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I always do blogs on the same site.  The reason is that good content will give the site a freshness boost, plus if you really focus on content you will also get natural backlinks, and social media signals coming back to your site.

The reason why someone might suggest doing it the other way is to get free backlinks to your site, but I don't think this will be any where near as affective as producing the top quality content for your site, and getting a buzz on social media, and backlinks from third party sites.

I have had a quick look at your site via opensiteexplorer.  It would seem you are a featured site for allaboutthepretty, which is generating huge numbers of unnatural links pointing at your site with identical anchor text.

My first port of call would be reviewing your link profile, and removing these spammy links.  I suspect the 1139 links with "westlake dermatology cosmetic surgery" as anchor text is contributing to a penguin penalty.

There are some other spammy links as well such as "face list austin tx" 2138 links.  You should try to avoid site-wide sidebar links from other sites that generate huge numbers of links.  For instance mommypr site has alot of image links, and 3boysandadog site too.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.westlakedermatology.com

Edit:  Just to add, you don't have to remove good links that provide traffic, but do make sure they add rel="nofollow" to the sitewide links such as mommypr.

I agree with Mark.  Sitewide links are an extremely quick way to get a penalty these days.

Another option is to ask those links to be no-followed if they do give traffic (and try to get an editorial link on the front page, or some other page), but at the end of the day if they refuse, your only option will be to dissavow.

Yeh, I also use Ahrefs  \ Majestic in combination with Moz for this reason, although I only subscribe to those services when needed.

That is very helpful, thanks.

So what I get from that is that tools using adwords data are fine for keyword research, but that actual visitor analytics is not going to reveal much anymore.

It sounds like you want something awesome, not some random seo position.

Well for this, I would look for some excellent technical skills.  In an interview or from your portfolio (i.e you blog) to show a high degree of discussion on how seo has changed, what you think for the future, and demonstrate a clean white hat top quality link profile for your example sites.  Be able to talk about why you have done things the way you have.

I would also look for someone who has that buzz about them.  I.e. you have some top quality technical articles on your own blog, you are active on SEO sites like Moz, and have a strong social following.

Now you say you only want part time work,... so the requirements may not be quite as harsh as I mentioned.  Essentially, I wouldn't want a CV saying what you can do, I want real examples of what you have done \ are doing.  Run a successful blog?  Excellent!.  I would also want to know about your experience in the employed SEO world (diy affiliate sites \ self employed client sites are different to employed work in a sense that you have more restrictions \ accountability \ procedural rules to follow).

Once you have all that prepared, and a CV tailored to the firm you are applying for (do your research i.e. if the firm does alot of local business seo, focus on local seo experience (Google places, and all the other stuff).  Practice your interview techniques, including problem solving scenerios that might be put to you.  How can you benefit the firm? SEO is always changing... you need to show you are up to date and relevant.

Now before you worry, you seem to have the basis to show all of this with your experience.  You are able to showcase particular expertise in profitable seo areas (ecommerce), you are up to date by being active on Moz etc.  Speak to your strengths, and have projects and the knowledge to back it all up.

Whenever I do optmisation for clients, I "brand out" the homepage and design it for maximum conversion.  I then use individual pages for keyword optimisation.  If you overly optimize the homepage for keywords it can look spammy.

Whilst this should be taken as a general comment, I have seen good rankings for keyword pages, even when the majority of backlinks are targeting the homepage with the branded anchor text.

Firstly you need to know what blocks make up an IP.  An IP is split up into different sections as follows:

AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD

The C Block typical denotes a neighbourhood of IP addresses.  It is unnatural to get only links from the same C block, as links typically come from different places.  Of course, a few links from the same neighbourhood is ok, but if you had 90% of links coming from the same place then it is probably indicative  that all your links are coming from the same place.

Here is what Matt Cuts had to say about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsSwqo16C8s

In answer to your question, you probably don't need to worry at all about C Blocks.  If you are getting links in a white hat way, your links will naturally come from different places, and hence most likely be on different C Blocks.

Your traffic seems to have increased around the time of the big Panda update around the 21st August.  Looks like (in contrast with your competitors) you were doing something right.

You might like to keep an eye on this chart: http://www.rankranger.com/rank-risk-index which I find gives a nice overview of the serp fluctuations.

Nope, its simply a link. I use them routinely for outgoing links myself.

Yes, this can cause a problem as the links will be classed as unnatural.  The best way to get round this is to make sure those links have the rel="nofollow" tag.

The penalty you should be worried about is Penguin, as this will hit pages with overoptimised anchor text links, and a menu link to an external site could generate hundreds, if not thousands of backlinks to another site, so the site you are linking to in that menu could have problems.

There are many instances being posted here of people being hit by penguin because they got featured sidebar links on other sites, resulting in 1000's of backlinks appearing in opensiteexplorer, all with the same optimized anchor text.  I liken the menu links to be similar in result.

But like I said, just ensure that the mass menu links to the other site are nofollowed and you should be ok.

Just got the access to this, but my campaigns don't seem to be showing.  Anyone know why this might be?

Go to https://moz.com/subscriptions whilst logged in.

You will then have the ability to upgrade, downgrade or cancel the subscription.

Sure, each contact page can have its own rich snippets for the different locations just fine.

I haven't tried it, but Yoast is pushing this with their plugin http://yoast.com/wordpress/local-seo/

I checked the site, and saw something a bit odd.  This link kinda explains the problem, as you have the same code they have identified as a problem.

http://www.oxwall.org/forum/topic/11304

I would recommend in the first instance your client speak to their host.  I am not overly sure how good Godaddy is, but I haven't heard good things.  The common fix for this is reverting for a backup prior to this event happening.

In addition, once fixed install http://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/

If you do not have a backup, then try reinstalling wordpress files (keep the database).  Delete all plugins, and reinstall from fresh.  But for the love of god... take a backup first.

If you need a recommendation for a host try Siteground for specialist Wordpress hosting, or Hostnine for something cheaper, but very good.  We use both, but mainly Hostnine for client sites.

My campaigns are showing now, but will take 24 hours or so to populate with data.  Just got to wait a bit longer.

Whilst logged in go to: http://pro.moz.com/campaigns?default_filter=archived

Then click activate the campaign you need to restore.

That's the date of the last big Google Panda update (22nd).  I think you have your answer.

See: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17268.html

Unfortunately, to successfully do decent SEO on a one-page site you will need to make alternate landing pages for the keywords you are targeting as you will only be able to really target a couple of keywords on that page.

This has a number of benefits, as you can usually put more information on the site that you cannot fit onto the "one-page" homepage.  I have successfully done this on a "one page" parrallax site, and even linked back from the front page content to the keyword pages.

On a negative side, the whole point of the "one-page" is to wow the user and maximise conversion.  If 90% of your search traffic bypasses that page... well it may well defeat the purpose of it to an extent, and you may want to consider an alternative.

I had the same problem. It showed after a few hours, and now I have to wait 24 hours or so to populate with data.

It sounds like you just need to wait for Google to recrawl your robots.txt file.  I saw this error in the serps:

www.thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/timber-water...

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.So it is clear that the robots.txt file has not updated with the changes, after the mistake was made.  Try fetching as Googlebot within webmaster tools, but it may take a little time to update.  But at least it would seem that the robots.txt error is still a cause of the problem, just need to wait a little longer.

OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?anchor_id=25321246274&anchor_text=holtorf+medical+group&anchor_type=phrase&group=0&page=1&return_page=1&return_source=phrase&return_target=page&site=www.holtorfmed.com&sort=page_authority&target=page

Check that page.  You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com

You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed.  There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems.  I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.

Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel

Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.

The site looks quite old and dated.

What do your competitors sites look like?  Chances are they would be looking at various sites, and may instantly compare you to some of the new sites, and click the back button.  There are some amazing wordpress themes now with Woocommerce integration, which even if you DIY the website would look alot better, so if you have a little knowledge you can get a site relatively easily.

If you budget or skills do not permit a new site, work on some of the little things.  Get a smarter \ crispier logo, add more features \ articles etc. Try to get more engagement, more help pages, blog etc.  Adjust the padding on the product descriptions so they don't line up against the borders etc.

I use another web based tracker that checks the rankings daily.  I guess I will find out tomorrow, and will update this thread then.  I am not sure they use an API though.  TBH I didn't realise they used Api's for this.

I think your brand name could be mistaken as it is quite long, but I don't think that would make much difference with your link profile.  It just isn't natural.

I guess branding is built from a number of signals, such as social media, domain names etc.  Those anchors differ from your domain and your facebook.

I suspect Google is more likely to see your brand as "Westlake Dermatology".

Just following on from what David Liu said about Ahrefs, you might find this a very interesting read:

http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/ahrefs-majestic-seo-1-million-domain-showdown/

That being said, I believe Majestic found more backlinks here, although as you will see in that article there is a difference between links reported, and live links.

I would highly recommend Wordpress.  Whilst typically it has been recognised as less powerful than the other platforms like Drupal (and indeed for for complicated websites this remains), there are alot of web designers out there making some extremely powerful feature rich themes which can make some excellent websites for businesses.

The benefit of WordPress, is that it is much more easy to customise, has a much better array of pre-made themes (see themeforest.net for example), and has lot more plugins available to add feature rich functionality.

As someone who learnt the trade using Drupal, and went over to WordPress I would recommend any small business looking for a website to use WordPress.

No problems at my end, but I think the ranking service I use is crawler based.

I too would like to know what people's opinions are with press release sites like prweb.  I have a competitor that has a high authority dofollow link via prweb, and it seems to have worked for them.

I guess the risk is whilst a prweb link may be good, you don't know which spammy sites will pick up that press release and republish it on their site.

But, yeh, would also love to hear what people have to say on this.

You can run speed tests on the preview, however this really won't show the whole picture.

Check the source code and see how much javascript is being loaded on each page.  There are some themes that load "alot".  Ask the creators to see if some javascript can be disabled (i.e. slider javascript that you won't need).  An example of this is the Avada theme.

You then of course, can install caching, cloudflare etc on top of this.  You can even edit the code to remove things you don't need.  So ultimate it is hard to give a definitive answer, but check the comments on the themes.  Many people post links to the site they develop you can check up on.

Another tip is to avoid very new themes.  My experience is that it can take a few updates to get rid of the bugs.  More sales, can mean the theme is supported more etc.

But ultimately, ask questions of the theme creator before buying.

The true method of "Negative SEO".  Shady.

I saw with your link example http://foodys.eu/ that they have alot of sitewide sidebar links.  This is a big red flag.  Sitewide sidebar links are one of the easiest ways to get a penalty, as the links are unnatural, even if it is a good site (i.e. one link is great, but sitewide links bad).

Any decent sites that have these sort of links and which are giving decent traffic you should get the rel="nofollow" tag added.  Of course this is dependent on the webmaster dealing with your request.

I like your idea for comparison, however, be warned that once you open the box be prepared for counter campaigns by your competitor.

But I think a blog post like that sounds a natural and potentially a good source of conversions.  Just be sure to be ready to back up any claims you make.

But yes, I like your idea, and thanks for the idea of using adwords advertising to do this.  I like that too.

Page authority is not the only factor that google takes into account.  For instance compare the root domains and you will see that your competitor has a much high domain authority, as well as considerably more backlinks.

I am seeing some high rankings lately from sites that have predominately branded root domain links with high domain authority, even if they have less links to the keyword pages than their competitors.

In addition there are other factors that won't be taken into account in the Moz stats, such as the freshness factor (new content etc), site speed, onpage seo etc.

Checking Ahrefs it is clear they have been hit by a penalty.  They have over 700 exact match anchors for "man with a van" for example from just 30 domains, which makes up 67% of their backlinks!

I have read elsewhere that it impacts what search engines see, so will insert backlinks to other sites which only show to the crawlers.  You, or anyone else visiting the site would not notice anything different.  Its a very sneaky hack.

This would potentially affect your site rankings.  Apart from PR leakage, if they are linking to bad domains etc Google might not look kindly on it.

Just remove the offending code \ hack, and things should slowly get back to normal though as your site is recrawled.  Have you noticed a change in your rankings?  If you sort it quickly, I doubt you will need to do anything, but remove the hack.

Has Google identified your site as being hacked?  If they have follow these steps including request they review the site at the end: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/

I have to say on my first quick look I cannot determine why you would have got a manual penalty.  Your link profile does not look spammy, and I wonder if google are specifically targeting sites that use PRweb.

With Ahref's I only see 77 dofollow backlinks, and to be honest you could probably be very brutal when it comes to dissavowing these links and starting again.

It is strange that the two methods of link building (prweb, and infographics) are two methods that Matt Cutts has recently (in the last few months) said that should be nofollow links.

But I cannot give anything definitive based on what I am seeing.

I would stay well clear of any company that resorts to those kind of tactics.  Sounds more likely to be one of those scams than an SEO company.

If they are linking back to you I wouldn't worry.  This will give a signal to Google that yours is the original.

I would go for www.  There are some technical reasons why you would want www's.

I don't know the full reason, but the way some hosts configure their caching, and cpanel cloudflare integration you may be forced to use www's if you want to take advantage of that.  Take a popular host like Siteground for instance, if you wanted to use their supercacher and cloudflare you must use www's.

Sorry I cannot provide clear technical reasons, as I don't fully understand it, but I have had to deal with this in the past.  Prior to running into these issues, I used to think it didn't matter and had all my sites with the non-www's.  Its not a problem on the whole, but you should be aware in a very small number of cases it might be (of course you can just avoid any problems by avoiding that particular configuration, it just might be annoying thats all).

That is actually quite interesting.  I tested it against a few brand names, and whilst facebook and twitter are ranked highly, I don't see the google+ pages.

However, I do like Google+ better for providing social signals \ interactivity via the Communities than facebook (although I don't have any metrics to say whether it is better or not).

I would say it is unnatural, and therefore any links you have should be no-followed.

I too am not sure if it completely fits, but I use tweetadder.com

I am assuming you want to put in the "@name" at the beginning of each tweet.  Tweetadder will let you import a list of tweets, and then it will tweet this out at a schedule (times \ intervals etc).  Its also a one off fee.

I use Tweetadder to auto retweet, find followers (relevant), set scheduled tweets, manage followers etc.  It is very good.