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The title tag is quite possibly the single most useful piece of on-page optimization you can do... Am I misunderstanding this question?

Hi Sida,

I think I am understanding what you are saying now. You seem to be concerned with whether or not the domain you are seeking links from has itself been hit by Penguin. Well honestly the only way to do this is to identify their keywords and know what their ranking was prior.. Maybe look at PR or DA but you'd have to compare that to past numbers.. Really it's pretty dang hard to do.

I'm not sure there's any reason to, either. Penguin penalties do not pass through domains. Meaning if you have a link from blackhat.com and it was penalized, that penalty does not transfer. The link itself may lose value, or "juice," but by no means does this penalize you instantly. Now, if you have a bunch of links coming from penalized sites, chances are you might be penalized too one day or the algo will catch up with you. Otherwise I wouldn't worry.

Gaining links from directories and forums is tedious work and ineffective at best. The only reason I would ever do it (other than maybe an occassional dmoz or relevant directory for funzies) is to actually provide a relevant link for readers. For example, if I am marketing a bicycle repair shop and am posting links from a country music forum under a topic regarding the best new music of 2013.. that's wrong and I shouldn't be doing that.

However, if I am sitting around on a Schwinn-Lovers forum and they are discussing the proper gears needed to best operate their bike, and I just so happen to have written a blog describing how mine is the best and why.. then BAM! I've found a great place to link to and it is relevant to the reader. Now I am posting this link not as a method of building my link profile, but as a way to promote my business first. Yes, I'm very happy to have gained that relevant link which helps my SEO efforts, but this was a marketing effort first and foremost.

Marketing is SEO is Marketing but it's Marketing first. This is the future and it is now. This is also why SEOmoz dropped the SEO.

Voila

No way. Not at all. Not only that, but it would definitely get you less clicks even if you did get better rankings.

Always remember: Your page's title is the thing your potential customer/user/client will be clicking on to first visit your page. This is a very important point of first contact in the digital marketing world. Think about the way you search and what gets you to click on links from Google. I bet it's somewhere around 95% based on the title present.

If you were Googling "Xbox One Games" and saw:

• Xbox+One+Games+Review+PS4+Games
• Xbox One Games Reviewed and Uncovered

Which one would you click?

Hmm... How to decipher this post..

Well, first off let me just say that the types of links you are describing are definitely what Penguin is targeting. Those are spam links (I'm assuming they aren't relevant) and are in violation of Google's Policies. So yes, I'd say they are "Penguin." Oof that was hard to type.

If what you are wondering is how to find out if you have been penalized or not, you should be able to tell. Between your Google Analytics account and your top keyword ranking changes (found either through moz tools or on your own) you will definitely notice a huge drop indicating that you've been hit by the little furry black and white devil.

Hope this helps a little. The new Moz forum is throwing me off.. CHANGE@!

I would be surprised if your internal anchor phrases knocked you out of the SERPs entirely.

Have you received a message in Google's Webmaster Tools?

Well, skipping ahead to the "what to do now?" question, I'd say you are correct in that there is nothing to do but wait. If it was a manual penalty, you would have a notice in your Webmaster Tools indicating it as such.

If it is algorithmic (and it sure sounds like it is from what you've described) then all you can do is wait. This process can take anywhere from a week to 2 months and seems to be a bit of a crap shoot. I will say, from my experience I've seen these types of fixes get resolved in more the 2-3 week range but have heard of it taking longer. A singing telegram might be nice but I think Matt would most likely just cross his arms and give off a simple fake smile, thank them and close the door.

This is oddly symbolic to the way the Google Webspam Team punks us SEO guys on the reg.

Am I the only one who finds OSE anchor text report to be a bit... lacking? I mean.. compared to ahrefs.com anyway?

Why does ahrefs so handily win this battle? I don't want to have to convince my boss to buy me an ahrefs membership so I'd like an excuse not to.

Nope, doesn't need to be fixed. There's nothing wrong with this practice, especially for a Wordpress site (imo).

The notices that moz tools are giving you are just that - to make you aware that those canonical tags exist. They aren't warnings or errors, just notices to draw your attention to canonicals in case you ever wanted to look into them or ensure they were correct.

I think what Marie is saying is that there is a disparity here somewhere. You say you have thousands of natural links, yet you only are showing 125 referring domains... Same thing on OSE *only 79 referring listed there but that's normal for ahrefs to have a more complete vision. Still not a ton of links.. I'm wondering if you would see improvement just by building some great content and gaining new relevant links..

oh believe me, I understand completely. But I googled london magician and you were number 2. That's pretty friggin' good!

One of my sites lost a number one ranking we held for our primary keyword. I'm just happy we are at number 2. I know it could have been worse. Like Chris said, probably not a penalty. Could just be the way the algorithm worked your competitor bested you. Build away and feel proud of the fact that you are operating under Google's Webmaster Guidelines. (most likely...)

You dropped just 2 positions?? Consider yourself lucky and go build some organic, natural links!

YES I am wondering this too. I'd kind of like to see him do it without natural links (or somebody) to test this theory. I hope it's true. It would just mean that we can focus entirely on proper content and link building and forget about poison links altogether!

Since Penguin 2.0 is an overhaul though (right?) it should technically overwrite whatever damage was done from 1.0... by theory? So my next question would be, OP - Did you see any changes at all last night? even bumped up or down a couple spots for targeted keywords?

No problem.. I'm sure you can get a ton of help around here this community is awesome. I'm going to write a rushed response because I'm hurrying to wrap up for a 4 day weekend (woot woot!) so ---

Start by getting a list of all referring domains. Use multiple tools. Open Site Explorer, ahrefs.com, Google Webmaster Tools. Check all you can and get this list. Maybe into Excel. (there are some great articles on parsing this data and how to setup excel sheets to help determine Domain Authority and Page Rank value, but I'm not able to grab links at the moment check around these forums and seomoz blogs..)

What you'll be looking for is low DA and irrelevant domains. If you have a bunch of links coming from autism-savior.com/forums/ it probably is spam. Some of them will jump right out at you. If these links don't look like they would help somebody to learn more then they are poison... etc.

I'm assuming somebody along the way used a link building service. Something like $75 for 1,000 links, etc... If so maybe you can contact the company that did this and ask for a full report with logins/passwords. I did this with some success. Removed about 1/5th of paid links once... Wasn't great but at least got me closer.

These are just a few ideas. Hope they helped. Keep asking questions, maybe start another thread (since this one is marked answered it might get less clicks.)

No problem. Sorry to hear about it, but like I said: You can recover! Don't despair and keep us posted on your efforts. Your story could help many I'm sure!

And here's why you were penalized via the Penguin update right here: http://gyazo.com/8b4c324ddc8b83d5be4f746b42dfa550.png

Get to removing the bad links.. Keep good ones, but build a more diverse anchor text. This is not a manual penalty for you it is recoverable. Build natural links and remove the unnatural.

You got Penguined my friend. In case you've somehow missed it, the 2.0 update rolled out last night, at the exact same time your SERP dropped. Not a coincidence, I'm afraid.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/

Yeah I didn't mean it was simple to recover, but simple to discover rather. I'm well aware of the difficulties, believe me.

I'm trying to learn more about this 2.0 Penguin action. The only way to do so is research. Can you please supply us with your domain? We may be able to help further that way anyhow..

To research your link profile, first you need a tool such as Open Site Explorer or ahrefs.

From there, it's simple.

links that don't exist or links to pages that don't exist?

..heck, either way i'd ignore them and focus on phase 2 of your plan. Disavow seems to be a bit overused in my opinion. It's more of a last-ditch effort for penalty recovery IMHO.

and if it's 404 errors you're trying to fix: Google will eventually stop following those after they 404 long enough. Don't even worry about it. (unless they're links you want, then put a relevant redirect in place.)

Hope this was helpful.

From my experience with this latest update (not even 24 hours old, mind you) it seems to be more of the latter than the former. I'm seeing sites that had a mix of good/poison links sit around the same placement while sites with nothing but spam links dropped off the face of the earth.

Again though, this is early and one teeny tiny little example out of the billions of pages out there.

Will probably be awhile before we know anything concrete but my guess would be the same strategies of 1.0 apply toward 2.0. I'd imagine they just widened the umbrella, so to speak.

We'll see! I've got a close eye on a few sites I'm curious to see what will happen to...

are you sure you are de-personalizing your searches? add &pws=0 to the end of your google search strings to ensure this is the case.

Any notices or warnings in GWMT?

edit: nevermind, I've been under a rock for a few hours.

You could change it without informing Google and just see what happens.

Personally I wouldn't do anything until you've actually seen a decrease in traffic and ranking placement. I received an unnatural link notice in GWMT back in March for one of my sites and have yet to see anything happen to it. There was black hat SEO work done on that site in the past (not by me, of course) so I wouldn't be surprised if all the sudden it took a hit but to this day I've seen nothing but improvement in my target keywords for that site.

I feel like if I had responded to Google and submitted my site for reconsideration I would have seen bigger penalties. So I created a re-inclusion package and waited... two months later I see no problems so I'm still waiting.

Absolutely! But only if it's

a.) not too long

b.) relevant to the page's content

c.) attractive to the target audience

i.e. don't make it long and spammy; keep it short and sweet because remember that this is what your potential visitor will be clicking on to visit your site. IT MUST ENTICE THE VIEWER!

Hope that helps.

You should link to the most relevant page. Forget about A or B or which one you want where. When you are building links you should make sure that they are being built in a place where people will actually want to click them. They should offer relevant information, data, or resources to further assist any potential users of the page you are linking from. The rest of that is irrelevant.

Link the page that fits.

just looked at the other site you say is working... it has a much simpler robots file and no delay. just sayin'   //

That's one of the bigger robots files I've seen in awhile..

You sure that crawl delay isn't messing things up? Not sure but that'd be my first guess.

Are you sure it says you "don't" have the canonicals? What section is it under? IE Warnings, Notices, etc.. ??

Because often times SEOmoz will tell you in Notices that you DO have canonical tags in place. This might be causing your confusion? It's not a report of a problem at all, just to make you aware.

If you corrected what it tells you... it should go away.

Perhaps you just did the update and rogerbot hasn't crawled since? Always wait for the next week to see updates in those rankings, in case you did not know that.

Well then, if I'm understanding you correctly, you shouldn't need these specific pages indexed anyway. Instead you should be promoting/doing SEO for the pages that lead you to the listing portal. So the duplicate titles or titles shouldn't matter or be a question..

?

Every mention received is positive if it comes about organically whether link juice passes or not. That said, a link would always be better...

Yes and pretty terrible, also. Unless your only target keyword for each of those pages is "home to home moving.." but I can't imagine that particular search string receives many queries.

Consider your keywords and fit them into your title in a natural way. If I saw those titles listed in Google SERPs I'd avoid them like the plague.

Not trying to be critical, only trying to help. Hope I did.. Feel free to ask more questions!

you should join the #seochat going on currently on twitter.. it's relevant to your questions. back to the chat --

yep.

seems to me that the word "openings" would be googled more often than "categories"

...so yeah I'd prefer the other but I'd have to do a little keyword research to see what I wanted to lay that out as, personally.

Something I forgot to mention --- I tried going to your site from your profile and the link was broken. Might wanna fix that. It goes to http//www.---- (colon is missing)

Good luck!

Seriously. It will honestly be incredibly beneficial and may in itself get your rankings improved.

When I joined my current company they were hesitant to change their website for the same reasons. I rebuilt the site and launched it a few months ago and we have seen drastic improvements in ranking and conversion ever since.

Go for it! My money says you'll see a marked improvement.

Paul is like the cleanup hitter. We all get on base and he drives em home.

Yes most likely. Really depends on the keyword though. For example - I work for a SaaS company. Instead of targeting the term "cloud computing," we target more specific keywords with high search volumes.

While obviously "cloud computing" is searched for more frequently, the fact is that Google isn't putting many commercial sites on page 1 there for good reason: People Googling that term aren't looking for services, they're looking to learn what the term means/is. I'd imagine that this applies to what you're discussing. Most likely Google is keeping enterprise companies off of their just based on the fact that that isn't what the users searching that keyword are looking for.. They're most likely looking for broader knowledge.

Good luck!

Well it sounds like you have competition now. Time to start a link building campaign, grow some strong original content via blogs/youtube/social media and get people to organically link to your site. IE - SEO-it-up!

Slightly unrelated - When was the last time your site had a face lift? Not to be critical, but I'd suggest perhaps looking into modernizing the layout a bit better. It looks old and dated and a bit clunky. For a brief moment I thought you were using frames... it's like that. The big banner in the middle at the bottom is full of horribly pixelated images and the layout is worn.. Again, not trying to be mean I'm just saying UX is everything.

Well I'd say you've definitely been penalized. Reason being would most likely be that you have duplicate content on a massive scale. Every one of your pages are duplicated between the .com and the .ca versions without a rel=canonical tag listed anywhere to be seen.

It seems like a manual penalty seeing as how your PR is gone, so I'd keep my eye on GWMT but in any case you need to solve that duplicate content problem before you do anything.

Basically what you should do is redirect one to the other 301-style. Like.. right now would be a good time to do it!

Good luck!

I'm responding to this in a semi-rushed matter as something is coming up but I just want to mention that the most likely reason for Google to index this version of your URL is because of the links pointing to it. Those which caused you to put a 301 in place, those that were 404ing prior... They are clearly demonstrating to be the authoritative URL to Google.

I'm not sure why you're worried about what the customer/user sees for URL. They are most likely looking more at the Title/Description in the SERPs well before the URL string. Most people only read the domain portion of a URL string and it's more used for the search engines purposes.. (my opinion) Also, once the user clicks your title or page they are taken to the redirect and the full URL string will be visible in the address bar of their browser.

As for why your rankings are affected... I'd be surprised if it had anything to do with this, honestly. If anything redirecting should help especially if you had links pointing to a broken page. The only exception would be if those links were poison, of course.

Okay got to run hope I was helpful. Good luck!

No 404's are fine they will just not pass link juice and Google will eventually stop following them but ideally they will phase out regardless as the internet moves along.

Kill it and redirect if there are any backlinks incoming. Definitely.

You're absolutely right, Paul. Thanks. Sometimes I forget that people's domains are more broad than the ones I work with. (I'm permitted to be lazy in this regard, but should not encourage such laziness.)

Onward!

Also don't forget that these tools aren't perfect; they won't always show every single last link. For example, I have a followed link from SEOmoz here that I have yet to see show up on my OSE link profile. (been about 3-4 weeks.)

Point being, if you see the link on the site and can confirm it's followed - rest assured it's passing you juice no matter what spiders recognize.

well you can find out how it's been indexed by typing in your domain. For example, if your domain is www.whoopsee.com then google "whoopsee" and see what it returns.

Regardless, this doesn't matter. What you NEED to do is simply do a redirect. Choose one, www or non-www. I prefer www but others prefer other things. It is not going to hurt you if you perform this redirect right this second, no matter what Google has indexed. If you do NOT perform the redirect... THAT is what will hurt your site.

So.. don't delay and don't worry! You will find that things will improve. Keep this in mind - performing a 301 redirect will pass link juice. Meaning if you point domain.com - www.domain.com then all previous links pointing to domain.com will pass juice to the new permanent redirected www.domain.com

Does this make sense?

Long story short - Your site will not be worsened by this redirect. It will be benefited. Because right now, Google sees them as two different sites and they are competing against eachother and link juice is split between them. Join like Voltron and move forward!

In your AdWords account, don't forget to use the Keyword Tool.

It isn't the end-all be-all, but it will definitely get you on the right path.

P.S. I looked up your site and I just want to add a bit of criticism from a user's standpoint (please take it in the spirit in which it is intended.): All your graphics on that front page banner are... blurry. Get 'em high-res if you can cause it hurt my eyes to look at and I'm sure I won't be the only one bothered by that. Not trying to be a jerk, just trying to be helpful.

Yes it definitely matters.

You're using Wordpress? You need an SEO plugin to help with these issues. Look into installing Yoast. It should clean up your duplicate content issues. Google it + duplicates for more info. I personally don't use Wordpress much but do have a small amount of experience with it and Yoast.

Good luck!