Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
I wouldn't worry about the high number of zero's, they aren't disproportionately high to the rest of your link profile. I'm not sure how you got any negative 1's though? I would just make sure you aren't actively building any low quality links and focus on high quality content.
Hope this helps,
I know WooThemes and ElegantThemes both offer great forum based support. Customization and troubleshooting support is so important in WP projects that I only look at themes from developers that have engaged communities.
I think you need your /author page to link to your personal google plus profile while the footer link should use the rel=publisher. Your post pages should have author bio's at the bottom with a link to that authors' archive page. Then your personal G+ profile should list your author page in the "Contributor" section.
Here is a list of Ultimate List of Google Authorship Markup Resources
In my opinion CL is great for the traffic it can drive but not good for link equity. I'm pretty sure they nofollow all of the links from Craigslist so the only real value is the traffic. If the listings are expired and still cached by craigslist I would suggest seeing if you can't login to craiglist to manage the ads either by adding new ones or possibly deleting old ones.
Well it is reciprocal by definition but when there is useful editorial content surrounding the link it's different than a page full of links just pointing back and forth at each other.
I'm not sure what business you are in but you could take a different approach. Instead of asking for links you could do your own editorial "features" of some of your authoritative blog owning alumni. You could push that on your own blog and then collaborate with them about covering the piece on their site with links back to you as the original source.
Might work but it does really depend on your niche and the relevancy of these blog owning alumni.
If you can get the editorial links by all means go for those first b/c then you can get followed links and have zero risk of penalty. But the response above is correct in that you probably don't want to roll this out before the next major google algo update comes supposedly on Friday.
I agree with Mike, you do have a meta noindex nofollow tag on those pages but it is likely autogenerated due to a setting in WP to exclude any duplicate pages created b/c of URL parameters.
Yes it "could" be that your homepage has been penalized or has lost some back links. If so it would have a direct impact on the link juice flowing through to your other pages. The best thing to do is check out webmaster tools for any warnings. If you don't have any warnings then I would start digging into my link profile to see if any links have fallen off your profile recently.
Agreed, the Yoast SEO plugin for WP is by far the best WP plugin to manage meta's and titles.
This sounds like a cautious approach. If you are only issuing 30-50 anchor text optimized badges and you vary the anchor text I think you're safe as long as relevancy remains intact.
I agree you are ok to include links in a badge but the main objective of the badge should be to build brand credibility not build links for the search engines. If you nofollow and stick with branded anchor text I think you are safe. It's a no harm no foul approach erring on the side of caution.
It depends on how you are coding it? Can you paste some sample code?
Why would you want to build comment spam? Are you trying to get penalized by Google?
I would continue with erring on the side of caution when it comes to link building. That competitor is on a one way street to a penalty sooner or later.
If they add a nofollow the links won't count towards your link profile in webmaster tools. Now that you mention that these are over 50% of your links it begs the question where are you pulling your full link profile from? If you are only looking at the links in GWT you should dig into Open Site Explorer, Majestic, ahrefs, etc. I would make sure to get a holistic view of your link profile before making any big changes.
I do think you should make the whole article available on the download page. If the page is designed well and the content is laid out in a digestible manner I think it's probably more link worthy as an html page than a PDF. You could also convert it and share on SlideShare type sites for added exposure and co-citation.
I would contact the webmaster and ask for the links to be removed or at least nofollowed. If that doesn't work I would disavow the entire domain if you believe these links are hurting you and there aren't any other spammy links in your profile.
Well if you want links to the content on an html page and not the PDF then make the content fully HTML compatible. Place a small form at the bottom of the page allowing users to submit their email for the PDF version and you won't have people trying to link directly to your PDF.
You could set it up in GWT but it sounds like you are using utm tags on internal links so you can see which physical links on a page are driving clicks. If that's the case a cleaner solution is to upgrade your Google Analytics code for enhanced link attribution. I'm assuming you are using GA but if so this will allow you to see which links are driving which clicks and won't create tons of duplicate page titles in SEOmoz.
See link: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2558867
Let me know if you have questions,
JS
Disavow as a last resort, start by contacting the webmaster of that site and ask them to be removed. Have you reviewed what kind of links these are? comment spam, forum signatures, some other BS?
I agree with both responses, there is no reason to 301 redirect just because of new title tags. I think 3 redirects is really pushing it in terms of retaining your link value but 2 I have done several times with no effects on rankings.
Hope this helps!
It is usually a good thing to do some natural internal linking from your editorial content to your main site or product/service pages. Be careful not to "over-optimize" the anchor text when you link internally or you stand a high risk of an over optimization penalty.
1. Yes you are correct about moving the blog to /blog so you can get the DA value from the root domain. It also will help your root domain more to have the content at /blog b/c any links you generate to your content will go back to the root domain DA.
2. I wouldn't recommend switching from wordpress. There is just no business case (SEO-wise) for switching away from Wordpress. The Yoast SEO plugin makes on page optimization and technical seo for wordpress a no-brainer and the WP community support will more than make up for any advantages you might think of on a propreitary system.
3. Yes tracking on GA will be suffice. You may want to setup a custom profile to track just the blog content in google analytics if you have someone who you want to be able to view blog analytics but not the entire site analytics. Just a suggestion!
Sounds like you are on the right path, hope this helps!
I believe sites are recrawled every 7 days, I want to say it happens on Wednesdays but I could be wrong on that.
I would focus on producing high quality content and getting it syndicated on high authority relevant websites. This strategy is safer in the long run and it is also very difficult to duplicate without putting in all the time and effort.
I think it may be hurting you b/c even though the links aren't passing link juice they are likely still messing up your anchor text distribution. This sounds like a case of negative SEO by a competitor.
What is your plan of action?
I think Google is smart enough to recognize that one of your top anchor text terms is your actual brand name but may still penalize you if those links are coming from spammy sites.
I think SimpleLivingWithGod.com will help you rank faster for simple living queries. Titling with your brand name at the end is a best practice in my opinion but definitely not required. I never recommend leading with the brand name unless you are Sears.com or WalMart.com. Those brands are recognizable to the point it makes sense to lead your titles with the brand b/c the brand actually drives CTR. If you're brand isn't known and you aren't investing heavily in the brand they I think your keyword targeted approach is the best option. Just don't get carried away and spammy with it and make sure your page titles reflect the actual content on the page and you should be good to go.
Thumbs up if this helps!
Thanks,
Did you pull your link profile from webmaster tools, opensiteexplorer, majestic, or ahrefs? I would start with pulling your profile from as many of these as you can. Are you sure a competitor didn't hit you with some negative SEO?
Can you provide the url and keyword you are referencing?
You should 301 redirect the old URL's to the new URL's and setup a disallow for search results in your robots.txt file.
I don't think you should forget them altogether. You aren't going to get penalized for directory listings with Yahoo, Manta, etc. I would use your best judgement as to whether you believe the directory is user friendly enough that you would use it and decide if you want a link there. I think of it more as putting your brand on another brands site, do you want to be positioned with that brand? I personally don't want links from shitty brands or sites, I think it's too risky.