors a few months later. (Visitors bounce off hard)

About once a year we run analytics on these pages to find out which ones are pulling traffic.  This traffic is usually related to the topic but not to the out-of-date event.  Where we have nice traffic coming in we look for a similar current topic, write a short story and redirect the old URL to the new one.

Any pages that do not have nice  traffic are deleted and redirected to the blog homepage.  Some of these deleted pages have links so that value is passed to the homepage - which faces competition.

In my opinion, having lots of pages on your site that are not pulling in traffic and have no value to visitors is like dead weight.  You will ride higher in the water and sail faster if you toss them overboard.

I hope that my competitors are doing this.

Six months ago I would have thought that this would be very very low on the effectiveness scale - especially if you are targeting anything moderately competitive or better.

Today, after penguin, I think that it would be ineffective and slightly risky.