Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tom, I read your blog post on this. Very helpful. Just wondering though, why use Majestic to download a massive list of links?

Wouldn't Moz do the same thing?

And Moz even allows you to filter out those that do not pass value?

Wouldn't that be a way to have Moz sift out a much smaller list that in theory would include all the affiliate links? As they should not be passing value because they are paid links?

No, but I opted for unrelated reasons not to move foward at this time.

Thanks,

Patrick

Please disregard this question. Someone in my company will be going. I'd prefer to delete this question, but cannot.

I managed to snag an early, early bird ticket to MozCon for $799. Now it appears I won't be going. I'd like to exchange it with another Mozer who does want to go, but would like to save $200 off the current price.

If interested, please email me at patrick.garmoe@travelex.com.

Just curious if anyone has experience working with: http://sojern.com/?

If so, and you don't mind giving me a quick overview of whether it was a good experience, email me at patrick.garmoe@travelex.com

Thanks,

Patrick

Then you have nothing to worry about as far as being delisted.

I doubt the server issue would matter, but do make sure your website loads as fast as possible. That is one factor that influences search results. But suffice to say the traffic sways up and down based on lots of factors from Google along with things like the day of the week, seasons of the year, holidays, etc. In my opinion you have nothing to worry about outside of simply steadily building your website traffic.

I agree with everything BlueprintMarketing said.

I would add that you should back up your blog posts, just in case something goes berserk. If you're on a paid theme or going to another paid theme, normally their support might have some advice for you.

I second Genesis/Studio Press framework from Copyblogger Media. I have one, and never had any issues when I switched from a free theme to a paid one. Never used Woo Themes, but I've heard good things.

Brian,

I agree with what Lumina wrote.

Sometimes when I run into this problem I look at the competition for the term, and then figure out how many backlinks my competitors who are ranking in the top 10 for that keyword are showing/their DAs, etc. the top 10 have, and compare it to my own.

It won't give you a super firm answer, but sometimes it's enough to explain why the top 10 is beating you.

Depends what your ultimate plan is. If it's a big blog and it's the ideal audience to get in front of for your product, it's definitely worth the traffic. If they click through and join your list or look around and purchase etc., then that's worth it.

But if you just want the link for the ranking value, then no it probably is not.

Think of it as though you are an opening band. Sure, getting paid is nice, but access to the audience who then becomes fans of your band for years to come is a lot better than just getting paid to perform.

If I'm reading the screen shot right, I wouldn't be worried. Seems like normal to me.

If you're not doing anything black or grey hat that you're worried Google might not like, I'm not sure why you'd be worried about getting delisted or penalized in any way.

Hello soralsokal,

I don't have a bunch of products like you, but generally I prefer to use the rel=canocial tag to push the link juice to the one category page I'm trying to get ranked well. So I still build out the various pages I want, but don't expect the duplicate content to be ranked.

I suppose you could also put them in your Robots.txt file to block them from search engines. I've done that with a blog that packed the blog posts in all sort of different categories, thus creating duplicate content.

Hello Gebby,

You can put it in the title tags. If I ran a local business, I'd use it on a few title tags, but not my entire site.

I'd encourage you to think of how many different ways  you can really highlight on your website that you are a local company, both for your visitor and therefore Google. It's not really about how many times you add it to a title tag.

If you're going after local traffic, you should make sure your address ideally is part of every page, (like in the footer) or somewhere. That can also include things like a directions to our store page. Use local reference information in your copy as well. Be sure to fill out local directories as well, especially Google+ Local store page (I can't recall the new name for this). Ideally if you partner with other businesses in town, have a page of recommended partners, and get your partners to do the same for you. You want to send Google as many signals that you are part of that local community. Collectively those efforts will help you show up well in local search results.

An SEO that specializes in local results will hopefully chime in with more specifics.

Never used the siteexplorer tool, but it probably provides very similar data. The Moz toolbar has worked fine for me.

I took a look at the links you posted. I'm not sure of what your business is, so I can't comment on relevance.

Some of these links hopefully popped up naturally, though if you had a previous SEO firm doing work, some of them might have come via that channel.

http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Night_Shark_Fishing_Florida/ is definitely a directory.

I used the Moz bar to show me it has a Page Authority of 1, and a domain authority of 25, so I would email the webmaster and ask them to "nofollow" the link or remove it, if not relevant to your business. Because of the low ranking, if it were my website, I wouldn't worry about it hurting my rankings by having it removed/nofollow.

On http://drama.academia.edu/LelaRanson I would leave this one. It has high DA value of 85 and at least on the surface looks like good content.

http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/post/93825362281/the-canaveral-circus

I personally wouldn't worry about stuff on Tumblr, as many social networks automatically nofollow all tags. Here you can see some of the links on the page are nofollow.

The post <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://ift.tt/1v4ezED">The Canaveral Circus appeared first on <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://ift.tt/1oFpDCf">Florida Fishing Stories.

Since you don't have a penalty, I honestly wouldn't spend lots of time getting rid of bad links as long as you believe no one on your end sought them out to begin with, like a former SEO. Focus more on continuing to build relevant links and content locally people want to link to. Easier said than done I know. But theoretically if Google hasn't taken a manual action of any sort out on your website, your issue lies with competitors simply optimizing more effectively, not "bad links."

Sam,

Here are a few thoughts.

"We've submitted the site to all the relevant local directories and listings sites" - If you haven't already, I'd use Moz Local or White Spark, just to make sure you really have hit them all. I used to have a list of the ones I considered important, but was blown away by all the other listings available, after visiting those tools.

Also, make absolutely certain you have the exact same name, address and phone number in all your listings. I've seen slight variations lead to long-term issues for small businesses.

That said, you're not the first person who has voiced frustration over not being near enough to the centroid, being the issue.

Is your address prominent on your website as well, ideally listed on every page in some form if it's a highly localized page? I've heard (not sure it's true) that Google is looking more and more at your own website property to impact how well Google+ does in search rankings.

You might also want to look at Moz's latest local search engine ranking factors report. I'm sure that might spur some other ideas.

I would agree with everyone here that duplicate content isn't really an issue here. And it's really not the concern it once was. I personally would take a screen shot though, just to show where the original is for your audience. I also heard somewhere that you can't republish Yelp testimonials elsewhere, or maybe it was Google+, and have them still featured on the original source. So you may want to double check the rules around testimonials for those two sites.

Hello CalicoKitty,

I've been dealing with something somewhat similar for my website (slight drop in rankings, but in my case it includes a targeted penalty, not sitewide thank goodness!) If I were you I'd definitely look at your backlinks. I've disavowed and asked for a bunch of mine removed.

Since you don't have a penalty but are losing some rankings, here are some references that have helped me decide which links are worth keeping (along with everything else that goes along with trying to get rid of a penalty).

The quick and dirty rule of thumb I use (in addition to using the Moz Bar to also gauge the value of a link) is do I think this website is genuinely built for real people who might find what I'm talking about or selling useful. If it's on the fence, I generally leave it (especially since you don't have a current penalty) but if you know in your gut it doesn't seem helpful at all, and is built more for the search engines and looks like a junk page, then you're probably looking at a bad link.Identifying Link Penalties, 2012: http://moz.com/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012He does a nice job of comparing a good link profile with one that has a lot of bad links. (Essentially the same anchor text.)You can find a lot of good articles on the subject by Mozer Marie Hayne. She also wrote an excellent book on the topic available here. http://www.unnaturallinksrecovery.com. It walks you through every kind of link you might run across. The ebook is about $100 though, so I personally wouldn't buy it if I don't have a penalty on my website. That said, I bought it and I'm not sure how I would have ever worked through my penalty without her step-by-step assistance in the book.http://moz.com/community/users/308135In depth look at quality guidelines.http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelinesMy answered question on which links to remove, which Marie weighed in on:http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-when-requesting-links-be-removed-how-important-to-google-is-the-address-you-re-sending-the-requests-from#reply_256531How to conduct a link audit:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2207168/How-to-Conduct-a-Link-Audithttp://searchenginewatch.com/article/2330944/7-Things-You-May-Not-Know-About-Googles-Disavow-Tool - Mariehttp://moz.com/community/q/is-this-negative-seo-should-i-disavow-these-links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7WK3s693oI&list=UU3jmlL2rHbipq_2tDd5zDRA

Thanks Alex,

It I assume could also be the "nofollow" issue Mike mentioned.

Happy Thanksgiving Mozers,

In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow".

I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google.

Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow.

Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.

Thanks for the input. I've never seen something like this before, nor can I really tell why it would benefit content.onlineagency.com, but I figured perhaps this was a normal black hat tactic I had not heard of.

Perhaps if it is a tactic to get travelexinsurance.com more inbound links, it's somehow designed to copy relevant content from someone else that is already pointed at travelexinsurance.com, and then simply create another backlink, piggybacking on the content.

I must not be explaining it well.

Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com.

One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516

In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/...

So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in all that.

And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com.

So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I fear this might be a part of that.

Hopefully it makes more sense.

My guess is no. I'm fairly new here, but I'm sure my predecessor would not have.

Or are you asking if these websites who link to use are using canonical URLs? My guess in that case is they wouldn't be either.

I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre.

Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com.

One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516

In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/...

So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on.

And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com.

So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.

wattlebristol,

I had the same epiphany you're having here.

It used to be much, much worse though. Over time the pendulum has increasingly swayed toward the white hat, or at least grey hat side. A site like copyblogger.com ranks at the top for every term they care about, because ever since the very beginning they've preached and lived by creating good content. And they have no fear of getting knocked off their pedestal.

But that's not to say other techniques don't still work. And in some cases they obviously are more effective than "create great content."

One rule of thumb I live by is that Google does not live to make your website popular. It wants to reward content that is already popular in real life. Kingof5 however, makes a strong point that it's not about white or grey, it's about risk tolerance. Do what you feel comfortable believing Google will never penalize you for based on what you are seeing. And be ready to live with the results.

Hello Mozers,

If you work in the field of online marketing and especially E-Commerce, I’m inviting you to consider joining my mastermind group.

I’m looking for up to nine other people who work in E-Commerce or online lead generation full-time, who would like to meet weekly on a Google hangout, to help one another solve our online marketing problems.

Ideally a member of the group would:

1. Have worked for several years in the field of online marketing, either as an E-Commerce manager, marketing VP, content marketer, copywriter, SEO, developer, or some combination thereof.

2. Currently work in house on the web team at a company of at least a few people, and you primarily do marketing online. As space allows professionals who work for agencies or as independent consultants can join the group, but we will have a no-pitching policy.

3. Be looking to grow as an online marketer by investing your energy in helping others in the group achieve their goals, and opening up to group members about the challenges you are having in your position, in order for other members to assist you.

4. Want to listen and share constructively. This is not a group for people who just want to gripe or tear others down or use black hat techniques.

5. Want to have fellow members hold him or her accountable for taking action in areas the individual desires to improve upon.

Sound like you, or someone you know?

Here’s the outline of what I’m envisioning a typical meeting might look like:

Mastermind Weekly Group Outline

Step 1: Start the meeting reporting on what you did the previous week.

Step 2: Talk about what went well, what didn’t go so well, why, and what you’re going to do to improve the situation.

Step 3: In a rotation, determine who is going to be focused on during this meeting. Typically we’ll focus on one person’s needs in-depth in a meeting, rather than trying to focus on everyone. Sometimes we’ll also focus just on a topic members are struggling with, like making sure your E-Commerce data is tracking accurately in Google Analytics.

Step 4: The person “in-focus” for that week tells the group what they’d like help with, discusses the challenge and asks for feedback, advice and strategy. This could range from advice on how to deal with a boss who hates ecommerce and blocks every initiative you propose, to figuring out the steps for dealing with a Google penalty, or maybe trying to increase conversions on a certain landing page.

Step 5: Everyone spends the final 10 minutes discussing his or her high leverage activity for the next week, which they want the group to hold them accountable for.

For those interested in potentially joining the group, I created a simple Google form you can fill out in two minutes. Your answers will be kept private. Feel free to share the link with anyone you think might benefit from being in a group like this.

http://goo.gl/forms/2dBiAWGtj7

There is no fee beyond committing to attend at least 80% of the online meetings, once you’ve had a chance to see if it’s a fit for you.

If you have any questions or additional ideas, I’m all ears. Please comment below or email me at pg@patrickgarmoe.com

My thought right now is to make it a six-month commitment or less, and then we can re-evaluate. I'll be contacting everyone in November, and starting the group the first week of December.

Anyhow, I look forward to hearing from some of you soon!

Patrick

Hello PTHerrington,

You certainly have your work cut out for you, that's for sure.

If I were you, here's what I'd do:

• Analyze where my competitors are weak when it comes to online local marketing, and exploit those areas especially. It sounds like the main advantage they have are offices in those towns, which you can't duplicate. I personally wouldn't bother with the PO Box option. I doubt it will help a whole lot with your end game from actually netting more customers.
• I'd start with a good Google AdWords budget while you're trying to build rank organically. Over time hopefully you'll have to spend less and less on AdWords, but out of the gate you'll need it to get traction over organic competitors. Ideally you'd have really good landing pages that drive them to a page for that town, or county if towns are not feasible. (Of course, if you worked hard on a handful of pages for individual towns for organic, those could double for PPC nicely.)
• People generally don't search as much for services on a county level. So I'd argue you should focus on a few small, key town pages, and try to fill them with as much local content as possible and try to educate your consumer a bit, beyond what your competitors are doing. Over time those pages could get rankings, but doing the H1 county thing with H2 town names I don't think will deliver.

Here's an example of a woman who created good local content and from it grew not only a pet sitting business for herself, but a thriving franchise business other pet sitters have replicated in their cities. I'd assume her area was dominated by larger kennels etc., and she appears to be a one-person operation. http://www.copyblogger.com/bella-vasta-case-study/

• Be sure obviously to check out Moz Local, and listen to Greg Gifford's webinar on local SEO. He helps local car dealerships, and that webinar is packed with good, practical ideas you can execute on.

In summary, I'd argue don't try to cover everything. Just pick a few towns and test out what works, and then slowly expand out with additional pages. You can always mention other cities you operate in. But don't try and bit off your entire coverage area with regional pages.

Most companies do little more in local SEO than register a Google Places page and have a physical address. So if you try to create a little more value and optimize heavily for those towns, over time I bet you'd see some good results.

If you've seen a drop in ranking but have no penalty, ideally you would be adding more links, but you're not the first person to talk about noticing this issue, and we had a similar issue on our website. I'd keep an eye on it and when you run across particularly bad instances, ask the webmaster to remove the link. That sometimes works. And when it doesn't, I would consider adding it to a disavow file.

We ignored this issue too long, and got penalized for not doing something about it. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that Google can always tell the difference between bad linking practices, and junk websites linking to your website.

Not sure I 100% grasp the situation, but if you intend to work with him for a year or longer, creating an affiliate network for his business could bring in a lot more leads. Ours has turned out to work amazingly well for this.

thinkseo,

You might want to provide them with some ideas related to what they might say on the page. I find people really just need to get a sense of what to write. Or perhaps you can say you'll do it for a little extra $.

Here's one link on creating better services/about pages

http://www.seocopywriting.com/content-marketing/7-hot-tips-for-writing-a-top-converting-services-page/

Hello frustrated wattlebristol,

I know, this kind of stuff annoys the heck out of me.

I even wrote a long post about basically the same issue, here in the U.S.

It was also dealing with design, but this guy created a network of simple landing pages to pull off the same sort of trick, but in cities all over the country.

http://www.patrickgarmoe.com/fooling-google/

I do think bit-by-bit Google is eliminating this sort of obvious flagrant disobedience of the rules, but it sure is frustrating for those of us trying to follow the rules.

It's odd you'd be getting good DA etc. numbers yet ranking poorly.

I'd recommend taking a look at the 2014 ranking factors report Moz puts out, and start going down the list of items outside of what you listed.

Site speed is a major one.

Something or many things may pop out. I'd personally also check to make sure all your pages are getting crawled correctly. It sounds like they are being crawled because your website does show up in the SERPs, but perhaps there are some broken redirects or something that is causing you not to get the full value of the website you've built.

Is there any fear that the entire domain would be considered spam, if you use a company domain?

Or is it just that you want to use a separate email address, so it doesn't get intermixed with other items? Seems like some people on the web strongly advise to use a Gmail address.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237534/Google-Unnatural-Links-Manual-Penalty-A-Recovery-Guide

What is the Best Email Approach?

Some prefer to use an email address associated with the penalized website: Joe@example.com.The thought is that a domain based email provides maximum credibility. My concern with this approach is getting a domain's email torched by having it marked as spam.

My preferred method is to use Gmail from the Dedicated Account created for the link removal campaign. A cc to Joe@example.com seems to add sufficient credibility. By having all of the email outreach documented there, it's easy to share with Google. Using Gmail canned responses further adds to the efficiency.

Thanks for the insights Daniel.

Yeah, it is difficult the bigger the company.

Do you have any insights into whether I need to worry a lot about getting spammed, if I use an email on my domain?

Thanks for the insight. Will have to check out your book.

One follow up. Is there a rule of thumb between the time you get a message in Google Webmaster Tools, and the time you get penalized for not getting rid of those links or sending a disavow report?

Thanks for the note. I really appreciate it.

@William Kammer, get this, my agency admitted they are using Rmoov, and need it for that reason. So you were exactly right.

We're starting a campaign to get rid of a bunch of links, and then submitting a disavow report to Google, to get rid of a manual action.

My SEO vendor said he needs an @email domain from the website in question @travelexinsurance.com, to send and receive emails from vendors. He said Google won't consider the correspondence to and from webmasters if sent from a domain that is not the one with the manual action penalty.

Due to company/compliance rules, I can't allow a vendor not in our building to have an email address like that.

I've seen other people mention they just used a GMAIL.com account. Or we could use a similar domain such as @travelexinsurancefyi.com.

My question, how critical is it that the domain the correspondence with the webmasters be from the exact website domain?

Hello all,

I installed Google Analytics on a main website and a blog (blog.travelexinsurance.com)

While it appears to be tracking correctly (and when I test it in real time it shows that I'm visiting) but it is treating the entire blog as though it's one page.

So I can't see data on blog post X.

All I see is that X visitors came to my blog in aggregate.

So I see blog.travelex.com has 999 visitors, but it doesn't show that /travel-luggage got 50 visits, while /insurace-tips got 75 and so forth.

I assume I screwed up the tracking somehow, but can't figure out where I went wrong.

Tracking on the main domain works just fine. It's specific to the blog.

Hello community,

I'm trying to find the oldest links to my website/places that have referenced my company. By old, I'm looking for anything 2008 or older.

I have access to a bunch of backlink tools, but they all log stuff based on when they discovered it, and we didn't begin using the tools until June 2013.

I'm hoping there's some tool or some easy trick where I can quickly sort my links based on original date they linked to travelexinsurance.com.

Thanks,

Patrick