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Thanks for your great answer David. Just to make sure I've understood this right...

In your opinion would a high volume of people pogo sticking back to the SERPs after clicking on a paid ad adversely affect the organic search performance of the rest of the site? Or do Google discount this high bounce rate for paid ads?

Hi Mozzers.

My website uses a landing page for Google Adwords traffic targeting keywords like HR Software, HR Systems etc. The design of the landing page is similar to our website but a key difference is that, being a landing page, we've removed the navigation (it is still possible to navigate to the main website by clicking on the logo). We've A/B tested this and found that by removing the navigation we get more people converting/signing up for the free trial of our service.

We track conversions using Google Analytics. Depending on the keyword the conversion rate is between 2.5% and 5%. However, because we've removed the navigation the bounce rate is really high, circa 80% for our landing page compared to an average for our website of approx 40%.

Would having such a high bounce rate harm our organic rankings for the rest of the website?

Thanks

Thanks Andy for your kind offer, if you're happy to have a quick look at our link profile your feedback would be very much appreciated.

Hi Mozzers.

Back in 2013 my website www.octopus-hr.co.uk was hit by a Penguin 2.0 penalty owing to a harmful backlink profile built by a dodgy SEO consultant (now fired). The penalty seemed to apply to the homepage of the site but other pages were unaffected.

We got what links we could removed, disavowed the rest and were informed in September 2013 that the penalty had been removed and our re-inclusion request had been successful. However our website homepage still ranks poorly for the search terms we're targeting in the UK: "HR Software" "HR Systems"

On page factors are in my opinion pretty well optimised for these search terms. In terms of link building post penalty we've focused on high authority and relevant sites. I believe that compared to most of our search competitors the back link profile to our homepage is in pretty good shape, however it still ranks badly.

Has anyone had any experience of a penalty hangover from Google in the past? Are there other things I should consider?

Thanks

David

Hi Mozzers.

I'm designing an infographic to be used in conjunction with a report we've compiled. It's a really strong story backed up with good data. We're planning to do a bit of PR activity around it to hopefully get it in some very authoratitve publications.

On top of this, to maximise the backlinks that we're able to build I've been considering posting it on some (possibly all of the infographic sites) listed on Paddy Moogans blog post about infographic distribution.

• Would this provide any benefit or is it likely to get me penalised in some way?
• Are there any tips/advice you would give to do this? i.e. link to a mixture of different pages, use non spammy anchor text?
• Should I limit how many infographic sites I distribute it too? Is there a maximum total I should consider or even a maximum number of infographic links I should build per week/month?
• Anything else I've not considered?

Thanks in advance

David

Hi.

I've noticed that some of my search competitors seem to be getting away with heavy use of exact match anchor text in their backlinks. In the UK, for the term [HR Software] the top 3 SERPs have on average:

• 63% of their backlinking domains using the exact match anchor text [HR Software]
• 50% of their backlinking pages use the exact match anchor text [HR Software]

I know there are hundreds of factors at play other than just the above but to me their anchor text profiles scream "LINK SPAM".

Is this normal? Have I missed something? or do I just bide my time and wait for them to be hit with a penalty?

Thanks

David