Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Has it penalized you, or just the links got devalued? Are you ranking for brand KWs? If so, don't waste time - keep building.

You can try Ontolo's link building query generator tool:

http://ontolo.com/link-building-query-generator-V2

Citation Labs also has great link building tools for finding prospects:

http://searchnewscentral.com/20120404276/Tool-Reviews/15-min-showdown-with-the-link-prospector-tool-from-citation-labs.html

Test them on a dummy site if you have the budget, or on some pages that already link to you.

Interesting question:

I would set up with goals as you mentioned.

GWO can screw up your rankings and is not advised - speaking from personal experience.

Separately, with tens of millions of pages, maybe the basic problem is

1. getting more links

2. trimming the fat and seeing if you can consolidate certain pages together.

Do more to differentiate them insofar as it's possible. Interview people from different countries for the respective sites, for example.

do you guys have any recommended resources on learning GWO?

Well, the test I just ended showed me, in the previews, all the same instead of the variations I thought I'd created...

In the past, tests I tried setting up just simply didn't work. Wordpress is quite difficult in spite of plugins and assertions to the contrary.

I've tried several times to use GWO, and I can handle copy-pasting some code etc... yet despite this, it seems that I can't get GWO right. Furthermore, it appears to me that a lot of the things you'd like to test require fancier manipulation of GWO than the standard setup allows for.

Do you guys also find GWO to lack user-friendliness? Are other platforms easier to use and get right?

Invite the public to submit questions and vote on them. Everyone wants a crack at asking a celeb a question...

Saying you need a history there is like saying you have to have existed to start a new business, which is illogical. By that reasoning, a new business could never get started, nor could businesses ever expand their geographic scope of operations.

A more relevant issue is having the resources to market yourself in 20 new communities. (I think this is what EGOL was getting at about having a presence in each town.) First, that means you're limiting your ability to get word of mouth to work for you. Second, it means you'll need to get links for at least 20 places. That's a lot of networking/resources ... Wouldn't it be smarter to go for a handful of surrounding towns to start? It's more manageable, and gives you better odds with WOM.

These links likely aren't bringing much if any traffic, so it's a moot point here, imho.

I don't see the connection to bounce rate? You mean click traffic or search traffic.

I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.

A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that...

and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text... nice number of footprints.)

Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page's keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don't want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda's filter. They've got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original...).

So I'm thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.

Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I'm considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I'm open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.

What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?

p.s. I'm asking this on my blog (seoroi.com/blog/ ) too, so if you're up for me to quote you (and link to your site, do say so. You aren't guaranteed to be quoted if you answer here, but it's one of the easier ways you'll get a good quality link.

p.p.s. Related note: I'm looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for my blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you're interested. You can also PM me here on SEOmoz, though I don't login as frequently.

Are we talking spam automated links, paid links, or something else?

If it's spam auto links - they'll get banned sooner or later.

If it's paid - read up on how to minimize the risk and jump in. Intermediate sites are one approach.

If it's paid - point out the risks of penalties to people selling the links. "OMG, my site can be banned. No wayyyyyy! Why didn't they say so! Nofollow!"

1. Keyword difficulty is useful to sort equally-well converting keywords on PPC and see what to SEO for first. ID the low hanging fruit. 2) I just finished a link analysis training with a client. Honestly, it's shooting fish in a barrel with OSE. And if you can answer WHY you're getting links and from WHOM, you can expand on that and rank #1.

Would it not be easier to get the lead gen / advertising / monetization stuff to transfer over to the other domain as well? Presumably if its a choice-of-where-to-advertise thing you can influence them to see the light; if it's that B has a stronger brand / greater ability to convert, then perhaps a moderate rebranding to tie the two together (and thus use testimonials from A on B can work?) Easier to control logos and colors than google's algo...

The question that matters is what does SEO need from URLs?

1. That they be static.

2. That they feature your keywords.

What does Big Commerce do?

1. Provide static URLs (at least, based on what you've shown; I'm not a salesman or anything and have no affiliation)

2. Features product name (which presumably you control, and can thus include long tail KWs).

Granted, it's slightly less easy to type out the product page URLs for anyone wanting to link (they need to remember the caps and .html) but that's the least of your issues. I'd imagine you can just set up a 301 to make the urls typed in redirect if they get the casing wrong.

Lastly, regarding custom URLs, consider scalability. If the store succeeds ... are you really going to give each product page a custom URL manually? Not likely... So it's not that important.