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Don't bother with plugins with this one.

Simply go to http://maps.google.com and pull up your address on the map. Once your location appears, click the "link" icon in the upper left (next to the printer icon). That will give you the HTML that you can then copy and post onto your contact page.

To do this, open the Contact page in Wordpress and switch to HTML view in the content section. Then simply paste the script you copied from Google Maps onto the page where you want it to display. This will not only embed the map on the page, but also allow visitors to interact with it right on the page.

Good luck!

There's a free XML sitemap creator at http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp. Not only will it create a sitemap for you that you can upload, but will also show you any internal bad links which can cause you the biggest problems.

Outside of that Webmaster Tools will be your most effective tool for catching those external sites linking to your old or missing pages. Be sure to reach out to repeat offenders and ask them to update their links to you.

Chris Horton

Horton SEO

http://www.hortonseo.com

I can definitely understand the frustration, but Google won't penalize sites for simply having duplicate content, and especially storefronts. Many merchants are provided with photos and product descriptions by the distributor, and when you're talking about hundreds or even thousands of products, it just not feasible for a merchant to change all of the descriptions and even more so if your inventory is changing on a monthly or even weekly basis. Then all of your changes get overwritten with the new upload.

A good example would be the SMC websites that you see on late night TV where they send out a CD with products to thousands of customers and 98% of them just upload the database into their stores with little to no alteration.  They won't be penalized, but they just won't be able to sell much.

In those cases, the sites aren't going to be penalized. And if those sites are ranking well without changing the content, then Google is definitely looking at other factors to make that decision (traffic, bounce rate, time on site, etc.).

The sites Google are penalizing are the ones that intentionally try to game the system by stripping content from other sites and reposting them with literally no changes at all. Also sites that try to duplicate one of their stores multiple times in a cookie cutter fashion in order to trick the system to see if they can get multiple listings on the SERPs.

You haven't provided specific sites to review for a definitive answer here, but they don't sound like they're trying to do anything black hat. They're just lazy. But if your site will be selling the same products, altering your descriptions and images is the only way that you'll get the advanatage over them instead of just becoming "yet another one of those sites". Good luck!

I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking.

Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images.  It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A.

My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A.

Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google.

My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked.

Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?

You're not missing anything. People link to useful or fun content. Unfortunately, I honestly can't think of any reason why I would want to link to a real estate article.That being said, I'm almost positive that I'm not alone.

The power is not in the links and guest spots. It's in your site content. I have sites that rank for very competitive keywords and some of them don't even have links in the double digits. Content is king.

Whatever the topic of your site is, you need to figure out what advantage a person would have coming to you instead of a competitor and capitalize on that. If you have the best closing rates, draw attention to that. Have more properties than anyone else? Scream it.  Can you always get a deal closed when someone has bad credit? Tell them. Offer more information on the topic than what someone else does. Services to use, tips on what to look for when looking at homes, how to negotiate the best pricing, etc. And keep the focus on location (i.e. Oxford). Going too broad in the real estate realm is way too competitive for an individual agent to keep up with.

Between building out your content and remaining vigilant in your article writing, real estate blog contributions, and staying active in the social realm (Facebook, Twitter), it will eventually sift out, but it's not a magic pill. It does take time.

But because you're frustrated is a good sign. It means it's almost about to pay off. That's typically when it happens is when you're standing crying in a corner with a handful of hair.

I don't think that the drop you're seeing is a result of your inter-linking. If anything stands out more than another, it would be what the text links say.  For instance, on http://www.beautifulcookislands.com/, you use the word "resort" and "resorts" over twenty times just on the home page and your navigation is even worse:

Luxury Resorts
Deluxe Resorts
Standard Resorts
Budget Resorts

And this practice runs rampant on all of your sites. It's fine that they're a family of "beautiful" sites, but your problems are almost definitely stemming from keyword stuffing, which is also part of the Penguin updates. You wording is very unnatural and that sticks out like a sore thumb to Google. Get that under control and you should be able to recover in a few weeks or less.

Actually, that IS the one answer I do know and that it DOES have a benefit to you if your image is being hotlinked to because Google sees it as a "vote" or the equivalent of an inbound link. I saw that on the Google Webmaster Forums.

I'm just at a quandary about the linker.

Wow, ok. So this is a very tricky question with a lot of unknowns. There was a thread similar to this in the Google Forums a while back and I think the person you really need to talk to is Maile Ohyo. Check out this thread that deals with your problem (and much more). It should answer your question, but if not, you can find Maile on Google+.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/YbXqwoyooGM