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Our business is heavily dependent on SEO traffic from long tail search. We have over 400,000 pieces of content, all of which we found scraped and published by another site based out of Hong Kong (we're in the US).

Google has a process for DMCA takedown, but doing so would be beyond tedious for such a large set of urls. The scraped content is outranking us in many searches and we've noticed a drastic decrease in organic traffic, likely from a duplicate content penalty.

Has anyone dealt with an issue like this? I can't seem to find much help online.

Hi, thanks for your response (although the screenshots aren't appearing...).

I'm going to have to disagree with you regarding the May "hit". We're a very seasonal business with the majority of our clients being college students. We see a big drop in our traffic, and general organic hits, after May and throughout the summer. That's simply part of our business cycle.

We're currently in our busy season until about Christmas break. The drop in traffic we're seeing right now is not natural. Yesterday's organic visits were one-third what they normally are on a typical Sunday. It seems to be getting worse.

Furthermore, our site is not that young. We've been around for 3+ years, so I don't think this is a factor right now. Like I said, we were ranking for many of these keywords, often times in the top three spots; now we're nowhere to be found.

I have a feeling this has something to do with our backlinks, but I really don't have the expertise to know for sure.

Our site is: www.kibin.com

Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow.

We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as:

• kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay
• kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper
• kibin.com/s/paper-revision

We no longer rank for these keywords... at all.

My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog

If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile.

Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out.

Thanks!

Thanks, Mike... that's what I figured: probably spammy but _might_be legit. They're pretty old-school, but they do have a social presence and some (pretty terrible) content.

Being familiar with them from simply being involved in the industry and my own due diligence, I'm almost 100% certain this has got to be black hat.

Any thoughts on the traffic data? Take a look at their compete data... that's a pretty huge drop back in May-June 2012. I'm wondering if it was due to them getting hit by a Google update for doing the same thing that they are (most likely) doing now.

DVEbgWR

One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to?

They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related?

Wh10b97

Charles,

Thanks for the kudos on the site design. We've spent the better half of January sprucing it up with bread crumbs, service pages, a new layout, the custom illustrations, etc.

The goal was to increase user experience while also improving the SEO friendliness of the site. It was a lot of (positive) change and that's why I'm excited to start seeing some results and fruits of our labor!

I didn't know that you could submit a url to WMT... in fact, we haven't been using WMT very much at all. I just poked around and found out how to do that, so that's done. Thanks!

As for backlinks, we did get a fair number of quality ones (and one coming early this week from eHarmony's blog yet too)... so I guess I'll just have to be patient for that to show up in OSE. We're still a pretty new SEOMoz account, so I'm just a bit antsy to start seeing some of our metrics improve.

I guess I just need to be a bit patient

Thanks for the response!

Hi all,

We just kicked off our first infographic to start a content marketing strategy:

I'm wondering how long it will take for SEOMoz to add this to our link profile, and I suppose more importantly, how long it will take Google to recognize the links that have been generated from it.

The response has been pretty good and I'm excited to see the results.

Thanks!

Thanks donford, that's very helpful.

After thinking it over, I feel it's best to keep the urls as simple as possible and use something like /s/essay-editing for them (the 's' representing services).

Thanks!

We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows:

Services

• Student Services
• Essay editing
• Essay revision
• Author Services
• Book editing
• Manuscript critique

We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing?

I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO.

Any advice on this is much appreciated.

Cool, thanks Andrea. Glad it's not just me...

I'm a bit new here, but we've had a few crawls done already. They are always finished by Wednesday night.

Our website is not large (by any means), but the crawl still says it's in progress now 3 days later.

What's the deal here?!?

We release a press release nearly a year ago:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9185282.htm

However, I can't find the links or the prweb.com linking domain in our link profile.  I've see MarketWire links show up in competitors' profiles.  Is this just an issue specific to PRWeb or am I missing something?

Thanks!

Ok, I'm really trying to wrap my self around all this SEO stuff.  Right when I think I'm grasping it, I come across something like this.

When running a keyword difficulty report for the term "essay editing", the top two results are:

www.papercheck.com/essay-editing.html

www.gradesaver.com/essay-editing/

The first result has a PA of 37, 2 linking page domains, DA of 48, and 197 root linking domains.

The second has a PA of 65, 32 linking page domains, DA of 68, and 2,572 root linking domains.

What the heck is going on here!?!?  I can't understand it.  I checked anchor text and that doesn't appear to be it.  The only thing I can find is that the papercheck has a link from a site (marketwire) with a DA of 90 while the #2 guy's highest linking domain has a DA of 60.

However, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around this considering the total linking domain stats compared to one another.

Any insight is much appreciate... this is frustrating trying to grasp these situations!

Thanks!

EGOL,

Firstly, I want to state what a truly great answer this is. Since most people are not playing in this niche, they may not appreciate the insights you've pointed out in such little time.

Content is going to be a large part of our strategy.  While others have done this to an extent, you'll notice the same bland, boring stuff recycled over and over.  There's a huge opportunity in this space to take content to a new level and create truly great stuff.  That's what we're planning on doing.

Regarding creating multiple service pages for these specific keywords... I think you're absolutely correct.  When I can't figure things out, I tend to think obsessively about them until I believe I have an answer.  Last night, before heading to a friend's birthday party (and before you answered this question), I reconsidered my standpoint (also after I poured through some Adwords search and conversion data for our site.

I decided that the best approach would be to create a general "essay editing" page with footer links to pages like "fix my essay", "revise my essay", etc.  Like you, I realized that there actually is different intent for these search terms than there is for "essay editing service" and I greatly appreciate your answer in helping confirm my hunch.

The one place I do believe you're not quite spot on is where you say, _"This is not an easy business niche.   Your competitors have been around long enough that they will not be defeated quickly or with little effort." _  This niche has not been disrupted like many niches have in the recent years.  The players, in my opinion, have become complacent and nobody has been attempting to become an industry leader here (I believe there's definitely an opportunity to do so).  The guys ranking toward the top of the SERPS do not have very impressive link profiles, they don't create good content (if any), their user experiences and design of their websites are awful.

I'm not saying it won't take effort and time to surpass them, but I do believe it's one of the more "doable" niches out there.

Again, thanks for the great answer.  If you've got any more insights, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers!

OK, so I've been diving into SEO pretty hard lately and learning everything I can. Something I'm not quite understanding is how to rank for a lot of different keywords.

We're in the proofreading and editing space which can be broken down into many categories:

• general proofreading & editing

• essay editing

• book editing

• etc.

If I consider the "essay editing" category, the main keyword I want to target is, in fact, "essay editing".  However, I'd also want to target:

essay editing service, edit my essay, fix my essay, revise my essay, etc.

Basically, a lot of modifiers.

I can easily target our main page for essay editing and essay editing service keywords, but how do I start ranking for those longer tail keywords?

Is it simply building content that includes them? Is it getting links utilizing anchor text? Or is there something I'm missing?

I don't see the point in building separate service pages for those other keywords; I think that's a waste and bad site architecture practices.

I'm just looking for my "aha" moment on these longer-tail rankings.

Thanks!

Thanks Sebastian.  I was starting to think nobody would answer this

I've been thinking about it and was considering only going after links with DA higher than our own.  We currently have a DA of 39, so I'd be looking at stuff 40 and above.

However, taking into account keyword difficulty does make sense and adjusting our minimums accordingly.

Hi SEO5, thanks for the reply and making me rethink my approach.  I just realized something interesting.

I didn't know Google was serving results for sites you've visited.  Notice in the attached image how it is showing sites I've visited higher than those I haven't (and most recently too).  I wasn't aware Google was doing this.

However, while in ad preview tool I get a slightly different ranking:

1. papercheck.com

2. gradesaver.com

3. scribendi.com

4. essayedge.com

5. wordsru.com

Can the SERP ranking really change that much between your and my previews??

pHSOu,Q69do#1

As I work on getting a grasp for what causes sites to rank better than others, I'm a bit stumped with two of our competitors.

When you search Google for "essay editing" you get these results:

1.  Ivyeyesediting.com

2.  papercheck.com

3.  gradesaver.com

4.  scribendi.com

5. essayedge.com

When you put these in OSE, it seems crazy that Ivyeyes is anywhere near the top.  For example, essayedge creams these guys on EVERY single category.

As a new SEO here, what am I missing.  This makes absolutely no sense to me.  Not only that, it's pretty discouraging seeing essayedge so far down the SERPS with what appears to be some really great numbers.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Hi all!  I'm putting together a list of sites I want to attack for link building.  I'm looking at my competitors while also seeking specific sites I know would work well to link to us.

My question is, since this is very time-consuming, do you have a minimum PA and/or DA that you require in order to perform manual link-building outreach.

For example, if a site has a DA below X and PA below X, what would X have to be for you to not consider it worth your time.

I'm just trying to gauge where my efforts will be best spent and trying to get some benchmarks.  Thanks!

You're correct, we do force https.  You wouldn't worry about it, or it's nothing to worry about?  Is the negatively impacting our SEO efforts at all?

This is for my site: www.kibin.com/

Does this mean there is something wrong with how we're titling our pages? We're working on our on-page SEO, titles, meta descriptions this week and getting them up to snuff.

I don't understand what is going on here or if it's something to be worried about.

Thanks!

Hmm, OK thanks!  I'm a bit confused looking at Yahoo!'s directory.  Do you get to set the title and description, or do they just pull that all from your meta data.  They have a place to describe your listing, but it's not evident that it will actually serve as the description.

Thanks Oleg, I'll check out those directories and see what's in our budget for now.

Thanks.  Again, we've got a content strategy nailed, we're just not kicking it off until February.  I understand the value of investing in content, I don't need convincing on that front.

I'm just looking to learn more about purchasing SOME (not a lot) of paid links to get the right mix of link building going on.  I see it as a pyramid with paid links at the top and content marketing at the bottom.

It looks like Yahoo! directory is $299/year... wow, is that right?

Thanks Chad, that's helpful.  As I said, we already have a content strategy we're fleshing out.  We kick it off on 2/4/2013 with a sweet infographic I've put a lot of time, research, and some cash into (about $1,500).  We're currently working on a slightly fresher design and on-page optimization until the 4th.  Hence, I'd like to do a couple link purchases before then, just to learn and start adding something to the mix.

So, I was perusing SEOMoz's suggested link directory list and noticed some sites there require paid links. I have a couple questions regarding this:

Is paying for directory listings a good idea? I'm not crazy enough to buy a bunch of links; I want to create a sustainable SEO strategy. But I do know that most everyone does at least a little paid linking.  Is there a budget or percentage of ones total links you would recommend for this?  Is it REALLY ok to do this at all?

Also, assuming I have about $200-$500/month I could spend purchasing links, what sites are best to get links for first?

Just  a bit of background: we're starting a content marketing strategy for our business and are spending about $2,000 per month "buying" content (design, data, writing, etc.) so purchasing links is definitely NOT our strategy and never will be.

Thanks!

Thanks Andrea, that's very helpful and it makes sense!  I'll stick with one campaign.

And yes, there is duplicate content issues with our homepage and /essay-editing page... we're working on a redesign right now and will have it live in the next couple weeks.  In the meantime, I'm setting up our Moz account and getting some crawl data to work with, doing keyword research, etc.

Thanks for providing some clarity.

I'm new to SEO and SEOMoz.  While setting up my campaigns, I was a bit confused. Do I need to setup separate campaigns for different pages of my site?

For example, I run a proofreading service: www.kibin.com

I obviously want to track keyword on the main page (like proofreading service), however, I also want to track keywords (like 'essay editing') on www.kibin.com/essay-editing

Should these be two separate campaigns or do I just put all the keywords into one campaign for kibin.com?

Thanks!