Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Those are poor quality pages and poor quality backlinks for your site. Get rid of them.

What steps have you taken to reach out to people and actively obtain links?

Looking at a screenshot of a website is a very poor way to determine content quality.

Might want to add the dev site to Webmaster Tools so you can easily remove any pages that do get indexed.

If Google tells you to do something for better SEO, it's unlikely to produce any significant results short-term. You might get some results if you stay at it for years.

I'm not going to endorse any specific tactics, but if you rely on Google for your SEO advice, you're being fooled. Google DOES NOT want people to be able to manipulate their search engine - why would they give you accurate advice on how to do it?

Adhering to Google's SEO recommendations is your biggest problem. You won't be successful for a long time - if ever - doing that, and don't let people here brainwash you into thinking you will be.

Is it working for them? If so, see if it works for you.

There is no white hat/black hat. There are only differing levels of risk tolerance. And risky SEO does pay off when done correctly.

Attachment doesn't work.

For the future - if you feel like you're getting into a situation where you won't be fully supported to do the best you can, stop and get out.

Check your settings in Screaming Frog for obeying robots.txt, obeying canonicals, etc. That might be your problem.

1. Get new, better quality links ASAP, before or while you're disavowing

2. It depends on your outreach methods - I had ~50% removal rate with one of our sites which is multiple times higher than the average. You can just disavow and hope it works or you can get as many links removed as possible, disavow the rest, then hope it works. I'd go with the latter.

1. Yes - clean now before you're penalized again

2. I work for a big ecommerce company (as in market-owning) that operates 2 completely unrelated businesses - I did link cleanups and disavowed 90%+ of our backlink profiles because they were poor quality links. And now organic non-branded revenue is up ~130% YOY for one brand and ~65% for the other, sessions are up as well. So if those 83% you have really are bad, it's not too dangerous.

Re: destroying your actual rankings, based on my own experience, disavowing shouldn't hurt your rankings further, but don't expect them to increase either. Your rankings were propped up by artificial backlinks so once you remove them you'll need to get good links in their place to boost rankings back up.

Keep nofollowing your links everyone - eventually we'll break Google!

• searchenginewatch.com
• searchengineland.com
• seroundtable.com
• searchenginejournal.com
• webmasterworld.com

Just read those sites every morning and you'll be up to date on everything. Books are a waste.

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.

Exactly right.

Wonder why your small business can't compete with the big name brands? That's why. If you're not buying links to some degree, you're probably not ranking very well.

I'd look at tracking/reporting on your end - sounds like you've got direct reporting as AdWords.

Duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites, you're unlikely to be penalized for it.

A flat URL structure would be ideal, meaning .com/rho instead of adding in leves of categories/subcategories/filters. You should be able to make the URLs flat while still keeping the full breadcrumb structure of how the customer's navigated - I know it's possible because we run Magento Enterprise and have done it.

DA will shift up or down depending on the size of OSE's lastest index. A bigger index = DA goes up, a smaller index = DA goes down.

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.

Every backlink tool will give you a different number because they're all operating with different resources. Pull backlinks from a few of the big sources - OSE, AHREFs, Masjetic, Webmaster Tools, etc. - dedupe, and go off of that.,

Use backlink checkers of your choice to pull competitor's backlinks, filter by domain authority high to low, look for blogs. Yes, it really is that simple. And that's only one of multiple ways to do it.

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.

One should never rely on Googlebot for anything - we've all seen it change title tags, change meta descriptions, disobey rel=canonical, etc.

I'm checking out this new Link Opportunities feature for one of our sites and what I'm seeing right now is pretty disappointing.

For Reclaim Links, everything listed is an internal link on our site. It's got tons of URLs from our old Iciniti structure (replatformed to Magento mid-March). It's crawling tons of stuff that's blocked in robots. There are no links from external domains in the first 5 pages.

For Unlinked Mentions, it's showing tons of mentions - 33,566 to be exact, a ridiculous number - mostly from news sites like Forbes, WSJ, Guardian, CNN, etc. These sites are not mentioning us. It's set up to look only for our brand name or domain name, so I don't know how it's thinking there are all these nonexistent mentions.

What's going on with Link Opportunities?

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.

Google smart enough to recognize what it is, it won't get you penalized for duplicate content.

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.

While you're going through the disavow process, make sure you're building new quality links. You won't get your rankings back just by disavowing, you need new links to improve.

Drop them as a client. They're paying you for SEO help but they obviously don't trust/like it. Not worth your time.

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.

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

OSE doesn't have the resources to crawl as much of the web as other services. For a complete backlink picture, check as many sources as you can - OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, Webmaster Tools, etc.

Duplicate content isn't that big of a deal for ecommerce sites, especially the kind you're talking about. Backlinks are likely why the pages rank so poorly.

Moz's rank tracker just isn't accurate all the time. I've repeatedly had it tell me keywords had massive shifts up or down, even out of the top 50, when a manual review showed no change in rank. Once it had all my keywords out of the top 50 for Yahoo and Bing. The rank tracker is a good estimate, but manually check if you want to know the real ranking.

It's absolutely ridiculous that our industry lays down and accepts stuff like this from Google. It is unacceptable for them to not be able to determine who originally created the content. They have the data to do it.

Highly unlikely to get you penalized. Google understands the nature of ecommerce sites and that products go out of stock regularly, hence the need for proper merchandising.

Sounds like it should be a 301. 302s should be used when the redirect is temporary. I'm assuming the way you're using it is permanent, hence it should be a 301.

Don't know their policy on this, but did you get a rel canonical from them?

The keyword thing is a common problem that's never been fixed. Some weeks it's accurate, some weeks it's not.

Possible? Yes. Likely? No. And I'm assuming that by good SEO you mean ranking well in Google.

Links are still the biggest factor for ranking. Matt Cutts repeated this again recently and studies back it up. Don't let the anti-link builders, pro-relationship builders, or whatever they're calling themselves at the moment brainwash you.

Disavowing links wouldn't have any effect on how Moz sees them. Some index updates get more data than others and that's going to impact the number of links and your DA. But that's just an estimate of your potential to rank. Keep an eye on WMT and GA non-branded search - much more important measures of organic success.

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.

People will come in here and overwhelm you with links and information, but I'll tell you what you really need to hear - if you don't know the answers to these questions, you shouldn't have launched your site yet.

You don't get penalized for duplicate meta descriptions. You could have every one on your site the exact same, it won't matter. It doesn't impact rankings. It impacts how likely a searcher is to click through to your website.

Moz on-page grader results mean nothing, they're a joke.

Further proof that black hat tactics work and work well. And they always will work. Google still can't really determine the quality of a link, whether it's natural, negative SEO, spam, etc.