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Hi Bob, I think that badges are really helpful to build a brand and get renowned in your niche, as more alumni use them the more exposure you'll achieve, however I discourage the usage of this kind of backlinks in your seo linkbuilding strategy since they're not editorially made, and since the link is embedded, it doesn't reflect an user real willing to link to a website. In this video from Matt cutts you can see what I am speaking about. IMO it's still fine to use this kind of links but only if you do the following:

1. put a nofollow in it
2. don't use rich anchor texts but only your brand name

In this way you'll be sure that no penalty may affect you in the future. Just a general guideline always try to achieve editorially made links. Hope this helps!

Normally the only thing which will prevent a page from ranking is noindex tag. If you don't want to have it indexed just noindex it, if that page has been laready indexed, put the noindex tag and delete from index using GWT option.

Concerning the canonical tag thing, it will consolidate the seo value in one page but it won't prevent those page to appear in rankings, however you may have two cases:

1. the two or more pages are identical. In that case google may accept the canonicalization and show always the original page.
2. the two or more pages are slightly different, it's the case of paginated pages which are canonicalized using rel next/prev. In that sense the whole value will be consolidated in page 1 but then the page which will be shown in the rankings will be the one which responds to that query, for example if someone is looking for blue glass, google will return the page which shows blue glass listing if that's different from the first one.

Hope this may help you!

Hi Rose, as far as I can remember Matt Cutts always says: "build your website for your users not for the search engines". In that sense you should have a look at your new content as an user of your site and imagine if he would benefit from it or not. If you think that the content is useful, than it's definitely better to publish it.

So SEO doesn't decides if this article is valuable or not, but structures it in the way you would benefit the best. I think that it would be useful to have it on one unique URL. Any link you may achieve will point to the same page, and with a wise usage of internal anchors you'll obtain a quite interesting user navigation. What it may create you problems is the page loadtime, 1000+ words is not detrimental to SEO but it could be if the page load time goes up a lot. So use wisely your images and optimize them in order to get a faster response.

Always point to add more flavour to the site, because you want users to return not to only buy something and leave.

Yes that happened to me a couple of years ago too.

If you're redirecting a lot of different content to the exact same generic page (like a section/category homepage) google will consider that the page is like a container, not the location where that exact content was moved. A clear signal for them would be that they can't find any portion of the old content.

Here you can read some guidance from google regarding returning 404s. It seems that mask 404 witha 301 is not the way to go anymore, just limit that to pages with backlinks pointing there, because if not you can just return 404 and delete those pages from google index (you don't want google to waste your crawl budget on those pages).

Hope this helps!

My two cents here are to not overoptimize urls just for ranking purposes, It's better to have kws in titles and h1-2 to help you rankings I'll choose the url structure based on how the choiche which will give you the highest control on them just for easy analytics study and future re-strucutration of the site. Also having a keyword may be good to have them bolded in serps so whichever choice you made may be good although I'll rely more on the shortest option which can give you both control and keywords in it.

every new page you post is additional keywords you're targeting. If you're creating low value content with bad user experience the additional bounces will only hurt your site as a whole but if you encourage creating only high value pages, useful for users you can improve your site. With the contente you manage your site being fresh and updated if you don't create new pages your site will be obsolete and so not so useful for users. It really depends on the market but users always changes their way to search for something an dyou need to be sure to let them find you in different ways. Wikipedia became great because of huge high value content being created on a daily basis, if SeoMoz achieved its position is due to the great care they use when they write new posts on their blog/site.

The general rule is it's worth to add content which is useful, is bad to create unuseful content which will make users enter your site and leave it as soon as they see shallow content.

Hey Jeroen,

If I were you I would play with canonicals in order to not confuse google.

For example: this url http://www.allesvoorbbq.nl/boretti-da-vinci-nero.html is for the black version, but then if you navigate the page and you go to http://www.allesvoorbbq.nl/boretti-da-vinci-nero.html#608=1373&swatch_id=750 you should point to the correct URL which is http://www.allesvoorbbq.nl/boretti-da-vinci-colora.html.

In the last url you also have a bad canonical as even if here http://www.allesvoorbbq.nl/boretti-da-vinci-nero.html#608=1373&swatch_id=750 you're showing the colora model you're canonicalizing to the nero model. You should fix that.

About duplication this is your last problem as google doesn't index different portions of the same page and using the # you're telling google that those are internal anchors and not different pages.

I hope this makes sense.

E.

Hi Bob, normally I would advice to remove clearly paid links or limit them to the homepage but your case seems quite different.

You said that those links are not only helping this site for their SEO purposes but that those links are driving him sales. In that case I imagine that those links are receiving clicks so they're actually highly related. I think that google will (or maybe it's actually) look at CTR of your backlinks. If they're trafficked they're high value also for the users so I will maintain them. However if you've generated them quicker than the normal you may consider use them as nofollowed links driving traffic to their site and ask those sites to write a post speaking about your company's services. In that sense you may push in a branded or url based link and still have the traffic from those links. I f you are able to get value and traffic from those links I woul dnot remove them, and for sure I won't ever disavow anything if you haven't received any warning from google.

Maybe you may consider to point them in a spreadsheet so if you receive a warning you'll always be able to disavow them and ask for a reconsideration.

Hi Moby, first of all the difference between all the tags you mention:

• canonical: is a meta tag which indicates which page containing the same content is the original one, It may be used from one page to another to indicate which one is the main one or a as a self canonical indicating the same page where it is located, because you can avoid duplciates due to sessions id or other kind of tags (trackings and the like)
• noindex: is a meta tag which indicates to bots to not include that page to their index. It's used to avoid low quality pages to being shown in serps
• nofollow: is both a meta, used to avoid search engines to crawl all the links in one page, or is used attached to a link to indicate bots to not pass value to that link.

So if you got pages which are identical you want to use the canonical in both the original page (as a self canonical) and in the other oines pointing to the original one. If they're are almost identical. If they're not you may want to:

• noindex those duplicates
• add quality content to the other regions pages so google finds that they're not identical at all.

Maybe your regions pages are seen as identical due to:

• low content, an image and slight changes to the title tag is not enough to mark a page as different, try to add good content, or mash content from other pages.
• is the content accessible when not logged in? If not google is seeing identical pages because its bots cannot crawl the content (bots cannot login)

About the login page you may noindex it, but I don't see any hurry to  make changes to that page.

Hope that helps!

They should not pass any ranking value, definitely not any anchor text value at all but it may depend. IMO if a link is passing human traffic to your site, this link may be related to your website and give to google some useful information.

remember that google actually sees that link the nofollow just tells him to not pass juice. If your choice is to not have any link at all got the nofolowed one, but always be selective on the sites pointing to you. You don't want any bad neighbour not even nofollowed

Hi Eric, in my experience I've always found 4** better than 301 to solve this kind of issues.

Many people uses this response too much just because they want to show google that their site don't have any 404.

Just think about it a little, a 301 is a permanent redirect, a content which has just moved from one place to another. If you got a content you want to get rid of, do you want to give google the message "hey that low quality content is not where you found it but  now it's here", no. You wan't to give google the message that the low quality content has been improved or removed. And a 404 is the right message to give him if you deleted that content.

It's prefectly normal to have 404s in a website, many 404 won't hurt your rankings, only if those pages were ranking already so users will receive a 404 instead and if some external sites were linking there in that case you may consider a 301.

While I think that google has a sort of a black list (and a white list too) I don't think that it has a memory of bad sites he encounters, if you fix your issues you'll start to rank again.

The issue you may have is not that you're site may be tainted but that maybe you still have some issues here and there which you didn't fix. As it seems Googlers said that Panda is now part of the algo so if you fix your issues you won't need any upgrade to start re ranking.

Hope this may have helped!! G luck!

Hi Bob, I can't see why this could not be white hat, the main issue I see is not on the bots side but on your own.

Having many sites in the same niche may be difficult to manage because you want to differentiate them enough to get the most of them, also it's hard and time/money consuming to build strong brands in a particular niche, branding nowadays is an seo factor too (not directly but it affects).

You're saying you're overlapping keywords, you can do that but consider that you'll have hard time to choose sites where build links for one and not to another, you then need three unique ips, and if you'll achieve results your client will complain due to one site cannibalizing the other, so actually the growth of one would be the loss of another.

Be wise, and try to understand the real needs of your clients and why he wants to build 3 similar sites at once in the same niche.

Hi Ve. A 404 is generated when someone reach a page which doesn't exist, so to have someone reaching such a page you need to give them a path to it. There may be two different paths:

• internal. You can remove this internal path changing all the links pointing to the old url to the new one.
• external. This may be trickier. There may be:

1. external sites pointing with links to the old page. In this case you need to think if it's really worth to change the url. If it is, get in touch with those websites and ask them to change the link.
2. Google having indexed that page and make it rank. That cannot be changed by YOU.

So make all the internal and external possible fixes

change your sitemap and submit that to google webmaster tools

and then you'll need to modify your htaccess (if your server is driven by apache, which 90% normally do) and create a rule which redirects from the old page to the new one. In that way even if the external site doesn't change the old link the user won't receive a 404 but will be redirected to the new page, and google will drop the old url (in a week or so it depends on the crawling rate) and then index instead the new one.

For the htaccess rule if you're not experienced with that kind of file leave that to your it guys, because a wrong comma there, may brake the whole site.

Hope this is clear

Well Google can index the iframe but not as Rogerio would like to.

Google can see the src link pointing to the infographic page sowhen following that google will index the content contained in the iframe but don't count with such kind of links as being valuable for you.

What I don't understand is that you want to use the iframe instead of the image because you got links in it. Why not brake the image and build it as a table and link each portion of it to the url you want? Use flash and embed the links? Or map the image to indicate zones where the links should be? I think there are more frendlier ways to put links without recurring to the iframe to have links in your infographic.

Or simply you can put a tinier version of that infographic and if someone wants to see full image they need to reach your site where they'll find all the links. Hope this may help!

Hi Eric, I'll try to answer your further question even if I'm not an oracle like Pete

First of all thanks Pete to underline that you need to give google just one response since you can't give them both 301 and 404, I was assuming that and I didn't focus on that part of Eric's answer.

Second. Eric, If your purpose is to give google the ability of recrawl the old content to let them see it has disappeared you want to give them a 404 or a 410 which are respectively not found and permanently not found. Before it was a difference but now they've almost the same value under google's eyes (further reading). In that way google can access your page and see that those contents are now gone.

In the case of 403 the access is denied to anyone both google and humans, so in that case google won't be able to access and recrawl it. If your theory is based (and I think you're in the good way) upon the thing that google needs to recrawl your content and see it ahs really gone, 403 is not the response you should give it.

The normal rule to achieve this is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newabc.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For the blog issue you may consider adding an htaccess file in the blog folder and put

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc.com
RewriteRule ^blog(.*) http://www.newabc.com/newblog$1 [R=301,L]

or maybe you can achieve that by adding the line:

RewriteRule ^blog(.*) http://www.newabc.com/newblog$1 [R=301,L]

However in this second case you'll have a double redirect: the first which redirect blog to new blog and then the non www to www.

Boom, That's an huge question Lee. And the answer is also huge. I will try to summarize as much as I can. Some points which are common to all solutions are:

• You can easily achieve the localization by setting the folders/subdomains/domains in search console and the language focus via hreflang.

• Normally you shouldn't be facing duplication issues if you deliver the same content for US and EN because duplication happens only within the same market. So having two identical pages focusing on two markets (us and EN) shouldn't be an issue for google.

Starting from here, there is NO best solution, but there is a better solution depending on your dev resources and your Goal. For tackling internationalization you have 3 options:

• Folders. (domain.com/en - domain.com/es) this is the easiest solution technically speaking as you can easily recreate what you have in different folders and also take advantage of the strenght of your domain by passing the juice from the main domain to its subfolders. The "con" I see with this approach is scalability. This is probably the best solution for smaller websites, with less dev support but which won't be growing too much. You don't have too much room for customization and also you're not getting the benefit of a loclaized TLD and domain name which could be a deterrent in some cases.

• subdomains. (en.domain.com - es.domain.com), while still not getting the value of full localization, you have some differentiation you could apply as the subdomains could be assigned to different server/hosting, and you can also build two different sites while using the same domain. The technical challenge is a bit higher but you won't be getting as much value as you are getting from your main domain as if you were using folders. Folders vs subdomains is the eternal debate but I think that there is a clear perspective in the seo community that folders preserve more value of the original domain rather then subdomain, which are seen essentially as different sites by google. BTW you can find a nice whiteboard from Rand about the value of subfolders vs subdomains here

• dedicated TLDs/domains. This is the most dev and SEO heavy solution as you're creating something from scratch, which initially has 100% cost and 0 value. This is the solution that pays the best in the long tho as it is the one that leaves room for more scalability. The main advantage I see here is on the linkbuilding side. all the links will be highly relevant to the local site, as you will have all US links to your US site and all UK links to your UK site. Here another point from rand about the three solutions

So at the end, you decide, but if I were you I would try to take the most advantage of what you have today using the folders solution. In this way you can enter a market with some value that would help you ranking higher as if you were starting from scratch, and if you see room for improvement you can always get serious about it and create a new domain where you can 301 all your existing content. this is a delicate process, but in this way you'll be safe at the beginning when things are harder, and once you decide to invest more you can swap to the domain approach with a more dedicated service AKA linkbuilding heavily on the new domain.

I can keep speaking about this for hours but I will stop here as you may want to ask more questions and get a better view on what are your options and doubts about each approach. I can link to a ton of resources, but I would say that your best readings are from Gianluca Fiorelli, who is not only a Moz associate but also an expert in international SEO.

I hope this helps.

e.

Hi Monster web, sometimes google may use your DMOZ or Yahoo directory title (normally people uses their company name), it's quite rare but it could happen. Try to add this line to your source code:

(no slash if you're not xhtml page)

In that way you'll prevent all robots to take into account your yahoo or dmoz title for your listings.

I've always been of the opinion that is preferrable to write more focused articles which may deliver less traffic but extra sales than broad article which only gets you traffic with high bounces just because after reading the article the users don't find anything related to continue on your site. You'll need to write always content which will attract your customer they may buy today or in a month buth you need to attract them.

If you're on shoes market maybe you may find interesting writing an article about Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and city who loves have many shoes and write a fun article about how to build your shoe inventory with less than 1k dollars. Or maybe something about link your shoes to your personality or your daily mood.

I think that when it comes to write new content you don't have to focus only on what is actually been searched but you should try also to create new trends of search. Users are bombed with lots of similar contents about top keywords, so you may consider write really different and original and cool articles on those ones or if you don't have ideas is better to write a cool different article and spread it thrgough fashion blogs, this guys loves about speaking about new ideas and trends so try to anticipate them or give them the original thing they can poston their site.

Always focus on best content, then your traffic will arrive both on keywords and your branded/direct traffic.

hi Cyber, EGOL,

I think that you've to be cautious on what you publish. Your focus should be always the final user. If you're focusing on the users you can't do it wrong, if after making the article you see that is not useful (because it is mainly done to attract google bot) avoid it because it won't be adding value to your site.

The division EGOL is proposing makes sense:

• articles to give freshness to your site which are industry related updates. You said that your niche is quite interesting so your users may find interesting to have all the industry news centralized in one site which is reporting them shortly and quick (you can also use that feed to update your social profiles)
• deep diving articles. Guides and helpful content with videos and images to really help your users and which are link/share worthly. One note: beware of how tos and the like. That is  demand media (ehow.com) core business and it was something which google was supposedly going after with the Panda update. Be sure to write good and deep articles without trying to scale it with easy articles written in a bunch by freelancers.

Always have a look at your final result and ask the question "is this adding some value to the user reading is?" if you find that you're losing your time while reading it the user will feel the same

I agree with EGOL. I think that a new design should improve User experience on the site and all related metrics. In this case we're speaking about the same list EGOL says, from bounce rate to conversion rate and from time on site to internal navigation. This should be tested using an A/B platform or whatever ensures you're not changing from one day to another without knowing the effect of the new design. This requires good tools and time (optimizely may be one).

A new design may also improve SEO rankings and in my opinion this means, all changes made in development of the site:

• SPEED: improving CSS and javascripts, using of sprites and the things which may help you speeding up your site (google loves that!)
• URL REDESIGN: if URLs are completely messed up it could be good to review them and write more user friendly URLs. BEWARE! this may cause your rankings to dance a bit, due to 301s and changes effects. 301s can be set up in a wrong way and even if set up correctly may lose some value of the old page, so if you really NEED to update your URLs structure be sure of the benefits of that. If you're not sure DON'T CHANGE THEM.
• EXPERIENCE: It's a really great opportunity to make the most of mobile increasing traffic and build a responsive UI, compelling with experiences throughout all the devices.

All of the above can be an additional value but consider design as an effect mainly focused on improving user experience.on the site rather than googlebot. Try to improve user experience metrics and to not HURT SEO this by maintaining the code as it is, improving it but not changing it, without changes on site contet, without changingn meta data and URL (if you don't have a clear plan on how to take advantage of that change), hope this helps!

Hi Ben, I think you got really good answers especially the Marie strategy is really a gold piece. However I'm adding my two cents here.

If you want to get rid of bad links you'll need to get more backlinks data not only relying on GWT, the same googlers said that you'll need to rely on more tools because doesn't show the whole data. Try the historical index from majestic SEO tool or the raw export of ahrefs or even here in seo moz you got good tools for that (although I recommend for this majestic historical which is the widest one, sorry mozzers ).

Then get those backlinks through a tool which may help you finding the toxic links which are poisoning your site (dtox tool is really popular this time) and disavow all the toxic and the more suspicious ones.

Be sure to disavow by domain not url because you may be missing other urls not indexed in the same domain which may get you in troubles in the future.

Add many attachments demonstrating your efforts to remove the links because google overstated that you should try to do everything to try remove the link before asking for a disavow

(here) -->"You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"

Hi RefCandy first of all canonical tag is a recommendation to spiders not a rule, so google will probably crawl your page.

Moreover the canonical tag prevents duplication issues not crawling itself there are many sites which uses self referring canonicals so there's no issue on your crawling rate at the beginning. However when google discovers the duplication of that page with the other you've set up it'll end crawling that page with less frequency, so it will give less value to some links in there.

The only rule which prevent links crawl is the nofollow tag in the page .

I think that IP filters are the only way to go. If you want to be sure that those visits are bots you should look into your logfiles and see if they come from the same ip and in which time range (if they're all in a couple of minutes for example). If you don't want to add that much filters you can put a forbidden rule in your htaccess so whenever that ip tries to visit your website you'll be returning a 403 in that way the visit won't be tracked. Beware of doing this kind of things because if there are users in the middle of that ip range you'll be affecting their experience too.

I think that fetch as google returns the performance it already has on the page last time googlebot went there, so if you have applied changes lately it could take a day or two to google bot to recrawl the page and get the changes you've done. When did you do the change? can you let us know if after a couple of days the issue was solved?

Normally if Google didn't send any warning of unnaatural linking to your site you're not supposed to send a disavowing request since this just raise the attention goole is paying to your site, however I unserstand you want to prevent any issue by acting before any warning message.

About the disavow request, if that've been received google should have take that into consideration.

You said that that page was an offending page so you want to 404 it. I think that if you're getting rid of that page returning a 404 you're preventing that (bad) value to be added to your domain. I think that this is a correct approach. Just be sure that those 879 links are all bad because you don't want to lose all that value. If there are good links pointing there just ask those webmasters to point to your homepage instead. Just be sure that if there was some good content inthat page it has moved to your home before asking a link to be changed.

first of all don't panic, wait for google to notify you.

Meanwhile you may want to see where are you losing that organic traffic. If the loss is at page level you may want to check if the pages which are losing traffic (and so rankings) are also heavy linked. If that so you may want to disavow those links and try to recover your rankings.

If the site was hit as a whole you should have received a notification by google or will receive that shortly. In that case just go on with a full disavow and start the reconsideration request telling them in details what you did, what you're doing to recover in details, and apologize for all your bad guy actions taken

Technical onsite is pretty important for a successful SEO but you still have several opportunities out there:

• onsite content creation: you can create new content to implement on the site and target your core keywords with LSI data

• title and meta optimization: I don't consider this technical but it's pretty key to get better rank and most importantly better CTR

• sitemaps: create sitemaps to better diagnose the site. I imagine the dev team may have other priorities but bugs should be handled anyway, especially important ones

• find 404 with traffic/links and redirect them

• lnikbuilding. This one is always tricky depending on resources.

• If you can create new pages do some broken linkbuilding and some ego baits (mention other in order to get them to link back to that content)

• influencers marketing in social media. Build up your community and get ready to share stuff, they will return the favor when you need it

• guest posting. There are a lot of sites that accept free guest posts, depending on the niche.

• cocitation. Get links where your competitors did (exception made for PR stuff)

• skyscraper technique. Find the best content in your niche and make it better, then get the links that content had.

as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.

An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.

yes, there are many options, always depending on how well are you able to maintain the page load time efficient. I think that having everything in one page without making it boring or overwhelming for the user is the best choice.

About images be sure that you're uploading he images in the size you're using without scaling them with css, because a 10001000 image even if shown as 100100 always weights as a 10001000, so rescale it and upload it as 100100.

Hi Howard, I think the best thing is to prioritize and contact all the sites in bulk to have those comments removed. If they don't answer disavow those urls, Then write arecon request to google to ask them to remove any penalty they put upon you because you were victim of some kind of negative seo attack. After having your rankings fixed try to understand from where that attack may be arrived although I don't think you'll find anything since the attack wasn't on your site

Completely agree with Tom, save your findings in an excel file, which may help you in the near future. Just because if those lnks may be hurting you you'll receive an unnatural link warning or a descrease in traffic. The disavow tool is helpful on removing links in a great scale, not for removing jsut a couple of links each week. Is good to prevent but as Tom said, better to not raise google eyes on your site, a manual review can only spot bad things; I've never seen a manual promotion after a review

• Hey Gianluca, thanks for responding to my answer.

  I agree that LSI is not a pure metric, and in the past when I used TF-IDF content, it didn't prove to work all the times in all markets. Despite that I think that both LSI and TF-IDF are recognized method to gather information about related keywords and provide to content writers additional insights.

  It's not the same when you request an article to a content writer about "Blue ribbons" than providing them information about related keywords, keywords suggested by Google and Questions related using askthepublic. The connection of the three is what I call LSI data, not 100% what google intends with pure LSI (based on the huge amount of data they have) but pretty accurate IMO.

Hi Fablau, I'm still seeing you first with both your keywords, but in the google image results. It shows the first page of the sonata while the link to your html seems down to the 9th and 13th page.

It's strange to see such old and good pages (it seems they got high authority) going so down in the serps. A couple of things:

• have you done something since the change? Like affiliate promotion or heavy linkbuilding? I'm seeing 11 domains linking to the beethoven page but ~5k links. Many of them are from origenmusic.com it seems like they' linking a lot to that page. An affiliate? Maybe you can explain more but seeing so many links from few domains, seems the kind of things google doesn't like so much these days. In november I remember a couple of panda updates with one of them being quite aggressive.
• I'm seeing you having many tabs which are also different urls. Why not consolidate all those pages into the same one maybe using ajax to load the content so all the value remains in one page?
• Include your images in your pages, it seems that google like it since you're still ranking first with that, maybe you can use that value including that image into your main pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi, actually you won't have any direct seo benefits by linking your G+ page to your website.

What you'll achieve may be +1 made on your site and your g+page will sum togheter and that your g+ page should appear for your brand name searches.

More than that there's no evidence you'll receive any kind of boost YET. However to have such features you'll need a g+ page instead of a profile and follow the instructions here

Hope that helped!

Hi CB. I think that keyword are the most important part, they're the base of everything you'll be doing then. So:

1. keyword research: make a huge bucket of keywords looking at adwords keyword tool or whatever tool you have and combine that with your competitors keywords, you can make it by putting the url in the Google keyword tool or better using a service like semrush. Build a huge list of keywords just like if you're building a ppc campaign. Then refine them and prioritize by difficult/volume you want the best relation between efforts traffic achieved.
2. then based on your keywords start creating your contents. at least not copied content in the beginning
3. base d on your keyword look for competitors and build the whole list. Try to imitate what they did good, jsut like social followers, sites bcaklinking to them and try to build a list of highly relevant sites potentially interested in your services. When yuor site will be good enough (the enoguh is defined by how good your competitors sites are)start contacting them after having built a relationship in social media, an d create assets for future backlinks.

Hope this helps!

I'm unsure if I get your request. are you asking for which are the advantages of setting your site to a given region in Search Console or to apply GEO targeting like HREFlang?

It's a tricky situation, it seems like you were making many changes to your site, it's always risky to put links with keyword rich anchors, and when they're too many and built in a short time period that's definitely dangerous.

First of all get rid of everything you made in a "dangerous way" like your many internal links, normally google has itsrict  parameters to check out a page and when you're above a certain threshold you get hit. However I think that to recover the threshold is even lower, it seems like, google is more strict with you since you've tried to game their algo.

Now these are just my ideas and nothing confirmed but I think that you should try to clean up all the new links first, then have a look at your pages, that way to create a lot of pages in such short time, seems that they're programmed pages without any valuable content so they may be toxic for your recovery. Try to make a step back, and restart creating them on a slower pace and maybe hope google to reconsider your position. However if you don't have any manual penalty you'll have to wait until you get recovered. Reconsideration requests won't help you at all.

Hi Spry, as you already mentioned, not all links has the same weight, there are navigationla links like in the footer, in the menu; also google may give some different weight among them, moreover some value may be reduced, and also there are some other factors that google uses to weight each link in a page that we don't know, but we may assume they have.

So given that we can calculate an aproximate value of juice passed from a link to another I won't rely so much in PR, the time you're spending in this caluclations may be given to other tasks. In general you may assume that the best pages to obtain links are pages which are nearest to the homepage of a site and which has the least number of outgoing (both internal and external) links.

Don't rely so much on PR, I've seen so many low page rank pages ranking well and high pr pages with no rankings that I think that you need to consider other parameters which are more important when it comes to linkbuilding: age of the domain, authority, topic related, etc etc.

If your calculations are made for onsite optimization just try to have your main pages higher in your site structure and linked directly from the homepage or from m ain categories.

I don't know who told you to remove pipes from titles since it has been a while seos normally uses them in titles, since they helps to separate sentences better than a full stop or comma.

Aboutthe order, you want your main keywords at the beginning of the title. I'll add the name of your site just if the two are true:

1. your title is still less than 70 characters long. If you add the name of your company and it's not showing, your just diluting the density of your title without achieving your goal (branding)
2. your company is renown. Having the name of the company helps to enhance ctr if the company is renown, but if you're not so famous, I'll choose to have more dense and focused titles without diluting their value with not useful company names

Hope that helps!

That's true gold Ryan. I'm trying to add more value to this even if it's difficult.

Probably you're making some confusion among the EMD algo, which reduces the value of exactly matching domains, and penguin which affects our linkbuilding strategy.

Waht you should try to focus is to create linkable assets and then spreading the word in the channels where you can achieve links.

If you're trying to achieve links in a product page (I prefer to point at product categories since product may expire or get out of stock) you may want to propose special offers or if it's difficult to find opinions on it, create an extensive review with a video maybe so users may find it useful and why not, maybe they'll link or share it!

Quoting Ryan with the best ending: "Stop building links, start earning them".

First of all, I'll better forget about tons of links. Sometimes is better to have few but good quality links than a massive amount of crap pointing to one or more pages.

Normally the highest value is hidden where no one can go. If you manage getting in touch on a 1 by 1 basis with good quality sites you may achieve few links but with an high value. To achieve this you'll need really good content. Not only original but with data, research and which may be considered useful to someone (because they'll need to link to it).

This is not scalable in the short end but as time pass by you'll be expanding your list of contacts and achieve a group of quality sites which already knows you and who are happy to share your content.

For this purpose, if they don't want to link to your content, try to ask them to share it on their social profile, there may be someone who likes it and link or retweet it!

About searching for blogs, I use the google tab but you can also consider on find 5 hi valuable sites and then use the related command in g search

First of all congrats on taking a linkfrom dmoz, even with its contras it still remains a good source where to have your link placed.

Second don't worry about it. Google knows how many sites are taking DMOZ data even Google directory is based on it

It's always good to have seo friendly urls, both for the bots and the users so they can easily understand what the page is about even in serps!

So you have to be cautious:

• be sure to implement well your 301s. Don't leave any page out if so you may lose real rankings
• prepare a new sitemap to submit as soon as you'll be swapping urls.

Even with that google will take a little to fully digest your new urls. SO you'll see some lower rankings at the beginning but maybe you'll recover in a couple of weeks.

Why not make a test with a bunch of lower priorities pages? So you'll be sure about the time to recover and maybe the impact will be less since it will be spreaded in a longer period.

Hi! what about using cookies?

I mean, when an user reaches your site have a get php rule that appends a cookie to the user if their medium referral is cpc.

In your form you can add an hidden value which is cpc= 1 or 0. When the user send the form you can look for that cookie, if it exists set the cpc value to 1 if not 0. So you'll ahve a db stored information about if that user came or not via cpc.

Hi James, first of all you're not bothering here that's the purpose of any community I think,share experience and thoughts!

about profiles I think that the way to make users interact with them is to enhance integration with social media is highly helpful. Link to their g+ and facebook profiles will help them to easily access them with their facebook login so to not haveing to register from zero with you and ease the way they'll adding content  to them.

I think that you need to be wise. You don't have to turn everything down nor everything up. I think that being paid for an editorial post may be good but always be sure that what you're writing is useufl for your visitors.

You don't want that your users think that you've sold your content. I've never been paid to publish content on my sites just because when I found something useful I will write about it and link to it even for free. HOwever if someone's contacting you offering money and you think that it is a good product why not accepting an extra money?

Sitemap and robots are not required but recommended. However you may find sites which doesn't need them jsut because they're really tiny or which doesn't want to show they blocked pages to competitors.

Sitemap may be the same, you don't want to show to your competitors your site structure or your site is so small that is useless. Also a sitemap may be useful for you to be sure that google is aware of all you urls and that those urls are crawled constantly.

For a classified ads site I'll recommend to use map for categories. You want google to rank those pages because there are the ones rankings for broader keywords and attracting users which may convert. Create one or more sitemap (with an index), based on how many urls you have, (limits for each sitemap are 50k urls per sitemap).

I'll also recommend  you to canonicalize you paginated series to the main page and submit only the first page. In that way google will focus on the first page and consolidating all the value there.