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Link Detox is good for finding toxic links, but you still need to manually review them all. It will give you false positives - no tool is 100% on that stuff.
Rmoov and Pitchbox are good for outreach, though I favor Rmoov since it was specifically built for link removal. Pitchbox is more for prospecting, finding new opportunities, etc.
I'm not surprised, OSE routinely misses many of our links. But none of the backlink checkers will be 100% accurate. Your best bet is to use a variety of sources - OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, etc. - and compile and remove duplicates to get a true picture of your backlinks.
If you're going through with link removal and building a disavow list, you might as well log all the outreach efforts and results - it really doesn't take that long. Just note when you sent emails, when they replied, what they said, and if the link was removed.
I'd upload that to Google Docs and include the link in the disavow file so on the off chance a real person looks into your site, they'll know you did the work.
It's Penguin 2.0, which was put out on May 22, 2013.
Your client can go the easy way with what some would call black hat tactics, rank very well very quickly, get a lot of sales, but then there's always the chance it'll disappear overnight. If you're in to churn and burn and don't care about starting over every few months then go for it.
Or your client can go with what some would call white hat tactics - focus on content, earning links, etc. Results will take a long time to come, but you're better protected from future Google updates. Depending on their resources this may or may not be viable.
Site B likely had a manual action or ran afoul of an algorithm and now that's impacting Site A. Your first step should be to figure out why site B had been going down over time, if it's a Panda issue like you suspect or something else. But don't take action until you know what the problem is.
Moz claims to report the average position that most people will see, but there are tons of factors that go into how SERPs appear for you.
Personally, I find Moz's ranking reports to be reasonably accurate most of the time. Then there are occasions where they report all my keywords dropping out of the top 50 when none of them moved more than 2-3 positions up or down. So take what it says with a grain of salt.
For rank tracking purposes, I use a Chrome incognito window with no history, not logged in, and location set to United States. As long as you're tracking with the same method over time, your results should be pretty reliable.
What steps have you taken to reach out to people and actively obtain links?
OSE doesn't have the resources to crawl as deeply as AHREFs, Majestic, etc., so the index is smaller. Get your backlinks from multiple sources for the best picture.
Using your company name in the title tag isn't (generally) done with the intention of ranking for it. If you can't rank for your brand name, you've got bigger issues to deal with.
Adding the company name to a title tag is more for brand awareness. If people know your brand, it reinforces that they're in the right place. If you're not as well known, it gets that awareness going in the consumer's mind.
C-blocks basically refer to where an IP address is located. C-blocks are like the neighborhood and sites that share it are basically your neighbors. More linking c-blocks is better.
DA can fluctuate with OSE updates depending on the size of the index. If the size goes down, DA may go down. If it goes up, DA may go up.
It's totally fine. Optimize for the term and have the landing page be a page on your site explaining the difference between and benefits of your league vs. Pop Warner.
Zappos does a similar thing with coupons - http://www.zappos.com/truth-about-zappos-coupons
Is this the actual total number of results or the just the numbers it's showing at the top of the first page? The best way to tell how much Google really has indexed is do your search, go to the last page of results, choose to have omitted results included, get to the last page again, and multiple out how many results that is. I got 1,910 results using that method.
The description should be long enough to convey the features of the products, the benefits of it to the customer, and any other important info. If it's 50 words, it's 50. If it's 500, it's 500. Writing to hit a number means you're going to include a lot of fluff.
Since you asked this question, it sounds like you're not a copywriter. Pay one to write your product descriptions. It will totally be worth it.
There are multiple ways to do everything in SEO. Multiple ways to rank highly, multiple ways to lose all rankings. I'd say it's pretty much 0% science, because if any part of it was then it wouldn't be nearly as hard. Even the things that one might say we have down to a science (proper title tag structure, well written meta description, etc.) aren't really because Google can display them how they want to display them - not how you wrote them.
The most important thing I can stress is don't rely solely on SEO. Don't rely solely on any one strategy. That's a guaranteed way to fail. Use SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc. Diversify your strategy and you won't freak when Google changes the algorithm and everything goes upside down.
It really needs to be a rule that you're not allowed to ask questions specific to your site unless you post the URL.
There is no one best tool for looking at backlinks. AHREFs seems to have the biggest dataset, but they'll all give you different results. If you really want to see what you have, use OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, and any others you like, put them all in one spreadsheet and remove duplicates. Then you'll have your true backlinks picture.
A meganav is not considered duplicate content. Duplicate content means product description pages that are identical, having the same articles multiple places on your site, etc.
To the main parts of your question - Google does not want it to be easy for people in the SEO world. They give guidelines, but following them means nothing. What Google considers an ok tactic one years becomes an unacceptable tactic the next (see guest blogging). There are many ways to succeed in ranking. Some follow Google's rules and wait for rankings to come, others use tons of spammy tactics and rank instantly (though they always risk losing it overnight if Google catches on).
The idea that an easy to use site and relevant content will make Google rank you fairly is a joke. And though only 1 has said it publicly, there are many top minds in the SEO world who will tell you that in private.
The Moz ranking reports aren't always accurate. They're a good guide, but if you see something suspicious like that (and there hasn't been an algorithm update or manual penalty to you), then it's probably wrong. I've seen it say a keyword has dropped out of the top 50 when it's still on the first page. A manual check is the best way to see where a keyword is.
Virtually all our big keywords/category names took hits in rankings on the day of and day after this recent Penguin update so that makes it seem like it's Penguin. On average they lost about 5 positions, but some lost as few as 1 and some lost 15+. But it clearly affected our whole site. Our idea was to test out removing the links on one subcategory and if it worked to do it for the rest of the site.
The guy they had building links for years did all the typical stuff - directories, spam sites, reciprocal linking, links with non-relevant sites, etc. We sell outdoor products and I've found backlinks on penis enlargement sites, anchor text for products we've never sold, etc. The backlink profile is very, very bad. Even if Penguin wasn't the culprit, these backlinks have to be hurting our rankings.
It would also be smart to add the subdomains in Webmaster Tools in case one does get indexed and you need to remove it.
I'm gonna answer these in the most simple way possible, others can elaborate:
1. If the unrelated site actually featured you for something - ex. you sponsored a program for this travel company, they mention it on their site and link back to you - then that's fine. If it's totally random and not related, it's not fine. If links to you have anchor text that's not related to your site, that's spam.
2. Almost always disavow at the domain level. Exceptions would be if someone set up a spammy blogspot.com or tumblr.com page - those are big, authoritative domains and you don't want to block them completely. In that case I'd go with the URL level instead of domain level.
3. I'd still disavow the links, even if you delete the pages they point to. It's better to cover all bases in a situation like this.
Because Google still has a long way to go at determining high quality content vs. low quality content, determining good backlink profiles vs. bad backlink profiles, etc. It's like people who write viruses - whatever the antivirus companies are doing, the writers are a few steps ahead. Same with Google. They're reactive, not proactive
The kind of SEO your competitor is practicing works and it always will. You don't have to follow in their footsteps, but obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there. Think of SEO like investing - it's all about your risk tolerance. Figure out how much you're willing to risk to get the rankings/sales/etc. that you want and go for it.
Sounds like management will end up sabotaging your SEO efforts with their ineptitude.
I've used Link Detox for a while. I've found that all Toxic links are classified appropriately, but that's not always the case for suspicious and healthy. Links marked as moderate, low risk, or very low risk can still be coming from spammy directories, link lists, massive resource pages, etc. And on the opposite side, sometimes links from BlogSpot blogs will be marked as suspicious even though it's a legit blog that linked naturally to you. They're just flagged because they have few backlinks or low trust. It's best to do a manual review of each link to see what's really worth keeping.
I've used Link Detox with Rmoov in the past and had good results with it. Rmoov is easy to use and keeps track of everything for you in a Google Doc.
On top of the site move issues, I just put your site in Open Site Explorer and you have no backlinks from anyone. That's a big part of your ranking problem. Did you get rid of a bunch or have you never had any?
A lot of people have been having this problem. I emailed Moz and was told to completely disconnect then reconnect to fix it, though I explained originally that I had been doing that and it didn't fix it. Still getting this error message.
Backlinks are what's hurting you. According to AHREFs, you've got 52 backlinks coming from paces like article directories, Russian comment spam, etc.
Get as many bad backlinks removed as you can, disavow what you can't get removed. But make sure you're building new links - quality links - at the same time. You need new links to improve rankings, getting rid of the bad links isn't enough.
Keep in mind that Matt Cutts has said people should usually be taking a machete to their backlinks rather than a scalpel. Don't try and remove just enough to make a difference, remove everything you think could possibly hurt you. And remove anything Google's likely to crack down on in the future. In my experience with Link Deotx, usually over 75% of backlinks marked as suspicious warrant removal.
Regardless of what Google says or does, links are still a huge factor in search rankings. You need to some quality links to your site to see improvement in your SERP positions. The Moz blog is full of tips on it.
With that type of budget, you'd be better off learning SEO on your own through conferences, books, etc. Plus you'll save a ton of money in the long-run by not outsourcing it. You don't need an agency, SEO isn't that hard.
The brand name coming first is generally seen with big brands - Amazon, Walmart, etc. The reasoning I've heard is that it lets the consumer easily know they're shopping there and generates trusts. And obviously brands like that don't really have to worry about trying to rank for a particular keyword.
Unless you're super well known, I'd keep it Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.
Why do you say it's not possible? A good copywriter can knock out titles and meta descriptions for a few hundred pages in a day. It's worth paying for.
If your competitors are ranking with those tactics and have been for years, then try those tactics!
There is no white hat or black hat in SEO. There is only risk tolerance. Think of it like investing. Decide how much you're willing to risk, then make those bets.
Regardless of how much the sheep say "create good content, the rest will take care of itself", it's very misleading. Links are the most important factor for ranking well. If you want to beat these guys at their own game, you have to play their game.
I've had to do this for our dev sites before - you'll be fine. Like you said, add the dev site in WMT, do a remove site by leaving the field blank, and proceed. It won't take your main site out of the index.
Yes, but with that you risk not having all the products indexed. Not good if you want to rank for something long tail like '[insert design here] dog id tag'.
Probably won't hurt, but won't help either. Could be seen as spammy if you ever had a manual reviewer from Google go over your site. 500+ words per page is overkill.
One should never rely on Googlebot for anything - we've all seen it change title tags, change meta descriptions, disobey rel=canonical, etc.
I've seen this with our sites too. Title tags, meta descriptions, canonicals, robots.txt, etc. should all be considered just suggestions. Google will look at them and in most cases obey them, but they don't always.
50% is a shockingly high success rate, way above the norm. I had a 16% success rate on one of our sites and around 35% on one of our much larger sites. I had one of the top names ever in SEO tell us that 5% would be a good success rate, though I think that's lowballing a bit.
Keep in mind that bots don't have to obey canonicals - they're just a suggestion.
You may be waiting quite a while if you think Google will take care of this on its own. I guarantee they didn't build all those links in the last month, and what just came out 1 month ago? A Penguin refresh. And if they're still outranking you, it probably didn't hurt them.
Why don't you try the same tactics they're using? Obviously you should be more discreet about it, but it's clearly working for them and could work for you as well. Don't get stuck in that false mindset of white hat vs. black hat, there is no such thing. There are only levels of risk tolerance, just like in a million other aspects of business. Decide how much risk you're willing to take then build links appropriately.
Moz is going by a percentage threshold - if more than a certain percent is the same, it's duplicate. Revise your meta descriptions or just accept having it marked as duplicate. Duplicate meta descriptions aren't that big of an issue.
Many people had big drops around the same time period, so likely an algorithm update that impacted you.
MyBlogGuest was penalized towards the end of March, that's probably not his issue.
I'd be surprise if you were hit by Panda for duplicate content on product descriptions. Matt Cutts is on record saying it's not a big deal for ecommerce sites.