Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Although this is a 2009 article, I still find it interesting : http://searchengineland.com/do-links-from-expired-domains-count-with-google-17811

"Buying Expired Domains: Don’t Expect Credit"

"Buying Domain & Running Web Site As Usual: Credit Likely"

Did you check with several tools that no links are getting indexed ? (Google Webmaster Tools, MOZ, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO...).

If your links are not visible on any of these crawlers, they are probably not very valuable anyway.

Matt Cutts on sitewide links : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTjN9x-by-I

A previous question about it on the forum : http://moz.com/community/q/are-sitewide-links-bad-for-seo

According to SEMrush, your website went from 600+ KW in top 20 for US in august 2012 to 150+ nowadays.

In my mind, links like http://www.freeadultwebsitesdirectory.com/stockings.html

http://kupilandia.ru/individual-order/

http://www.sexualallsorts.co.uk/xxxSextoyShop/Stockings-and-Hosiery-Tights/default.aspx

are not helping to stay out of algo penalty.

With owner permission "having your name on the site in unlinked text" seems the best to do.

I remember the penalty story of 'Web Design Yorkshire by Pinpoint Designs' - http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

<greyhat>Need to vary anchor text if you do it :).</greyhat>

1/ Get 200 MOZ points for the removal of "nofollow" from first custom URL on profile :p.

2/ I would recommend you to read "Link Building: The Definitive Guide" ; http://backlinko.com/link-building.

I'm working with an European e-commerce; they already have a French website with a .fr domain.

They want to target the Belgium with a .be domain and the Nederland with a .nl domain.

Belgium = 50% dutch, 50% French.

Is it better to do 3 websites, one per country, or 2 websites, one per language ? Thinking to SEO, costs, VAT management, what is your opinion?

As Richard mentioned "You want any links that your content builds to be directed to your website".

I would use <cite class="_sd">http://sites.google.com // blogspot.com //</cite> wordpress.com // tumblr.com etc. only as satellites.

From what I see :

• You don't own any game / have no original content.

• You don't host any game. And when a website like "Game Jacket" is down, the game is unavailable :

http://www.loglod.org/play-game/3168-raging-steel-2

• Few or no text on the website.

Sorry if it sounds harsh, just trying to find reasons...

1/ I would buy an exact match domain for a new and short term project only. If you have a 8 yo known brand/domain, keep it and don't bother with additional domains :).

2/ Your keyword is moderately competitive according to MOZ (39% difficulty score).

To rank on first page you should :

• Get 10-15 good links with appropriate anchors text.

• Have a great text/content (2000 words+ // http://bit.ly/1bQL13C).

To rank faster, you could 301 redirect your homepage to yourwebsite.com to yourwebsite.com/antique-fireplaces-london

3/ I assume that your title, headings and ALT attributes are already optimized ~~.

Just my personal experience in case it could help:

On some WP websites using "all-in-one SEO" to rewrite titles, Google rewrites my titles again.

On other sites using "yoast seo", I don't have this problem.

I will try to reduce titles length to see if it changes something.

Quick fact : an average first result in Google = 2 400 words.

http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/20/the-science-behind-long-copy-how-more-content-increases-rankings-and-conversions/

It you can do a great relevant text, just do it :).

1/ "This is not a competitive area"... It depends :).

Your homepage title is "Gîte en montagne - Chalet - Savoie | Alpage du Choaille d'en Haut"

"gite en montagne" "gite savoie" "chalet montagne" "chalet savoie" are quite competitive in terms of SEO or SEA.

It you want to target "beaufortain", you should include it in your page title.

2/ Average #1 ranking = 2000-2400 words. Your text = 200 words.

3/ As Matt-Antonino explained, you lack of authority ; you need more links... and more anchors text relative to your keywords.

4/ As far as I'm concerned, I would add a blog to talk about the area, to explain why it's great to stay there and what you can do, testimonials, videos etc.

Is there a way to do great content and to get a few natural links ?

1/ About links : page and domain authority are not all; anchors text match to keyword can make the difference.

2/ About content/text : try to understand regarding the other results what is the expected semantic according to Google. Besides, a length of 2000+ words will help.

You're welcome. I mean "I know you'll do that for someone else" ;).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-grant/pay-it-forward_b_4270340.html

To go deeper: average text of #1 pages in Google = 2000 to 2400 words. Adding a relevant text would be a good idea.

I checked the first results for "accessoire de mesure" on Google.fr

They don't sell the same product than you. There might be a semantic issue here.

According to Google, accessoire de mesure = building or sewing sector.

http://www.conrad.fr/ce/fr/category/SHOP_AREA_37381/Appareil-de-mesure

http://www.matopo.fr/mesure/accessoires-de-mesure/index.html

Quite the same for Google Images.

Is accessoire de mesure a good converting keyword in your industry ? Is it used by your competitors ?

Besides adding text, I would suggest to get a simple French URL + 301 redirect the old one.

IE : from http://fr.mt.com/fr/fr/home/products/Laboratory_Analytics_Browse/Meter_family_page/Meter_Accessor.html to something like fr.met.com/accessoire-de-mesure

I agree with Andy.

1/ According to SEMrush : feb. 2014 = 536 keywords in Google top. Only 269 in march 2014.

http://fr.semrush.com/info/smartpress.com+(by+organic)

Does Google Analytics show the same ?

2/ Did you modify website navigation/menus, template, server or htaccess file recently ? Probably not.

3/ Check Google Webmaster Tools for manual penalty. If you don't have a penalty message, look for an algorithmic penalty.

4/ No big change in 2014 algorithm according to MOZ yet : http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change#2014

But smartpress got a lot of new links recently :

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/?target=smartpress.com

From 680 to 900 domains in few months; are all these links "natural" ?

I see that you did a lot of guest articles ; some are not really close to your niche. That may deserve you :

http://creditcard-lawsuit.com/credit-card-debt-management-and-related-ideas/

Matt Cutts warned people on jan. 20 2014 : "The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO"

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/

I would also suggest to improve your internal linking. Link every article to one or two relevant articles of your website.

Thanks, this is the post I wanted to mention.

1/Links = 40% of ranking factors.

Try the first step to rank : write good content. Even a family owned and operated small business can do it.

Egol wrote a great answer about this recently but I can't find the post anymore. The idea is to write about your customers, their problems and how you help them #InboundMarketing.

2/ IMO, a spammy link is a link you can't control. With a charitable organization, you can always ask them to remove the link in case of a possible penalty. If their thank you page has a high PR, I would take the risk.

3/ When I get a new customer, I try to get him links from the town hall website, the local chamber of commerce, his suppliers, his clients, school they accept a trainee from etc. Try to think to everyone who has an IRL link with your client.

1/ Short term answer : EMD.

2/ Long term answer : forenamesurname.com

I vote for 1/ if :

• You have a limited budget / a limited time to rank.

• Your client is not able to help you to produce great content.

I vote for 2/ if your client is patient and willing to build his brand.

According to MOZ ranking factors, EMS is 7 or 8% advantage and I read that partial EMD is useless.

IMO, weddingmakeupbyforename.com is too long anyway.

Would be not very interesting for Google to see people stop ads because of an organic penalty :). This is his core business.

Most of time, the opposite question is asked : "does Participating In Google AdWords Help My Organic Rankings?"

No, of course : http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-organic-results-15910.html

Is it really www.SubconsciousMind.com ? PR 0 and listed at domainnamesales ?

Nice links.

Personal experience: I had a manual penalty on a "MFA" domain for unnatural links. I did not renew it on time and he has been offline for few days. When he came back online, there was no manual penalty in GWT anymore.

So, if only few days offline can waive a penalty, I would be very confident for a domain offline several years.

Brian Dean wrote: "Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google."

In another article, he explained that he generally links to 4 authority sites in his articles.

His friend is probably thinking to "Amazon's Mechanical Turk". You pay people few cents to type what you need in Google.

Does it work? Yes. Is it ethical? I don't think so :). Especially when you pay for "you competitor + scam".

A French manager has been caught for "negative suggest" against a blogger.

Update: found the article about this story http://www.slate.fr/life/82581/sophie-gourion-malhonnete-e-reputation; use Google translate ~~.

Forum helps you to collect mails, can be very valuable.

If you want people to register easily, try a Facebook login system + allow a dofollow link on profile. Maybe that the forum just launched by Quicksprout can inspire you.

http://www.quicksprout.com/forum/

Would you have enough time to run a blog + a forum ? If you are usually busy, step away from forum and focus on blog.

LEAVE AS : the blog website can link to other websites of your network and improve their domain autority.

LEAVE AS : you will lose blog comments / social shares.

We should not "believe" anything, we should always test :).

Same feeling than Ron. I would care more about title and page stuffing. Checking the top 10 results and what they are doing can help you to decide.

Use 301 redirection old page->new page for every page; see the Google "moving your site page" https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en

SVN = 86% difficulty / 18185 global Bing search volume.

Subversion = 83% difficulty / 3164 global Bsv.

• Both keywords have the same difficulty; SVN is more searched than subversion.

One of your popular page is https://help.cloudforge.com/entries/22483742-Setting-up-svn-externals

Most people search "svn externals", not "subversion externals". For each important page, you should check what is the most important keyword, SVN or subversion; it looks that SVN is far more popular.

Good news: it will be easier to stay under 70 characters :).

Did you notice a loss of ranks/traffic? Did you get a warning message in Google Webmaster Tools for "unnatural links"? As an "authority site", the answer is probably "no". No need to use the disavow tool in my opinion.

You need to build trust. I would add an "about us" page with address, phone, contact form/mail, privacy policy, picture of the team, bio of writers etc; everything that helps you to look more human and real :).

Both answers are true:

• A good keyword density can help to rank; most of your competitors used the word "lifestyle" from 4 to 6 times on their homepage (with the SEOquake bar, you can check density of a page).

• If you go over a normal limit and repeat "lifestyle" 20 times, it will look spammy for the reader and for Google. You repeat it already 14 times; maybe it's too much but there is no definitive answer; the best way in my opinion is to look how competitors rank.

Once you have an optimized website, the difference will be made by links; but like in the top 10 US, the top 10 UK = a lot of exact match/partial match domain. You will need better links than them.

Of course, don't focus only on one keyword; your SEO strategy should include 100's or 1000's of keywords to bring traffic.

I checked the top in Google US for Lifestyle Magazine. They ALL have lifestyle or magazine in their domain name or in their URL.

http://www.lifestyle.org/

http://www.lifeandstylemag.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_magazine

http://www.nashvillelifestyles.com/

http://www.lifestylesmagazine.com/

Etc.

Without an EMD/PMD, it will be harder for you to rank. if I look page authority/domain authority, the 5th/6th rank is possible with a good net-linking work.

As far as i'm concerned, I would not repeat Magazine twice in your title :

"Lifestyle Magazine No Magazine Subscription Required"

Once + website title would be better not only for SEO but for CTR.

A French e-commerce had the same issue:

• they picked a new domain.

• they used a java-script redirection from the old homepage (no 301), which is not supposed to pass penalty (to be verified) - it helps to redirect people who bookmarked the website/the direct visitors.

• they tried to understand the reason of the penalty and changed their way to build links (no more links on farm websites, diversified anchor etc, more nofollow, no over optimized titles etc).

• they updated the top old links.

• they used SEA and bought ads the first 6 months to keep the same traffic.

One year later, they got an even better traffic than before the penalty.

I did a test last month on google.fr with the keyword "cuisine quimper" (kitchen + town name); with one dofollow link, I got the 11th rank.

Then I added 3 good nofollow links... and got rank 2. Nofollow links value is probably very low but not equal to 0.

All details and screenshots : http://internetbusiness.fr/liens-nofollow-utiles-pour-gagner-des-positions-dans-google

Do you own test :). Anyway, good nofollow links can bring you direct traffic and help your linking profile to be more natural.

linking-nofollow-cuisine-quimper.jpg Historique-liens-cuisine-quimper.jpg Autorit%C3%A9-cuisine-quimper.jpg

Hi,

I saw the same result for a webmaster that accepted paid links from a casino/poker room on his homepage. I don't know the other possible reasons. Hope community can help :).

I have question : did you lose ranks on your keywords ater the PR loss ?

Erwan.

Thank you for your answer people. It looks like index,nofollow would be indeed better.

By looking more on the net, I also found a yoast article about this issue: http://yoast.com/wordpress-threaded-comments-and-seo/

"WordPress automatically adds a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag to each URL that has ?replytocom in it."

This is why all my comments URL look like http://www.example.com/example-post/?replytocom=1

Yoast plugin update offers an option to remove ?replytocom variable. I think that I will have to drop All in one SEO on this website...

Hi,

I changed the design of one my wordpress website at the beginning of the month. I also added a "facebook seo comments" plugin to rewrite facebook comments as normal comments.

As most of the website comments are facebook comments, I went from 250 noindex/nofollow comments to 950; URL's are ?replytocom=4822 etc.

Moz campaign noticed it and I'm asking myself : is it good to have comments in noindex/nofollow ?

Should I do something about this ?

Erwan.

A webmaster can remove the nofollow from wordpress; most blogs have dofollow comments in order to get as many comments as possible.

Try to do a right click on a page / view page source / CTRL+F (find) then type nofollow to see it.

You can also use a navigator addon like NoDoFollow on Firefox.

MajesticSEO is good to have a second opinion on your netlinking and check all the nofollow links.

Please note that a natural link profile has dofollow AND nofollow links :).

If you want to check ranking manually, you should use private navigator option ("new private window" in Firefox). If you don't, you will get personalized results.

In my opinion, if you care about rankings, you should give up blogspot and get your own domain + shared hosting. It's really unexpensive. Pick a host from the targeted country.

My first blogspot website never ranked well and it's a good experience to learn more about hosting and wordpress installation.

I use SEMrush to discover ranked keywords and then SEOmoz to track them. But SEMrush works better if your website is some months old.

The payday loan site probably just made the buzz with a great content ;).

Check : http://www.zen-zen.info/festival-de-silence-3eme-edition/

Useless website; webmasters post cheap content to get a link.

No social engagement, ads everywhere... Even if the DA is 44, just forget this kind of website for guest posts.

Quality is a bit subjective. Google does not really like coupons/affiliate websites. You need to inspire confidence.

1/ You should insist on your original content and promote it - your blog is not easy to find from the home page.

Put a blog link top of the page - maybe add an excerpt/a quote from the last article.

2/ About us/Contact us pages are a little empty. Would be nice to have an address, a picture of the office, of the team etc.

3/ If I look one of your competitor : http://media.couponmom.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=emhecijvt7m0kpeq4qp9nlcr64&cid=275

I find the design bad but the visitor can see there's a real person behind the website.

4/ You could add a FAQ page.

5/ Another competitor have a privacy page + a california privacy rights page.

6/ You used the social facebook plugin on your blog; maye you should also use it on your home page like http://www.couponnetwork.com did.

7/ Try to get trust signals like http://coupons.com did :

http://clicktoverify.truste.com/pvr.php?page=validate&url=www.coupons.com&sealid=102

http://www.bbb.org/sanjose/business-reviews/marketing-programs-and-services/couponscom-incorporated-in-mountain-view-ca-223835#sealclick

Groupon.com mention : https://www.trustedshops.com/shop/certificate.php?shop_id=X06E5E546FF38C7F9EFF97A9141038AE8

8/ Maybe it's time to rework on your design; coupons.com or groupon.com have a good one.

9/ I think you got penalized because of modified/hidden links.

When I click on Kernel picture by example, I get there : http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/buy-employee-desktop-live-viewer.php

This is not the visible link... The user should know he will be redirect on another website. There should be a text like "visit Kernel website to redeem your coupon".

10/ You got the general idea. It's all about trust and user experience!

Matthew made a good point with social engagement.

1/ You could also look the PageRank. If you are PR 3, focus PR 3+ websites.

2/ Most important is the website himself. Does it look spammy or does it have a real content? Is it an interesting website? Is there affiliate links, text link or casino ads ?

If a website is new but has only high quality posts, it does not matter if DA is under 30 and PR still 0.

3/ A natural linking profile means also links from "low" websites, not only from PR3+ by example, especially for a new website.

Look the charts in this article : http://www.seowizz.net/2010/10/high-quality-links-dont-work-natural-profiles.html

You clearly see the natural/not natural profile :).

1/ Unnatural inbound links message does not lead necessarily to a loss of rank and a loss of traffic. Even SEOmoz.org got the same message and lost nothing (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-unnatural-links-warnings). I had the same experience for a flash game website.

2/ If you actually lost ranks/traffic, you have to show your good will and give something to Google. I suggest you to use Open Site Explorer and to look for low authority linking domains.

Example : last URL = www.cheapautoexpo.com/tag/coupons/

You have 4 links on the same page - deals365.us did the same. A click = a pop-up. This looks like a bad neighbourhood.

You won't lose much by removing this kind of links. Keep a track of all the links you removed. In this case :

http://www.cheapautoexpo.com/Lifestyle/verified-online-promo-codes-for-discounts-on-apparels-shopping/

http://www.cheapautoexpo.com/News/get-discounts-on-concert-tickets-through-with-ticket-spot-coupon-codes/

http://www.cheapautoexpo.com/Education/revolution-prep-promo-codes-coupons-to-learn-sat-act-at-affordable-price-online-/

http://www.cheapautoexpo.com/Lifestyle/get-expedia-promo-codes-coupons-to-have-cheap-tickets-for-travel-and-hotels-/

It will show Google you did a serious work.

3/ If you can't remove the links manually, ask the webmaster to do it. In most cases he won't answer if this is a spammy website.

Then consider using the disallow tool : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

4/ I would recommend you to do the same for all the low directories... and the link suggested by Google : http://www.allworldlinks.com/k/317277/online-free-coupons.html

5/ Pinpoint Designs had the same issue and wrote and article about : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience

In the reconsideration request, they mentionned :

• Who we were and what we do
• Why we believed we had been hit
• What we had done to rectify the issue (a link to the Google Docs file was attached)
• How we knew it wouldn't happen again
• An apology
• My name / contact details

They also tried to improve the quality of their website (do you have good content on your website or just coupons ?) and to get better links; they started a blog and wrote guest articles.

6/ To get better links, I suggest you to use open site explorer on competitors to see their most authoritative links. Most of time, you can also get the same link if this is a directory or a blog taking guest posts.

7/ Last but not least, Google spam team is human. Your reconsideration request depends of the employee who will deal with it... You can never be sure of the result.

Good luck ~~.