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I recently paid to have my site changed to https but at last minute did not publish it as I got nervous about it! I asked several experienced SEO people and they suggested that as my business is very small, I have a very small budget and it is 100% reliant on search engine hits, that I might take a 10 - 30% hit on ranking and it would take a long time to regain where I was. And that is the best case scenario if we do everything correctly. Apparently even with being very careful, it is easy to make errors which could have some unfortunate consequences.

Any opinions?? Is it worth it?

It has taken 2 years of a lot of hard work (bad link removal, better content, social media) to get my site ranking again. It was only the monteverde site that was penalized (not a manual penalty) but it is recovering, thankfully! So I don't think the Arenal site will have an adverse effect in this way.

Ah,, sorry for my ignorance.,., what is a naked URL?? Non-follow?

I have had 3 tourism web sites for many years (each site represents a different place in Costa Rica) and they cross link with each other. www.monteverdetours.com is the main site -  the most important one.

In order to help ranking and to comply with all the new google changes.... I have recently been advised that (page by page, I should incorporate the other site, www, arenalvolcanotours.com into the monteverde site with 301s,

In other words there will be a new  directory on monteverde called /arenal-volcano-tours which will be the new home page for the arenal section.  So page by page I can map the old URL's to the new URL's  eg arenalvolcanotours.com/arenal-hotels-economy.html
301 redirect to
monteverdetours.com/arenal-volcano-tours/arenal-hotels-economy.html

Now my monteverde site was once penalized by google and I am worried that doing this might have an adverse effect (although the thinking behind doing this change is because google prefers it to all the cross linking and also I will be able to consolidate all the links from Arenal into Monteverde).

I respect the person who made the suggestion but I was interested in opinions from other people! I want to be positive this is a good ideas before undertaking this major work!

Any opinions would be appreciated!

But how to get those 10-20 quality links (natural ones, not bought)... that is a harder question!

when you say the local keywords you mean horse riding costa rica or horse trek monteverde?

The company name is Horse Trek Monteverde

There are other companies with more general names such as horseback riding costa rica and costa rica horseback riding,

Yes, indeed there is another web site that a friend started called www.costaricahorsebackridingvacation.com    years and years ago. The name is way too long (!) and she does not do anything to do it, in fact she has moved from the area and does not reply to my letters. But the site ranks so well!! She never really knew anything about seo or linking, she started doing it for a hobby.

Hence I decide to start a new web site and link tripadvisor and horse trek monteverde facebook to that.

I wanted from the start to use horsetrekmonteverde.com as the company is called Horse Trek Monteverde. But as soon as I started asking around and mentioning that I also own a domain called www.horseridingcostarica.com most people advised I should use this as more customers will put that in a search.

Horse Trek Monteverde is known only by people who do a search on tripadvisor and by the local hotels in Monteverde.

My gut feeling is to go with Horse Trek Monteverde as I could market/brand it better but maybe I am wrong? I feel that Costa Rica and horseback riding will be mentioned so much in the site's content that the actual domain name won't be too significant. But others are telling me different!

We have 2 markets..... dedicated horse riders who are looking for a multi day horse riding vacation and book from the States well in advance.

The other market is tourists who book last minute once they are in Monteverde and for short rides.

With all the google changes and social media focus on seo, I am in a bit of a dilemma and any opinions welcome.

My husband has a very small horseback riding company based in a tiny mountain town of Costa Rica and I cannot decide whether to call it by the company name or by a more generic name that is likely to be picked up by the search engines ( I do believe the importance of domain name is less than it used to be in terms of search with all the new google changes).

The two names are  www.horsetrekmonteverde.com   (bear in mind that his customers come from the States and horse trekking is not commonly used)

and www.horseridingcostarica.com

One mentions Costa Rica, the other not as you can see. Also not many people have beard about Monteverde. However I am trying to do some strong branding! What would you do?

I have seen answers for this back in 2012 but as we all now things have changed in 2013.

My question is Do rss feeds help seo in 2013?  Or does google see it as duplicate content (I see that the moz site has RSS ...)

I know there are various posts about this but none of them are up to date.

I am so reluctant to do any linking now as I was hurt by google algorithms (without even knowing I was doing anything bad back in April 2012).

I am just overwhelmed with all the seo info out there - I have written articles, blog on my site, lots of facebook postings  but I don't seem to reach people

I now have someone who wants to help me get a new linking structure to get my ranking back but the whole idea scares me. He basically wants to do the following using social media platforms only to get natural links (is this a very bad idea? ANY comments will be appreciated:

Proposed Plan includes 200-250 Do-Follow Themed Links to your “TARGET SITE”

50 Approved Social Bookmarking Links: - 2 articles are used to build 50 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.

25 Approved Article Submission Links: - 2 articles are used to build 25 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.

20 Approved Press Release Links: -2 articles are used to build 20 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.

50 Approved Web 2.0 Properties: - 2 articles are used to build 50 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.

30 Approved Classified Links: -  2 articles are used to build 30 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.

ahhhh... link didn't work....

Has anyone used this? www.linkdetox.com/

Any opinions about it?

I came to the same conclusion!

I am having the same dilemma..  did you end up sticking with Modx? If not, can you tell me your reasons why not? Someone is trying to persuade me that WordPress is fully optimized for SEO, unlike Modx but I am not convinced it matters as long as you get URLs, page titles etc right.

I recently had my link profile done as I was badly effected by something in 2012 (Penguin, Panda.. who knows? never got a message from google in webmaster about anything).

Loads of INBOUND links were identified as being 'dodgy'' and the person highlighted them in different colors. However, another seo éxpert' told me to leave them (perhaps remove just 3 of them) and don't bother with the rest. Now I am not sure what to do? Any opinions?

RED
3 were highlighted as being from untrusted malware. I think I should disavow them but really, would 3 make that much difference for a fall in my site?

ORANGE
240 were said to be spam articles and I was advised:
The following pages highlighted in orange are on sites created for the purpose of publishing articles for link building. Since the same articles appear on multiple sites, Google views this as duplicate content. Links to Monteverde Tours in these articles should be removed or tagged "nofollow." Where this is not possible, the domains should be disavowed.

YELLOW
85 were said to be from Low-quality directories
The following pages highlighted in yellow are on low-quality directories and link farms. Links to Monteverde Tours on these pages should be removed or the domains disavowed.

GREEN
340 were said to be from sites were the page was not found , Account suspended, Problem loading page, Link removed, domain expired
The following pages highlighted in green include pages whose links to Monteverde Tours have been removed and pages that were inaccessible for various reasons, as shown in the Comments column. These pages or their domains should be disavowed to remove them from the Google index.

I have read (and asked on this forum) about disavow but the more I read the more I am getting confused about the next action. I tried for one year to get rid of any bad outbound links, did blogging, social media, improved content, landing pages etc but all to no avail.

Any opinions appreciated. I am not looking for a magic bullet, I know there isn't one. I know I need to keep improving content etc  but after a year of NO improvements should I consider the link removal route?

<colgroup><col width="215"></colgroup>
| Untrusted site - malware! |

What is best way to get rid of bad inbound links in your opinion?

I am thinking that maybe my best action is to take the first 65 (that are very untrusted sites/malware) and see if get anywhere with http://www.removeem.com/

The thing is .. SOMETHING must be preventing me from getting my raking back (as I have made such a huge effort with content, social media etc etc)

I have had two SEO 'specialists' look at my site after the 2012 Penguin update as I was hit badly for one very important keyword. I took off any bad sites links but I never did anything with inbound links.

• One says my link profile is fine and do NOT use the disavow tool but I should improve my site (landing pages, content, photos, put blog on site, articles, social media etc etc). This I tried for several months but my site never improved.

• the second 'expert' said I HAVE to take certain ones off and he identified inbound links from spammy sites. He found links from 65 links from malware/untrusted sites and 267 from spam articles and 124 from link farms plus hundreds more from pages that no longer exist or never provide traffic

What would you do? i should point out  the anchor text for these inbound links is the one keyword that is the most important to the site and the one that got hit by the Penguin 2012

I just came across this and I wanted to let say it is a great answer and thank you

A couple of years ago I was told to take off the 'pipes' for my page titles. To be more organic ....now I  am being told it is best to put them back.

For example I just read it is a good idea to do the following:

'Using pipes to separate these words would look like:

SEO Company | Franchise Services | Higher Visibility

Although this might not be the creative title you’re used to seeing on blogs, it’s a title that is incredibly optimized for Google (yet it still lets readers know what they can expect).'

Should  I replace the titles of my poor performing pages, with the common format which I am told is:

Page Branding | keyword 1 |keyword 2

or keyword 1 | keyword 2 | Page branding.

And I should keep the piping.

Any opinions?

Thanks - very clear

What social media does help ranking?

I wasn't planning on doing this. I was curious as so many people are offering these fake fans and I couldn't see the benefit

My site was hit by a Penguin or Panda, for some bad linking in 2012. Ever since then I have been 100%  completely white hat, being careful who I pick to my marketing. Once burnt....

Recently, with all the hype of social media being the thing to help you boast rankings, it got me wondering about how Google really can monitor this.

I saw this the other day on Elance...

I need 5000 Facebook fans. They must be real looking and be coming from US IPs, Preferable real looking US accounts.

If people are just going to get false Facebook fans, tweets etc.... then it is no better than all the bad linking.  Perhaps Google will come out with Puma penalty (well we have pandas and penguins)

Thank you!

My site recently went down, as I has a problem with the payment renewal and  meanwhile Verio put a similar site up, whilst my site was being restored.

So it seems some hosting companies could have a stock of these advertising sites when a new site is being built or is down?

But the question is .. if you advertised on this would google see it as spam links?

I have been asked what type of site this is?

What kind of page is this?
[http://www.gotocostarica.com/](http://www.gotocostarica.com/)

In my opinion it is site put up to create back links and should be avoided

(especially in the light of the new Penguin and Panda updates coming).

But I don't want to give wrong advice. What are your opinions?

I read somewhere (hard to say where with all the information about SEO and google!) that in the future, Google will put less importance on the URL name for ranking purposes. Any thoughts?

So really if I keep the photos small or limited to reduce load time this would be ok.

Good to know. I thought about doing it on a few pages and labeling it:

1  history before 1960

2. political history etc

3.        all on different URLs but it really disrupts the flow. Like I said it doesn't really have sales value but it is interesting and I want my site to be partly informational not just sales.

Thanks for your advice. It is amazing how many different options there is on this one subject!

I have read varying discussions on this... some say it is good or rather it does not really matter (as long as not stuffed with keywords)  and some say more than 1000+ words  is bad!

I have a travel site and I want to add an historical page about the zone. It is very interesting (very organic, not written for SEO purposes as such). It adds flavor and details to a site that is really all about sales.

Does anyone have an opinion whether this is detrimental to SEO or not?

I need a new hosting company asap. I am based in Costa Rica but need a reliable international service that supports Modx. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank so much for you response. I am looking to change hosting as soon as possible. I am based in Costa Rica and my site is in Modx. Any suggestions of a good hosting company that supports MOdx??

It is the URL of the main page http://www.monteverdetours.com/

Keep getting a 5XX error and my site is obviously losing ranking, Asked the hoster. Nobody seems to know what is wrong. Site is www.monteverdetours.com

I know this is probably an obvious problem and easy to fix but I don't know how to do it!

Any comments will be greatly appreciated.

The site should not look different. We changed some URLs for unranked kewords on minor pages (with 301 links). We added the canonical tag.

We got rid of the https and redirected by 301 to http

and some of the suggestions you said above.

No major stuff and the site is not recovering... so strange. I think we must have done something structurally wrongs. I would happily pay someone to revise my site and make suggestions. I am at my wits end. Need someone familar with MOdx.

Can you see something obviously wrong with the site?

Between 12th and 16th July it dropped from page 8 to 45 and from 20 to 24th from page 45 to 86

Hi Mat

Thank you so much for your detailed answer I really appreciated it. So here is an update....I asked my web master to implement the changes you suggested for www.monteverdetours.com - the site has dropped from page 2 or 3 to page 89 and we thought it would bounce back after a few days and it hasn't. Do you have any idea why this would be so?

Best Regards,

Janet

Thank you so much!

SEO Moz gives me an duplicate page error as my homepage  www.monteverdetours.com is the same as www.monteverdetours.com/index is this actually en error? And is google penalizing me for this?