Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great answers, Thanks Marcus and Irving

Hi there,

I've found a good domain that is available for a new project. It has been expired for about 4 months or so. It has a couple of links, with the domain name as an anchor, nothing horrible. Will buying a domain like this be safe from an seo perspective? I'm guessing it would be treated the same as buying a new domain that has never been registered before, Would I be right?

Peter

You should be ok using the head term, but I have seen a couple of instances where sites have been penalized for this. To be extra safe, you could use the keyword.com

HI Daniel,

1. It's generally a best practice to not have more than 100 links on a page. In regards to internal and external, I'd say any combination is ok if it's natural.

2. Both are very important for ranking. It's often a good practice to have important pages linked to as closely as possible to the homepage.

3)Yes, that's an issue. How would users navigate round your site if there are no internal links? There may be issues with bots spidering your pages too.

Pete

Hi mozzers,

Quick question. Whats the best thing to do about URL errors in webmaster tools. They are all 404s that point from external sites. Many of them are junk spam sites.

Should I mark them as "fixed" or just leave them. I'm hoping google is aware it's out of my control if spam sites want to link to 404s on my site.

Peter

Is there a way in GA to setup tracking of the clicking internal URL that 301's to an affiliate ID?

Peter

Thanks for all the responses everyone!

I was wondering in this day and age, do you guys think its worth submitted to these directories anymore?

Hi there,

I'm working on site that has been badly hit by penguin. The reasons are clear, exact match blog network links and tons of spammy exact match links such as comment spam, low quality directories, the usual junk.

The spammy links were mainly to 2 pages, they were targetting keyword 1 and keyword 2.

I'd like to remove these two pages from google, as they dont even rank in google now and create one high quality page that targets both the keywords, as they are similar.

The dilemma I have is these spammy pages still get traffic from bing and yahoo and it's profitable traffic. Is there a safe way to remove the pages from google and leave them for bing and yahoo?

Peter

Thanks guys, seems we are all on the same wavelength

hi there,

It could be penguin.. There was another penguin update a couple of days ago...do you have a lot of exact match anchored links?...  more information on it here..http://searchengineland.com/google-pushes-first-penguin-algorithm-update-122518

Hi mozzers,

I have some external links on a resource page on my established site. I have a new site in the same niche with content that if linked to, would improve the resource page.

If I linked to it using branded anchor text, would it be safe? My thoughts are yes...as long as it adds value and isnt keyword anchored.

The sites are on different C class IPs

Would welcome some thoughts

Peter

Thanks guys...post penguin, I was a little concerned too.

Hey everyone,

A lot of my content gets scraped regular. I'm wondering about using the RSS Footer plugin for wordpress. It allows you to put a link back to the page on your site from the RSS feed. You can use the title of the page as the anchor text or a brand name.

It could result in lots of scraper links...with branded anchor text

How safe do you think this practice is nowadays?

thanks chiaryn, does anyone know where the option is to change cookie settings in Firefox12? I cant seem to find it.

onpage seo is only one of many factors search engines use. Google is getting better all the time at ranking sites for things that are highly relevant but don't have good onpage optimization for a particular keyword, but maybe is well optimized for a synomym..like a page may rank for "autos" when it is not optimized for "autos" but is for "cars".

sorry there seems to be some confusion. I don't mean backlinks, I mean affiliate links... like www.affiliateprogram.com/userid?peterm22

I have a wordpress blog and was wondering the best seo practice for doing affiliate link redirects?

Peter

I think one hyphen in a domain is not too bad, especially if its a .com...it only looks really bad whens its buy-cheap-viagra-online.info. It's very unlikely to affect ranking.

That sounds unnatural and that it would not be like that if it wasnt for search engines, so yes.

Hey,

The seomoz toolbar was permenantly logged in. But for some reason after a period of inactivity it now logs out and I have to relogin. I'm using firefox, what could be causing this?

This is serious and can get you into trouble.. I would 301 redirect them to one page

sorry EGOL, missed your post somehow. Thanks for the reply

Hi Geoff, thanks for the reply. Personal finance, money saving etc.

Oh yes, I'm aware of the cheap ones that produce horrible content, this is not appealing at all. Typically what would you charge for a 1,000 word article?

I'm curious what people are paying when they outsource content writing. I'm thinking about outsourcing some writing. I'm looking for the best quality content on the web, nothing medicore or average! What do you guys pay?

Thanks Ross..thats what i'm thinking too. As long as the site has a solid backlink profile themselves, they are still worth it.

Yes possibly..Make sure your titles are awesome and eye catching, this can help a lot. Perhaps add a "related posts" plugin to wordpress. That will give people more places to go after they have read your posts.

What do you think of getting links from...

high quality sites, with many non spammy high trusted links to them....but their traffic has been majorly hit by panda. I suspect perhaps for having too many thin pages.

Is persuing links on these sites a good idea or not? I'd welcome opinions.

Your backlink profile looks very SEOd... nearly all exact match anchors. Looks like some of the links may be from private link networks too? Google has hit sites that have these kind of links very hard. They busted a lot of the private link networks last month and last week they released the overoptimization penalty that seems to have hit sites that have lots of exact match keyword anchors very hard. Sorry I don't have better news!

I'd get rid of as many of these links as you can....though there are sooo many I'm guessing this task won't be easy.

Hi everyone!

What is the maximum length a title tag should be and what range should a seo description be for best practice?

Thanks so much Ben, This has done exactly what I wanted

hi najul.. Thanks, I already use allinone seo, and have that option selected, but it hasn't put noindex on these pages.

hi syed.

Thanks for the post.. I did that a couple of months ago, and it has removed the description, but the pages are still indexed. I'm trying to get them deindexed.

Thanks

Hi there,

Does anyone no of a way to noindex all the "previous entries" pages in a wordpress blog. They usally show on domain.com/page/2/ etc. They are the small snippets that provide a summary of the all your posts.

I've not been able to find a plugin to do this.

Thanks so much!

Its far from ideal. I'd remove them if you can, especially if it's a new site or these spamy looking links make up a big chunk of your overall backlink profile.

Personally I'd do a variety of homepage links and inner page links. I wouldn't do more than one link per directory. I'd stick to high quality directories, over a longer period of time. Also, use different anchor text. Brand names are good and URLs.

Thanks serge! Yes. I'd love to see your graphs.. I've just been looking at vps.net

Hi Sergie, thanks for the reply.. how much quicker were vps.net than bluehost? I use bluehost now.

You can write a seperate page for each keyword, or if there is not too much competition in your niche and your keywords are related, you might be able to create two or three high quality articles that include your other keywords in.

I see WPEngine now has a discount as pro member perk. I'm looking a superfast host for a wordpress site. Has anyone used WPEngine? or have any suggestions?

Thanks!

Thanks Vahe! Thats better.. but There used to be a set of graphs showing 1am-2am 2am-3am etc.. Did they get rid of those?

Hi Hallam,

Thanks for your reply. Trying to get a full report. I know there used to be the option in GA..but I can't seem to find it anymore. Live data is cool, but not really what I'm after!

Thanks!

I think theres only a few worth submitting too.. After that they just become increasingly low quality and spammy...so not sure I would bother!

Is there a way to find out how traffic is spread by the hour i.e 1am-2am 2am-3am etc.. with GA?

yes..we all make mistakes...I've made many. It's good to learn from them and other peoples.

Thanks..Yes.. I will always test throughly.

Interesting responses. Thank you. Yes, I can see what you mean. These low quality links do not interest me. I beleive search engines are getting better all the time at discounting them.

I have not really valued toolbar PR as a major factor for valuing a link for a lonng time.

That must be annoying Istvan....No top trusted seed is going to link to junk..or at least highly unlikely

I'm eager to hear peoples experiences both good and bad with SEO Agencies. I have tried many. I'm particularly interested in hearing experiences of types of link building. In my experience many SEO agencies build low quality links, that at least in my view are unlikely to stand the test of time, with one or two expections.

This is often called 3 way linking...engines are getting better at picking up this sort of this all the time...I wouldn't do it for a site you have long term plans for. It might work, but chances are it won't stand the test of times.