If it helps, my links are showing up again on GWMT as of mid morning.  Looks like the fix is in place.

Hi Karl,

Check out this thread here to start with.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-my-good-links-disappeared-from-gwmt

It appears that GWT is having an issue currently with reporting all links going to the homepage of your site.  According to Google it shouldn't be affecting your rankings or traffic, just the reporting - but they are checking into it.

That might be a good part of your issue.

There's an updated response from Googles John Mueller:

"Thanks for the report, Anne (and thanks for escalating, Stevie!). This looks like an issue with how the data is displayed in Webmaster Tools, it shouldn't affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking. I don't have any specifics at the moment, but the team is looking into the details to see what we can do here. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the confusion!"

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-homepage-bug-16322.html

It looks like when this happened back in August of 2011 it took up to two weeks to fix.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-bug-13886.html

I have to imagine that it's just a temporary hiccup because my site lost links from major media institutions like Bloomberg and Forbes.  I can't image those links would have been "devalued".  Give it some time and watch your traffic.  Mine is normal today and I imagine that it would have cratered if all my links had actually disappeared.

Good Luck,

Jason

My corporate site went from 140K+ links on Webmasters tools to 133 overnight.  I lost links from Forbes, Bloomberg, and some universities so they were good links.  It has to be an error.  My brand new site is down from several hundred links to showing no data at all.

I'll wait it out but traffic doesn't seem to be affected one way or the other.

It's probably just an issue of time with Google.  Depending on your site it can take a while to get re-crawled and have the new changes indexed.

Best,

Jason

I don't understand how it would interfere with on-site SEO.  We use the Quantcast scripts and haven't seen any issues with it.  Our rankings have been increasing steadily and we haven't received any notifications of crawler errors.

Quantcast is generally pretty on-the-ball with things like this and I think if Google had issues with their script then they would fix it fast.

Best,

Jason

Keep in mind that Mozscape only updates once every 30 days or so.  If you just put out the link you won't see it on OSE for a  while.  http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

However, I can see the link redirection and I'm not certain that you'll get the most benefit from that.  Perhaps someone can answer that a bit more competently than I can.

Also, press release sites are passing very little value these days so I wouldn't get your hopes up overall.

Best,

Jason

Hmm.. Perhaps their main links were still included?  Mine dropped right along with my competitors.

Have you noticed link volume loss in other tools?

It was most likely due to the smaller size of the mozscape update http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

Basically this months update was smaller than ones in the past, so links (and their metrics) that may have been included in the past might not be showing now because the update indexed less overall.

Check out your stats compared to your competitors and you may see that everyone has dropped by a fairly comparable amount.

I think you should probably figure out what's setting off the red flags and fix it.  They like to give warnings first if it's not a huge issues.. but they could drop the hammer on you at any time.

Best,

-Jason

I'm still too new here.  What did the Term Extractor tool do?

-Jason

It's very unlikely that Google would hit you with a manual penalty for press releases, especially if the content isn't spammy.

Whether or not they give much or any value to links coming from PR sites is another question.  Press releases are a normal part of an established business and aren't really considered link manipulation in most cases.

My company puts out several press releases on PRWeb every week and while we haven't seen any great SEO advantage, we haven't seen any sort of penalty either.

We do get some referral traffic and every so often a larger site will pick up one of the releases for their own content.  On top of that we often get scrapers snagging and spinning our content but they generally don't keep the links pointed at us.

Best,

Jason

Nice example Bede

Consider using mechanical turk to crowd source writing new product descriptions if you have a lot of them.

I've never found any spinning software that works anywhere near well enough that I would want to show the results to customers and it can even hurt you with the search engines.

That sounds strange. I have hundreds of pages with titles where only the city name is different and they aren't being flagged as duplicate.

I thought that any actual change different from any other page would count as a unique page title without duplication penalties.  I know that actual content on-page is a different story however.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken here.

Are you certain that there isn't a different issue here?

Best,

-Jason

Thanks for the answers guys.  I really appreciate it.

I understand now and yah, that seems like an unnecessarily confusing way to go about it for Facebook.

This is a pretty stupid question sorry, but hopefully it is easy to resolve:

Both OSE and Woorank list our site as having 17 Facebook likes.

The Facebook icon on the page shows 92 likes.

Our Facebook Page shows 560 likes.

Where is the 17 number coming from??

our page is: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com/

Thanks,

Jason

Perhaps an article or infographic discussing the most environmentally responsible pest control methods?  I was sold by a company recently who made a big deal about how environmentally "green" their pest sprays were compared to the competition.  You could talk about the consequences of some of the older and more damaging pest control chemicals.

Maybe an infographic showing the different kinds of pests and the consequences of an infestation?

A bunch of scary close-up photos of insects, their swarms and the damage they can do in an infographic may get a few clicks.

Also check out Todays blog: "

The Guide to Developing a Content Strategy for "Boring" Industries"

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

Good luck!

-Jason

Hi THB,

According to the recent Q&A with Matt Cutts at SMX 2012, Google does not look at Analytics for ranking.

http://www.seroundtable.com/smxadv-mattcutts-15253.html

However, if you're getting a good amount of traffic through a link, I'm sure it may help ranking in a tangential way.  If it's getting traffic then the referring page probably has a decent authority so that link is probably worth more for rankings than one from a page that isn't getting much traffic.

Hi Jennifer,

I know I might catch some flak for even talking about this, but I have to keep a close watch on our competitors because they are constantly rocketing up in the SERPs from paid/spam links.  For some reason it seems to take Google a while to catch them even with the new Penguin update.

I have no problems with using tricks of the trade to get advantageous results in rankings, but it irritates me to get outranked by competitors who are blatantly just buying thousands of junk links.

In each situation I use OSE to get several examples and then use:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport  to report them.  It seems to take a week or so but each time I've reported I've seen the spammers URL tank about 50 positions.

In many situations however Google will just remove value from the junk links without penalty and you can still lose your position to the competitor if overall they have more good links than you do.  Also take into consideration your onsite SEO, content quality and social signals.

Best of luck,

Jason

I track a couple hundred keywords and rank tracker varies a bit from week to week.  Seeing your rank move one position over a short period of time isn't cause for much concern.

Did your organic traffic decrease significantly recently?

Use Google Chrome Incognito and check your position manually for each keyword.

Check out what the competitor that replaced you in the second position is doing.  I have seen several competing site that will rocket up in rankings for a short time because they purchased or spammed 300K links quickly but they eventually fall.

You may also have to give it some time.  I made a bunch of changes all at once before and I dropped 4 to 5 position on a lot of my keywords for about a week or so, and then I went right back up.

Thanks for this Matt!  Great answer and I owe ya.

Jason

Hi guys,

Just to clarify, because I've been wondering this same thing:  Google considers "Likes" of your webpage to be different from "likes" of your business Facebook page which is LINKED to your webpage...correct?

And from what I am seeing, Google values webpage likes more than Facebook page likes as far as social signal rankings are concerned. Right?

Sorry if this is confusing.  I may need to change our Facebook button on our webpage.  It's currently going to our brand page on Facebook instead of "liking" the webpage itself.

Thanks,

Jason

Keep in mind however that links and rankings can degrade over time.  If you aren't building new content on the new domain then the advantage may begin to fade after a while.  It can be difficult to develop unique, fresh content for both domains.

It depends on how close your branding of each will be and if it's meant to drive sales leads then you also have to make sure to focus on the user experience for both.

-Jason

I agree with Justin. "Defensive" use of multiple domains to pick up misspellings or misremembered names can be valid strategy, but I would 301 them to the main site.

Trying to build links, social signals and unique, fresh content for each individual domain for SEO purposes probably isn't a good idea.

Hi Laura,

Intertek is a well respected company in several fields (I actually used to work on digital campaigns for one of your larger competitors) and should have a fairly natural advantage in terms of content that exists already and industry recognition.

The onsite SEO for the entire site looks a bit below average (Please correct me if I'm wrong here..) and you could probably show some improvement in the numbers fairly quickly that way.

I found some success in driving quality/relevant traffic with a competitor of yours through community development.  Intertek deals with a fairly technical audience and there are a lot of related active discussions happening regularly in different forums including linkedIn groups.  Gain some cooperation and buy in from some of your brand managers and have them participate in community discussion and conversation.  Use a social media platform to monitor the different groups and apportion responses and questions to the appropriate person.  Remember to "brand" them as well otherwise they'll eventually lose interest.

I'm fairly certain that Intertek has a great deal of tools and guides that your technicians and surveyors are using.  If they haven't been declared internal-only try to find audiences that could make use of them, even if only for basic reference and publish them on sites that cater to that audience.  (Make sure they're copyrighted first).

Get some cross-promotion going with the various associations, professional certification groups and advocacy groups of which I guarantee Intertek has been active with.  Find out what content their marketing people would like to have and utilize your internal resources there.  This can be challenging because your operations people aren't going to want extra demands on the non-marketing subject matter experts that are probably overworked already, but you should be able to get questions answered or short descriptions written that you can flesh out into longer content pieces.

Focus on your division first and document everything.  I mean everything.  Show the benefits of your work over time and pitch it to the other business units.  Make sure to brand yourself and your team as being the ones responsible.  You should be able to show some good improvement in the numbers over time and describe to the powers-that-be how your efforts in your unit can be applied to their area of responsibility.

There is, of course, traditional media buys and search marketing, but that depends on your budget.

Best of luck

-Jason

You can add multiple locations to a single Google Places account.  I would strongly recommend registering all locations under just one account unless you intend for the listings to be managed by different people.

I'm currently struggling with trying to manage hundreds of locations spread across 16 different accounts and it's a giant mess.

Apparently Yoast is really great.  http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Check out the SEOMoz blog about it too:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

ahh, I see.  I usually consider landing pages just to be a separate page, not a whole separate domain.  I would definitely agree to use a new page on the same domain rather than a whole different domain or subdomain.

-Jason

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question, but isn't what you described the very definition of a landing page?

I usually consider landing pages according to the particular purpose needed for them.

If I have a search PPC campaign I'll make sure to build a landing page specific to each particular customer I'm targeting.  For example, I'm in the gold buying biz, so when I want to target customers that are looking for the current price for gold I'll build a landing page with current pricing and then make sure its the destination page for ads that target keywords like "Gold Price", "Spot price of gold" etc.

If I'm interested in increasing organic rankings for a particular keyword set that is beyond what my main page is optimized for, I'll create a page and new content that is designed for not only the new keywords but the customers I expect to drive to that page.  That "landing page" then is optimized for those new keywords and visitors and I work to increase its ranking, along with my main site in the SERPs.

I wouldn't necessary build a "landing page" that is a subdomain or a new URL completely, unless perhaps it's an exact match for the keywords I'm targeting.  I would however create a new "landing page" subpage on my current site and target a specific set of keywords or a specific customer profile.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.

-Jason

Thanks Rich,

I'll make sure to do the same.  Good luck!

Hello JBGlobalSEO,

I'm having the same issue.  I run digital marketing for a company that has over 200 stores nationwide and now, apparently, over 200 Google+ pages.

From what I've been able to find out, each of these local Google+ pages are currently able to be managed through their associated Google Places accounts.  Google has said that they are looking to include the functionality of being able to handle multiple locations through one Google+ account, but they haven't mentioned exactly how they are going to accomplish this yet and there's no expected timeline yet.

It's going to be extremely important however, since the new Google Places/Google + pages will be indexable.  I'm already building a procedure for our local store leaders to regularly contribute content for their individual location while I manage it centrally and it's going to have to be updated on a regular basis.

I know this isn't much of an answer, but I wanted to confirm that so far there's little to no information out there on handling multiple locations through a single Gplus page, however Google has stated that they intend to provide that functionality "soon".

Thanks,

Jason

Perfect.  Thanks Takeshi, I appreciate it.

Thanks Modbargains,

I was just hired to help with SEO (I've only been here a few weeks now) and I'm working on a backlinks strategy now.   We definitely, definitely need better links with better anchor text.

My concern however is that we haven't done anything drastic over the past couple of weeks  yet we've seen a big drop in domain authority according to OSE.  I'm trying to figure out what happened.

Also, what 301 redirects are you referring to?

Thanks!

Jason

To add to this:  We have over the past 3 weeks noticed a negative SEO campaign against us.  Our press releases are being horribly spun and added to really spammy sites.  We've also seen a lot of links being added to strange porn sites.

It seems strange however that we would have seen a drop in backlinks somehow though.

Hello,

I've noticed that our sites domain authority has dropped enormously this past week according to Open Site Explorer.  It also shows us as having lost about half of our backlinks.

Google webmaster tools doesn't show a corresponding drop in links and we haven't done anything to our domain recently.  Anyone have any ideas what might have happened?

Our site is at: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com

Thanks!

The new indexing may be a huge advantage for local-oriented businesses over national online-only competitors that might have stronger link profiles/SEO but no local presence.

Facebook-type, regularly updated Google+ local pages that are well optimized might end up dominating local SERP.

Looks like this exact question was just asked.   Sorry all.  Early Monday morning search fail.

Hello,

I've been newly hired to head up a decent sized company's digital marketing initiatives.  Between social media campaigns, web content development, ppc management, etc. I've been a bit overwhelmed.

It looks like until my team gets a bit larger we may have to outsource link building, but with the new penguin update I'm worried about choosing the wrong company and ending up with a ton of spam links that gets us nailed.

Does anyone happen to have any good recommendations?

Thanks!

I agree but I'm worried we are going to see a lot of past work causing false results unless we determine how Google sets categories.  If your main keywords are shuffling you off to a new, but irrelevant category, you might lose a lot of traffic or even get the wrong type of traffic.

So according to CNN an hour ago regarding new Google update:

"With Knowledge Graph, which will begin rolling out to some users immediately, results will be arranged according to categories with which the search term has been associated"

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/tech/web/google-search-knowledge-graph/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Does this mean we need to start optimizing for Categories as well as Keywords?

Thanks Kynduvme,

I have our priority keywords mapped out included a large volume of long tail.  We are currently using Analytics and I've been able to get a good insight into how our customers are using the site.  We are in the process of adding new features to increase visitor usage metrics (Galleries of notable purchases, click through tutorials, etc).

Our on site meta is pretty bad, and needs to be redone.  I've been waiting until our new features and revisions are up to change that however.  We have a few hundred locations now and I've been making sure they're verified with Google Places.   We've been seeing a lot of traffic through that.

I really appreciate all the advice.

That's perfect! Thanks Steve,  I'll check them out today.

Thanks Andrew.  We are working on making sure we have enough keywords in the content.  We are probably going to have to do a full revision on the site itself.

I appreciate it!

Hello everyone,

I was hoping to be able to get some advice if at all possible.  I'm know there's some really skilled people on these forums.   I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting links so if it's crossing the line to post the link of the site I'm working on please let me know.

I was just hired as the Director of Digital Marketing for a decent sized company.  I have a lot of experience with PPC, media buys and digital integration but unfortunately I'm a noob with SEO.

I'm trying to learn as quickly as possible, and I'm reading everything I can (including everything I can find from Rand)

The issue is that I have to start somewhere but there's so much that needs to be done that I'm getting a bit lost.  We used to have 3 separate sites that ranked really well for our main keywords on Google, but with the growth of our company we consolidated the different market sites into one main one and 301'd the older ones.  In doing so we lost nearly all of our search rankings.  Our current site is:

Http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com/

Does anyone have any advice on where to dive in here?  I'm currently paying a ton each month for traffic through search PPC and contextual display, along with a bunch of geographically targeted brand awareness display campaigns, and I really need to show some progress on our organic search.

Thanks in advance for any help!