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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.

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!

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

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!