Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, Thomas.  That helps a lot.

Webmaster Tools is showing that I have 78 duplicate title tags.  Here is an example of tags they deem to be duplicate:

• www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts/
• www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts
• www.lifeinsure.com/life-insurance-trusts/

I have done 301 redirects from any posts beginning with "/blog/" to "/" Any idea why this is happening?

Dan,  thank you for your post om WP SEO.   It is the most informative piece of writing I have found on the subject.   I'm going to dig into my sites this weekend to make sure I have set up my blogs per your instructions.

The responses to this question have been great.  While I have written some very good content, I have learned that "if you build it, they will come" doesn't necessarily apply to writing content.

My question is, once the content is written, what are the best ways of getting it "out there?"

We were penalized for back links our SEO firm acquired for us long before the Penguin update.  As I found out, link removal can be a slow, painful process.  After months of trying to do it ourselves, we hired Virante, a company that is SEOMoz-recommended.  They are fast and efficient and it was well worth the money.

Only one of the directories they contacted wanted to be paid $10 per removed link.  It's no wonder they were one of the spammiest site contacted.

Thanks, Peter. I appreciate your feedback. We are going to move slowly until we get a response (or not) to our reconsideration request.

Rand, I appreciate your feedback.  We have been doing this for 9 years, thought we were doing a fairly decent job of building a brand (until we took a hit) and plan to continue for the long term, so I think your advice on building the new site(s) is a good one.

Once Google responds (or doesn't) to our latest request, we'll make that decision.  By the way, we have been using an SEOMoz-referred company to help us with link-removal and, despite Google's refusal to budge after a huge number of links have been removed, I think they're doing a very good job.  I know what they're up against, so I'm hoping to be able to give them rave reviews once this is done.

We were hit hard on both of our sites yesterday and can't afford to wait for the dust to settle, as some folks are advising. We have been attempting to work off a penalty on one of our sites by undergoing a massive (and expensive) link removal project over the last four months.  We are on our third reconsideration request and, hopefully, this last round of link removal will have done the job.  I'm hesitant to go in and "de-optmize" the site by changing title tags and changing the anchor text until the penalty is removed, but I'm not sure if that's the right plan of action.  I am, however, going to dig into the non-penalized site and change some title tags and anchor text.

Any thoughts on this strategy would be greatly appreciated.

You basically have to contact the websites from whence the links originate and ask them to remove the links, which can be an arduous process.

We were penalized for links one of our vendors got for us, so we are now going through the process of getting the offending links removed.  We are working with Virante, who is an SEOMoz recommended vendor and they are doing a great job.  Hopefully, as a result of their work, we will get our penalty lifted soon.

We host our blog on WordPress as part of our site.  The blog "address" is www.website.com/blog/post.  If I were to take the same content that's on this blog and post it on a Blogger account we have, would Google consider that duplicate content?  If not, would there be any benefit to doing this?

Thanks, Kane.  That's what I thought but I wanted to get some other viewpoints.

Many URLs of my site are long due to long navigation paths.  Here is an example:  http://tinyurl.com/6qc4syb.  My question is, if I shorten the urls (which I probably should do), does it matter that they no longer follow the navigation path?

Thanks for your answer and reference, Alan.  As many of our internal pages link to the home page, any juice the lost pages may have been passing to it may have been lost, correct?  I'm pretty sure it was our blog pages that weren't indexed during that period and many of them had some good links to them.

I am doing some research into why we were bumped from Google's first page into the 3rd, fourth and fifth pages in June of 2010.  I always suspected Caffeine, but I just came across some data that indicates a drop in indexed pages from 510 in January of that year to 133 by June.  I'm not sure what happened but I believe our blog pages were de-indexed somehow.

What I want to know is could that significant drop in indexed pages have had an effect on our rankings at that time?  We are back up to over 500 indexed pages, but have not fully recovered our first page positions.

Thanks, I'd appreciate anything you could find.  We were working with an SEO company when we dropped.  We had just switched companies when it happened, so my guess is the previous company was the culprit.

Thanks RDK.  Love your profile picture, by the way.   I am definitely playing it safe, but I might be suffering from a bit of paralysis as a result of my past experiences.  However, doing nothing is probably not going to get me back on page 1, so I am considering hiring a consultant,   Thank you for that suggestion.

In June of 2010, we lost rankings for four of our best key terms for our website http://tinyurl.com/6e73q52.  No other terms were majorly impacted, so our assumption was that is was either due to Caffeine or a filter on those terms.

We have worked with several companies using various strategies since then with little or no success.  We later found that their linking strategies were less than white hat (I'm being polite) The best advice I was given recently is that we were over-optimized for those four terms (life insurance, life insurance quotes, term life insurance, term life insurance quotes) and we need to balance that out by linking with other terms.  I know this will not be a fast process.

My problem is I see many of my competitors in this extremely competitive space using black hat (grey at best) techniques and rising quickly to the first page of Google.  Some of the SEO companies working with my competitors offered help to us, which I consider ethically questionable.  These four terms convert the best, as you would imagine, so it has become very cut-throat in this competitive environment.

We want to keep our hats white, as we are interested in longevity, not a quick hit and run (our site has been live and working for 8-plus years, by the way).  I have become extremely gun-shy and generally suspicious of working with a new SEO company, so my question (finally) is:

I would like some recommendations and success stories you have had with working with SEO companies (white hat only).  Thank you for listening to my rant.

Thanks for your help Wayne.

Best,

Richard

Thanks, Rachel.  That's what I thought, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to check with some Pros.

Best,
Richard

Thanks Wayne,

I'm okay with our domain name, but the urls of some of our pages have long navigation  paths (e.g. http://www.lifeinsure.com/education-center/life-insurance-videos/how-much-life-insurance-should-i-have).  A lot of our pages have urls like this.

Do you see any problem with a url this long and does Google put more weight on the title tag than on the url?

Best,

R

I'm sure this question must have been asked before but I can't find it.

I'm assuming that the title tag is far more important than the page's url.  Is that correct?   Does the url have any relevance to Google?

In running one of my campaigns in SEOMoz Pro, it was recommended that I reduce the amount of times a keyword is used to 15.  On the actual page, there are fewer than 15, but when you include the number of times it is used in drop-downs from the nav bar, the number is 53.

I know there is really no hard and fast rule about how many instances of a keyword make for keyword stuffing and the drop-downs only use the term where needed.  Without it's use, it would be difficult to navigate the site.

Is this a problem or should I focus on more important fixes?

We had a complete redesign of our website and moved it over to wordpress several months ago.  As url's changed, we had appropriate 301 redirects done.  Rankings for our top keywords dropped, but others remained intact.

Our SEO company told us rankings drop when a redesign is done, but I thought if we did all redirects properly (which they approved), it wouldn't be much of a problem.  Additionally, we've been steadily adding good new content.

Any advice?

On my blog posts, I have links to all the categories and months, dating back 5-6 years. This make the number of links on each blog page well over 100, which I understand might decrease the value of each page. Is there a problem with having more than 100 links on a page?