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Does it matter which version is getting ranked the best in the eyes of Google in terms of which URL's we chose to 301?
If I was doing this I would redirect the pages that rank lowest. The page that ranks highest is there for a reason.
**If we 301 a version that is getting ranked well in Google, does this hurt us in any way? **
I don't know... but your other pages are not ranking as well for a reason.
STICK WITH A WINNER! (However, I might work to improve that page.)
I never have bought links and have not copied any content although I know i should try and add more content to my website.
Probably a good idea to read both of the blog posts below and follow your own advice on duplicate content. (these are just two examples). You might be cutting your own throat....
http://www.websitedesign-miltonkeynes.com/what-is-duplicate-content/
http://northampton-websitedesign.co.uk/?p=258
Also, you got advice on this same question here about two weeks ago and never responded to them.... (I recommend reading replies #6 and #10)
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/need-seo-help-458271.html
Seeing that there are only ten positions on the first page of google, your chances are not good.
First make an outline of what visitors to your site "need to know" or "want to know".
Then write articles that address that content, crafting each one to target a keyword or two related to your topic.
After that you have a basic website that is worthy of visitors.
Then write supplemental articles that add more information where it is useful. Craft these to target secondary keywords.
I think that your time would be better spent working on your own site - especially after you have already gotten one or two posts on these "unspammed" blogs.
Yes.
Powerpoint files, word files, pdf documents can all be indexed, accumulate pagerank and pass link value.
I see lots of what appear to be "opinions" as answers here.
Does anyone have a link to an article with data that clearly ties keyword links in articles that connect to pages on the same site being a genuine problem that has been penalized? A video or blog post where a Googler such as Matt Cutts is quoted would also be great proof.
If this was a problem then sites like Wikipedia would be in big trouble.
Good luck to you.
I think that it is very difficult to find an author who can write highly competitive content - no matter how much you pay them.
If you look at what is already on the web, ranking on the first two pages of google - that is what you need to beat. If the content can not beat that then I don't think that the "publish and forget it" method will work well.
We have got 1500 words + 15-20 high definition images + videos
Oh... thanks for adding that. It sounds like you deserve to be winning.
The articles that you are producing sound a lot like mine. They usually start out deep in the SERPs but over time they slowly climb the rankings. A year later, maybe two, they are at or near the top of google for their target keywords.
It is really slow progress, but instead of spending time/money on low quality links, I allow things to happen naturally and spend my time on another article.
hmmm...... you have fifteen hundred words...
They have two hundred words and six nice images and a video?
Imagine the contrast in the first impressions of a visitor...
Six juicy images and a video vs a block or black and white text.
I think just about anybody anywhere would rather watch a video and look at six nice images.
If I was you I would be buying a digital camera.
To be honest, I have the same frustrations as you do. I can't say if their satellite blogs are making an impact. But I think that you can make a better first impression if the visitors to your page see a big nice image above the fold and maybe more of them below. A digital camera will help a lot and if you don't have the topics needed you can license some really nice images from istockphoto for not a lot of money. I usually spend quite a bit of money getting props for images, paying someone for custom graphics. When I add them to an article the visitor stays a lot longer and I assume that it really helps with social sharing.
.pdf documents are indexed and will compete in the search results along with web pages. They accumulate pagerank and any links on them are followed and credited the same as a web page.
So, if you have copies of your webpages in pdf format then you should expect them to attract at least some of the traffic that would have gone to your webpage. It is possible for them to rank higher than your webpages - especially if you optimize them by giving them document titles.
I believe that they can lead to duplicate content problems. I have lots of pdfs on my sites. To prevent duplicate content problems I have used htaccess to rel=canonical them to the corresponding webpage.
Plenty of webmasters do not link out for selfish or strategic reasons.....
... but the web is all about linking. That is why they call it "the web".
I link out a lot. I believe that it makes my pages richer information sources. I believe that it builds credibility.
If you were a visitor would you prefer a page that has no links or the same page that links out to information sources, sites with great information on directly related subjects? Which of those would be recommended more via tweets, links, likes, emails?
So, my vote is that google gives credit for linking out and even if they don't your visitors will.
Every word of content that I write on the topic areas of my business is posted on my website.
I give nothing away.
I don't want to feed my competitors and create new ones.
I recently joined a retail company... So far we haven't been hit but i'm not naive to think we're out of the woods yet.
hmmm..... If I was a new guy and had this situation... I would think about writing a very clear one-page memo to my bosses explaining... "what is penguin".... Show examples of your spammy links... explain what might happen to your rankings... and say what % of your traffic comes from google... and how that might hit revenue.
I would include a couple links to easy-to-understand articles about penguin by well known SEOs.
You don't want to be blamed for a disaster that occurs this summer that was caused by somebody else.
I would not bad-mouth the last SEO or the methods... lots of people did this stuff and continue to do it... just explain the risk and how to reduce it.
If you have a "message to get out" then give that article to everybody everywhere.
If you hope that the article will attract traffic, likes, tweets, etc for your site then publish it on your site and on your site only.
Don't give your best content to anybody or they will get your traffic, likes, tweets, etc. Plus they will compete against you for your own keywords. And, that will give you duplicate content.
The only exception to the above is if you can place the article on a site where it will be seen by many many many more people than will see it on your own site.
Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches
Nice work! WooHoo!
I don't know how Google will do this - or if they will.... but if I was the boss at Google, each crappy post on the blog would increase the odor of the entire domain... and anchor text links would have their juice cut by 90%.
Thanks for the link.
I have them on lots of pages and am not worried about them... but they are not "overstuffed".
Can anyone suggest one reason why google would consider meta keywords a sin?
If nobody has good reasons then I doubt that google would penalize for them.
How do you think Google will determine which guest post links to devalue?
The ones with crappy content that have keyword anchor text links pointing to other domains.... and the domains that they point to have lots of other crappy content on lots of other crappy blogs that have keyword anchor text content.
What a story!
This site has seen a lot of hatchet carpentry.
If I inherited this site I would hire a wordpress expert who has an established ongoing business and who also is an expert SEO. That way I would have someone who will probably be standing in my corner long term. I would want the person to have BOTH sets of expertise because an expert at WP and an expert at SEO allows things to fall through the cracks.
Anybody who is going to put ongoing effort into a website needs an expert with the site technology and an expert at SEO getting them set up and off to a great start (or a restart in this situation).
This type of expertise is hard to find and will likely cost a bit more but the results in the long run will be better.
I think that 45 words is too much. I would use a title. Or a title and a few words. Or, a title and a sexy sentence.
Last, a new question: Can you think of ANY good reason to put blog excerpts in a site-wide footer the way http://springboard.com/ and http://seoaware.com do?
Yes, but only until I had time to do something better.
Yes, straight links, "in theory" should be ok.
But speaking from the perspective of the website owner, you will never find one of my sites with sitewide links to web devs.... and especially not to SEOs or hosting providers.
I think that it will do nothing at all that is positive for my site.
These are in the footer? How many people are going all the way down there and clicking on them? I bet nobody. If nobody is clicking them then why do this?
I would run crazyegg on a few pages to see if anybody is clicking these links.
The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500.
If you really want to get people into these posts your best bet would be to link to relevant rather than random? Don't you think?
Almost any blog that has 500 posts is going to have some really good ones and some real sleepers. I would focus on promoting the really good ones if you want people to click these.
Promote your best. Not random.
So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts.
Eighty five words for each? Wow... that is a lot... Way more than I would use. How a bout a title and ten words. Nobody is going to read these.
I think that you could run into duplicate content issues with this - even though they are shuffled randomly.
Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique?
You can see my answers above. I think that the footer is bad location and I think that you should promote your best instead of random.
Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog).
I would not use nofollow on links within my own website. When you use nofollow the pagerank that would have flowed into those links evaporates. It is lost. Poof! Instead, allow the pagerank to flow into these pages and out through their links. If you nofollow you cut off the power.
Artists have always signed their work. It is a good thing to do for many reasons and it benefits people beyond the artist.
Web devs continued the tradition of signing their work when they built the first websites for others.
However, when they realized that a link might help their rankings they stopped signing and began linking. Some might have linked their signatures prior to that, just to make it easy for people to visit their websites.
When they realized that keyword anchor text might also be beneficial for search engine rankings they stopped linking their signatures and began linking their keywords.
In an honest assessment, any thoughtful person should conclude that keyword links are done for manipulation. Linked signatures might not be manipulative, but some probably are.
I am not a web dev but if I was I wouldn't be linking my keywords.
I have some articles that go 4000 to 5000 words accompanied by up to ten images, two videos, tables of data and reference lists that link out to many other websites.
These are some of the best performing pages on my sites.
These long pages provide broad and deep coverage of single topics and information about that topic that appeals to many people... .and the volume of long-tail keywords that these pages attract surprises me.
Although these pages rank in the top three positions on google for their root keyword the long tail traffic exceeds the head traffic by over an order of magnitude. That can vary depending upon the sophistication of searchers and diversity of subtopics in the niche.
The person who captures the high ground early can hold a long term advantage.
Since you are below them, crafting an extremely good title tag and snippet is essential to win clicks away from them. Offer surprise, mystery, free shipping, kickass price or free beer in your title to win traffic into your site.
I have lots of articles of various lengths on my website.
I have also been improving lots of short content that was written a few years ago.
The articles that perform best are those that make a very detailed presentation about the topic and are long enough to address the most important subtopics that you would find doing keyword research. These typically go a minimum of 1000 words and can be as long as several thousand - in addition they have many photos, sometimes graphs, sometimes data tables or a video.
These long articles rank well and get LOTS of long tail keyword traffic. Think about it... there are a large number of different relevant words on the page and I addressed all of the major keyword topics for the subject area.
Years ago I tossed up a lot of short pages that have 30 to 50 words and a photo about a topic, then a couple years later I upgraded them to a couple hundred words and a couple photos, now I am making them 1000-3000 words and 6 to 12 photos. With each improvement rankings improved and long tail traffic exploded.
I don't break the long articles into several pages - that would kill a lot of the long tail keyword combinations, the article would not be as impressive in presentation, and don't you hate clicking through those long articles that span a dozen pages that are very slow to load?
Even if the article is monetized on the basis of pageviews I believe that the improved rankings and traffic will make up for the pageview loss. Plus the increased sharing will be a bonus.
Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content?
Google can be slow to detect duplicate content and sometimes tolerates it.
Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"?
Only google knows.
Why has only one site recovered?
Only google knows.
Google sees a lot of sites with same content and you say that these are "med-large" sites. If I was google I would say... "these are dupe content, we aren't going to index all of them, our searchers don't want to see ten sites with same stuff".
If these were my sites I would merge all of them into one single site. If the content on that site was unique to me I would probably then put all of my efforts into promotion and informative content for the product lines.
If the content was on other sites that I don't own then my efforts would go mainly into making unique product content and informative content for the product lines.
Google has been squashing duplicate content for years. If you have it and you place links between the sites it is very likely that at least one of your sites will be demoted in google or filtered - probably filtered. They don't want to spend their resources indexing ten duplicate sites. They would rather display unique sites to their searchers.
"you need to fix whatever issues are there, wait for the algorithm to process again, and then if you've solved the issues, you should theoretically restore the rankings. That's much easier said than done. You don't know exactly what the issues are, and we don't know when the algo will process again."
I agree with this 100%.
These types of problems can be fixed and then must wait until google reevaluates and then republishes back into the SERPs. Sites that are hit with these types of problems escape in batches - not when things are fixed.
So, you could do great work, get it fixed on 25th day and then google does not reprocess and republish for 60 more days and some other SEO gets credit for your hard work.
I don't think pointing good links into the site will get rid of the issue with the problematic links and clear you of the algo.
Exactly... What are good links? Your "added" links will not be natural.
I am being logged out too.
If possible I would like to remain logged in.
Best on the web?
Your costs could include: content area expert, editor, photographer plus money spent on props and perhaps travel, data acquisition and analysis, graphic artist to illustrate.
A several hundred dollars on the lowest side for something that the author can write off the top of his head and supply photos from his personal collection.... several thousand dollars for something that can be done without much research and travel.... to a boatload of cash for something like a great National Geographic article.
.....are requesting i put a link on my home page...
The Pope can't get a link on my homepage.
The opinions that you get on this will vary depending upon the content development skills of the person who is speaking and their tolerance of creating competition for their own websites.
I would not do any of the following.....
*Writing quality articles for external blogs with keyword links back to sites
*Taking the above articles and spinning them at SEOLINKVINE to create several articles
*Writing quality articles for every site's internal blog and using keywords to link out to other sites that are on different servers - All articles are original, varied and not duplicate content.
*Writing quality, relevant articles and submitting them to places like Ezine
I don't want to be one of those sites that gets 1500 hits a day & no calls.
I have sites getting 100,000 / day and no calls... but we run adsense.
Maybe you should start selling something... what impulse buy could you offer?
Let's say that your old rankings were #3s #2s and #1s.
If the new pages and new keywords are ranking at #5s #6s and #7s then CTR would be expected to go down. Right?
So compare average ranking to average CTR.
Alternative is that competitors have more appeal in their title tag. Maybe offering free beer!
If you want him to be pleased with the service that you provide then it is your job to educate him.
Sounds like a smart client to me.
What have you done for him lately?
Just send a spreadsheet with the URLs where his links are located. Easy.
If they are links on sites that he respects then he will love it.
If they are crap comments on forums that make him look like a fool then he will not like it.
If I had DA of 73, MozRank 5.40, MozTrust 5.88, and over 45,000 external links..... my thought would be... what will a cheap link package do to help?
I would spend some time doing something for the site that visitors will enjoy. I think that you will get more impact from that.
I am worried that Google will see this is unnatural,
Does your friend know about Penguin, Panda, etc. and understand what they are about?
I would spend the money on beer.
When I have a page that is getting a lot of attention I write pages on related topics and link to them from the popular page. Do your best to target different keywords but if that is not natural you might be rewarded with #1 and #2 listing for that keyword.
I would bet big money that Todd is right. When I landed I was thinking.... "Huh? Where's the content?"
These pages are really lean above the fold. Lots of wasted space. Huge gutter at the top, lots of redundant, and big eye sinks on the right and left.
I would frame the page and get some darker solid-color background around the design to hold eyes in on the content.
We use the "Authorize Verified Merchant" as a trust logo..... plus you can put up something like.... 45,000 satisfied customers in 2011.
I have been thinking about BBB because it would give me a trust logo and a link from their site to mine. The cost is about $400. Anbody have any strong opinions on BBB?
I am waiting for someone to draw one with a monitor flying at him. 
Most of the sites that I own are exact match keyword domains. I think that they still have some bonus value in the search engines but I believe that they were cut significantly in February 2011.
If you have domains like GardenFurniture.com or LawnMowers.com then I might agree with you and use the method that you propose.... however, if you have domains like LawnMowerReview.com then I would strongly vote for putting everything into one huge site.
Anybody can register a domain like LawnMowerBob or LawnMowerSomething... why should google give extra credit for that?
In my opinion the "exact match" keyword domains are effective, but "keywords in the domain" are nothing special.
And... any linking that you would do between your sixteen sites would be more dangerous than valuable.
That's just one opinion... but my opinion on this is firm enough that I would use it as a rule for my business.