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Great question...

This question has been questioned by many SEO experts themselves for a long time.  Some SEO firms like beanstalk or other very reputable older firms have footer links still from every client they have ever worked for.  Many of these firms are ranking on the first page for terms like SEO services which is a very competitive term.  Hence, they don't all have relevant links to their site.

I think what you mainly have to worry about is where is your link being placed.  Is it a low quality website?  If you woke up one morning and 1000 people posted your link on 1000 domains with DA's that were 9 and they had no intentions of trying to raise their website ever, you would most likely be in some trouble.

It also all depends on what types of links these will be.  You talked about a badge then anchor text, which will this be? Will you be placing anchor text on a page, or will it be some type of image?  I am a bit confused about this part..

There are many variables that we would have to know to correctly answer this question.  What type of service will you be offering?  Would adult sites be able to post this link on their page?  Casino sites, etc.. Who would want to post this?

To answer your question about home page or inner page, this would be both.  You want your DA to increase for your full site and if you just build to 1 page, it will increase your PA  a lot, but wouldn't help your DA much.

Have a great night, I hope this helped some.

Hello Jesus Duran,

There is a lot of talk right now and you will find a lot of bias answers all over the web.  While many tactics work for many scenarios I highly suggest you use the following tactics.

Read up on these factors.

1. Onpage SEO -

A. Over optimization

B. Keyword Density

C. SEO friendly URL Structure

D. Inner Linking

E. RSS Feeds - how to proper utilize them.  I have boosted a site to a 50 DA off of RSS            feeds alone due to feed burner and many other feeds etc..  Make sure you learn how to set these up correctly.

F. Blog - utilize wordpress, learn everything you can about wordpress for your blog.  Learn the best SEO plugins to use

G. Meta Tags - Make sure you use an SEO friendly title.  Again many have a lot of opinions on this and honestly I use the following   Keyword | Keyword | Keyword  and it has never failed me.  I hold ranks for terms like  payday loans, cash loans, cash advance, cheap SEO, affordable SEO, CRM, CRM software, and 1000's of others.   I am not saying I know it all by any means, but I have had my fair share of experience on what works.    Make sure your description will really pull people in for conversion purposes when they read it.   You can use other forms like - or , etc.. Many will work, but I feel the | is the best, but again that is my personal preference not a fact.

H. Content - Make sure your using proper content techniques for conversion purposes and SEO purposes both.  This is very tricky sometimes, but you will know when you have it, this can take some fine tuning before you get it right.

That is a great start to onpage SEO.  Many will tell you Onpage is everything and it's what you need to rank.  I have a case study after the penguin 2.0 update that just happened here http://dailyseotip.com/what-other-marketing-firms-want-you-to-believe-that-isnt-true/3356/  and I encourage  you to read it.   It will prove that Onpage SEO isn't everything and if your offpage SEO is strong enough it will easily make up for bad OnpageSEO.

2. Offpage SEO

There is a fine line on what to do here, on what works, what will not work, and what will not work every 3 months when Google makes another update lol.  Offpage SEO involves quality backlinks.  A backlink is a link leading from another site to yours.

Research the following.

A.  Anchor text diversity - This is very important.  I suggest that you build to your brand name, domain name - many variations of it, natural terms like click here, visit now, etc..

B. Platform Diversity - Many people make the mistake of using 1 type of platform to submit to and this may work, but doesn't end well.  Google does look for this, I had a case study in 2012 that proved this floating around somewhere.

C. IP diversity - Try to submit to many websites not just the same one over and over.

D. Press Releases, sites like prweb.com is a very reputable company, but is also very expensive.  You can submit to some high authority free press sites, but I wouldn't make a habit of it, these sites generally don't have very good moderators due to so many people submitting all day.  I feel a lot of these in the future will get penalized for allowing low quality content to go through.  When you write a press release, make sure that you are writing it in 3rd person and you have a catchy title, example title " XYZ Company Just Lowered Their Prices By 50%"  and of course there are many different ones you can use.   Never use your keywords in a press release.  A press release can get many backlinks for your website if submitted properly.  The last thing you want is for your anchor text diversity to shoot up to 17% or something high  along those lines.  Make sure you use brand names, urls, etc..

E. Guest Posts -  There is a very fine line on what is ethical and what isn't.  When you write a guest post, don't write an article just to write it. Make sure you are putting something out on the web that is informative.  Ask yourself this, will your article help someone else achieve something other than making them bored lol.  Make sure that it's catchy, try to write about new stuff on the market.   I highly suggest  myblogguest.com   Ann Smarty is a great person and her team of moderators read over your content as much as possible and make sure that you aren't just submitting to submit and others would like this. They also check over grammar which is important for me since mine is terrible lol.  They will help teach you the ins and outs of writing.   Link to popular sites like .gov, edu, MOZ.com and other high authority sites on the web.    Try to place your anchor in the byline and don't get to greedy.  Only use 1 anchor per guest post.

Don't get sucked into software spam tactics like 1000 social bookmarks, spammy blog posts, low quality directory sites.  Here is a good list of quality directory sites  http://www.dirjournal.com/blog/business-directory-deals/  these were rated by SEOMOZ a while back and I have personally utilized some that were relevant for some of my websites.   Only use high quality white hat tactics!

Oh and listen to Rand Fishkin hes a smart person

While there is a lot more to SEO than this, I feel this is a great start for anyone right now after the Penguin 2.0 update.

Also, that guide you mentioned is a great guide, however there is a lot in their that isn't needed for SEO like social media links.  Again read my case study and you will see why I am saying this.   If you have a limited budget or time ,this isn't where I would spend my time or money at.  Sure it's great to have, but I hold very competitive ranks for sites without a single social site linked to it at all. No likes, not tweets, etc..   Social marketing has nothing to do with organic SEO, now I am not saying it won't in the future, but it does't right now and my case study proves it over and over again.

I hope everyone enjoys reading this and it can help some others along the way.

Matthew Boley

There are a few things here that I think you should be aware of.

1 if you leave it like that, you will have duplicate content issues, because both of those pages are the same, the pictures are just in different places.

2. The page http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical   is a pr3 and the other is a pr1.  I would personally keep the pr3 page and 301 redirect the other page to that page so you no longer have those duplicate content issues on your site. That way if you have anyone still visit that page through old links they will still end up on that pr3 page.

3. The url structure, is a bit messy for your site.  I generally advise others to have something a long these lines. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/electrical  this is an SEO friendly url.  I am not saying the ones you have now won't work, it's just a bit messy that's all.  Personally though if your getting good traffic to it, I wouldn't mess with it at all.  Now if you were just starting out I would say change them asap.

In the future when making new pages, I would set it up to make a proper url structure.

Have a great day.

Matthew Boley

I guess this would depend on many instances.  What are you selling?  What is your site about?  Which will benefit you more?  If your selling a cd of yourself and your the author then I would say go with the author.  If your selling a 1 of a kind brand that no one else in the world has, then go with the brand name.

Eventually you may want to just do both, but since your starting, it's not a bad idea to go with brand, because it will be those are considered the most natural backlinks to your site that isn't your url.

Have a great night.

MB

This is an easy one.

Your anchor text diversity is terrible you have built 33% of your anchor texts to makeup artist sydney and 15.04% to Sydnety makeup artist.  Try to lower this to around a 2%.

I would look into a lot of press releases, use natural terms, brand names, your urls.  Don't use your keywords at all in them ever.   Try that and see if you come up in the serps.  When you get a press release done by someone ask what the syndication is.  Generally my press releases have a 10k to 30k syndication i perform.  Also ask the quality of them.  I would use prwebs premium + a few other syndication's out their as well.

Please note: I am not saying this is the only factor that is wrong, but it's the biggest.  It would take a while to look into all of your link types you used, etc..

Have a great day.

What is the site that you analyzed?  Comparing PA versus PR isn't going to help you btw.  Page rank can be manipulated as well very easily.  For example I seen a pr4 for sale on  godaddy auctions today for $5.00.  The site had 0 backlinks.  The site has been down for 1 year.  So how does it still have a pr4?  Pr4 to me isn't a good indication to link to anymore at all.  People buy high pr sites daily and can make them look like they are 10 years old fast.  I count on PA and DA to give me a good indication, because most people aren't cheating DA and PA if there is truly a way to do it.  Also, to cheat it, you would just be cheating for your own confidence and it wouldn't do anything to help you rank better if you cheated yourself to a high one.

So to sum it up, I feel that PA or DA is much more accurate and up to date than PR.  Sure PR still has some weight if your going to buy a site, i think it's burnt into our brains that we need a good one, but it's not everything.

Have a great night.

Generally our biggest mistake is not understanding our clients correctly.  Some will approach us and tell us that they need to rank terms to get traffic to their site which is normal.  Some tell us just to get traffic to their site.  We have found that we have to settle on keywords no matter what, because even if we get thousands of real visitors to a site, it really matters what keywords we are using to a client regardless if they are still relevant.  I have had clients get mad that we weren't ranking them for terms like "toys" for example for $325 a month.

We learn on a daily basis on how to better serve our customers, but something new always comes up.

Have a nice day.

Hello Laura,

Page headings and onpage optimization isn't going to be the key on specifically ranking up keywords.  Your keywords may not move at all due to this.

I highly suggest you read many more threads here on some tactics on how to rank up keywords.  There are many different ways to rank keywords, and many theories on how to rank them.  I highly suggest that you read Rands posts and I personally like this thread here  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013 by  Dr. Pete.  He's also very smart and knows what hes talking about.

As for the time it takes for Google to analyze your site is not known really.  It can be right away, or it can be in two weeks. It all depends on how popular your website is and what reason Google has to keep going to your website.  Is your website new? Is it already indexed by Google?  If not you could submit your site to search engines, or ping it using a ping services.  It's also a good idea to submit your site to social sites so it gets indexed quicker.

Have a great night and a happy holidays.

MB

I would also think in this manner as well.  You need diversity of platforms and Ips.  So if anything it's good for that.  They are also natural looking links to your site since they get syndicated.

I would however make sure that that you aren't making your press releases to over promotional, they link to a source other than your main site and you don't use to many anchor texts.

I personally like to link to my website and then a source like wiki, gov site, a health site for facts, or anything in this nature to help show where you found your facts at.

Have a great day.

Matthew Boley

Are you referring to duplicate meta titles or actually pages that are the same>

if it is meta then I would personally setup dynamic meta tags as a quick fix.  I would then make it pull from the titles of each post , this way you will have unique meta tags and cut down on some errors quickly.  You can obviously still define the pages you want to define like your home page with manual tags instead of dynamic.

Again that is a quick fix instead of going over 1000's of pages all at once.  This is better than hiding the whole site.

Have a great night.

Matthew Boley

I think you are referring to the fact that many frown upon many financial institutions and you want to build a great name for yourself if someone researches your company correct?

Moz has many great tools to get you started for this.

I work for very large financial instutions like banks, credit unions, tax refunds, cpas, CA's, payday loans, etc.   I hold rankings like payday loans, cash loans, and 426 other financial terms all that get 150 + exact hits per month.  So I am decent in this area.  So I can tell you a little about this field.

1. This is very competitive.  Don't think for a second that the company above you wont write 100 articles bad about your company.  Don't think that for a second they wont try negative SEO.  I had a company spending $10 a day on 100 word articles and submitting it to blog networks like linkvana, etc., just to try to bring them down in the SERPS.

2. You are going to want an ethical everyday site to use that you only use the safest tactics on possible. Never use a questionable tactic on this site to rank it up ever.  Use very clean tactics like prweb, high quality guest posts 1 anchor per post and make sure your link is natural.  Engage in social media marketing a lot to try to build up your brand name.  A free $25 gift card of some type goes a long way on Facebook if you offer it for a competition or some goal you want to meet.

3. You are going to want several rinse and repeat sites where you rank them up quickly to grab top spots and let Google penalize them in 3 months or so.  The reason you want this, is because 90% of the top terms for financial is going to have others do this.  I ran into companies using hacks where they would inject footer links into popular sites after they hacked them.  They would make private networks and buy every domain possible with DA 50+ and even if it was irrelevant they would still place their link on it.    The point is, you will have to do these if you want to rank for competitive terms in your field regardless of what anyone says.

Other than Moz I can't recommend much other than hootsuite, maybe some email marketing, mobile marketing, etc..  Other than this, Prweb's financial press release is great.    It's going to take a lot of hard work and dedication in the financial niche so be patient and get ready for a ride you will never forget.  It took me a long time to get the hang of it, but when you do, you will understand what I am referring to above.

Have a great night.

Go to majestic SEO, type your url in.  If your keywords you got penalized for are over 10% diversity you are being penalized generally, however there are a few exceptions, but not many.  I analyzed 440 sites and found that the highest was 2.47 for a site that didn't have keywords in the url.

Also, I suggest you read this http://dailyseotip.com/what-other-marketing-firms-want-you-to-believe-that-isnt-true/3356/  I see that you are really focused on Onpage SEO.  I think this will help you understand more.

The next thing you may want to do is start contacting admins and deleting low quality links if you have them.  Use OSE and figure out low quality links.  There are only a handful of directories I recommend out their.  I have a message from Google telling one of my clients to get rid of their directory links, it was and example link coming from a directory site to be exact.  Never use a keyword at a directory site, always use Brand name or your URL.

Make sure your Disavow is your last resort and I highly suggest you get someone to do it that has experience in it.  Many have messed this up and really hurt their website.

Have a great day.

If your going to pay for links, I would just go to godaddy aucitons, find a site with a nice DA and PR and w/e other stats your looking for, put it up and place yourself a link on it.  This is 100% cheaper, not only do you own it, but your also going to be able to keep it forever.

I find paid links a waste of money honestly unless your able to get on the front page of a real pr7 or higher. Or something very rare that you couldn't buy for cheap.

I see domains that are pr3 with 50 + DA all day long on godaddy auctions for $20 total after checkout price.  I know, because I have bought many myself for projects.

You can find free templates or cheap templates as well all over online. Fiverr has people that will give you 150 + templates for websites that are actually nice for $5.00.  You could pay someone on Fiverr $5.00 to setup the site for you and another $5.00 to have someone write the content for you.  So you may have a total of $50 by the time your done.  If you do it yourself, it's cheaper obviously.

Again this is only if your going to go this route, I wouldn't do this as a ethical tactic though, because it's not.

Have a nice day.

MB

You can also search the net for a tool called detox, it is a start, but after the report I highly suggest you use SEOMOZ to make sure that the tool worked correctly.   The tool helps people that need to pin point bad links out of thousands quickly.

Have a great night.

Your welcome.  If that was your issue and you have a lot of pages, I am sure this will help a lot.

Have a great day and happy holidays.

Hello,

I will do my best to help you, but there are many reasons why you may not be rankings.

After doing a research I started to find links like this to your site  http://www.casinoreviewpages.com/?category=Shopping_10

I can tell you that this isn't going to help do anything but hurt your site.  I am not a trophy expert, but I know that trophies aren't relevant to casino reviews.  I found many questionable links like this.

Not to mention the fact that you lost thousands of backlinks to your site in the past year.

I feel that your building to many backlinks per month to your site, and I don't feel the quality of your backlinks are good enough.

I highly recommend the following.  I feel you should take a month or 2 and remove all bad links to your site.  Run a detox report as a start.  A detox will get some, but not all.  Make sure you review all links from a detox report too, some are still good.  I would then start to build high quality backlinks to your site.

It looks like your using some kind of software for submissions purposes too.  I also seen very low quality writing to your site.

I recommend hiring good writers, find someone that is willing to manually submit, make sure that what is submitted is to relevant sites.  I would also make sure that all sites submitted to are high quality and not just a submission to submit.

Did a SEO company do this for you? I know that we have never done anything like this before and am sure that what they did isn't very ethical or white hat, because none of the tactics used are in our playbook here.  I would start only submitting to quality sites.

Have a great night and I hope this helps.

Matthew Boley

Hello Tamra,

No I don't actually.  However since the disavow is just a devalued link in their algorithm, I am not sure what the wait is for?  When Google manually analyzes your disavow list that your suppose to tell them about in your reconsideration letter, it's going to let them know that you have a list that needs devalued.

It's going to take some time for them to answer, it's going to take a while for your site to refresh they call it due to the disavow tool.  We do about 5 - 10 sites per day right now for others and found that the normal time for a refresh of data is about 3 weeks. However it all depends on the site and the amount of backlinks it has pointing to it and that your disavowing.

When your resubmitting your reconsideration letter I would personally use the lost data from majestic seo telling you how many backlinks you lost recently.  You can actually use this data to show Google how many backlinks you were able to take off of your site.  Maybe you contacted admins, maybe you didn't, etc, etc... However I have learned that it helps a lot.

So far we are 10 out of 10 in the past 10 message from Google allowing the site to get back into Google.

Get personal with Google when your writing your reconsideration letter, don't lie of course, but tell them how much your site means to you, and it's your chance at helping you get some extra income, and your really looking forward to this site so it can change your life in some way. Maybe your using it to help others?  Maybe your giving a certain amount to donations that you earn?  All of these factors if you do them can help them determine. They like personal messages I have found.

If you just write a 100 words telling them that you did what they asked and nothing else, your chances aren't as good as getting personal with them, maybe even joking, tell them you are in SEOMOZ asking others, and your very concerned about this.

Have a great night and sorry I couldn't link you to any hard concrete evidence.  I have found that there aren't to many other companies out their submitting more per day than we are, so I never looked for any evidence on the net for a time delay in submitting one.

MB

Right now, I can tell you that I have a message proving that directories will indeed get you penalized.  I had a pr4 51 authority link on a directory site that was very popular.  Google doesn't generally give you an hints on links, but they did and I have proof.  They told me to take specific directory links down that we built to very relevant sections.  Not only that, but even told me that my main url of my site I used as the keywords was still spam.

So, Google I feel is hand picking the directory sites like DMOZ, etc, etc.  I also don't feel directory sites are that high of a quality in a link anyways.  What can you really say in 30 or so words about your site.

I am not saying to stay away from them all, I am just saying be very careful, because I thought they were ok to use if you picked good ones too, but it's not.

Have a great night.

MB

Citations need to be for address specific, because they should all match up.  So just area specific no, because if it was possible it would allow others to rank up for local terms in any city they would like around the world.  So I highly suggest you get an address in some way.  Maybe a friends address, a home address of your own, or something in that area you could possibly use as an address.  It has to be a location that has never been used with Google local before though.

How did you signup with Google local or place page with no address?

Have a nice day.

MB

Yes actually,

When you submit your reconsideration request make sure you get everything above I said in her message together such as your lost links overtime.  You can use those lost links as some of your advantage and make it look like you took time to remove links to your site which they like the efforts.

No one really knows how many links need to come down, but many studies show 16% of your links.  Now I have had some sites where it's 80% and some that I didn't have to remove any at all which is very odd, but yes your reading that right 0 links removed and I got back into Google for a clients site.

Don't get discouraged though if the first time you respond they turn you down.  It's pretty normal for them to turn you down the first time and then after you resubmit a 2nd time I feel that a real person views it instead of a bot/automation process which is usually the 1st time.

Have a nice day.

MB

Hello Carla Dawson,

You have a few issues, 1st you have a 26% anchor text ratio for that keyword which is very high.  2nd you lost 234 backlinks since Nov 19th.  I would find out why your losing backlinks that quick.

I would do the following

1. analyze your competitors densities and find out what is working for them, then use it.

2. Figure out if the quality of links your building are high enough quality, because it doesn't look like they are all sticking.  However never count on all of them sticking, but 234 in a little over a month is a lot and I would question it.

3. Start working on diversifying your backlinking structure with Ip, region, Anchor, and platform diversity.

Have a great day.

Matthew Boley

I would use a canonical link as well on every page, just to add to what you guys are talking about.

Have a great day.