Thanks for all the responses.
Think I'll opt for a server 301 to a suitable page
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Thanks for all the responses.
Think I'll opt for a server 301 to a suitable page
I've got some crappy pages that I want to delete from a site.
I've removed all the internal links to those pages and resubmitted new site maps that don't show the pages anymore, however the pages still index in search (as you would expect).
My question is, what's the best practice for removing these pages?
Should I just delete them and be done with it or make them 301 re-direct to a nicer generic page until they are removed from the search results?
Alan - thanks for your response. OSE is good, but it doesn't provide a management platform for logging your research.
Competitive link finder again is pretty useful as a standalone application, but I'm looking for something all encompassing.
I'm looking at packages to help with link finding, outreach, acquisition and management. But I'd appreciate some views from fellow forum members on the best choice;
BuzzStream
Link-Assistant
Link Research Tools
Other?
BuzzStream looks pretty promising to me. Has anyone else got any experience or views?
Thanks
John, thanks - I'll check out Adobe Indesign.
Ideally I want something like the up coming infographic creation tool from Visual.ly?
It's not live yet http://visual.ly/labs but if there's a running alternative that would be great!?
Ivaylo - Thanks for the resource, they look pretty decent
In the interests of creating some quick, but nice link bait;
Does anyone know of any software or online info-graphic generation service? i.e. Something that is easier to create infographics in than gimp/photoshop.
Something that you can enter some data in to create some nicely laid out graphs would be amazing.
OSE share data is based on page rather than domain, so that's a massive number of shares for a single page!
It almost certainly has to be a follower/like service. They're a dime a dozen. If they were running significant facebook ads you would expect their facebook page likes to be much higher than 25.
Buying a aged domain name has numerous problems, not least of which is that if the domain registration information changes and then shortly after the site is up, but completely different to what it had been in the past, Google may wipe any ranking clean and consider it a new site with a new owner.
You'll still benefit from any existing inbound links, but it's worth bearing in mind.
OSE doesn't drill down as deep as say Google would and so you may not find all the links you would expect to. Some pages simply aren't included.
The latest Linkscape build I believe went shallower than previous updates so that more URLs were encompassed instead. You have to offset one with the other, otherwise the computing power required would be huge.
Also if the links are new, that may be relevant. Remember that OSE updates once per month.
Also, Press releases in general, I believe are not considered as 'significantly influential' links, therefore there's another reason they may be left off the linkscape build.
Martijn - Thanks.
That's worked for me before as well, but I was having no success yesterday!
I'll raise it with Moz
Yes, I remember seeing that! Someone had made a comment about it (obviously I'm spending far too long in the forum!)
Has this happened to anyone else?
I keep running reports in OSE and then exporting them, but I only get 120 rows exported to the csv when it should be several thousand.
Thought I'd ask around before raising it to the Moz team!
PS I would give you a Good Answer, but I've reached my 3 limit for this thread!
Not that it should really matter to an associate - but I've seen your excited tweets in the past about reaching x number of MozPoints!
Nice bit of investigation Keri - thanks for that!
Their practices looked a bit dubious to me (ie. the forum links and blog posts), but that facebook comment doesn't exactly help their cause!
Think I'll stay clear.
Got anyone you can recommend?
Yes, we do have craigslist, but to be honest I've never used it. I'll check it out.
Thanks again
Egol, yep certainly is. Unfortunately as it's my area as well, it's proving quite challenging for me at the moment as well.
It's often hard to stay away from the black hat 'easy' methods. But Rome wasn't built in a day was it!
ha, it's an actual photo.
ok, thanks for the pointers.
Know any good copywriters?
Yes, it certainly is. I'm always searching and hoping for a 'quick win' strategy, but nothing can really beat earnt links unfortunately!
If you ever find software that can create some great content then go out and network with people and share the content, then get some links back in from these credible sources, please let me know!
Sounds like a good strategy; never really considered copywriters before, so I'll investigate.
How would you go about 'marketing the hell out of it'?
No, just no! Automated software is never really a good idea and although it may result in short term gain, the long term prospects are not very good at all.
Concentrate on creating high quality links that require a human to put effort it. 1 high quality link will out shine 1,000 spammy links
haha, yes, that's a fair point, taken.
I'm essentially looking to get some high quality links, but my time is limited, hence looking for other options. But as you say and I agree, this may not be the place to go!
Thanks for the wake up call!
They've got a few examples on their site of clients they'd helped, but I hadn't thought about checking the Whois, so I shall do that.
Also, it's hard to determine what links they may have added and what links the site owners have added via. other methods.
I'll do some more investigation
Thanks
Has anyone had any experience with or used quickseoresults.com? I'm just looking into them now. They seem to offer a 30 day free trial based on 'white hat' tactics that gives results. You can then pay to continue their services. They seem to base their services heavily around link building, so I'm dubious.
Thomas,
Just had a gander, and I like the look of it. Just the sort of thing I was after!
Thanks for the tip!
OK, before anyone says anything, I know this isn't the right way to do things properly and that if I want to build a genuine and interested following base, I need to create some great content, tweet great things of interest and build a genuine and engaged follower base....
BUT
....Has anyone got any actual experience of using paid for twitter followers and if so would you recommend it or recommend any particular company who does it in the UK?
I know there's companies who do it by getting reciprocal followers and others who just use bots to give you lots of 'useless' followers.
I essentially want to know if it can work at all on any level and get you some degree of useful followers (i.e. people who may actually read your tweets as opposed to fake accounts).
Maybe Google have started their own SEO business??
That would be a sure way to wipe out the competition and earn some cash!
Seriously though, unless they have access to some amazing link resources then this has to be black hat doesn't it? unconsenting at that! like you say, if it's dodgy then some serious damage could be made here in the long term.
Gianluca,
Yes - sorry, It's a wordpress blog. But the main site isn't. So will this plug-in generate the sitemap for the wholesite (i.e from the root downwards?)
Thanks
Excuse my sitemap ignorance here.
I've got a site and it's got a blog in a sub-folder. The blog gets updated frequently, the main site does not.
Is it best to;
a) Have 2 sitemaps.. one in the root and one in the /blog folder.
b) Have 1 sitemap that is regularly updated
The reason being, I know there's various plugins that create blog sitemaps on the fly, so that would be much easier than updating the main sitemap every time a change was made.
If the answer is 2 sitemaps; Would you stop the root sitemap from detailing the contents of the blog folder or just update it every so often with the contents of the blog folder?
Anthony,
Thanks. I'll see if I can dig out their contact form because it's just getting a bit silly now.
I've made sure that the address I've given is the most detailed possible, but still no joy!
I've been trying to register a business on Google Places now for a few months.
As part of the verification process, Google send a postcard to your business address so that you can enter the pin online and verify your address.
They also say that it takes up to 3 weeks, however this is now the 3rd time I've requested a pin and none have turned up so far. The latest one was requested well over 3 weeks ago.
Has anyone else had problems getting a local results postcard? It's driving me nuts!
Atul,
Try reading this, especially the website content section;
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
There's some great stuff in there that every SEO can learn from
As Zachary says, these results are personalised.
The best way to check is to use incognito in Google and Private browsing in Firefox whilst being logged out of your google account. This should remove any personalisation from your searches.
As long as your website hasn't got a particulary spammy link profile then adding spammy links to it should make no difference. Google recognises the fact that anyone can link to your sites and potential 'spam bomb' your site with numerous dodgy links, so rather than penalising you for it, if Google didn't like a link, it would just devalue the link to your site.
If it's got a DA of 66, then it's probably worth linking to your site. Although DA can't tell us if google has penalised a particular site, it's still a good measure.
On another note, be aware that google has the ability to detect sites that are linking to each other from the same server, C-Block or even with similar registration details. Therefore it's possible for your link to be devalued if it recognises it as coming from the same source/owner.
A directory is just that. A directory; if someone has used your directory to find a site they are looking for then great! Google won't see it as a bounce, because they'll be coming to your directory and following one of your links, which isn't a bad thing.
If you wanted to make more of a resource for your users, you could provide rich descriptions on the sites in your directory (this may also help reduce spam submissions). You could even create your own rating system for the sites. This may create a better experience for your users as they would be able to search your directory and get some useful and insightful information about the sites they are visiting... This increases the amount of text and information on your site, meaning you have a better chance of ranking and may set your directory apart from others in your arena that just provide links to other sites.
Gregory - Check out this new blog post, might contain just what you're looking for;
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity
Santosh - Check out this blog post regarding a link profile tool - It may help you track down your 'bad' links
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity
Spammy links include things such as link directories, link farms and generally any domain that appears to be a directory. There are other forms of spam link, but you generally have to look at your links and make a judgement call on whether a site linking to you looks spammy or not (not all directories are spammy, so you need to make a judgement call on this as well).
One measure I use is how many links a domain has going into it vs. the amount of domains these come from. If the number of links is many, many times higher then it could be a dubious site.
Regarding your cardiffhyno site, Vitalscom is correct in his advice, it wouldn't surprise me if a google algorithm has picked up on things like your footer and devalued the site.
Nice keyword drop there
Are you looking to completely re launch the site or will there be a lot of similarities between the two? If the new one has a lot of existing content, then google will probably notice that you have just updated your site.
If you have been subjected to malicious link building towards your site, then most of the time it shouldn't make any difference. As long as you have a good link profile to start with (from reputable trustworthy sources) then adding a load of spammy links shouldn't hurt you. Google recognise that this sort of thing can happen and therefore only normally penalise people who have a 100% spammy link profile.
However, if you feel that your site is affected by this and you have ruled out other things, including any low quality pages you may have on your own site which are bringing it down, I would do the following;
Try and get these links removed. Contact the site owners involved and ask for removal
File a reconsideration request to google explaining what has happened. Make sure you try and get rid of thse links first and tell google you've done your best to get them removed from linking to your site.
Make sure everything is as legitimate as you can before doing this and all being well, you'll be back on top.
Regardless of what google may say, having a nofollow link to your site does pass credibility to you. So having a link from a national newspaper is a big win.
I wouldn't worry too much that it's a no-follow. In my experience, if it's from a great source, it makes little difference. You should still get value from it
Activitysuper,
I see you're using the rel=canonical on the non www version, but really you need to use a 301 re-direct on the domain with the non www to direct it to the www version (if that's which one you want to use), you can then set the www one as your preference in webmaster tools and remove the non www version from your account. You can do this quite easily in IIS on your server, by setting up a separate site for the non www version and simply using the re-direct feature to 301 it to your www site.
The site has the potential (to a googlebot) to look slightly spammy in the fact that it's a single page with no external links coming into it. I would try and get some quality links going to your domain to give it some link juice and trust.
It's also an easy site to copy from a content perspective. Someone can just come along, rip your content and setup their own page on a more established domain, so make sure this isn't happening. Google could give credit to the other site in this instance.