Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
You didn't devalue the links at all IMHO. If the reciprocal links make sense and they are placed in sensible locations, then by all means you should have those links. Google is only looking for spam links and they can tell when the links are unnatural based on location, anchor text, quantity and other factors.
pages with less than 250 words per page (and a lot of pages like that) are considered low quality sites and have a good chance of getting hit by panda.
completely doable, but you open yourself up to a possible lawsuit which I believe is the biggest risk here.
If this is a legitimate question, proper tagging and display, quick page speed times for mobile and user engagement such as bounce rate etc will be factors in helping Google to decide to give one site better mobile rankings over another. Google is recommending one site for both web and mobile. So simply the fact that one site is purely mobile and another is both mobile and web does not mean that the mobile only site should automatically rank better because it's a .mobi or whatever.
Ok - an article about being good at SEO citizen with black hat techniques in the comments section - how funny
I wouldn't be concerned since they nofollow the link
but - if they are legit, you should be able to contact them to get the comment removed.
Are the pages indexed in Google? If you don't see any PR it's probably not worth buying.
I agree with EGOL, unless you are trying to dominate the first page with search results for the same keyword phrase. Then in that case they need to be completely separated, no interlinking and no shared content.
if you are on page 50 for "kayak fishing" there is a good chance that you are penalized for that term
your site seems to be loading incredibly slow - see what is hanging, check out your page speed time in WMT
add the main keyword to the beginning of your title tags see that all the first page results have it that way on their sites
clean up all broken links on your site and other WMT recomendations
look at your blog and forum indexing (you have a TON of indexed pages on this site (110,000) try to weed out the flimsy content page so Google doesn't think you're spamming them) no index category pages and others that may be creating duplicate content in the index like this:
http://www.yakangler.com/articles/how-to/fishing - this should not be indexed, only the individual articles
noindex user pages and other sections like this. Look in google MWT for duplicate title tag ang meta desriptions you'll see a ton, try to make them all unique
<cite>www.yakangler.com/yaksocial/707-troutbeard/profile</cite>YakAngler.com is kayak fishing's ultimate resource, offering fishing forums, kayak fishing community, articles, reviews and more.
<cite>www.yakangler.com/yaksocial/800-rhinojoe2014/profile</cite>YakAngler.com is kayak fishing's ultimate resource, offering fishing forums, kayak fishing community, articles, reviews and more.
<cite>www.yakangler.com/yaksocial/555-mountaindewman/profile</cite>YakAngler.com is kayak fishing's ultimate resource, offering fishing forums, kayak fishing community, articles, reviews and more.
Disallow in robots.txt
Add a noindex meta tag to these pages
Request Google to remove the URLs from their index via WMT URL removal request
It depends on a few factors
a) are the sites linking to you shady
b) do you have a good link profile already or is the site new with few links, it's all about passing a threshhold on Google in terms of number of bad links vs good.
c) are they easy to remove, if yes then i would remove them, sitewide links are dangerous
Don't buy links from sites that sell links unless you want to get penalized. Google's already got these sites flagged.
Since you are new to this my suggestion would be first to concentrate on your on page SEO and get that up to snuff before thinking about the dangerous and complicated art of link building.
If you are targeting three different long tail searches i would say separate pages, but if it's all about the same product or topic I would create single pages with robust content over 3 pages with moderate content.
"web design derby" is not in your anchor text. If you want to rank better for that it needs to be an exact match - for instance
Web Design DerbyThat being said, the same anchor text globally on the footer of every site you make could get you penalized. If you are going to go this route at least make a different link for each site. Point to different internal pages and use different anchor texts for each site you build for someone.
If the content is not needed for rankings due to low competition, and is not of benefit to the user, then i would not create additional content just for the engines unless you see slipping in the ranks.
Directories ARE spam links for the most part. Directories had a place on the web a long time ago, now they are just places for SEO links because people use search engines to find what they are looking for.
Stay away from directories except for a few of the big guys like Yahoo where you are not guaranteed inclusion - but those cost money. Skeptical clients will think you're a hack if you prepare a report for them with spammy directory links.
That's reciprocal linking, I wouldn't do it. Plus the deal is they write good content for you and you give them a link. Why would someone want to link back to you AND write content, seems like a bad deal for them and at that point you're just doing link exchanges. They may want to promote their article on places like FB or twitter and link to you from other sites though.
Absolutely. Flimsy pages will have a hard time ranking, and if all pages on your site consists of all flimsy pages you'll get hit by panda and even if you aren't hit by panda, high competition keywords will be difficult to rank for with weak content.
Anything less than 250 words is flimsy IMO. Don't write for SEO if you care about the user and conversions, don't over optimize and be sure to use similar phrases and industry words so that Google can tell that your site really is about that keyword and not just an article with that keyword thrown in for SEO.
Excellent sir.
We will know pretty soon how everything shakes out once people start reporting back, but my suggestion would be that if you have a site that is not penalized you should NOT use this tool as an effort to try and clean up any spammy back links and clean up your good-to-bad backlink ratio. The reason is, this is a tool to be used as a last effort in trying to come back from a penalty when there are some links you tried to remove but simply cannot.
Sending this report will put eyeballs on your site and bring unnecessary attention to your site. Why ask Google to review your backlink profile and look at the nastiest links pointing to your site if your site is currently healthy.
An exception to this rule I think would be if you notice you are clearly under a negative SEO attack. Then it would make sense to be proactive.
There are so many factors that come into play with rankings positions, it;s almost impossible to pin it down and definitely not one factor like FB. If Google ranked sites that strongly based on FB engagement then FB would be nothing but spam. FB should be thought of as a marketing tool and a traffic driver not something the help with rankings, although I do believe Google does consider if you have social media presence in their algorithm.
If you have the power to kill off 73k links from one site to your do it, if it's not a site u care about 404 the site, or remove the links on that site, or if you can change the configuration to nofollow those links that works too. The links can still be there as long as they are nofollowed and no longer pass PR.
Speed up the crawl rate in WMT if you want to get respidered more after cleaning up bad links on your site. Explain in detail to Google what you did specifically to clean up your site and humbly request reconsideration.
The Google algorithms are very complex. There are many factors that are taken into account for Google ranking positions like trusted backlinks, age of site, percentage of healthy content, schema markup and more. New sites have a barrier to entry and must prove they are worthy of being shown in the SERPS.
Yes that is duplicate content created by a technical issue
you need to redirect the slash to the no slash. or vica versa depending on which page is your real page and has more links and PR accrued. and then stick with that one way across the board
also canonical the pages as a second safety measure - this will tell Google if they visit the slash version that it is the same as the non slash version and to count the non slash version as the real page. or vise versa depending on which way you go with it.
Welcome aboard!
Content needs to be unique especially if you want to rank.
How many pages are we talking about, I would suggest you get the content re-written by someone if it's not a ton of pages.
I am amazed that BOTW is still milking that site. This will not help you one bit but shouldn't hurt either, I can almost guarantee you Google has BOTW listed as a site to not pass PR from and that they are just a neutered site for SEO.Not a bad neighborhood but also not beneficial for SEO.
No problem, don't worry about that. Just try to have the H1 with the main keyword phrase and H2 with the secondary if possible. Someone ask Cutts this question a while back and he said Google understands.
Desk and Desks is good but wood twice is not 
find strongest primary and secondary matches
Assuming the plural is more valuable than the singular, and wood is more valuable than wooden
<title>Buy Wood Desks | Wooden Desk Sets | Bob's Discount Furniture</title>
Assuming the singular is more valuable, and wooden is more valuable than wood
<title>Buy Wooden Desk Sets | Wood Desks | Bobs Discount Furniture</title>
If your rankings returned you're probably OK but I would at very least look at the biggest offenders with the highest number of links pointing to you and contact those guys first. Also make sure you changed all of the passwords and updated and security issues to make sure it doesn't get hacked again the same way.
Also, since it's one letter you have to craft you can just use it for all of the emails.I'd follow up at least once though a week later just to remind them.
a) visit the site
b) get the email address and webmasters email
c) paste the letter and shoot out the email
I bet I could do that in one day. it's probably worth it if they're spamming links to you, but it really depends on how important the site is to you. If your companies livelihood depends on the sites health then I would say do it.
The good news is the links don't have any of your real keyword phrases in them so you're probably OK even if you do nothing.
If the secondary page is getting indexed it should still accrue PR, maybe slightly less than the 1st page of the article, if people are linking to the article they will link to the first page obviously. But if the site has good navigation structure, the secondary page will get indexed and get some PR too so i wouldn't be too concerned about it.
Google has great guidelines for images that you should follow:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=114016
Not so good:
Better:
Best:
To be avoided
Filling alt attributes with keywords ("keyword stuffing") results in a negative user experience, and may cause your site to be perceived as spam. Instead, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. We recommend testing your content by using a text-only browser such as Lynx.
Singular and plural search results vary and are still treated differently and if that's what you want to rank for (which was his question) i would recommend it in both the title tag and also include both singular and plural in the body content a couple times of course.
I definitely agree though it needs to be reader friendly from a marketing perspective, and also since title tag is limited space, doing keyword research might help you uncover a secondary keyword phrase that might be more valuable than including a plural or singular secondary keyword phrase.
Short and sweet - something like this:
Hi,
I am the SEO at mysite.com and I noticed your site was hacked! If you look in the source code of your homepage you can see hidden links to pharma sites in your source code. This can definitely result in your site being completely banned in Google.
I'm telling you this because our site was already banned, and we lost a lot of traffic as a result of this hack. You might want to take a look at your site as well and remove the code. Maybe you already know about your site being hacked, if so you can disregard this email. Thanks, Irving
Meta descriptions have no impact on rankings and are more of a marketing tool than SEO optimization. Let your client know that and his opinion about what to work on for SEO might change. Title tags are the most important thing you should be optimizing.
So, think of the meta description tag as an advertisement that should be written to entice the user to click to your site. Usually a question or call to action works best. Having the main keyword in there is not a bad idea because it makes the page seem like it is going to me more relevant for what they just searched for since Google will highlight that instance of the keyword in your meta description.
Meta descriptions should all be unique so be sure to add enough unique identifiers so you don't wind up creating tons of duplicate tags.
If Chicago Alarms, Illinois Alarms, Naperville Alarms then yes
if Chicago, Illinois, Naperville then no
Top example is spamming "alarms" keyword
I'll give you a direct answer. No. Directory submission sites are no longer relevant due to search engines, and they are seen by Google as nothing more than sites designed to sell links and pass PR.
Smart link builders stopped this activity years ago. There are only a small handful of directory sites like yahoo that are worth submitting. 99% of them are not.
If you find a directory site that is in your niche and nofollows your link then it might make sense to get listed as a possible traffic driver.
It takes a lot to get your site removed from Google index, the easiest way is to be hacked then your site gets banned until you remove those links.
What would most likely happen with directory submissions is that the keywords you are targeting get suppressed in the rankings, you go from page one to page 50 for example and your traffic drops. Google emilas you a letter in WMT saying they detected unnatural link building and then you spend all sorts of time trying to get your links removed and disavowing and resubmitting for reconsideration.
Directory sites are dead, if you're going to do link building it needs to be one offs to individual sites who have never sold links, not on sites who's sole business is to sell links.
if your brand name is your domain name then you should already rank for that. don't build links while trying to recover from a penalty.
Since the title tag is used for rankings by Google and no one is searching by typing in the phone number, you are wasting your title tag space.
Better to put the phone number towards the beginning of the meta description. This way people can see the phone number and call it without having to click anywhere. Since you are concerned with calls as a conversion, clicking through to the site is not a prerequisite, you just want them to call and this gives the phone number up front.
See the meta for <cite>www.drgeorgerappard.com/</cite>
It must be done! You need to figure out which page has more PR by using Google PR Tool and SeoMoz PA Tool and I would 301 redirect the page with less PA/PR into the page with the higher PA/PR. If both pages are relatively equal, i would drop the index.html if all pages that link to the home page internally will also drop the index.html from their link. Also, you need to review what your best external links out there and see which version of the home page they are linking to to make this decision. The combined PR/PA of the two home pages should be greater then any one individual home page but a 301 doesn't always carry over all the page juice.
crappy links indeed, however the reason is probably because they are greatly varying the anchor texts.
for example: buy air conditioning units from Aircon247
if they were using "air conditioning units" over and over again they would get penalized for that but they are smart enough to know to create long tail variations that still contain the exact match "air conditioning units"
that being said, they still may get dinged. Google.co.uk competition is less than google.com competition too so it's much easier to rank in the UK. Hope this info helps.
search pages are usually intentionally blocked from getting indexed to avoid spamming googles index. so if tyou are doing that, then it doesn't matter how you are linking.
What is your target keyword phrase for the home page. Keep your focus on that phrase. The first option is certainly spammy, but I can't figure out your prized keyword target from your second paragraph. What is in your H1 and title tags?
only submit pages for indexing if they have unique and quality content on them, right now the current indexed pages of the site looks properly indexed with main pages, PDFs, and no duplicate parameter pages at the moment. The last thing you want to do is make hundreds or thousands of indexed user pages with little to no content on them.
by the way i would move the brand name to the end of the title tag instead of the front, if you want it included. title tags should always start with the main keyword
existing
better
You cannot get a site out of a penalty from redirecting the banned or penalized site to a new domain. If you're only looking to link images to the unpenalized site you're probably fine if you nofollow them since image links don't push rank. Keep the alt tag off of them so you're not suggesting any semantics. To be really safe if done properly you could javascript them.
Brand new site, how long have you seen that in the top result. A lot of times when a new site emerges Google temporarily does a "hello world" ranking and for a short period of time gives the site good rankings, then it goes away.
The site is of course junk, maybe they are redirecting some other sites to this URL. I don't see any backlinking going on yet.
main keyword first and then secondary. the most important main keyword should be at the beginning of your title tag. so depending on the keyword research, probably something like:
DUI Lawyer in Dallas Texas | Drunk Driving Attorney in TX
DUI Attorney in Dallas TX | Drunk Driving Lawyer in Texas
EDIT: note both state and abbreviation are included, and secondary keywords (going on intuition here based on a previous client) "attorney" and "drunk driving"
ALSO:
Make sure your Google local and + page is set up and completed with all your info and website. Local searches will show places pages and you want to be in the 7 pack! at least and even better at the top of that pack. Have clients take the time to give you positive reviews on your places + page too, very important!
you can put a chunk of content on the page like in the sidebar or footer so you can get a couple instances of the main keyword on the homepage which always remains there regardless of whether the latest blog posts contain that content or not. Also, in the homepage image file name, meta description, h1 or wherever else it's approproate to add it without overdoing it of course.
Definitely disavow them if you can't get the webmasters to cooperate. Article directory links are bad enough as is, scraped and reposted articles are worse.
It all has to do with quality, nothing to do with speed.
Google won't punish a site for going viral, but they will punish a site for manipulative link building in an effort to manipulate ranking positions.
I would leave the existing ones alone and create new page(s) targeting baptism and link to them prominently from the homepage and globally on the site, submit the URLs in WMT and add them to your sitemap.xml file for quicker indexing.
Easy answer. Keep the original page and create two new pages properly addressing each target which will be more effective, write unique content for each, don't 301 and don't canonical to one url (canonical each to it's own page)