Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You could look at guest posts and reviews of some kind?

You could also maybe look at local stuff, see if there are any good local directories, sponsor local sports teams, get involved with charities and local events etc - can generate some good links.

Paul

Yes it makes sense. Incoming links do contribute to your domain as a whole, but if you're targeting competitive keywords you're likely to need some links to the pages themselves. Also, if all of your links go to one page of your website, it looks suspicious to search engines, much better to spread them out a bit. Paul

I always recommend that each key page of a website has a unique, primary keyword target. I wouldn't recommend having the same keyword on different pages as only one is likely to rank. Your time would be better spent on building lots of good links to the one primary page and focusing other paged on different keywords.

A natural link profile will feature a diverse range of different links from a number of different types of websites. In terms of anchor text ratio, I would recommend looking at the ratio for your top 10 competitors for your primary target term, adding them all together and dividing them by 10 to get a benchmark figure for brand vs anchor text link. I would recommend building relationships with bloggers in your industry, creating link worthy content via social media and your blog and also looking at a few good directories for a start to build diversity into your activity.

I find that this is completely variable and it varies from link to link.

Often, you will see a slight improvement in the short-term and then the website will continue to improve over time.

I have built a number of great links to sites in the past and it's been a couple of months before I've seen movement, but I've also seen a site move up considerably within 24 hours - there's no real way to tell how long it will take.

Why don't you get them to try and review things? This has always worked really well for me.

You could also do something a bit more creative like a competition based on the best story, post or article (on their blog), a sports blogger award (nomination badge placed on blog linking to page on your website containing details of the award) or asking to become a guest contributor.

Blogs are a really good way to go though as they update their content regularly and gather lots of good links.

What are the URL's of the links? Are they all keyword-rich anchor text links? Do they all go to the same page? Are there any signs that the links could have been paid/sponsored?

I would say that 10-15 links is a lot to get in one week, especially if they're all really high quality and you weren't really building many links prior to this.

It may look like you have gone and built a large number of links (that are all similar) in a short period of time in order to boost rankings quickly.

Paul

Hi,

I would recommend either using Excel and just adding hierarchical structure by using 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 etc. This allows use to build on your data in the future (you could add meta content, rankings, volume, traffic details etc.

I would also recommend using mindmeister (free version) and building a map of the website structure.

Paul

The positioning was the same when the site was reincluded.

One of my colleagues did something very similar a few weeks ago to a few key sections of a website and it only took around 4 hours for the main pages to be reincluded in the index. I don't know about a whole site, I would advise doing everything you can to get different sections re-crawled (getting links, social sharing, pushing google to index pages in webmaster tools etc). Good luck Paul

One of my clients has the same problem, so I looked at some of the biggest websites within the industry, and they also share the same issue and have more than 200 internal links on their homepage and the majority of their internal pages.

I would say that it wouldn't have a massive impact upon your rankings or PA if you were to reduce the amount of internal links, but you could use the nofollow tag tactically to do so. For example: if you have a link to a page within your top navigation, you could nofollow a link to the same page if it's also featured within your footer or sidebar.

This is just an example. I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it's an easy way around the problem if you're keen to resolve it and it won't have an impact upon usability.

I wouldn't recommend creating a second page, as it's going to serve the same purpose and feature very similar content.

I would say you should spend your time on the existing page, if it is optimised well for 'denver buick' then chances are it will rank for the slight variation too anyway.

Paul

This is a trailing slash canonical issue, you should choose one version and redirect the other on all of the pages of the site using a rewrite rule.

I am facing this problem with a couple of clients at the moment (huge magento sites), but the developers I am using are finding it really difficult to create rewrite rules that don't result in problems in other areas of the site (such as the shopping cart).

Why don't you get them to try and review things? This has always worked really well for me.

You could also do something a bit more creative like a competition based on the best story, post or article (on their blog), a sports blogger award (nomination badge placed on blog linking to page on your website containing details of the award) or asking to become a guest contributor.

Blogs are a really good way to go though as they update their content regularly and gather lots of good links.

Hi,

I would recommend either using Excel and just adding hierarchical structure by using 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 etc. This allows use to build on your data in the future (you could add meta content, rankings, volume, traffic details etc.

I would also recommend using mindmeister (free version) and building a map of the website structure.

Paul

I have had a quick look over your website and I would recommend that you fix your canonical issue as this could be influencing your positioning.

You currently have four variations of your homepage, each of which are visible to search engines (www, non-www, and index.php) and have been detected. I would recommend choosing one primary URL structure and then use it across the website and redirect the other pages to your preferred URL's.

What was the website that you got a link from? Could it have had a penalty or been deemed malicious by the search engines? Was the link in amongst lots of other comments and did it feature anchor text?

It may be worth contacting the site owner and asking them to remove the comment.

Paul

One of my colleagues did something very similar a few weeks ago to a few key sections of a website and it only took around 4 hours for the main pages to be reincluded in the index. I don't know about a whole site, I would advise doing everything you can to get different sections re-crawled (getting links, social sharing, pushing google to index pages in webmaster tools etc). Good luck Paul

I wouldn't worry about it, as long as you don't have a huge amount, I wouldn't expect this to make much of a difference either way.

I'd recommend focusing on other aspects of on-page optimisation and building really good links.

Paul

If this did influence your rankings, it would only be short-term and it is ultimately still a tactic aimed at manipulating their algorithm.

I would say that your time and money would be better spent on a similar competition with industry bloggers - maybe you could send a few emails saying that the best press release, story, review or related blog post wins X.

Chances are these bloggers will link to you, providing more value than Facebook likes in both the short-term and the long-term.

You could also just get a blogger to review the prize you were looking at providing - quick, easy and natural.

What are the URL's of the links? Are they all keyword-rich anchor text links? Do they all go to the same page? Are there any signs that the links could have been paid/sponsored?

I would say that 10-15 links is a lot to get in one week, especially if they're all really high quality and you weren't really building many links prior to this.

It may look like you have gone and built a large number of links (that are all similar) in a short period of time in order to boost rankings quickly.

Paul