Welcome to the Q&A Forum

So there's no way I could type out my thoughts / questions.   If you're bored, have a cup of coffee and some oreos, and are interested in a strange situation that I can't figure out the solution to, I'd appreciate your input: https://youtu.be/GomGOAdNens I should note ahead of time:  It really is important to me to do things "by the book" and "to the letter" with SEO.   So while there may be some gray areas, I would like to really do the one thing that is BEST in this situation.  Thanks for any input.

1)  I've been told that other sites linking to my site with keyword-rich text are bad. 2)  But Google Console / Analytics shows that we rank extremely high for random, pointless phrases loosely tied to the topic of our site.  Like "dht blocker".  (its a hair loss site) 3)  This week I began analyzing our backlinks.  Guess what I found?  Literally hundreds of bot-created spammy trackback and pingback text links around the phrase "dht blocker" It seems to me that keyword rich anchor text on external sites is NOT a bad thing.  In fact its an outstanding way to rank better for your desired keywords.  Obviously the "bad" is the spam element.  Probably the high quantity.  On unrelated websites.  But guess what?  It worked.  _We are ranking extremely well for these pointless phrases, thanks to these spam bots.  _ Obviously we will be disavowing all these sites.  But I want to start building quality links via legitimate, honest means. So here is my question: If I begin a legitimate honest link building campaign with other websites, and request that they put the HREF around our most coveted keyword phrase - is this inherently BAD?  Or is it actually possibly GOOD? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thoughts?

Not sure how to handle this one.   Simply because there are SO MANY .... I want to be careful not to do something stupid ... Just a quick 3 minute video explanation:  https://youtu.be/bVHUWTGH21E I'm interested in several opinions so if someone replies - please still chime in. Thanks.

When looking at my backlinks if I see something like this: www.domainPizza.net
www.domainPizza.com
sub.domainPizza.com
www.domainpizza.org
domainPizza.net
https://domainpizza.com
https://www.domainpizza.net What is the actual list of disavows that I put into the file if I want to disavow this domain?  I am seeing so many variations of the same domain. Thank you.

Only way to explain this was to make a video. Would love everyone's input on this: https://youtu.be/TcdaOvz24Aw
Thank you.

I am 100% new to the world of WordPress, more advanced CMS systems, and all the interesting things that have been developed over the last several years on the web. After installing WordPress I noticed options to allow pingbacks and trackbacks.  Upon researching these, I found it interesting that you can very quickly and easily identify spam wordpress blog sites that mention your article in a spammy fashion if you leave this option ENABLED.  Because you literally get a notification of new nonsense happening on the web that may affect you. Is this a logical, rational thing to leave enabled and use as one of many tricks to manage new additions to a disavow file?  It almost seems like a Godsend because you don't have to go looking for them.

I have a website with nearly 70,000 incoming links, since its a somewhat large site that has been online for 19 years. The rate I was quoted for a link audit from a reputable SEO professional was $2 per, and clearly I don't have $140,000 to spend on a link audit 🙂  !! I was thinking of asking you guys for a tutorial that is the Gold Standard for link auditing checklists - and do it myself.  But then I thought maybe its easier to shorten the list by knocking out all the "obviously good" links first.  My only concern is that I be 100% certain they are good links. Is there an "easiest approach" to take for shortening this list, so I can give it to a professional to handle the rest?

After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation. We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone.  No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google.   But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all. A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users. We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google.  We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers.  I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles.   People can comment there as well if they like. Are there any potential downsides to doing this?  My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings. Thank you.

17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss.  The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase:  hair loss.  Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases. I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could:  Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart.  Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for. For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along.  Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down.  Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic. Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long. Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation.  The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place.  Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero.  By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design.  We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either. Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016: Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress.  (80 pages) - proper 301's. News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's. Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages).  301's. Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's. Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%.  Almost zero. Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs.  All of these 410'd. Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed.  All 410'd. Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc).  All 301'd to new Article URL. Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content.   It was a lot of work! After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us.  I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to.  Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us.  He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda.  He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday. Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site Cleaned up Google Search Console fully Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there. Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised. Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts. Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media. Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless:  "Hi! Need help!?" **Despite this, nothing has helped.  Nothing has budged.  Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January.  Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it.  It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up.  I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience.  Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years. That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers.  It hasn't worked.  As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss.  Its simply not there.  At all.  And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible.  But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post.  But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.