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So, I'm going to throw out some ideas for contest promotion that should apply broadly to what you're doing... First step is to figure out audience so you know where to target. There are a billion mommy blogs that will promote contests but if it's not the right audience for your contest than it's a waste of time.

Figuring out the audience will dictate where you go to promote the contest. I'd start out simple - Google "literary contests" and see what comes up - you might get a few places you can email and tell about the contest that would be willing to write about it, or share with their social media pages and newsletter. Then move on to similar queries like "list of literary contests", "writing contests", etc.

Your question mentions doing keyword research for kwd volume. I'm not sure how that would apply to contest promotion? Overall I think you have the right idea in manually doing research into different outlets.

A few other posts to help you out:

• http://www.linkspiel.com/2012/09/using-contest-to-build-link/
• http://moz.com/blog/running-giveaway-competitions-for-links-and-seo
• http://www.linkspiel.com/2011/10/linkbuilding-recommendations-when-using-contests/

+1 for Corey's response. Different categories, different levels of corruption, and many categories are without editors.

I'll add that you can often get added as a volunteer editor for a category if your intent seems to be in line with their guidelines. Never hurts to try.

Hi Juan,

Here are the resources I usually hand to beginning link builders to get them started:

I'd point you towards these three resources to get started:

• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
• http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html
• http://www.clockworkpirate.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

It should take you a year of full time link building to truly go after all of the strategies listed in the first 3 resources, and all of them contain tactics that you can use indefinitely. The important I'd focus on is keeping a steady pace of content creation and outreach efforts, diversification of your strategies, and avoiding anything that feels spammy (because that's a good sign that it's a low value tactic).

Feel free to ask any questions here, but that should get you started!

Sure:

• The SEMRush blog has a lot of good tutorials.
• There's an ultimate guide written by Refugeeks that is worth reviewing.
• I've written an article on how to use SEMRush's display ad tracking features for non-PPC purposes.

Those numbers show up in the HTML, so they're likely calculated server-side in some way.

Feedburner (RSS feed provider), Twitter, and Facebook all have an API of some sort to grab the content from. Moz appears to use bronto.com to deliver their Top 10 email, so that's probably where they're getting the email subscriber count from.

Here's a tutorial to get you started on pulling content from Facebook/Twitter/Feedburner. Since it appears that your personal website uses Wordpress, I'll use that as a reference:

http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/how-to-get-facebook-twitter-and-rss-counts-wp/

OK, so assuming that the large jump in links is coming from internal links, here are a few ways that Wordpress might create that many pages:

• Creating an extreme number of categories (more than 20-30) while using permalinks that contain /%category%/ and applying posts to multiple categories.
• Using a theme that contains parameterized URLs such as ?reply-to-comment at the end of every comment reply button.
• Using a strange permalink setting that causes issues.

If all of those pages are really new internal URLs then I suppose it could have confused Google and affected your rankings but since I have not dealt with such an extreme amount of duplicate content added so quickly I couldn't say for sure.

There are also plenty of ways that you could have triggered that many external links. Any sidebar or footer link on a large site could easily add thousands of links. I highly doubt this type of link would have caused a ranking drop on its own - it's no different than someone adding you to their blogroll.

This is a difficult question to answer properly without looking at the site or the exact links, because all I can do is list of lots of hypothetical causes. If you'd like to include the domain or PM it to me I'm happy to look at the website itself.

Just to clarify, 70 characters is a good rule of thumb for title tags, however that limit is largely in place due to the number of characters that Google displays in search results.

I personally think 80-100 is a good rule of thumb for maximum length on a URL but it's not always feasible, and the best practice for URLs is not as clearly delineated as title tags.

Those are pretty broad terms, but according to the Keyword Difficulty tool you're doing well on a couple of them. I'll take a look at a few for you, using the KD tool set on "United Kingdom" & Google:

wedding singer:

You're doing remarkably well on this keyword considering the relatively low Page Authority and # of links to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. You're probably only doing that well in the first place due to your on-page optimization efforts. If you want that one to perform better, it'll need more links.

cover bands:

I show you at #6. Links to the cover bands page will also help on this one, though this page isn't lacking as much as the wedding singer page.

entertainment agency:

I show you at #10. This one is trickier because your PA/DA is in the middle of the pack. I would bet that you're getting beat because the people ranking highest have "entertainment agency" in their name, which means that a high percentage of their links will feature "entertainment agency" in the anchor text. It's going to be difficult for you to duplicate that, but I'm guessing that more exact anchor-text links here will be the only way for you to compete on this term.

--

While I'm looking at your site, please take a look at what GigMasters is doing in the US. They've dominated the market for hiring bands and entertainers for weddings and parties, and they have a very user-friendly site. If they move over to the UK, you're going to have a hard time competing because of how great their user interface is. If I were the owner of your site, I'd be thinking about how I could copy their format in the UK before they move in and do it. So, work on making it easier for people to find bands to hire. Currently it is difficult to navigate and find that content.

So in short, your Places listings will update data for your G+ Local listings. This will be different from your G+ Business page (unless you've gone through the merge process), and could be under an entirely different account.

Some good coverage from Blumenthals.com: http://blumenthals.com/blog/category/google-plus/

These three posts discuss the differences between the G+ Business Pages vs. G+ Local Pages, and issues going on with the merge process.

1. Aug 3rd - Google+ Business and Local Merge Process is NOW LIVE
2. Aug 10th - Google+ Business Pages: To Merge Or Not to Merge, That is the Question
3. Sep 19th - Google+ Pages For Local – Known Bugs & Quirks After the G+ Local Merge

I'm hoping someone can chime in with any newer information than this. I haven't been involved in this process over the past month so I'm wondering if the situation has gotten better.

I have clients that ask me this question (eg "how can I add quantity links to the quality stuff you're working on?") and I tell them to go ahead and do it if they're determined to do it, but the ROI of time spent is minimal in most cases. Some go ahead and do it anyways, which is fine in most cases as long as they're avoiding spammy practices and using branded anchor text.

Blog commenting, forum posting, and spending time answering Q&A sites can be effective and produce a good return - but the value is in the click-through, not the nofollowed links. They're rarely effective tasks to hire out to a VA unless that person has an understanding of your product and native English skills. You need to be able to provide value above and beyond the generic comments with an obvious link or cry for attention that most people use.

Here's one decent way to interact in forums, provide value, and see a decent ROI: http://pointblankseo.com/ecommerce-forum-link-building. Emphasis is on "interact" and "provide value" - without those two things you're just another spammer. The same concepts can be applied to blog comments and Q&A sites.

Haven't had a chance to use it myself, however based upon the product page it looks like it could be an effective platform to test as a low budget CDN.

Be sure to review the limitations listed on that page. None of them strike me as that big of a deal unless you're using animated GIFs - but it does timeout on large image uploads so that could affect you if you're not resizing huge images prior to uploading them.

I would be worried about whether it fails gracefully. In other words, if you uninstall it, will your image links revert back to self-hosted, or does it permanently change them? Would be a hassle to revert a large number of links.

If it's included in the SEOMoz directory list, and if it's relevant to your site, then it's a quality site.

The second questions becomes, which of those is the most valuable, and how much is it worth?

The first part is relatively easy - look at the Domain Authority and then the Page Authority of the most likely page that you'd be on. Rank them high to low. Don't worry about Pagerank, it's infrequently updated and somewhat unreliable. Get the SEOMoz toolbar and focus on those metrics.

Value is also going to be related to content of the directory. Big wide open directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory aren't really used by actual people, they're just quality links. On the other hand, vertical niche directories are often great sources of traffic, and they're highly relevant links. Domain quality metrics like PA/DA might not be as high, but that's OK, the value goes beyond PA/DA.

So, how much is it worth? That's probably going to tie in to your budget. When I see high value directories (in terms of traffic or link metrics) that only cost $20-50 as a one time fee, there's a decent chance I'll jump on it. If it's a recurring annual fee, my best recommendation is to gauge the value based upon potential traffic, and try to ignore the link metrics. If you think it's worth it for the traffic alone, then try it out for a year or whatever the minimum time period is.

As far as number of directory links, just spread it out amongst your other link building. Spend more time producing content than you do link building, and you'll be OK.

Hi Sara,

Google+ required 1,000 followers in order for your Google+ page to be verified, however this did not mean you need to have 1,000 followers in order to add rel="publisher" code to your homepage - that can be done regardless of follower count.

You can see this in AJ Kohn's article on proper rel publisher setup: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/google-plus-seo

If you go to the Google+ Page Verification page at Google, you'll now see that the requirement has been changed to state "Your Google+ page must already have a meaningful number of followers." Obviously this is open to interpretation, but based upon that language change, I believe you'll probably be OK with a few hundred followers as opposed to 1,000.

Correct, I don't see a duplication issue.

Hard to say whether it's adding any value or not at the moment, so whether or not removing it would make a difference for mobile results is difficult to guess. I generally try and keep mobile content as complete as possible, and if this snippet of text is kept at the bottom in a minor font, I don't think it's adding too much 'weight' to the page.

Luke makes a good point. In certain industries (vacation rentals comes to mind) almost all referral traffic will come from paid directories. In this industry, the big companies will spend 200-500 per years on sites like VRBO and Tripadvisor because it absolutely makes financial sense to do so, regardless of any SEO benefits.

In other words, don't let link metrics get in the way of making a good business decision.

Hi there,

302 redirects are only an issue for links pointing to your own site. So, if you have an internal link going through a 302 redirect, that's bad. If you have a link from a blogger who mentioned you're website that is 302ing, that's bad.

If you have links on your website that are sent through a 302 redirect to another website (especially a large one like Facebook), that's not a big deal and can be disregarded.

So - hard to give a good answer for this aside from subjective opinion of what we've noticed recently. And, whatever answer I write will probably be dated 3 to 6 months from now.

With that said, the above answers are about right. Google should be able to understand these, and probably does (especially when there are no exact match results), but that doesn't mean that the page will rank if there are a bunch of people specifically targeting the "best haircuts calgary" variation.

If there were two pages, one with a split keyword and multiple links and social shares, and the other one with an exact match keyword and zero links or social shares - I'd put my money on the page with the split keyword.

Seems fine to me. I generally try to avoid doing things like changing a <title>tag and nothing else on the post, but if you do this shortly after posting then I don't think it'll affect much. Of course, it's better if you can find a happy midpoint between the two options.</p> <p>Make sure the URL is done well from the start - you definitely don't want to have to change that.</p> <p>Jason Acidre has a good post on a similar concept: <a href="http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/">http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/</a> and seems to have worked fine for him when just changing the title tag.</p></title>

Not currently. You would need to download the CSV each month, and compare via Excel. Not terribly hard to do once you've got a process in place.

There are other tools that will do this, some better than others. Raven is the most popular toolset that offers this feature that I am aware of. They're a competitor to SEOMoz, but they also offer Open Site Explorer link data, so I'm assuming it's still in good taste to mention that one on here.

Can you verify if this is showing up in LinkedIn emails with the message, or inside the message on Linkedin.com? Can you test this with other domains and see if all are changed to https?

I would make some slight variations from the two pages. For example, make page 1 "Seattle Homes For Sale" and page 2 "Seattle Home Listings". This avoids the issue of having two pages going after that same keyword and allows you to get more granular for the terms you want to rank for.

If both pages are almost identical content, then I would consider canonicals as a solution, but it doesn't sound to me like that's the case here.

I agree with Jared's comments - the current keyword layout of the pages is an effective one. There's probably tweaks that can be made but overall I don't see major issues with having concrete repair as a subpage.

This homepage is ranking on page 1 for "concrete repair west yorkshire". That may or may not be the ideal keyword, but I would focus on link building - run your way through this entire list of opportunities and see how that affects performance.

I'm guessing that because they have an exact match domain, where CadeirasTiffany.com.br matches the search term "cadeiras tiffany" exactly, Google is showing additional results for their site because it appears to be especially relevant.

You can definitely still beat them, but since they have a slight advantage you'll have to do a good job with both on-site optimization as well as building more quality links than they have.

Hey Mike,

Outside of Local SEO, one single site would be the clear winner because it’s easier to build the authority of that one domain.

Within Local SEO, having dedicated domains could make more sense. One could make the argument that it’s simpler for Google To understand a single location, but there are plenty of retail sites with single domains that refute that argument.

One could also make the argument that it might be easier to build homepage links to separate domains, but I don’t think it’s enough of a factor to change your web structure.

Option 2 is the standard in your industry, for certain. But it typically means higher web design costs to build and maintain them all, even if they’re somewhat cookie cutter. Frankly I think that’s as big of a factor in your decision.

I wouldn’t worry about the administrative relationship you described. It’s not going to be a major factor - you’re not deceiving Google by separating the sites, you’re changing how users experience the sites.

A couple of clarifying questions:

• Are any of the communities near each other, or are they in many cities across the country?
• Are you seeing subpages of corporate sites ranking in the local search results for any of your communities?
• Is there any administrative value to separating the websites? Outside of SEO considerations.

The issue is two pages on the same site trying to rank for the same keyword. They're going to be fighting against each other and confusing search engines.

It's better to either combine the pages (option 1), or to give them a separate target keyword (option 2). Option #2 is probably easier, but you'll still need to make the user-friendly page more search friendly, and vice versa. Option 1 is probably better if you can add search-friendly text content beneath the map portion of the page, and ditch page 2.

Good comments from the others here.

Focus on the unique description as the primary one shown to users (further up the page) unless the manufacturer's is better. You can also label that as "Manufacturer's Description:" to differentiate it from the content you wrote. Some users will even hide it on a tab that is crawlable but has to be clicked by the user, which is fine.

As Takeshi mentioned, the small amount of duplicated/templated text should be a problem as long as it's not 80% of the page content.

Assuming that the directories are indeed low quality, I'd say that you probably wouldn't be penalized for it, they'd be more likely to just devalue those links. The odds might increase if you were overzealous with exact match anchor text in your links, but that would probably be more of an issue with anchor text than an issue with those specific directories.

Knowing that all of your properties are in the same area, this seems like the biggest argument in favor of separate sites. Google may be more likely to rank other sites instead of subpages of the same site to avoid what is called domain crowding. However, it still happens in local. Just search for "office supply stores" and you're likely to see multiple listings for Staples or OfficeDepot, for example.

Honestly you could do both. Have a corporate site with pages for every property on it, and set up microsites with single properties on them. If the site is setup well with something like Wordpress Multisite then at least the same software can be running and updated simultaneously. In that case I'd probably use the microsites as the landing pages for Google local listings.

If you do go the route of multiple sites, I'd recommend having a clear button or call to action to "View Our Other Properties in the XYZ Area".

I haven't seen any studies with <embed> the way I have with <iframe>. <embed> is also used for video and flash, but neither would be indexed the same way as PDF so hard to compare. The embed tag is pretty standardized, so I really doubt they wouldn't crawl this similarly.</p> <p>IIRC in the ugly era of flash, it was proper to have a <noscript> {crawlable content here} </noscript> section after the <embed>, so that's one comparable situation, but that's due to the flash itself not being crawled well.</p> <p>If it's not a hassle, I would add the text link to the PDF that says "download full PDF" or similar. If it is a hassle and takes longer than a couple hours, then it's a harder call.</p> <p>Similar thread that could be helpful:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686331/does-google-index-html-content-supplied-by-the-object-tag">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3686331/does-google-index-html-content-supplied-by-the-object-tag</a></li> </ul></iframe>

Hmmm - are you referring to a list of keywords that are relevant to each of their clients? EG if they're working with a pet food company, they're tracking "Dog food", "cat food", etc.?

Or are you referring to agencies that track an index of general competitive keywords to see how SERPs are changing over time? EG "credit card consolidation", "payday loans", "Women's heels", etc.?

I don't have an answer for all of your questions, but this Panda update may be the cause of the rankings drop:

http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-20-released-2-4-of-english-queries-impacted-135291

It's more likely to have affected a site based on content than links, however. Unless you're working with an Exact Match Domain, I'd guess this is the most likely cause of any significant ranking drops from the date you mentioned.

Hey Eric,

You've got a deep one here with a few different things going on. Let me start with some observations and then walk you through the direction I would take if this were my project:

1. The content on that example you gave is all HTML that's crawlable. So that page is getting indexed properly.
2. If you were to reduce the amount of content in the left section, and swap it with a button leading to the blog post, Google shouldn't have any problem indexing those links to the pages which have more content. In that sense, your map page would be no different than a blog archive page, with titles and teasers leading to a complete post.
3. Let's pretend for a second that we want to go with that solution, but we don't want users to have to leave the page to read the full content when they click the button. Then we'd want to display the content somehow in a way where we know it won't get indexed. We should be able to override that <a>link and load it into a popup instead of actually loading the page. If it gets displayed in a popup modal, that would be a nice experience without leaving the page. An iframe should ensure it's not indexed as content on the page, though you'd have to play with how it's sized and positioned. You could also load the content in with Javascript, though Google is more likely to index that properly than they used to do, and I can't recall which particular methods are non-indexable.</a>
   <a>* Your next point was regarding users sharing the proper URL. You can hardcode the share buttons to the URL that is appropriate for them to share. domain.com/map#snorkelmaui would be a good URL to enforce the map to flow down to the Snorkel Maui business listing, and domain.com/map/businesses/snorkel-maui/ would be more like the URL of the individual article that is separate from the map but which can be loaded in a modal. This page would probably have some kind of "back to the master map" button or functionality to lead users back to that full map page experience.* Your other point was regarding users not visiting the correct page and therefore it would rank poorly. This isn't a big deal. If it's getting indexed properly and has internal links flowing from the popular and (let's hope) well-linked map page, then it should rank just as well as any other URL on the site with internal links.</a>

<a></a>

<a>Option B: If you want to get really advanced and avoid the separate page experience, you could use some kind of AJAX pushState() scenario to change the URL while they're looking at the modal, and fix it when they exit to modal. Downside here is that if they refreshed the page they wouldn't see the map experience, they'd see the static page version. You could also take this pushstate approach and use it to create a single page experience that does have multiple URLs without leaving the page, but each individual page is rankable on its own. </a>These two blog posts should set you down the right path if you choose that option.

I think that covers your concerns and lays out 2 options for you, but let me know where you still have questions.

"apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content."

As a blanket statement, this is misleading at best.

Default title tags for most websites are "Page Title - Site Name", or something similar.

I generally like to keep the brand name in the title tag because I'm usually working on sites where the brand is valuable. For instance, "Seattle Lodging - Airbnb" is more compelling than "Seattle Lodging".

The main reason I usually get rid of the brand in the title tag is when I'm trying to create a high-clickthrough-rate title tag and the brand portion is getting in the way. For example "Seattle Lodging & Vacation Rentals - Nightly Rates Starting from $79!" might be a really compelling title tag and I can't fit the brand name on there, so I'll drop it. BUT I won't drop it elsewhere on the site where I want a solid default title tag format.

The only caveat is that if your brand sucks (eg DavidsCheapAffiliateReviews.info) then it might actually detract from your click-through rates, and you might want to leave it out.

You're right, but don't get totally caught up in the follow/nofollow, it's not the only value provided by the links and if it's a driving force in your link building, you're probably missing out on some valuable nofollowed links.

That said, here's a better answer to your original question - a more complete list compiled in March 2011:

http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2011/03/ultimate-social-media-profile-chart.html

There may be others once you finish those - this SERP has a few articles that might contain more options:

https://www.google.com/search?q=followed+profile+links+social+media

If you had them on a secondary network, like Vimeo or DailyMotion, then there would be value to putting these on YouTube. But since they're already on YouTube, I don't see a lot of additional value coming from the other networks in terms of actual impressions from the client's audience. It might get them a few followed or nofollowed links, but not enough to salivate over.

I would recommend embedding this content onto the client's site in a Video section or as blog posts each time the Hangouts are finished. This makes sure that potential customers on the client's site can easily watch the videos without getting sent to YouTube, because in general, any traffic you send to YouTube has a low chance of staying on the site once you send them away.

When you add the videos to the site, it's also worth considering getting a transcript made in order to increase the unique text content on the page - or at least highlighting 5-10 video takeaways in quotes beneath the video. This will help the video page look more valuable and have a shot at ranking.

Finally, don't title the pages "hangout session 01-21-2015" or anything like that. Title them using keywords that are worth targeting based upon the topic of the video, like "How to XYZ With Jane & John Doe (Video)". This will give them a better shot at ranking for something worthwhile.

Update: The Google Webmaster Central update listed by Alan below is the format I would likely go with if you're going to have multilingual content.

In most situations I would do the .COM, and focus that on US as well as general international. I would us a subfolder such as /ca/ for Canada, /fr/ for France, etc.

If there's some weird quirk with the company, product, or distribution then I might change that, but that's definitely the minority of examples.

Recommended Reading:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-international-versions-of-websites

Greg's response is correct:

• Be consistent throughout the site - either use www or don't, but definitely don't switch back and forth.
• Implementing canonical tags is important, especially if you don't implement redirects as directed below (though you need to do both, preferably).

I have two additional concerns:

• Implement redirects. There should be sitewide redirects so that if you decided to use http://domain.com and a user types in http://www.domain.com, they are redirected. This should work for subpages as well, so http://www.domain.com/subfolder/page.html is redirected to http://domain.com/subfolder/page.html
• Be consistent with linking as well: If you decide to go without www, then make sure all of your link building activities do not include the www. in the links you use. While people will be redirected just fine, there is a small loss in value during that redirect and we want to get as much value from the links as possible. So, use the exact url you want linked, not a secondary version.

We see scraped content all the time. Occasionally we see scraped HTML in full form but slightly edited.

In general I'd do the following:

• Disavow those domains in GSC. Also consider disavowing any domains pointing links at the mirror sites. It could be possible that they are building up junk links to a mirror site which canonicals your site. No idea why anyone would do that but worth covering your bases.
• Submit DMCA notices to Google, their webhost, etc.
• Take a look through server logs for anything screwy. If you see tons of weird traffic from countries that aren't relevant to your business, you might decide to block them with your .htaccess file.
• Certainly make sure nothing has been changed on your own site (canonicals, common Wordpress hacks, etc.), though nothing is suggesting to me that that has happened.

Other than that I would just keep an eye on it and keep an eye on Google Search Console.

I'll leave some thoughts, with the caveat that I haven't bothered doing stuff like this in many years because the cost structure only makes sense if you're going to build 40 great sites (eg sites making more than a few hundred dollars per month), and I'd rather spend more time on fewer sites.

I think most of the people doing this effectively are probably using option number 1 or slight variations, and not wasting their time on building any sites that can't cover their individual hosting costs. In other words, if the new site can't cover an incremental $10-50/month hosting expense, it's not worth your time to build it in the first place. With this route, you can also centralize control of the decentralized sites with a tool like ManageWP assuming it doesn't leave public footprints (like /wp-content/plugins/ URLs), but it'd still be all Wordpress site footprints.

At the scale you're trying to do this at, it would be pretty easy to "blow your cover" with extensive interlinking of the sites, shared access to GA & GWT between any of the sites, shared registrar dates & contact info (or shared registrars at all), and like 20 other server & CMS-level footprints. I'll assume you've covered all of those bases if you're at the stage of testing ways to centralize your hosting, but it's worth bringing it up for anyone else who is trying to take this approach.

I would be skeptical that the CDN option would work. Unless I'm mistaken, the sites would still need to have the same nameservers before the CDN delivered any content, and any search engine could plainly see that.

Not sure about the Varnish method.

Most of the hosting providers you'll talk to don't want to give you class-C IP addresses, because they spend a lot of money to acquire more IP addresses over time, and the type of customers asking for more Class-C IP addresses are typically mediocre hosting customers.

Just my two cents. You probably won't get too many replies on here, because most of the people doing this effectively don't feel like sharing their methods. Blackhat World or Wicked Fire will probably get you more candid responses, but your question is pretty specific, so I don't anticipate too many people willing to describe their full stack or workflow in detail.

Sorry, I can't help much re: multiple languages and how you should be tracking. I would probably track each subfolder as a separate campaign, but I'm going to defer to someone else's opinion on this question, since I don't deal with multi-language sites.

The best way to judge them would be to look at their backlink profile: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?filter=&group=0&site=www.eyeflow.com%2F&sort=page_authority&source=external&target=domain

In short, nothing sketchy shows up on the first few pages and if it exists, it's mixed in with lots of high-quality links. Assuming they do similar work for their clients, should be a decent company to work with judging from the outside.

Here's a list of questions if you at least want to keep them on their toes:

http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/What-are-the-best-questions-to-ask-when-you-shop-for-a-SEO-expert

One more thing that could be a long shot but is worth keeping an eye on: If someone had zero ethics and wanted to steal your links, one thing they could do is reach out to webmasters that link to you and pretend to be you, and claim that the mirror site is the new version of the website and ask them to change their links. Once complete, they'd redirect the mirror site to their own commercial site.

So, keep an eye on your own link profile and theirs, just to make sure none of those links are changing.

Hey Tim,

A few questions for you...

1. What type of e-commerce CMS are they on?
2. Are these mis-matched pages always on the same site (and not the competitive site that you mentioned)?
3. Are there any canonical tags on the site that are pointing towards the other website?
4. Is the content on each page unique for that domain (not including the other domains you mentioned)?

OK, 2 primary questions for a multilingual site. This specific site has 2 language so I'll use that for the examples.

1 - Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag Necessary?

The first is regarding the correct implementation of hreflang, and whether or not I should have a self-referencing hreflang tag.

In other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), I am uncertain whether the source code should contain the second line below:

Obviously the Spanish version should reference the English version, but does it need to reference itself? I have seen both versions implemented, with seemingly good results, but I want to know the best practice if it exists.

2 - Canonical of Current Language or Default Language?

The second questions is regarding which canonical to use on the secondary language pages. I am aware of the update to the Google Webmaster Guidelines recently that state not to use canonical, but they say not to do it because everyone was messing it up, not because it shouldn't be done.

So, in other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), which of the two following canonicals is correct?

1. OR

For this question, you can assume that (A) the English version of the site is our default and (B) the content is identical.

Thanks guys, feel free to ask any qualifiers you think are relevant.

Yes, I understand. You're only going to get those links from web design sites if there is content on your site that is relevant to web design. So, you need to create that content on your site before you have anything to link to. Those pages won't rank for traditional real estate keywords, but the pages will pass link value to other pages on the site, and the domain overall.

The relevance won't be an issue - although you will have to build all of the normal realtor links as well as the web design-related links if you want to compete. However, the web design links will be a good way to exceed the competition.

Google will recognize on a domain level that the site overall is about both web design and real estate. They will also recognize on a page level that some pages are about a specific topic. You'll need to be conscious of what keywords you're targeting on each page.

Hi Duncan,

Here's some initial thoughts on steps I would take:

• Since external links are fine, there shouldn't be a need to do anything disavow-related, but I would definitely do that if you see any external links pointed to those old pages, which is common with hacked sites.
• Sounds like you've covered your bases regarding preventing the site from getting hacked again at a CMS level, database level, plugin level, etc., so I'll assume that is good to go.
• If these spammy internal pages were all in a specific subfolder, you could block that subfolder via Robots.txt to send a stronger signal that the URLs should be ignored and de-indexed.
• The internal links should disappear as the pages are removed from the index, but that can take awhile, and it's not uncommon for Search Console to display pages/links/data that have since gone away.

And a couple of questions for you:

• Once those bases are covered, then you're still faced with the potential "penalty", or poor performance. I'm assuming that these pages not ranking in Google were performing well before the site hack?
• How long has it been since the site was initially hacked, and how long since full cleanup was completed?
• Are the spammy internal pages showing up as 404 crawl errors yet?

Hi Taiger.

I'm assuming the sidebar widget is linking to ?cat=9 instead of /category/category-name/.

It seems like this is a relatively uncommon issue. The simplest fix would be to use a list instead of a dropdown.

If that's not an option, you could look into hardcoding a dropdown menu yourself instead of using the widget code. You'd need to open up the source code, fix the incorrect links, and paste that HTML back into a text widget.

Hope that helps,

-Kane