Dear MOZ Community:

In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure.

The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding

My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors.

Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages.

Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic.

Thanks for your input!!!
Alan

My PR agency has suggested a question answer format be incorporated in my blog. They suggest a microblog with a single sentence question and an answer of about 300 words.

My blog currently has about 35 posts. I would like to ramp up blog entries to about one or two per week of these "mini blog" posts.

The format of the new blog begins as a question with the responses being paragraphs that do not use headings. My concerns are as follows:

1. No headings in an answer of 300 words will fail to provide Google with context regarding the content's meaning. Everything I have read about SEO suggests text be broken up in short sections and that it be divided by headings (preferably H2s).

I very much like my agency's concept for a question answer format blog. It provides very practical info for visitors. How can I use it in a manner that supports SEO best practices?

2. According to a reputable SEO firm that has been assisting me, Google does not consider a blog post of less than 600 words to be superior quality. They told me that  blog posts of 300 words, from an SEO purpose will not be a great helpful, that the content will not be rich enough to generate incoming links.

Is this really the case? What if this abbreviated content is very well written and engaging? If so, is 300 words sufficient? From the visitor's perspective I am not sure they would have the patience to read 600 words when 300 words is more than than enough to answer these basic questions. From a PR perspective I think the shorter content in a question answer format is superior at least for my line of business (commercial real estate brokerage).

3. If 500-600 words is the minimum word count, and headings are necessary, what is the best way to execute a question and answer blog format?

The purpose of this blog is to provide very useful info to my visitors while generating incoming links to that will boast my rankings.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!!!

Alan

Hi Marie:

Thanks for your very thorough response.

My site dropped in rankings in April 2011 and never completely recovered. I had a site audit and they really stressed the urgency of removing toxic links to my site.

For the first time I looked at links using Majestic SEO and noticed that most are from low quality directories and many have the same IP address. Also I have seen Domain Authority on MOZ drop from 38 to 27 in the last year. Page authority at the moment is 38.

The audit (from a reputable MOZ approved SEO vendor) found the site to be pretty good technically (unique content, fast download, no Google or MOZ errors, etcetera). I think they checked the links with software, not manually.

Regarding the Google penalty, I never received any sort of written notice on Google Webmaster Tools.

The SEO firm is confident they can remove around 60% of the toxic links. They in no way promise to remove all. So from what you are saying, even if a few remain I may be in trouble. Furthermore they are not at this point addressing the "suspicious" links.

I'd like to point out that there are only 445 domains linking to my site. Would it be possible to overcome the penalty by building thousands of high quality links over time? I am also concerned that removing these links before adding new ones will really cause my traffic to drop (I receive about 4,000 unique visitors via search each month).

Is there any kind of action that I can ask the SEO provider to take to ensure they will be removing the bad links? I would hate to spend $3,000 and find the site still penalized by Google for bad links.

One last thing, I am particularly concerned by your last paragraph. Are you saying that it is very unlikely that Google will lift this penalty no matter how many new links are built of how many bad links get removed; that the domain my domain is in a sense "blacklisted"? That since the links were never very good, Google will never remove the penalty? If that is so, there is no sense in investing in link clean up.

THANKS,
Alan

Well, OK looks like I need to bite the bullet....

Is there an objective way that I can identify toxic links, that I can detemine if in fact they need to be removed? The SEO firm has identified  45% of incoming links as "Toxic", 50% as suspicious and 5% as healthy. There are a total of 1,500 links coming from 450 domains.

About 130 have a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero and a citation flow of zero.  So they don't look great.

While I don't want to be too skeptical I am concerned that the SEO firm may want to generate revenue when perhaps it is not necessary to remove these links.

Alan

I get it,  however there are varying levels of complexity and there is software such a link detox that can simplify the process.

Is this out of the league of someone who is not an SEO pro but is tech savvy?

Link building, development of content strategy, local SEO, link removal, duplicate content removal can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars or more. Need to do what I can myself so I can invest in services that add the highest value.

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Jen:

Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. They are of the opinion that it is imperative to remove the toxic domains.

The fee for toxic link removal is about $3,000.I would prefer to save the $3,000 but would prefer not to take the risk of screwing up my ranking if this is a complex procedure best left to SEO professionals. My assumption is that link removal will involve  identifying the toxic domains, requesting removal and eventually submitting a Google disavow request.

Can I do this myself or is there a big risk of screwing it up? Assuming it is safe for me to remove toxic links, would anyone suggest  software of tools for doing so?

Thanks so much.
Alan

My real estate web site was migrated form Drupal to Wordpress last July. The ranking have dropped a lot since migration. One of the things we changed is that we have added two carousels to the home page. Most of the text is below the carousels. Is this bad for SEO?

Thanks,
Alan