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Quick question, do you have control over the iframed content?

Thanks for the input Cyrus!

If your interested, here is what ended up happening:
It turned out that my colleague, the person who was pressuring me to find the research,  had read some hubspot powerpoints that talked about the size of your website and how much inbound traffic you can receive, rather than the size of your website being a ranking factor. So this was my response back:

It sounds like we are both trying to answer a slightly different question. I was looking for “Does a site’s size determine its ability to rank in search engines". You were looking for “Does a site’s size effect the amount of traffic it receives”

While they both seem very similar they are quite different. In regards to a site’s size being a ranking factor I would disagree. A site’s ability to rank for a given term is based on its external linking factors, social mentions and on-page targeting. This is why even smaller websites and companies can be competitive for individual keyword terms. However I would completely agree that a site’s size does give you a better opportunity to gain more overall traffic because there is more content to be indexed in search engines and shared across social networks, blogs, directories, etc..

In the end they decided to take the suggestion and combine the product and demo pages to help increase their page's authority and in turn its ranking position.

Since you didn't receive any penalties this may be tied to an algorithm change, however that is something pretty tough to prove. If you can check their analytics and see if the drop was inline with any updates listed here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change. Above and beyond that here are some more specific answers to some of your questions:

What would be my best recourse to fix the Spam link problem? I would first define what parts of your link profile is related to spam. A great tool to use for this is called LinkDetox and it is only $40 per site that is totally worth it. From there i would suggest disavowing any sites that are flagged as toxic.

**Also in today's Google,  what is considered a spam link? **
Some red flags would be any website that is not indexed in Google, has a domain moztrust below 2, and if the content is not focused/randomly generated.

Should I just link to his business name, or to a Keyword like Edmonton Real Estate Agent?
Make it as natural as possible. If you are linking back to a portion of the website about home loan questions, use that as anchor text. Or if it is the contact page perhaps use "contact edmonton real estate". Now-a-days you want to keep the end user in mind almost more so than the search engines.

Is there anything I can do about the expired link pages?
Actually this is a good thing - if it was a spam link and it has expired all the hard work has been done for you in the removal

Hope this helps - Kyle

Rand and iPullRank just did a great WBF on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday

Well if you know that the frame is already indexed you can do a site search of the frame and see what it looks like as well as the last cached date. The query would look something like this:

site:example.com/iframe-page.html

This will give you the page that Google has indexed. If you are going have the pages not be indexed i really so no SEO value into adding a hyperlink pointing to the frame itself (why build its authority if it is not in the SERPS?). So i would really just take into account the end users experience. If they can already see the framed content, why have a link that just shows it again?

If you are able to share some URLs i might be able to give some more specific answers, thanks!

• Kyle

Oh the troubles of agency side SEO... i wish i could transfer to in house

Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301?

Yes. 301 redirects make sure end users, search bots and link equity are passed to the new page. It is true though that not all link equity is passed with a 301, however good or bad it is passed. I have found this out with my own testing with clients as well as a few post i found on SEO round table and Google groups.

Does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped?

Where you tracking your external links use OSE? If so they crawl a different amount of domains and URLs each time they update their index so chances are you are looking at different data sets each time.

The link tracking is using a 301 redirect so 99% of the juice will be passed along to your page. As Jason said OSE has a slight lag with updating their index. Try out http://www.majesticseo.com/ for additional link information. In my experience they tend to update their fresh index more offten.

Good luck - Kyle

I've always had a great experience with 99designs but you want to make sure you give a lot of requirements and inspiration if you want to get exactly what your looking for. I've only used them for logo work though so i can't give much feedback for other types of projects. What are your price points?

There is no benefit or negative aspect to either - pick one and stick with for your own internal linking structure, external linking structure, Google Webmaster Tools setup and outreach. I also suggest doing a redirect from the one that you do not choose to the one that you choose. For instance if you want to go with www.domain.com, make sure you 301 redirect any traffic from domain.com.

My two all time favorite tools (free to a certain degree) are Ubersuggest and SpyFu.

Ubersuggest gives you a lot of keyword variations and suggestions while SpyFU can be used to look at how your site compares to your competitors. I also would suggest letting Google SERPs give you an idea, try using long tail keywords related to your site and see what others are targeting.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Try and do you best to stick to quality websites for links but most importantly make sure the link is tied to relevant content. Beyond that i always look at 3 factors when choosing places to reach out to:

1. Do they have a domain Moztrust above 2
2. Are they currently indexed in Google
3. Is the content focused, relevant and to the point

Also if you ever want a sanity check on your link profile, http://www.linkdetox.com/, does an awesome job of automating the process of telling you good, suspicious and toxic links in your profile. Plus it is only $40 for the tool which is totally worth it!

Good luck!

• Kyle

Brent - thank you for finding my post, i thought it was forever lost!

They had created a custom template, however i will still suggest them try the TAC plugin just incase. I will post the results once i get them.

Thanks again - Kyle

Tom is spot on with tools for a link profile analysis.

If you know that you are being penalized by Google (via a warning message) i would also suggest checking out www.linkdetox.com to give you a quick run down on what are good, bad, and suspicious links for removal.

Good luck!

• Kyle

A 302 status code is a temporary redirect which, depending on the circumstances, can cause issues with search engine ranks. Here is a great infographic from Dr Pete on status codes and how it effects each user in relation to SEO:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

If you would want end users to redirect to that page and NOT search engines, then the current setup is fine. However, if you would want to send search engines, end users AND link equity then you would want to recreate that as a 301. This process normally requires access to your hosting environment as well as some technical knowledge.

Hope this helps - Kyle

This happened to me in the past. My client's site had a custom 404 that redirect all missing pages to the homepage. When roger bot (seomoz crawler) searched for the robots.txt page (that was non-existent) it continually got redirect to the homepage.

So on that note, check if you have a robots.txt file. If not, add one and see if it solves the problem.

First i would check to see if the update you made to the pages have been recognized by Google. You can do this simply by doing a "site:www.domain.com" search, then view the cached page. If you find that it has not been recognized, you can always resubmit a new xml sitemap to your webmaster tools. In the past i have seen this help speed up the process.

How long ago did you make these updates?

If i do not have a relevant page to redirect them to i always send them back to the homepage. This way the end user, search engines and link equity are still brought back to the highest level page. It isn't the best case scenario but it is better than losing your equity and end users getting an error.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Recently i have found that the data in the trifecta report is becoming less complete. For the last few sites i found that the report returned about half of the metrics it was looking for.

For instance, it mentioned that one of the domains did not have a dmoz or wikipedia link/page even though they had both? Also, it rarely returns the Yahoo Site Explorer metrics even though when clicking to see the source the data is there?

Are you guys planning on phasing out this tool, if not it seems like some work needs to be done on cleaning it up.

Thanks!

I agree social media is a most... depending on the niche. My normal suggestion for people trying to ease into social media is to use social bookmarking (add this, share this, etc). With social bookmarking you can see what channels your users prefer and based on your analytics you can make educated steps with your social media plan.

In my experiences with on page optimizations never choose more than 1-2 keywords to target on a page. You should have one short tail and one long tail keyword at most. For instance, your homepage should be targeted to "Boston Cosmetic Dentist," after that you shouldn't have it focused on any other pages for risk of keyword cannibalization. Then for your teeth whitening page. Have your short tail keyword be "Teeth Whitening" and your long tail be "Boston Teeth Whitening."

It is important to cater your website to the user not the search engine. Simply adding dentist three times in your title and h1 tag will do no more for you thank listing it once in your title and h1.

Good luck!

SInce i can remember the SEOMoz toolbar didn't display Google's PageRank, just DA and PA. However, as far as i know Google is still using this. If you are a pro member then you have access to the historic page rank tracker:

http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank

First check to see if the site has been reindexed in Google's cache (this link can be found in the site preview box in the SERPs, it actually gives you the last crawl date). This will tell you if your updates have been reviewed by Google. If they still haven't, then its a waiting game. Rasmus does bring up a valid point with resubmitting an XML sitemap, i have seen that speed up the process as well.

Good Luck - Kyle

Jenny, here is a full list of post were rand and other SEOMoz associates talk about the updates to the mozscape index (which powers OSE and the pro tools):

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=mozscape+update%3A

In regards to your question of what is mozscape here is another great resource:

http://www.seomoz.org/help/what-is-mozscape

In regards to your last question, it sounds like it was a blend of you losing some links and the mozscape fluctuations. Always take OSE data with a grain of salt, that information is simply to give you insight to trends in your link profile. Did your domain authority drop or stay the same during the changes?

• Kyle

Well i took a look at your site's link metrics using majestic seo and it looks like you have some pretty limited link metric's for your site currently. Chances are you aren't seeing an error with OSE or Google's PageRank, you just simply don't have enough back links yet. (No worries though, there is always room for improvement!)

Remember it takes OSE around 2-3 months at times to notice new links if they see it at all. I would suggest using someone like majestic or google's webmaster tools to measure the amount of links as you start off.

As for how to build your links, here is a great place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=link+building

Good luck - Kyle

I agree the campaign tool is great... However there is a week long lag to get results. Sometimes you need it in a matter of minutes and the rank tracker tool did that perfectly, until now.

Is there any chance the lag time could be changed for ranking results?

You would never be penalized for having to many links on a page unless it is being done for a spammy/deceptive reason (and after reviewing your page - you are obviously not).

The reason SEOMoz marks it as a "warning" is because it is something worth knowing for two major reasons:

1. Most search engines can only crawl the first 100 links on a website. So it is important to place the most important links higher up on a page.
2. With more internal/external links on your page you disperse the link value far more quickly.

So once again, it is nothing to worry about but something to be aware of. Keep focusing on the great content you are publishing and less on the minutia of technical SEO

Good luck! - Kyle

This has happened to me in the past, make sure when you are setting your filter you have everything set correctly to get your full link profile. Make sure you have the inbound links tab selected and your filter is set like this:

Show "all" links from "only external" pages to "pages on this root domain" and "show links ungrouped".

The biggest issue is making sure you have it set to root domain, if not you will only be pulling the backlink profile to your homepage. Let me know if that did the trick, if not i would submit a help ticket to help@semoz.org. They are normally really responsive!

Regards - Kyle

Redundancy is bound to happen for websites that are very targerted for an individual product or service. Without knowing the specifics i would suggest to target the short tail or more difficult terms to higher level pages like a home page or top level page. While creating longer tail or easier to rank for terms for the deeper pages.

For instance if you are selling Ski Jackets on your website. There is a very good chance that the keyword "ski jacket" is going to show up on every page whether you like it or not. However if you target longer tailed keywords the deeper you get the better, like "womens ski jackets" or "thermal ski jackets" etc.

Keep in mind these are all guidelines not rules.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle