Welcome to the Q&A Forum

ok, I accept the points raised above and understand where you are coming from.

The difficulty I am having is that I want to outsrouce link building/content reach (and yes, in white hat manner), but everyone I speak to seems to have a 'network' of sites they can build links from which really worries me as I'm sure google will spot a pattern.

How do I outsource without having this issue?

I apologise in advance if this has been discussed before, but I'm a bit confused by this whole buying links/outreach scenario.

Example..

High ranking PR site (PR 85) has people advertising they can get you links from that site in exchange for money.
You would give them an article and it would look natural and a link - branded or keyword - links back to you.

This is not new to people here who know of this. Obviously there is a difference between a link farm (crap site just selling links) and one of these highly recognised sites where you can obtain a link from.

I'm sure a goody 2 shoes will now tell me 'i should do everything natural not be tempted', but I actually dont know where the line is drawn between the same site giving a natural link to me and someone selling a link from the same site.

Google isnt going to downgrade the site I'm sure but how do they combat this or even do they combat it?

Do we have to accept that buying links is still a normal process and if done in moderation and discretely, you can get away with it?

We have a property site and have many area pages with listings of properties. For example, one page may have up to 30 properties listed, with 100 words of description on that listing page for that property and then you click 'more info' to get to the page of that property with maybe 200 words in total.

I want to add bullet points for each property on the area page but Im worried that it may be seen by google as spammy even though its usefull to the client.

For example, if I had 30 properties on a page, and 28 of them said next to each picture..

• Property Type: Shared, Open Plan, Single Bed

Would that be a problem for google?

ok, thanks.

We have a property listing site.
Wandered if its more important to update the results of the listings (adding or deleting them) or is adding new articles more important.?

We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there.

What's your recent experience?

Thanks for the detailed response Tom..

We have for example

A = Listings page with brief of all products

linking to B,C,D,E,F,G etc.. which are all specific pages for those products..

The B - G's rank ok for non competitive terms on the page but page's A dont rank so well.
The problem about no indexing A is that I think the other pages will get lost and have importance taken away from them..
Canonical from  second pages of A listings yes, but what I was also thinking to do is put some unique content on page A in order to make that page more unique..

Any thoughts on that?

We list products on our site and suspect that we have been hit by Panda as we are duplicating listings across our own site. Not intentionally, we just have multiple pages listings the same content as they fall into multiple categories.

Has anyone else had the same issue and if so how did you deal with it?.. Have you seen a change in results/rankings due to the changes you made?

My thought is really that if one of the sites we link to on a normal basis gets penalised/banned by google (we link to big sites but dont forget BMW scenario), then we could be penalised in turn for linking to them

How do you handle outbound links from your site?.. do you no follow them all to be on the safe side?

Thanks EGOL - You have been answering my questions since 2006 on SEOchat so appreciate you know your stuff on articles/blogs etc.

Nobody is paying us for links, there is no dodgy reciprocal or paid arrangement at all. We are writing news articles and linking out to relevant sources for that article (about 50% relevant to our industry, but 100% related to the article)

I think your point about the 2 and 2 is a valid point. Its a long job as our articles go back to 2007

On the subject of articles and pages that list headings of articles.. any idea on minimum text needed before something is regarded as 'thin content'?

Had an interesting situation today..

We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links.

For example..

'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.'

So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site.

I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site..

I actually asked them why and this was their response.

'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.'

Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.

Thanks William. We found screaming frog recently. Why nobody ever told us about it before is amazing.

Hi Guys

Two issues to sort out..

So we have a website that lists products and has many pages for:

a) The list pages - that lists all the products for that area.
b) The detailed pages - that when click into from the list page, will list the specific product in full.

On the list page, we perhaps have half the description written down, when clicked into you see the full description.
If you search in google for a phrase on the detailed page, you will see results for that specific page including 'multiple' list pages where it is on.

For example, lets say we are promoting 'trees' which are situated in Manhatten. And we are also promoting trees in Brooklyn, there is a crossover. So a tree listed in Manhatten will also be listen in brooklyn as its close by (not from America so don't laugh if I have areas muddled)
We then have quite a few pages with the same content as a result.

I read a post a while back from the mighty Cutts who said not to worry about the duplicate unless its spammy, but what is good for one person, is spammy to another..

Does anyone have any ideas as to if this is a genuine problem and how you would solve?

Also, we know we have alot of thin content on the site, but we dont know how to identify it. It's a large site so needs something automated (I think)..

Thanks in advance

Nick