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Good idea - I'll adjust it now. Thanks.

There are a lot of differing opinions about footer links, particularly how to optimize them.

One camp says that these links should be innocuous, brand-name only links (i.e. alt tags that are your domain name or corporate name). Too many optimized inbound links (or alt tags on images that link to your site) could cause some sort of over-optimization penalty. While I think this is solid advice, I too have seen companies use highly optimized site-wide footer links, and they seem to be beneficial...so I'm not inclined to say that footer links shouldn't be optimized at all.

Another camp argues that you should go ahead and optimize all the link text, but to do so slowly and naturally. My concern with this approach is outlined above...at some point, you're going to have dozens or hundreds of links pointing to your site with optimized text/alt tags. That's not necessarily natural.

A middle-of-the road approach is to just change some of the links, and if I were you this is how I'd start. I'd identify the most trusted sites, change the alt tags on half of them to something optimized, then sit back and wait 3 months.

Additionally, I've always been of the opinion that one good footer link on a website's homepage - or an in-text link on the client's "about" page - is more valuable than a site-wide footer link. While I don't have any proof of this, it's something you might test. On sites we design, we like to put an "about this website" sub-heading on the client's about page, then link to our site in that text. It seems natural to me, and my site does OK.

Anyways, good luck. Whatever you do, I think gradual change is the key.

We've been doing a little bit of linkbuilding and content development for this site on and off for the last year or so:

http://www.olsonirstaxattorney.com/

We're trying to rank her for "Denver tax attorney," but in all honesty we just don't have the budget to hit the first page for that term, so it doesn't surprise me that we're invisible.

However, my problem is that the site gets almost NO traffic. There are days when Google doesn't send more than 2-3 visitors (yikes). Every site in our portfolio gets at least a few hundred visits a month, so I'm thinking that I'm missing something really obvious on this site.

I would expect that we'd get some type of traffic considering the amount of content the site has, (about 100 pages of unique content, give or take) and some of the basic linkbuilding work we've done (we just got an infographic published to a few decent quality sites, including a nice placement on the lawyer.com blog).

However, we're still getting almost no organic traffic from Google or Bing.

Any ideas as to why? GWMT doesn't show a penalty, doesn't identify any site health issues, etc.

Other notes:

• Unbeknownst to me, the client had cut and pasted IRS newsletters as blog posts. I found out about all this duplicate content last November, and we added "noindex" tags to all of those duplicated pages.

• The site has never been carefully maintained by the client. She's very busy, so adding content has never been a priority, and we don't have a lot of budget to justify blogging on a regular basis AND doing some of the linkbuilding work we've done (guest posts and infographic).

I see no possibility of a penalty as it sounds like these domains were purchased just to grab type-in traffic, protect the product and brand, etc. This is natural and logical behavior.

Unless you're actively building links to one or more of these redirected domains (something that spammers do), I think you can sleep easy.

If you want to be extra careful, you could monitor backlinks to all the domains you've got redirected and make sure that no one is linking to them...but if your site already has a good link profile and trust with Google, I'd say who cares.

It's nots a "bad" thing to post the articles in two places, as this type of syndication is somewhat commonplace in the corporate world. Provided your site already as a lot of content and is generally good quality, there's no risk of a penalty for syndicating content.

However, I would encourage management to look at it from the user's perspective: If the user reads the article in the magazine, they're not going to find it very useful to see the same article again on your site. Conversely, if your website visitors aren't going to see the article in the magazine first, why send it to the magazine at all?

One solution is to quote a snippet of the original magazine article on your site, and then write a 200+  word summary or intro for the magazine article that perhaps summarizes the key points, introduces the article in a different way, etc., and then links to the magazine.

From a user's perspective, all the content you've published on your site and in the magazine is unique and potentially useful. From the SEO perspective, there's no possibility of an issue and - unlike syndication - you're adding a unique page of content to your site that is highly likely to be indexed and help you in the long run.

Syndication isn't bad, but you have to ask why you're doing it in the first place. It's often just as easy to create a short "What You'll Learn In This Article" intro on your site than it is to cut-and-paste.

There are a lot of differing opinions about footer links, particularly how to optimize them.

One camp says that these links should be innocuous, brand-name only links (i.e. alt tags that are your domain name or corporate name). Too many optimized inbound links (or alt tags on images that link to your site) could cause some sort of over-optimization penalty. While I think this is solid advice, I too have seen companies use highly optimized site-wide footer links, and they seem to be beneficial...so I'm not inclined to say that footer links shouldn't be optimized at all.

Another camp argues that you should go ahead and optimize all the link text, but to do so slowly and naturally. My concern with this approach is outlined above...at some point, you're going to have dozens or hundreds of links pointing to your site with optimized text/alt tags. That's not necessarily natural.

A middle-of-the road approach is to just change some of the links, and if I were you this is how I'd start. I'd identify the most trusted sites, change the alt tags on half of them to something optimized, then sit back and wait 3 months.

Additionally, I've always been of the opinion that one good footer link on a website's homepage - or an in-text link on the client's "about" page - is more valuable than a site-wide footer link. While I don't have any proof of this, it's something you might test. On sites we design, we like to put an "about this website" sub-heading on the client's about page, then link to our site in that text. It seems natural to me, and my site does OK.

Anyways, good luck. Whatever you do, I think gradual change is the key.

It's nots a "bad" thing to post the articles in two places, as this type of syndication is somewhat commonplace in the corporate world. Provided your site already as a lot of content and is generally good quality, there's no risk of a penalty for syndicating content.

However, I would encourage management to look at it from the user's perspective: If the user reads the article in the magazine, they're not going to find it very useful to see the same article again on your site. Conversely, if your website visitors aren't going to see the article in the magazine first, why send it to the magazine at all?

One solution is to quote a snippet of the original magazine article on your site, and then write a 200+  word summary or intro for the magazine article that perhaps summarizes the key points, introduces the article in a different way, etc., and then links to the magazine.

From a user's perspective, all the content you've published on your site and in the magazine is unique and potentially useful. From the SEO perspective, there's no possibility of an issue and - unlike syndication - you're adding a unique page of content to your site that is highly likely to be indexed and help you in the long run.

Syndication isn't bad, but you have to ask why you're doing it in the first place. It's often just as easy to create a short "What You'll Learn In This Article" intro on your site than it is to cut-and-paste.

I see no possibility of a penalty as it sounds like these domains were purchased just to grab type-in traffic, protect the product and brand, etc. This is natural and logical behavior.

Unless you're actively building links to one or more of these redirected domains (something that spammers do), I think you can sleep easy.

If you want to be extra careful, you could monitor backlinks to all the domains you've got redirected and make sure that no one is linking to them...but if your site already has a good link profile and trust with Google, I'd say who cares.