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You might ask the Joomla person you hired if they have recommendations, and also if maybe the 40 sites shouldn't all be on the same server? That would really depend on your server configuration and the types of sites, but that's something to consider too.

Some of your sites are near duplicate of each other last time I looked. Maybe as you move servers you can just redirect the duplicate sites to your main site and that can save you some time on setup and reduce your duplicate content.

I'd say you need to have a reason why your forum is better than what is already out there, and why a broad forum where any topic goes is better than a niche forum.

I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum from you. I run RC Naval Combat, a forum that is devoted to RC warships that shoot and sink each other. We have a custom design warship registry where you can show off your boat and list details about the scale (1:96, 1:144, etc), class (USS Iowa, HMS Revenge, etc), type (battleship, cruiser, destroyer, etc), local club, and more. We have a number of subforums for various aspects of the hobby.

That site has more activity and members than the warship combat subforum of a couple of major RC hobby forum sites. Those sites are much bigger, but look at us as the crazy people who shoot ball bearings at each other and sink each others ships. There can be helpful advice in the other subforums, but they just don't have the experience with fully submersing a ship and how we need our things set up differently in many cases.

Think about what exists out there already, and what you can do better. You're going to have this battle in many subject areas I would imagine. You need a value proposition about why people should come to your site for their discussions. It could be ease of use, mobile friendly, unlimited image uploads, a way of doing something way better than most everyone else is..but it's more than a build it and they will come proposition.

The last time I used a tool, excluding via robots.txt was also sufficient for URL removal.

Recently, Google has updated their documentation to strongly encourage you to use URL removal only for things like exposing confidential information, and not to clean up old pages or errors in your GWT account (see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119). I know many people still use the tool for that type of stuff, but wanted to point out that change.

The last time I looked, you can request removal of an entire directory as well, which should work for the OP.

When the big update came through a little over two years ago about page speed, I was working on a site with load time issues. I did see quite the drop in organic referrals from Google after that update was pushed, while organic referrals from Bing and Yahoo continued to increase. I was working in-house at the time, so I don't have a lot of other sites to judge at that time, but I did see distinct change in that one site.

I also agree with you that load time affects users and their browsing and conversion behavior. And even though "everybody has broadband" there are a lot of people on poor public (or conference) wifi connections or on their phones, and pagespeed is quite important to them.

Can you elaborate a little on the forum being about "all topics"? That sounds a bit broad, and possibly an uphill battle if you're trying to be all things to all people. Would this be a place where one could talk about Christmas wreath designs and song lyrics and video game strategies and knitting?

Hi Omri,

Open Site Explorer usually updates once a month. We've had a delay this month, so it'll be a little later than initially expected. You should see the update on February 29th however.

When you talk about letting the old links become inactive, do you mean these are paid/rented links that you are letting expire? If you could define what you mean by inactive, that'll help us answer the question better for you. Thanks!

Duplicate post. Please respond at http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-links-hold-there-value-after-12-months

It looks like it's related to a toolbar where people are paid to click on ads. Skylancers.net and skylancers.com appear to be connected, based on the whois info, and on this FB post http://www.facebook.com/pages/Skylancers/200579273364198. Check out the dot com site for some more info.

CoTweet allows you to assign tweets to other people as well, and archive tweets for which you don't need to respond.

To be honest, the use of the word brainless in the post a couple of times might have been what kept people from answering, as those who use FB and Twitter for business might argue a bit about it being brainless.

Be sure to check Facebook's rules as well, they likely have even more guidelines than G+ does. I believe you also need to run the contest off of FB, but not sure of the exact details.

I am not an AdWords expert. I suggest possibly going to the AdWords help forums and asking there, where you'll find a few more experts than you might here, and possibly someone from Google themselves will step in. Also, as Gary suggested, give them a call.

When I think of a price comparison site, I think of something where I can see model XYZ dvd player and see five stores that have that DVD player and their prices.

The link you provided looks to the user like just a list of anything that matches the keyword DVD. The first result is a Dell laptop, then a DVD recorder, then a DVD movie, two DVD writers, and a CD/DVD rack. I'm not seeing any price comparison here. If I click on an individual item, I'm taken to a specific retailer, and I assume that I'm using an affiliate tracking link. Ok, I now see that if I hover over an item there is sometimes a price comparison feature, but if I just click, I go straight to a retailer. On the link you gave, I'm seeing only 25% of the items having a price comparison option. That's hardly what I expect when I go to a price comparison site.

Have you looked at the page that they have for Landing page and site quality guidelines at http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675? Some of the things they specify:

You need original content that can't be found on another website, and provide substantial information. "If your ad links to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), it must also provide additional, unique content." I think reading the landing pages guidelines thoroughly could really help you here.

OpenSiteExplorer crawls a portion of the web, then processes what it crawls, then updates on about a monthly basis. It can be up to two months for your links to show, and sometimes not all of the links show. The next update is on February 29th.

OSE won't show you every link you have, but neither does Google. OSE does offer you a lot of valuable metrics and insights into links and domains that Google does not.

I saw another person asking about this same site over at http://www.seomoz.org/q/my-ranking-got-down-from-4-to-9-in-just-2-days. Are there multiple companies working on the same site? You'd want to coordinate with the other company for any working being done so you're not working against each other.

Providing you have permission from the site owner, yes, it would be helpful.

Years ago, I was subcontracting and one of the web designer's clients refused 2-3 AdWords charges that totaled about $35. ALL of the Adwords accounts that I had were suspended without warning, even though they were different clients. I had everything in Google Webmaster Tools. They do look at these signals.

This post from a year ago might be of interest to you. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

Do you have any content on your site? Do you have anything unique about your site that makes visitors want to come, and to stay there after you get links?

Hey Rick,

Could you send an email to help@seomoz.org and ask them about this? They'll be able to tell you if it's something on your end, or if Roger is misbehaving in his crawls. Thanks so much!

Keri

Noah's Dad has a valuable addition here Diane: "talk about why people should go check out the full article" and adding unique and valuable information to the article. Just two sentences and nothing else really isn't going to cut it or make it a destination place for your readers.

I'd use Google Analytics or another analytics program and track your traffic. Traffic increases, you've made progress.

Keep in mind that Open Site Explorer updates about once a month, so it can be a two month delay before you see your links in OSE. The next update is due February 29th.

OSE also doesn't crawl all of the web, so if you have a DMOZ link that's ten levels down, it just may not be crawled. Hope this helps!

Oh yes, I had forgotten things like the little league, chamber of commerce, any associations you are a member of or support. Show (not just tell) me that you're a member of the local community and that you know the area. You might even have a page for you in the community, showcasing any volunteer work that you've done or projects you've supported, pictures of your team on a float in a parade, etc.

I'm glad you like the boats! My husband got into the hobby while finishing his mechanical engineering degree at Cal Poly. Sadly, there's nothing local to the central coast, but we have battles in the San Jose area, and if you're into all kinds of mechanical things, come up to Maker Faire in San Mateo in mid-May. We'll be battling at a pond there as part of a huge event (makerfaire.com).

I'm thinking about both links and just natural advertising. I'm from Santa Maria originally, so am familiar with the area. My first thought is Cal Poly students needing carpet cleaning (and general cleaning) before move-out at the end of the school year. Do you have any connections there with students who could tell you of any appropriate online newsletters where you could advertise your services?

Could you sponsor the monthly lunch of a group of realtors or property managers in exchange for a mention in a blog post or a list of resources?

I'm thinking people from your industry aren't your potential customers. Links are for more than just building links, they are also for building customers. Build some quality content that your potential customers might want to link to. For example, you might want to target Cal Poly students or Cuesta College students with mentioning that in your SLO area, and tips on carpet cleaning for an apartment, and why they should hire you instead of taking the cheap way out and renting a rug vac from the local hardware store.

Hi Cavalorn,

If you could email help@seomoz.org that'd be the fastest way to get this fixed. I don't have the tools to be able to look at your account and help you with that, unfortunately.

I'm looking at the source, and I see /google_analytics_auto.js as well as Yoast's wordpress script. You might want to ask about that and see if someone just installed one of those and if that's causing the problem.

Yes, it does matter. For some in-depth background about duplicate content, see this blog post by Dr. Pete. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Linkscape was originally due to update mid-month, but did get pushed back to the 29th sometime last week.

Hi Pedro, here are some reasons why only one page may be crawled https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page. If it isn't any of those reasons, send an email to our help desk at help@seomoz.org and we'll see what's happening.

Keri

I'm thinking the same way Serge is. I've seen that happen when you get two analytics scripts firing at once, especially if one is a plugin and one is custom-coded.

Alan, please add your response on to the duplicate thread that has correct line breaks. http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-hard-could-it-be-to-outrank-a-huffington-post-article-with-pa-0-2

I'll come back and delete this thread in the morning (Seattle time) after you've had a chance to copy and paste your response so we can keep everything in just one thread.

Have you considered just rewriting your URLs so they don't use extensions at all? That way, when you use a different technology, you don't need to rewrite your URLs once again. If you look at SEOmoz, you see they don't use .php or .html as extensions, but instead have no extensions.

Open Site Explorer last updated mid-January, and the next update is due for February 29th, so that's why you haven't seen those links yet. It can take 1-2 crawl cycles for new links to appear.

The calendar is available at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule to let you know when the previous updates were, and when the next one is scheduled.

Keri

The page looks OK to me, the category looks like may others have done the same thing. I'm seeing hundreds of pages with thousands of articles similar to http://zoomation.asu.edu/gallery/zoomation_text.

My question is: is unique visitors the right metric that you should be measuring? On Fiverr.com I can get 2000 to 10,000 unique visitors for $5. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=unique+visitors&x=0&y=0

Can you tie your metrics to something else that might have more value for you, such as purchases, newsletter signups (still easy to fake, but at least takes a little more time), etc?