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True: Not using keywords in the anchor text should already help to prevent raising a red flag.

Thank you for the amazon and Hayneedle sample. I know that I am not amazon and Hayneedle is a good warning.

My concern is less the linkjuice. I also might not use the link in a footer (especially after your examples). Probably the link would be placed in the header, in a blog post or in a slide. The aim would be to inform the customer about the additional service.

So they might think: "I liked this AC company. So their plumbing service should be good, too."

Thank you William!

So you are thinking that having the websites on the same IP address lowers the chances, that Google is thinking that the links might be spam?

Here's the scenario:

An AC company bought two plumbing companies. The plumbing websites and the plumbing company names will stay the same for at least a year. Then the two plumbing websites will merge and have a new domain and website. However, we will already make small modifications to the two plumbing websites to introduce the new owner.

Is it okay to create the following links?

AC Company < > Plumbing Company 1 (linking to each other)
AC Company <  Plumbing Company 2 (one way link)

After the merge is completed:

AC Company < > new Plumbing Company Inc
new Plumbing Company Inc < (301 redirect) Plumbing Company 1
new Plumbing Company Inc < (301 redirect) Plumbing Company 2

My questions: Could the links described above raise a red flag or cause any other issues? The links are not at all meant to be spammy. They are meant to advertise for the other company's services and let the customer know that the Plumbing and AC companies are under one roof.

I am thankful for every opinion.

Johannes

Hello chuckakins,

I noticed that the keyword density for your homepage is a little bit too high.

• plumbing has 6.79 %
• atlanta has 6.04 %
• plumber has 4.53 %

To avoid to be filter for over optimization (especially since Penguin), try to bring the keyword density to a natural level. Around 2 % should be good.

Even though you seem to have a good amount of incoming links and Google in honoring that with a PageRank of 3, a lot of incoming links have the keywords plumbing, atlanta and plumber in their anchor text (-> Opensiteexplorer). To Google that might not seem like the links are build naturally.

Did you always have ranking problems or is that something more recent?

Hope this helps you a little bit.

Johannes

Thank you for your response Kathy!

You got a good point with the tourist destination vs. ac company. Even though I was aware of it I decided to do such a mix because I did not know how to target 9 locations with the same keywords and at least some unique content. Actually the bounce rate on the city pages was around page average. But I will work more on the content. Thx!

@references: Good Advise! But which references did you mean on the Sarasota page? Siesta Key Beach is in Sarasota (if you meant that one).

But I still think the city pages might not the reason for the sudden drop yesterday night.

Do you think brightsidewg.com was maybe the issue? If so shall I submit the website for reconsideration and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace (brightsidewg.com)?

I appreciate your honest response Steve!

@many links: I will get rid of some links for instance the repeated link to the city pages - correct or? Do you think I should also remove some links in the footer?

@spammy content: Did you think that all content was spammy or certain content (e.g. city pages, homepage, recent posts etc.)? Believe me, it was much much worse before. I am trying to improve...

@rel="canonical": Currently a WordPress plugin already adds the rel="canoncial" tags to the header (). Or do you mean I should have a common canonical tag for all the city pages? But then they would not rank any longer separately.

The weird part is that I didn't really change these things in the last few days, google had these pages in its index and they were ranking pretty okay.

So you don't think that the slightly older copy of the website on brightsidewg.com was the main issue? Because brightsidewg.com started to show up roughly (- ~10 ranks) were kobiecomplete.com was showing up.

Thank you so much!

Hi Greg,

a 301-redirect  will maintain the page's metrics.

Open/create the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website.
Add something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)2/global$ http://www.opentext.com/2/global/products/enterprise-content-management.htm [L,R=301]

Johannes

Hello David,

I can confirm that the Facebook feature in seomoz is working. In your screenshot it looks like you used the whole Facebook url but you only need to enter your username.

Also there is no way around it of having admin access to the Facebook account. Facebook will ask you if you want to allow seomoz to access information from the Facebook Page (for instance "Insight").

Hope that helps.

Johannes

Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice.

My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links).

Yesterday night (May 15th)  the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1.

Here are some more details:

• I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected.
• The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time.
• site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages
• Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all. 
  I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools.
• I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking. 
  To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com.
• Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+
• No malware on website
• I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones).
• I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty.

It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!?

I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com.

What do you think about it and what shall I do?

Thank you so much for any help!

Hello chuckakins,

I noticed that the keyword density for your homepage is a little bit too high.

• plumbing has 6.79 %
• atlanta has 6.04 %
• plumber has 4.53 %

To avoid to be filter for over optimization (especially since Penguin), try to bring the keyword density to a natural level. Around 2 % should be good.

Even though you seem to have a good amount of incoming links and Google in honoring that with a PageRank of 3, a lot of incoming links have the keywords plumbing, atlanta and plumber in their anchor text (-> Opensiteexplorer). To Google that might not seem like the links are build naturally.

Did you always have ranking problems or is that something more recent?

Hope this helps you a little bit.

Johannes