Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the tips but I would love to know if you have any experience with receiving a penalty and not recovering your rankings even a year later. Also, its quite confusing that the DA is not bad!  Is that a symptom of a bigger issue?

Hi,

A client of mine who owns a website reached out to me. He got penalized a while ago and has long since recovered (not sure exactly, but for sure a year). His domain authority is in the upper 30s but is still not ranking for many of his keywords that he ranked on the first page.

I am not so familiar with the technical aspects of penalties and such, but is this a common scenario? Why is his domain authority great but his ranking downright awful?

Does he have a chance if he builds great links, or is something else wrong that we can't figure out?

Chris,

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this thorough answer! Truly proud to be part of such a great community!

You said some really great points and put some of my worries to ease. I will continue link building and making a few corrections.

Thanks again for your helpful advice!

Rachel

Hey Chris,

Thanks for steering me in the right direction way back in May! I was wondering what you'd suggest now... I improved the 50 pages with unique content and disavowed the links I couldn't remove, but I still have that horrible spam score :(.

Should I simply disregard it? Also, does OSE count the links that were disavowed?

Thank you,

Rachel

Hi All!

I'm an experienced SEO freelancer trying to help a company achieve great SEO results

I optimized a lot of pages which helped the site start ranking, but now some keywords are flying up and down seemingly at random. For example, one keyword went from #11 to under #50!

Is it a bad sign when there is instability in the keywords? Should I be seeing some "settling down'' on my dear keywords? If there is no settling, any suggestions?

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for putting in the time and effort to look into the website and answer my question.

This industry in general is full of spam and doorway pages (probably because of the hardship of getting quality links) but our competitors who have more links and spam are doing better than us and have a better spam score. Do you think if I disavow those links it will help?

You are very right about the pages that seem to be extraneous but I am actively curating content and they will be unique landing pages. Every state has its own laws and quirks in regards to medical waste and we will be focusing on that.

Do you think when I finish those task I will be able to rank better and have a lower spam rate?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks again!

Hi,

I recently took on a client for local SEO and i started improving his on page optimization etc and now I'm continuing with link building. It's hard since it's a boring industry (medical waste disposal), but I have gotten some links.

When I check up his link profile in OSE, it's still giving me a spam score of 7!!! and not showing the links I have acquired. I already removed the link it's showing up by contacting the website and it's not there anymore. The site is a very clean nice site, why am I getting such a high spam score?

Thanks for your help!

Rachel

Hi There!

I've used other options out there like mechanical turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) which can be very successful IF you ask the right questions and give sufficient directions.

Good luck!

Hi Local SEO experts,

A while back we created Google My Business listings for a few of our company locations. A couple of months ago we removed them, because we realized that G might not consider them company locations as they weren't constantly staffed.

Only problem is that they started showing up again. Truthfully I don't mind, but I just want to make sure the business won't get penalized for it. They say "claim this business" on the local listing because it's not claimed by us anymore.

Is this okay or can we get in trouble for it? If it's not okay, how do I go about removing them if I don't have access to it?

Thanks for your time,

Rachel

Hi Logan,

These pages will be eventually transformed into unique landing pages for each state so I don't want to get rid of them as of yet. I will try demoting them.

Any ideas to how they are getting the anchor text of TX and NY?

Thanks for your valuable time!

Hi There!

I've used other options out there like mechanical turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) which can be very successful IF you ask the right questions and give sufficient directions.

Good luck!