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Nah. Ditch em. Article directory links are pretty garbage these days. Any miniscule benefit they may still provide isnt worth the headache of wondering if those are the links keeping ya down. Also if you ever have to do a reconsideration request it'll be one less thing for you to clean up because under a manual review there isnt google engineer out there who isnt going to frown on them links.
Keyword density is irrelevant unless you are just spamming the crap out of the page with it. Assuming you are writing naturally I'd have to guess its a really long page to get your partial keyword in there 60 times. If you aren't writing naturally, fix it of course. If however its not a big block of text we are talking about here but rather an ecommerce page with a ton of product listings that just happen to contain the word (for example its a page listing different types of boots and thusly the word boot appears a bunch of times) I think google is smart enough to figure out whats going on there and not ding you for it.
Hope that helps.
Article directories have been looked down on by google for quite some time now (basically since panda, long before penguin). Couple that with them coming down on overly aggressive money anchor linking and the issue you have with semi-duped content there (Im guessing you spun them so you could take the same article and shop it to all 10 directories each time you did this) and yeah thats a bad recipe. I'd definitely delete the articles if you still have access to all the accounts. 50 unique * 10 directories Im guessing 500 crap links in total? Ditch em and then work on getting some really awesome replacements (you wont need nearly as many). High quality guest blogging is the new article submission. See if you can't get some guest author accounts at a few tightly related sites from your industry or aim high and see about getting guest author accounts on general purpose but super authoritative sites (few examples that allow this, national geographic, cracked.com, washington times, guardian.co.uk, investopedia, you get the idea here...) dumping those old links and adding in just even 20-30 great ones is going to be a huge lift for you.
One thing to keep in mind when doling out this kind of advice is that time isnt free. If the cost to do a one off payment on a link is far less than the hourly cost * the number of hours it takes to develop great content, make a new friend and of course the fail rate on that sort of outreach (which is super duper high if you've spent any time doing it) then saying it'll save money is kind of actually not true at all. Not advocating buying links perse but yeah time isnt free.
I do this pretty regularly so hopefully this will be of help. If you decide to go this route there is a ton of diligence that needs to be done. First keep in mind that post-penguin there are a ton of people dumping essentially burned domains. When you are digging through your drop lists first start off by making sure the domain is still indexed by google at all. Next take your list and dump it in a google doc and use the moz api (tutorial here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/updated-tool-seomoz-api-data-for-google-docs) to pull up the following stats on your list:
Page Authority
Domain Authority
Domain Trust
Root Linking Domains to Root Domain
page authority is really not overly important at this stage, you are just using it to figure out if they were WWW or non-WWW for when you do your site rebuild (more on that later)
For the other ones dont touch anything with a DA below 40, a DT below 4 and RLDTDs below say 150.
once you have your remaining list (it'll be a lot smaller than the one you started with) you now have to basically check SEOmoz's work. A lot of times a domain that has been spammed all to hell will still have semi-decent numbers with moz. They just aren't that good at determining spammy links just yet. Look for really high money term anchor counts (bad) really high link to root linking domain accounts (means lots of sitewides, also bad) and things of that nature.
Once you've chucked out all the domains that are really ugly take your now very very small list and go to archive.org. You are looking to see how long the domain existed in its most recently current state. Does it look like it changed hands a bunch? Or has it been pretty much the same for years. Does archive.org have most of its site archived? You'll need that for site reconstruction. As others have mentioned you basically want to restore it to its previous state as closely as you can. At least to start out with. If all that checks out then you'll want to look at the whois info. You are going to want to register it with the same registrar it was last time. Match their whois data as best as you can. Make it look like they just forgot to renew for a while but then fixed it. Once the whole site (or as much of it as you can) is restored, just let that sucker camp for a few weeks. Let google get used to it being back. Make sure they don't pull a pagerank reset on it for the drop (if it had some and it suddenly drops to zero, you might as well toss the thing out. It means google knows it changed hands). If all looks good after a few weeks? Slip your link in wherever it makes sense. A new page linked to from the home page would be ideal. Adding a new link to an old content page is in most cases a pretty glaring sign of link manipulation.
Hope that helps 
P.S. in the version of the google doc included in that tutorial it doesnt have DT or RLDTRDs build in. You'll need to mod the code slightly if you want to pull those stats. Here is the bit you need to change
add this:
"ptrp" : "domain trust" , // 524288
"pid" : "root domain links" // 8192
under this row:
"upa" : "page authority" , // 34359738368
and then change this row from this:
var SEOMOZ_ALL_METRICS = 103616137253; // All the free metrics
to this
var SEOMOZ_ALL_METRICS = 103616669733; // All the free metrics
now in the main sheet just add 2 columns. One with the heading domain trust, the other with root domain links and be sure to change the yellow box formula to include the extra 2 columns during its fetch. Cheers
Important to have a hero page (or 2) otherwise you risk keyword cannibalization. The short and dirty way to handle this of course is to make sure that any page that is basically on topic with your hero page but isn't the hero page links back to the hero page with the appropriate anchor somewhere in the editorial body. There are other more elegant ways to handle this but this way will get you into less trouble than, for example, rel-canoning all those topically relevant non-hero pages to the hero page (bad idea dont do it).
Not sure on OSE but in both AHREFS and Majestic there is a "first discovered" date on links. Perhaps this should go in the feature request bucket for the OSE team?
The best bet would be to use the words semi-interchangeably on that page (don't over do it) and then just grab some links with anchor texts of the various synonyms. Single page is going to be the stronger bet.
I doubt a single string is going to add too much overhead. Im not sure how they have designed their CMS but it may just be a case of having it everywhere is easier to implement than page specific. The other thing may just be making sure google has an easy time associating sub-page content with the author/publisher without having to look up the main page. Im simply guessing here though, Im sure a mozzer will come along and give you a more definitive answer once they see your question.
can't speak to the moz staff but meta tags aren't treated as links. neither are rel tags within an <a>tag. So no risk to "leaking link juice from ever page". :-)</a>
Not a complete answer but instead of rel-canonicaling your dynamic pages you may just want to robot.txt block them somthing like:
Disallow: /*?
this will prevent google from crawling any version of the page that includes the ? in the URL. Cannonical is a suggetion whereas robots is more of a command.
as you can see from this query:
Google has indexed 132 versions of that single page rather than follow your rel=canonical suggestion.
To further enforce this you may be able to use a fancy bit of php code to detect if the url is dynamic and do a
robots noindex, noarchive on only the dynamic renderings of the page.
This could be done like this:
I also believe there are some filtering tools for this right within webmaster tools. Worth a peek if your site is registered.
Additionally where you are redirecting non-www subpages to the home page you may instead want to redirect them to their www versions.
this can be done in htaccess like this:
Redirect non-www to www: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This will likely provide both a better user experience as well as a better solution in googles eyes.
I'm sure some other folks will come in with some other great suggestions for you as well
Much as people hate to hear it, On Page plays a very minor roll in what ranks and what doesnt.
Your page itself isnt a particularly strong page (only 1 inbound link pointing to it) but more importantly your domain itself is just not there.
Take a look at these 2 links:
The first is a comparison between your page and the page ranking in the lowest spot on page 1 for the phrase:
This second one is a broad look at those in the top 10 for that phrase:
Pay special attention the PA/DA scores, The root linking domains to both the page and the domain itself.
Right now it looks like your entire site has about 25 unique root linking domains. Thats something you'll want to work on. Try and get the best links you can of course but any links are going to make a big difference for you right now. Spread em around. A bunch to the home page, a couple to this specific page. This is going to be a major factor on when and how high you rank. Good luck!
Mind shooting over the Query and URL in question? I'd love to take a peek directly.
well the first thing Im seeing right off the bat is google seems to prefer the address you just gave me however that redirects to a subdomain reflecting your desired keyword. When did you do this? I would
A) make sure that you are redirecting properly
B) if its only been a short while give google time to figure out whats going on here
C) make sure that any links that previously pointed to the root domain be switched to your preferred address.
Edit: Take a look at this...
A great way to get around this would be to apply a different title within the category page linking to the product page than the one displayed after hitting the product page. People at the category level likely know they are in the mens shirt section so doing brand + color + style (long, short, sweater et cetera) and sizing options at that level for the title and then when the user gets to the actual product page having your H1 and title tags reflecting the full string including "mens shirt" may be an ideal way to do this. Obviously this may take some adjustments in your CMS but if what you are seeing seems definitive enough this is a great middle ground and likely worth the coding effort to add an extra entry field for "category page product title" You may even be able to automate it by simply having your system drop the category text from product titles within a category page.
I think the "SEO is Dead" statement comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of what SEO actually is. While we search marketers tend to clump a lot of extra marketing tasks into the SEO bucket, SEO in its simplest form means exactly what it says.. search engine optimization. Search engines will always exist in one form or another. Even using the "FIND" function in twitter is tapping into a search engine. As long as there are people searching for things and thus information retrevial, optimizing that will always be a necessity. People tend to confuse short term tactics with long term definitions. Just because article marketing or link building or digg may no longer be the way to optimize something for search, or even if google and bing cease being the preferred search portals it in no way means SEO will go away, just the strategies and tactics and applications will change.
IP based bans are really rare within google. If you can link to your site that'd be great. Im wondering if there might not be a robots.txt problem or something else that may have arrived from the move as apposed to an IP based block.
You should be able to control positions 1-3 with just your primary domain. Work on pushing up some of your sub-pages for your brand term.
Once thats done consider tossing a blog or something else (presskit, video content, employee directory) on a subdomain. That should net you another 2 spots on page one with your domain with a little effort.
Once thats done, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Youtube can take the other 5 spots.
Russ is correct. SEMrush also has a bunch of historical ranking data.
If it just went viral yesterday you might want to give it a few days to see ranking changes. Also remember that google still primarily relies heavily on links. Traffic != links. The other pages you mentioned may be more heavily direct-linked to than your page. My recommendation would be to hit up those people discussing your content and make sure they are placing a do follow link back to your content, preferably with an anchor text that either directly or partially matches the subject you are hoping to rank for.
You'll want to focus on Bing rather than yahoo. Yahoo has its search results provided by Bing. In general bing has a pretty marginal market share. They also have a much smaller index. One that is refreshed far less frequently than Google. What you are seeing is about par for the course at the moment.
I'm also seeing it in position 10. However in a scenario where this would be outranking another domain some things to consider:
Facebook is a high authority site. That gives it a nice initial bump.
The page appears to be liked some 500ish times. If a portion of the users who like that page have thier profiles set to public, google can see those internal links from thier pages to that page. Facebook does not no-follow internal links. So if a portion of the public pages linking in also have a decent amount of links going to thier page (ie they have a lot of friends on facebook or they've heavily linked to their facebook page from a decent blog or something like that) you get a ton of juice flowing into that page all with exact match anchor.
When we do reputation management for some of our clients we actively use some of these exact things to boost pages on social platforms but we learned the tactic from observing this as a natural phenomenon.
I think you may be misunderstanding what PageRank is. But moving past that for a moment. No, interlinking within your own site is not going to hurt you, generally speaking. However this is assuming all the pages reside on the same subdomain (www for example).
If you have every metro on a subdomain e.g. "seattle.yoursite.com" and interlink all of those... THAT could create a problem.
Recommend you stick with:
www.yoursite.com/state/metro/ instead.
hmm. Tough call. Depends on the authority of your domain honestly. I've seen absolute garbage + duplication rank given the right link profile. That being said you might do better to pull in some local data with APIs and scrapers and mash it up to bring extra content to the page that is more localized. Then find a way to incentivize UGC for further diversification.
301 is going to be the way to go here. Not only is it going to pass a little more juice but chances are if you have a new site the likelihood that much of the content is identical... well you get where I'm going with this 
I would say its all a matter of implementation. Many media sites do full page ad overlays without issue. Cloaking only becomes an issue when you are showing the engines one thing and the users another. To solve this you COULD no-index (assuming you dont need the pages to be indexed) or you could simply show google the same overlay as you show the user. You could possibly even use an intermediary page.
Easy
Cheap
Safe
Pick any 2.
you really dont need very many "branded" links when you have EMDs to rank #1 for your brand name. Just seek links with context to the subject matter rather than links with the anchor "arse"
I imagine very little of your traffic is going to be branded traffic anyway
Also for places that you are sending actual link request emails (which I almost always avoid like the plague anyway) I am going to assume that if your site is a bit cheeky as the name would suggest, the places that are most likely to link out to you are going to be the types with a sense of humor so I doubt it'd be an issue.
No it wont. Easy way to test this is with google instant turned on simply type arse and hit the space
if it displays something its ok, if it displays blank its filtered.
I've already tested this for you and it displays all sorts of sites. Clearly google is ok with the word arse
Well we are just south of seattle so SEOmoz events are definitely something we like to send our people too. I dunno if the Moz crew would go for it but a fieldtrip to the mozplex would certainly be something we'd be open to (in reference to your bit about a visit from rand)
As far as Mac vs PC we pretty much give people whatever computer they want! To us its a bit of a no-brainer to let people pick out their favorite computer as its their primary tool.
I love all these suggestions!
Fantastic ideas. Really like the napping room!
Why stop at 3 monitors when you can have 6! Pics attached are my actual computer at the office.
6x 27in LED monitors on articulating arms.
Most of the time.. if its worth linking out to, its worth leaving followed. No-follow really doesnt help you save any juice these days it just tells google you don't trust the site you are linking out to. I would say if you dont trust a site you are linking out to... maybe just don't link to it at all (unless its for a blog post were you are poking fun at the site in question and the link is for reference purposes)
My company Click2Rank is building a new office we are opening around June. Since we will be hiring a bunch of SEOs and Programmers we want it to be basically the perfect geek hangout spot. Knowledge workers need a great place to hang their hat. So I thought I'd reach out to the community and ask.. if your office could look like anything... what would it include?
You can pretty much ask for anything... xbox360? Unlimited supply of energy drinks and food? A nice big couch? Accent wall? plants? fountain? desks shaped like your favorite animal? a pinball machine?
Lay it on me. Your dream work environment what does it look like (think office obviously we know for a lot of people your dream office is netcommute from home but thats not helpful in this instance)
Think about both your personal workspace as well as the total office/community space in the office. Thanks in advance! Feel free to attach pictures as well!
pretty much all the of the onsite stuff you have done has no impact on domain authority. Domain Authority (at least the way I think of it.. SEOmoz may calculate in some other factors) is entirely derived from the types and quantities of links pointed at your domain.
Some possible reasons for it going down would be either Moz making adjustments to the algorithm that calculates it, a change in their index size or index content (maybe they stopped including some stuff that was previously in their index), or the more likely senario that some site or sites that were linking to you arent passing as much authority as they used to and your score is reflecting that.
You may also want to think about slapping a robots noindex on the individual pages as well.
Like david said it'd be helpful to see the stats and what you've done.. that being said... SEOmoz does play with that metric from time to time as seen here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscapes-august-update-better-domain-authority-numbers-new-partners-and-more
It may be a situation of "Its not you, its me" if you know what I'm sayin.
Define smaller budget. The term is really subjective. Some companies consider $5k/month to be small. Some people think $200 is small.
My company offers linkbuilding and I like to think we are some of the best out there but our monthly minimum is $2500 and requires a multi-month contract.
I know of a few great freelancers that do a lot of local SEO starting at just 500 a month.
Another option would be to snap up the individual things you want done sorta ala-cart from places like freelancer.com, odesk, wickedfire and digital point.
I may catch some flack for this.. but this is EXACTLY what software like thebestspinner is for.
Keep the original on your site, then plop it in the best spinner and spend 30-45 minutes doin up the spintax on it. submit the variations to the article directories.
This has 2 benefits:
you aren't putting exact duplicates of your content out onto other peoples domain
your article subs vary from directory to directory, increasing the likelyhood that more of them will stay in the main index and perhaps pass you some visibility and traffic in addition to link equity.
Another thing I would recommend and this is just a personal preference.... don't link your distributed article back to its twin on your site. instead link it to a different article on your site that may be related... or to a category page of related articles.
This is mainly a UX thing. Why would someone want to read the same article twice? If they just got done reading it they arent going to follow a link just to read it a second time
The very first thing that strikes me here in this is you say you have about 12,000 links from only 48 domains.
Site age may be helping them but I'd be willing to bet that they probably have a more ip-diverse link profile than you do as well. Sounds like you have the niche relevant links down so now its time to get outside that box and start going after other metrics. Here are the big 6 I look at:
Trust/Authority
Niche Relevance (you have this covered)
Segmentation (where the links appear on the page)
Anchor
IP diversity (links from many domains > many links from few domains) <- start here
Link-weight (link juice, pagerank, whatever you want to call it)
I'd be willing to bet your 80 bucks would be better spent on something like a pauls or angelas backlink packet than it would be on renting one or 2 links a month. And a lower risk too.
you may see some initial drop as google figures out where your content went and how its being repurposed (even with smart 301ing you are still chunking up the content)
HOWEVER, wiki-style internal linking has proven to be very effective! I mean... all those rich anchors, links in the content instead of the nav.. these are all nice signals.
Im fairly certain wiki comes outta the box with dofollow for internal links and nofollow for externals however you can change all of this stuff with settings and plugins.
All in all I'd say if you are willing to commit the time its going to be a net gain both for your rankings (over time) and more importantly for your users.
Hmm. Well there is a LOT of ground to cover here but I would say the short version is it sounds like its time to rebuild your website. Depending on the size and scope of the project my firm may be willing to take it on pro-bono. We actively give to charity every year and though that usually means monetary donations I would absolutely be interested in donating something that we do best!
Now to the core of the question, yes having everything on a single domain is usually better. There are situations were subdomains are appropriate but without more information I'd say this is likely not the case for you. I also think that having your subdomains hosted in different parts of the world is likely sending some really odd signals to google as to the connection between your subdomains and the main site. I would definately try to get the whole site hosted in one place.
I can't fathom a good reason to use iFrames in the senario you are discribing instead of just self-hosting the content in the correct location.
Oh man this is me to a T. Its hard to explain to others that the rest of the time spent farting around online is really a primer for this. If I just tried to come in for an hour and leave It would never be an in the zone hour.
small caveat to the endorsment above... IP diversity does seem to be a rather important ranking metric. It's been my experience that Quantity and Quality need not come from the same source. If you've got some great quality links, and a bunch of quantity only type links.. it seems to still result in a net positive.
Six things I normally look at linkbuilding wise (in no particular order):
Authority/Trust
Niche Relevance
Segmentation (links in content > links in sidebar, footer, comments)
Anchor
IP diversity
Linkweight (Juice, PageRank, whatever)
As long as you have elements of each of these SOMEWHERE in your link profile you generally do well.
Other than that I agree with these fine folks. Also automation is great for scaling but it almost always leads to a great reduction in quality and possibly could end up being a wasted effort if the rejection rate goes up enough as a result.
That could very well be it. I rode the line on a lot of things but ad placement wasnt really one of them. I just have the standard 3 adsense blocks and they are well placed and blended into the site. I also intentionally sold some links on the site (like I said its a testbed) but they arent designed to stick out like a sore thumb so I doubt that would make a diff one way or the other.
P.S. Haha fruedian slip of some sort I'm sure.
Oddly the handful of sites that I have which should have most probably been affected negatively actually saw boosts in traffic, CTR on ads and eCPM on ads. Not huge jumps.. but yeah.. I benefited which was odd. These domains are testbeds I set up a long time ago to find the upper limit of what you can "get away with" in google so I know where to draw the line.
Other interesting facts. I rand some tests over the weekend (may not be large enough to be statistically relevant yet) but it seems the farmer update has almost no impact on indexation of poor or duplicate content given enough raw link juice (no anchor, ip diversity or any other cool factors, just a flat link from a big ol' bucket of link juice) which I find disappointing. =/ I expected a bit of a challenge after all this hoopla. Even though I rock the greyhat Im still pretty anti dupe/crap content.
