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Link building is changing / has changed. Google is getting tougher, so make sure you read recent advice as old advice could get you in trouble with google.
This is a good recent guide: http://moz.com/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin
This is what you are looking for: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Firstly, the name of the site is:
cycling-jersey-collection.com or cycling-jersey-collection, it isn't cycling jersey collection. That is just keywords you want to rank for.
Having cycling jersey collection on every page is not useful, I doubt you will ever build a brand with the domain cycling-jersey-collection.com - 25 characters including two hyphens is horrible.
Only one page of your site will rank best for "cycling jersey collection" so just put it in one title tag.
The dropped seems to have started with Panda 3.2, why do you think that is not the problem?
Did you get any messages in google webmaster tool? e.g. un-natural links warning, etc?
What is your url? You might not want to supply your url, but its would help people here tell you what is wrong.
Considering your traffic has been down for nearly 18 months and you have been unable to fix it, it would be wise to either ask here or pay an SEO to do an audit. e.g.
Has your rankings dropped as well?
And when you say "so would it be best to go back and remove all of the links from the templates of our websites and just leave the dofollow links on the homepages of our websites" do you mean leave a link to bluetone media on just the homepage of your client sites and not other sites you own?
Wikipedia updates content all the time and they seem to rank rather well.
From google's perspective they would rather rank up-to-date content, so yes its got to be a good idea to update. An old page might have links to it, and history with google, so if it had up to date content its got to be better than a brand new page.
The first thing you should do is try to identify what the penalty is. Try this: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Once you know which penalty you have you will be able to make a plan of action after doing more research.
Basically if you have been hit by panda it because your content is not good enough, and if you have been hit my penguin you have some/a lot of un-natural links.
The way I see it is this... if the directory is quality and charge not for inclusion but for the editors time to review your site then its not a "paid link".
Check out this video from matt cutts: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-explains-how-google-handles-paid-directories-video/40511/
How many people search for "no1 android phone"? No many, so why put it in your title?
I would do some keyword research and target those terms.
Yes that all makes total sense.
It's a real shame that google are so harsh on new sites. New sites need traffic from google like a baby needs oyxgen, and without it they might not be able to survive.
Happier is self funded and about 6 months old, and still losing money every week. I've thought about pluging the plug a fair few times. I'm not sure how much more money to invest, I might be just throwing good money after bad. Sorry whinge over.
If you only have 50 links and all are from paid directories it won't looks good or natural.
In this video matt cutts says: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IzUuhTyvJk about 15
"once we re-run our data (every few weeks) if we determine your site is of higher quality you would pop back out of being affected"
Panda has effected thousands of sites and a lot of smart people have been working on the problem for about 2 years since the first panda was launched, but I can only find 1 site that has "popped back" to their original rankings. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491
Apart from Motortrend.com I can't find any sites (of reasonable size) / case studies of sites that have solved the panda problem, and were definitely hit by panda. Which doesn't feel right, some people have deleted a ton of pages, redesigned their site, improved their content, etc with no success. Therefore is it a pointless exercise? Therefore, is it better to simply give up and start a new site?
Submit and forget it.
If you do get listed great but don't expect to and certainly don't think it will make much difference to your rankings.
If you are pinning you hope on dmoz you are going to be disappointed.
It sounds like a blogroll link, so it shouldn't harm the sites.
But if the area on the page is titled: sponsored, advertising, etc, google will know the link is paid for and if it's not nofollowed it could be a problem.
Is the link paid for? If yes, be careful. Also review the other links around it, if it's surrounded by other external links that aren't relevant be careful.
I would be interested to hear of the sites that have resolved the problem with Panda. I can hardly find any examples of Panda recovery examples.
What are you trying to achieve by buying dropped domains? Are you planning to redirect them to your own sites for link juice? If you do that be very careful, there are lot better ways to get link juice.
To check a domain I would:
that should do it.
Should be as quick as google re-crawls the robots.txt.
Best thing you can do is add a couple of links to sites that are crawled daily, to encourage google to visit your clients site as soon as possible
Could be:
Thanks Lily.
Redirecting old sites is unlikely to give you a rankings boost, especially if they have changed hands and have expired / dropped. You really need to buy them before they expire and don't change two many details.
Think about seomoz.com to moz.com - all the link juice have been transfered, and so it should, its just a rebrand, same servers, so owners, etc. But if they brought so ramdon site and redirect do they deserve the link juice? No, and google doesn't think so either.