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Guest posts are being targeted actively by Google - so aren't necessarily a good idea just for SEO. If you are going to go that route, then just make sure that:
Good luck
Did your re-design include deleting these pages? If so, then just create a new sitemap.xml and submit it to GWMT then mark it as fixed. They usually stop searching for the missing page pretty quickly...
Improving your speed will help more from an SEO perspective as Google likes to count it towards the 'visitor experience'. Country specific really makes little difference these days, especially as many businesses use content caching such as Cloudflare - which could be based anywhere.
Unfortunately not. If he blocked crawlers from his site for long enough, they would eventually give up and treat the site as though it was gone from the Internet. If he doesn't rank now, he will effectively be starting from scratch.
Indeed you are doing fine if you are getting improvements in search engine results. Whether he will return to page 1 or not depends on many factors, such as how much his websites has changed, how many links have been built during that period, what other websites have done during that time and any Google updates that might have affected his linkbuilding.
I wish you the best of success - but you will need to be honest with him and tell him the damage he did by blocking search engine crawlers. Doing THAT was 100% not your fault.
Alan pretty much summed it up. ONLY go for quality backlinks that happen naturally. If you link profile is over optimized for your keywords you could dilute it with other keywords such as 'click here' or 'read more'.
However, if this is a manual penalty, then you're going to need to get those links removed as best as you can and then submit a reconsideration request to Google.
There are a whole bunch of alternatives - all with their pro's, cons and prices. Here's the ones I can think of from the top of my head:
ChartBeat
GetClicky
Kissmetrics
Woopra
Reinvigorate
Piwik
Open Web Analytics
Mint
GoSquared
StatCounter
Would it be out of the question to ban the members for violating your TOS and delete their profiles?
Aside from that, if your site is big and has many members etc, I dont think people building spammy links to your site will hurt your SEO. What does OSE or ahrefs say about your anchor text profile? Are these user campaigns having any affect?
There aren't really any SEO qualifications that are worth anything. However having a good understanding of Google Analytics will help you in your own SEO campaigns - and you can get a qualification for that: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/
I know you've seen them already, but there is so much information from reputable sources (such as SEOMoz) that I would spend some time reading their guides. There are also a ton of books on the topic at Amazon - just look for something with good feedback.
Hope this helps,
Disavowing links is ok, but won't remove any penalty in place (if you have one). I do use it as part of my efforts to help clients that have been hit and include this in the documentation I send to google for the reconsideration request. Not had a request rejected so far...but then I've only had to do 10 or so.
You can buy them pre-compiled from places like fiverr. Don't get over excited though...directory links are worth about as much as you'll pay for the list itself 
Duplicate page content.... or duplicate post?
Anyway, having separate title tags for each page helps searchers get a good idea of what the page content is about and provides an SEO boost if they include your keywords. Try to keep it relevant to the page and only squeeze in keywords where it's natural to do so.
If you are running Wordpress, then you can use the excellent Yoast plugin to make SEO title tags easier to change.
Also, the video is pretty hard to see...screenshots might work better.
As meta keywords - no. As part of your meta description - maybe. Like with your body text, it must flow naturally.
Your meta description should contain your main keyphrases, by which time you wont have much room left for anything else as Google only looks at the first 150 - 160 characters anyway. Anything beyond that a) will get truncated and b) looks like keyword stuffing.
In your case, I'd focus on sliding the LSI keywords in to your body content where natural and not worry about including them in your description.
p.s It should go without saying that 'meta keywords' holds pretty much zero value in SEO anymore. Even Yahoo doesnt care about them much these days.
Further reading: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description
Not necessarily. I run a news website that covers current affairs. And as my site is in a small niche but has good domain authority, it ranks well for many random search terms. My bounce rate is about 83% but still ranks #1 for all my main keywords.
Naturally, I'd prefer if it were lower, but it does show that it's not a critical factor. I'm pretty sure it counts a lot more when Google calculates your quality score in AdWords however.
There are still plenty of people selling SAPE links and they still work. But as a large part of the network is made up of hacked websites, I think Google will target the people at the end of the link rather than the victim website itself, which is probably why it's taking time to crack down on it. It's a targeted penalty rather than an algo update to find & destroy it.
This is not a 'sandbox'. A site that is being affected in this way won't show any results in the index for a period of time. If you've dropped to page 6 all of the sudden, this is more likely a penalty. The example of the keyword you search for makes it sound more like an EMD(exact match domain) penalty if there is one.
Anyway, as Andy said, if it's a penalty then you would probably have been advised in Google Webmaster Tools - although it's possible that you wont get a notification if it's an EMD penalty.
And even Google has said that buying AdWords does nothing to boost your organic results.
Having built 7 websites with the same features you describe, I found Wordpress to have the shortest learning curve.
I did try Drupal as well, but found plugin support for Wordpress to be more readily available. That was support that i desperately needed to make my projects work too.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who can recommend Drupal as well. Simplest way is to try both and see which you are more comfortable working with. It's free to find out after all!
That depends on what percentage of your links are made up using those keywords. Negative SEO usually takes a LOT more effort than building a few crappy links to your website. The same has been done to some of my client sites in the past and it's not made any difference to their SERPs
Anyway, the simplest solution here is to login to Google Webmaster tools and use the Disavow Links tool so that at least they won't count towards your backlink profile.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487
Hope this helps.
Whilst I do agree with Federico, it is also possible to 301 those old sites to the new one and enjoy about 85% of the linkjuice they had. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why one might do this - indeed I once closed 4 separate websites and 301'd them to my new site in order as the business we being consolidated. None of this was about building a private link network at the time...that's just how it worked out. Anyway, my new site went from PR0 to PR3 at the next toolbar PR update and has been fine for 3 years+
Just my 2 pence...
From other blog posts and my also from own experience, you are losing approx 15% linkjuice for each 301 hop. Too many hops and Google will give up ...Matt Cutts recommended not having more than 2 or at the most 3 redirect hops for googebot to crawl.
+1 to Jesse's reply. This is usually a case of having blocked Google's crawlers from your site. Under such circumstances, Google webmaster tools will report this as an 'issue'.
This is very easy to achieve. If they bought a couple of domain names with decent domain authority and 301 re-directed them to this new site, then they will boost up their own authority. At the same time, no links will be seen in any link index.
Google weights most of its SEO 'strength' to the actual domain name iteself - and even then, from left to right i.e the further right your main keyword is, the less juice it will get.
However, if you have relevant content on the page and name the page accordingly then you are making what is called an 'seo friendly' URL. Many people who use Wordpress for example, change their permalinks to change the url from something like mysite.com/p1 to mysite.com/keyword - which WILL make a difference, albeit not a huge one.
So if it's straightforward for you to do so, then by all means do it. Outside of SEO it will help your visitors better understand what the page is about, and will look a lot prettier in the SERPs too.
Also, rather than 301'ing each page, you may be able to change the structure of your permalinks within your .htaccess file so that it will happen automatically e.g by naming the file with the title of your page or postname.
Hope this helps...
Unfortunately I doubt anyone will point you to a resource that can do this.
First off, there are very few services that can give you an accurate representation of the links pointing to your site (you are however look at one site that can). Secondly, a link can be very hard to categorise because the site itself may not be in any particular category.
For example, I could have a webpage on my own site that I place links on as part of a link exchange. Then after 5 years, I've got so many that it becomes effectivley a directory.
A category for a type of link site is only a term given to it by humans in order to describe it. There is no semantic markup (none thats adhered to anyway) to describe the purpose of a site, be it directory, blog or otherwise.
Here's hoping that another mozzer proves me wrong, at which point I'll go and write an SEO tool that even Moz can't touch!
Indeed, that holding page left me salivating!
I agree, it only has loose ties to SEO, just wanted some thoughts on it. +1 for the idea of PR Web though.
My largest client, a financial services outfit are about to launch a major new service. As part of this, their PR agency is about to issue a press release that will go to financial journalists and the whole stock exchange.
Is there some way, as their SEO advisor, that I can increase the impact of this and help them to further benefit?
Thanks in advance...
I'd recommend you steer clear of sitewide links from B to A. The majority of your duplicate links will be disregarded by search engines and they look like spam. Far better to put one link on the homepage of B and have 1 authority link instead of 400,000 discounted ones from PR0 pages (which I will assume most of them are?). Its always better to have links from diverse sources than many links from one source - even if its a notable one.
Good luck.
You'll be just fine with that until a competitor or disgruntled customer reports you to Google and they look into it. At which point you'll be hit hard for offering paid links, as will anyone who you link to as a result.
I'd want to be making a FAT wad of cash before I allowed the above to happen. Certainly not something I'd consider for a site that made any sort of income for me anyway...
I've help a couple of my clients to set this up. It's a double edged sword because if they dont stay on top of it and keep it up to date, the Facebook page looks like old news and will give a negatove slant towards reputation management for them. If they do work at it though, they can benefit assuming that anyone on Facebook cares a damn about their products or services. I have a client who repairs boilers. He's #1 in Google for all his terms but nobody cares about boiler repair on Facebook.
If you can:
then it can help. People who read something amusing or captivating on Facebook are far more likely to check out a link to the site owners web page. It just needs some real effort and proper thought. The odd post saying something uninteresting just wont help. In which case, its a waste of energy IMHO.
I've tried this before. There's no real way to do it, particularly because you cant place GA code on your Facebook fanpage. Sorry to be late in answering AND the bearer of bad news!
At least you can relax now
Yup, these guys are excellent:
http://www.yourprivateproxy.com/
I've used them for search requests, map requests and even Scrapebox. Always available, low ping, not shared and reasonably priced for the 10 pack. Their user interface is simple and they get you up and running quick.
I'm starting to sound like an affiliate so I'll leave it at that.
Here's 20 (with PR listed) to get you started.
http://www.web-directories.ws/Regional/North_America/Quebec/
Enjoy!
Assuming each site is different, I'd say that Trip Advisor has more mentions of the hotel name and 'relevant content' than your own website. It's a PITA but I've seen this happen. In some ways, I suppose it's a good thing. If of course you have good review on TA. In my experience, where I've seen this before (twice) the original hotel site eventually outranks TA.
I'd suggest you dont lose any real sleep over it. If TA reviews are good and your website has plenty of relevant content, you'll get there and visitors to both sites wont care much anyway
Rackspace are also very pro. Not used them myself but heard good things about them too...
I actually went to Dreamhost who are a smaller company but serving some BIG customers. Many including myself migrated my 100+ domains to them having had enough of Hostgator. They don't use cPanel but have their own friendly but powerful interface which works well. Tech support is also much better than Hostgator (who I actually didnt find too bad).
From memory they offer a 30 day trial membership where you could check it out. And no Im not a rep or I'd have my affiliate link here. (you checked if that was a link didn't you?).
Hope this helps,
GZ
Hey! I Cant believe that nobody has answered this...
Yes I would say that any site with a mobile version should have a seperate sitemap for it, it does count and Google likes it as it makes it easier to crawl and index for them. Just make sure that:
Your mobile sitemap ONLY contains URLs that serve mobile content (otherwise they get ignored).
Make sure all URLs have the mobile:mobiletag.</mobile:mobile>
Have fun!
Dan
I agree with the post above, you're going to have to cut down on the info. Some great tips and answers to your questions can be found in this webinar from Moz that is well worth a look!
http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/everything-you-didn't-know-about-infographics
Google definitely do split testing. Like Kane said, I've also had differing results from the same account, plus they also bring in changes then withdraw them again a few days later!
I'd say that if its there 2 weeks later, it's probably there to stay and SEOs are going to be talking about it at SEO roundtable / SEL etc.
See how it pans out before jumping to any conclusions.
Hey Brant!
I'd go with the sub-domain route like es.yoursits.com and have the Spanish pages right there. In my experience, I've created multi-language sites and not run into duplicate content issues.
Secondly, Google translate does a kind of dictionary translation that may not read so well by your target audience. If at all possible, find someone who can translate the pages for you. Spanish is a common language so you may know someone who can do that for you. If this isn't the case, you could try the url below, I've used this provider before and had good results. May not be viable if you have a lot of text to translate though.
http://fiverr.com/newwealth/do-small-english-to-spanish-translations
Hope this helps,
Dan
Ah, when you said ad units, I assumed you mean AdSense. In terms of non G ads, I run 4 per page with no issues. You could probably stretch this to 6 though.
So did you meet any other mozzers?
Im amazed that nobody commented on this. You may post up to 3 AdUnits per page. As long as you follow the rest of the guidlines, you should have no problems. I have a couple of adsense sites that do just fine as long as I follow the rules
"You may place up to three link units on a page, in addition to the three standard ad units, and two search boxes. Just make sure the page complies with our program policies. "
Hope this helps,
Are the pages mostly duplicate content? Do you know how many have been indexed?
If it's a lot, then yes, noindexing them will make it look like your site has dropped a ton of content. But if it's duplicate then I'd go for it anyway as it will probably help things.
Alternatively, how about removing them from the sitemap instead? They may still get found but at least you're giving them a clue that those pages don't matter to you.
Chicken and egg. Writing great content is a good idea...but if nobody can find it, nobody will link to it?
I'd expand on the above idea and suggest writing a great article then perhaps push it out through Digg so that people will see it and likely talk about/links to it. Works for me anyway.
Good luck!