Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This site should prove helpful:

http://www.notprovidedcount.com/

and of course what you can do:

http://moz.com/blog/100-percent-keyword-not-provided-whiteboard-tuesday

After reading the Post by ZOOMPF http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte I was wondering if any of you have optimized your TTFB and noticed improvements in rankings.  Have you optimized and not noticed any differences?

As a link builder - I would not pay attention to dofollow vs. nofollow ratios.  Just go and try to get the best links you can, whether followed or no-followed.

As far as the anchors - I would personally allow the anchors to be as natural as possible, so when you ask for a link to a page from a webmaster, don't even include what you would like the anchor to be - just let them pick naturally.

Very strange!!

Is it back to normal now?

What's the link to the product?

I have not heard of one - but if you find one please share with us!  I would love to take a look

Great! Looking forward to it being released as well.

I believe you have it misunderstood - they took action on the pages (on your website) which were benefiting from the unnatural links, rather than taking action on your entire website.

You should still try to target and clean up the unnatural links.

Best of luck!

If you are already enjoying good rankings in the SERPS, I would not worry about this issue. Rather, I would spend your time developing your site more with good content, as well as continuing to try to build high quality links.

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/

http://www.freeimages.co.uk/galleries.htm

And many others.

Search for "free stock images"

Hope that helps.

I would take a good look at your back-link profile, and try to figure out which links you are being punished for.

Also, if you notice a drop in ranking for only one (or a few) specific pages, look at the back-links pointing to that page and figure out which links are hurting you.

Once you target the bad links, contact the webmaster and ask them to remove your links. Document your efforts. Try again (if they don't respond or remove your links) - Document your efforts.

If you could not get your links removed, use the disavow tool (like a machete).  Submit a reconsideration request and include your documentation.

Also, someone who I follow for this type of stuff is Gary Vaynerchuk - follow him on FB/twitter and check out his website. http://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/

He is unbelievable.

His mindset and advice will surely help you figure out your social media strategy.

Agree with Oren - finding the right balance should be majorly dependent on your company and/or profession.

I think the time frame will be different for every site - I believe mostly dependent on how often google crawls your site.  The more authority you have (and the faster google crawls), the quicker they will update.

Can you give an example where it adds your URL as plain text to the code of the page?

I don't think leaving Disqus comments will harm, or benefit, your site SEO wise.  I would feel free to comment as you would naturally, while not trying to comment unnecessarily for SEO benefits.

If "Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option.," AND "pages have good organic positions and authority" - I would not worry about the error - continue to build authority and valuable content and you'll be fine.  Look how many internal links Amazon has, and they are doing just fine in the SERPS.

I think you should use both - each when appropriate.

You should focus on building both brands - your personal brand, and your business brand - both will pay dividends.

Not sure if you can "merge" the accounts, but perhaps someone at Moz can assist with this.

Why don't you cancel your brand new account, and upgrade you old account - and create the campaigns in the old account.

The Yoast SEO plugin is the way to go, as jStrong and Vadim have mentioned.

My pleasure!

Exactly - as Keri explained, they try to crawl the most valuable links.

By linking to the correct pinterest page, you will signal to MOZ (and google) that your Pinterest profile is worth crawling/indexing, and it will gain more page authority as well.

https://getlisted.org/ is your best bet for getting started.

It is because the MOZ crawl didn't pick up that pinterest page.

One thing I would recommend - on http://www.chicfamilytravels.com/: Your link to "follow me on Pinterest" which goes to http://www.pinterest.com/ChicFamily+/ is a dead link.  Update it to the correct link http://www.pinterest.com/ChicFamily/

Hope that helps.

Curious about this as well...

"E) Adwords is a battle of quality score.  If you start out trying to get cheap clicks your quality score is going to suck.  I go in bidding crazy high to help the quality score and then back off."

Can you explain this a little further?  How does your high orignial bid increase the quality score?

Thanks!

Agreed - that is an excellent post, with many useful tools and info.

I would add - for the google suggest part of the post - an excellent tool is Uber Suggest. http://ubersuggest.org/

Make sure to 301 the current page to the new one - as well as the old archived posts to the new post pages (assuming you are keeping the archived content.

Let us know how the switch goes!

Wow - I have received an email like that recently, and was surprised that the person emailing me would want to take his link down - but now it all makes sense.  It was a competitor all along!

Talk about Negative/black-hat tactics!

I have seen proof that white hat SEO leads to rankings.

I have not seen proof that Social Signals alone will lead to rankings.  I agree with EGOL - you should focus your attention on the quality of the content, and possibly more white-hat link building, rather than going ALL-IN on social.

Wow - PDF Branded Reports!  Can't wait to see those!

I would focus on the Page Title, and Duplicate Content stuff first.

The description tag won't hurt or help your ranking, it will just have an effect on your CTR.

Once you go through the Title & Content, start remedying the # of links.

Hope that helps.

From John Mueller

It's good to double-check these things, and it appears I was wrong there -- we do treat 410s slightly differently than 404s. In particular, we'll sometimes want to confirm a 404 before removing a URL from the index, and we tend to do that faster with a 410 HTTP result code. In practice, the difference is very small, and it's not critical to use a 410 if a URL is permanently removed. If you want to speed up the removal (and don't want to use a noindex meta tag or the urgent URL removal tools), then a 410 might have a small time-advantage over a 404.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/qv49s4mTwNM/discussion

Look in OSE: Showing only _rel=nofollow _links from external pages to pages on this root domain:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.sylvaniachurch.com&sort=page_authority&filter=nofollow&source=external&target=domain&group=0

It shows only 17 no-follow external links to pages on your site.

Agree with Lynn and KempRuge. Hard to give feedback without more info.

I would add text based content to give your readers, and google, more info about the landing page.

Hope that helps Aaron.

Many webmasters, such as yourself are cautious and hesitant to use the disavow tool.

I would document that you contacted the webmaster and they required a payment of $.30 per links to have them removed, and send that info over to google after you use the disavow and put in a reconsideration request.

"Use the disavow tool like a machete" - Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/#comment-86419

I would stick to the hyphens, and vertical bars. Google recognizes those two as separators.

While tildes, apersats, and slashes could hypothetically work as well - there will certainly not be any gained SEO advantage.

I agree with Jesse - this would cause major red flags to go up at google.

Wow - nice graph!  Where is that data from?

No worries! Appreciate your input.

Interesting note on the discriminatory aspect - I was under the impression that as long as the directory provided real value to users, Google would be lenient.

While I agree that there is nothing more annoying then telemarketers, our company does not have a choice, we pick up the phone when it rings. (And I have a feeling your company is the same way.) Our phone number is on our website.  I don't think being a part of "Dial a Human" would cause any extra telemarketers to call us.

I was asking more from a link-building aspect whether you thought this link was worthwhile.

I know people have mixed feelings towards submitting their sites to directories, but this one really seemed special, so I decided to share the opportunity with the Moz community, as well as open up a discussion on the value of being a part of this directory (and similar ones.)

We recently submitted our site to Dial a Human (www.dialahuman.com) It is a directory of companies' phone numbers, which go directly to a person (bypassing the machines.) I think this directory actually does provide users with value, and is far from your typical link farm.

The Page Authority is 56 and the Domain Authority is 47, and it is a PR5 site.

The other companies listed are all extremely reputable (most of them are fortune 500 companies.) The fee to join is $75-$150, but to be included with this group of companies, we felt it was very worthwhile.

We would join this type of directory over and over again.  Would you?

If you have any other directories which are of the same caliber please share!

Well, the comparison page has a page authority of 32 while the product page only has a page authority of 21.

This is the most important factor.

THe comparison page also has external links from PC Gamer, and Bit-Tech - while the product page has zero external (followed) links.

I would try to build some external links to the product page.

You have to keep working at adding valuable content, and providing a great user experience.

At the same time you should never be satisfied with your backlink profile.  Keep working on building them - but stick to high quality, relevant, and non-spammy links.

They are hard to get, but worth the time.

I agree with Ron.  I would not trade links with any random site, especially not one with SEO in the URL.

I would say it is possible - with the likelihood depending on how many pages you are including in your sitemap, and how authoritative your site/sitemap is in Google's eyes.

Of course linking to the page from other pages on your site increases your chances dramatically.

Hope that helps