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Unsure why anyone would make that as a good answer as it didn't help me at all.

I was hit very hard in the last Google update. Yes, i was building links. Before i started doing that, i was earning $1 a day despite having a very good blog. i saw my income rise to $3000 a month over the last year.  Now I'm back to $1 a day.

I have suspected it was coming for the last two months because of the things Matt Cutt's has been saying. Worked hard to avoid it but not hard enough.

i stopped using blog networks after Build my Rank got hit.  I've been using another tool known as ABC3000 or Automatic Backlink Creator. Its not automatic. That's the tool that got me the rankings and that's the tool that took them away. I've removed all links from the tool now.

Yeah, I know its a bad sign to loose 10,000 links all at once but Google already knows so the best thing to do is get ride of them.

ALL of my sites were hit, not deindexed. I'm seeing minus 30 and minus 100 penalties.

One of the websites has 10,000 + Pages.

I've got one on page issue that revolves around my forum, vBulletin is causing a massive amount of duplicate page titles. I don't know how to fix that. It looks like each post creates a new page with the title of thread. I plan ot move it to another domain but I'm fearful of doing that. I'm not sure how. I will research it.

But the Google slap is massive and I'm really wondering if I have any hope of restoring a site with good content and good social signals with good engagement. A TRUE bounce rate of less than 30% was higher before the slap at about 23%. I have an average of 4 to 5 minutes per visitors. All my stats look great except 1.  That's SERP results as of April 24th, also known as my personal dooms day. haha

Trying to keep my head up but it is starting to get hard now.

Thanks for the help,

Rusty

To get backlinks from high pr websites and to get traffic. I use to use the Ezines a lot. I do't any more as they have become too picky about approvals and I now question their worth. One article I posted did get me some traffic.  It didn't seem to help with my PR much at all. It remained at one for a long time.

These sites often have a high PR but I've always wondered how much Google values the links from such sites. Google has to know that most of the content on these sites are publish in order to gain backlinks from the site owner.

I'll usually add a spun article to several of these sites for a new site.  Having multiple links from the same domain is not a huge value unless you get traffic from it. If the directory loves your content and features it, you'll get traffic. Otherwise, I'm not sure. I found the articles on Ezine competing with my site. They allow you to post the same content from  your site IF it is posted under the same author name. If you play with Ezine they will ban you in a heartbeat. Only post original content there. Not spun.  I often saw my article ranking slightly higher there than I did on my own site. I even removed on article from Ezines because of that.

Now if you're having trouble getting a site indexed at all, article directories will help.

Others swear by them and put a lot of time into them. I think blog networks work much better if they have a large number of sites that my articles get published on. That is what is meant by in content links. And they are the links that Google is said to put the main value on.  I'm in two such networks. One has almost all PR0 and PR1 sites. So its not of a great value. The other one though has given me links from PR4 and PR5 sites which is very good.

I'm about to drop them though and go with an out sourcing. I found someone that will write the content, spin it and publish to seven of the largest and best article directories. The cost is not cheap at $37 per article but the impact will likely be higher than me posting manually to the to the two blog networks each day. My cost are going to double and the number of different links and different articles is going to go down. However, I'll be on more websites with higher PR and I don't need to sign up for all those network blogs myself. One of which would cost me $99 a month.  I'm in that one now on a trial but I'm going to cancel it.

Now my thinking could be all wrong but that's how I see it.

I have a pitch/sales page that has a PR of 2, mozRank of  4.17 and a moz page authority of 38.  Not great numbers but considering its a sales page probably not bad. I don't have a lot of affiliates because the niche is quite small.  People that want to move to the Philippians and live the expat life in the Philippines.

Based on this, I'd have to say that I'm getting link juice from affiliates.  Most of the sites linking to me are PR0 or PR1 and Moz Rank is showing only root domains linking to the site. The site/page is a two page site and about a year old.

I have seen countless SEO "experts" suggest internal links are great to help the search engines find your content.  I wonder if that is true any more.  It seems like a sitemap would do a better job.

I think tags may even hurt the content I want to Google to know as most important.

I'm using Simple Tags on all of my WP sites. If it "sees" a word in the article that is also a tag it adds a link for that tag to a listing of all the articles with that tag. It only does this once per tag though.

Going on the experts advice, I thought this was a good idea.  But now, I'm thinking these tags reduce the value of links to my eBook or other content i want to feature. Which doesn't get tagged much since I don't promote it all that often on my site within content.  I make it nearly impossible to miss it on the site though.

What I do see the tags doing is helping users find the content. So I do see it improving the bounce rate and giving uses an assist in finding more content about what they are looking for.

I have tags marked as noindex follow. But I'm really considering now removing the links. I hate plugins anyway.  Seems I'm always finding another must have plugin though.

Now I'm thinking I'd be better off to just add links manually into the content that I really want to feature.  All these automatic links I'm generating can't be good.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Thanks Keri! Nice to have associates answering questions here.

I'm still going back and forth on keeping it. I've changed my mind three times in the last two days.

Is account sharing within ToS? One person suggested that.  Though I don't know of anyone to share it with.  

HAHA, yeah, it kind of thew me for a loop too. I've been putting way too much empahsis on mR.  Someone that is quite good with SEO explained it to me first and got it all wrong based on what I"m learning now.

When looking at the SEOMOZ tool bar and the link count. That is including internal links too?  I'm going to guess it does. Even Google Webmaster Tools does that when I look at links to my site in their interface, which is not often.  It does seem they give an option now for ONLY external. I don't recall.

It seems almost all tools do this, count the internal. Maybe I don't understand something here. I don't think that internal links do anything to improve search engine rankings other than helping Google find the content. And it seems like the sitemap would do a better job of that. But many SEO expert suggest that is a good idea, internal links to help Google find the content. I'm beginning to seriously doubt that. I'm going to ask another question on that top rather than delve into it here.

I know that PA uses mR to calculate a pages PA. so does it use external links only in that computation.

Thanks very much and it really is nice to see SEOmoz employees (i guess you're an employee) answer questions here. The support from you guys has been outstanding!

For the "report" you go to the on page option in the menu at the dashboard. You should have that there. If there is nothing there by default, try clicking on the sub menu for report card and you can enter any URL you like in there. It needs to be for a keyword you've setup for one of  your sites though.

I find this tool best for finding out what my competition is doing in regards to links.  Where are they getting them and then I try to get them from the same place. That way I pretty much match anything they do plus I have my own links. I just go after their links with the highest page authority.

I've only been in for three weeks but for keyword research I like SE Cockpit.  It frankly rocks. It has an API interface for SEOmoz so I get some moz data there.  I just don't get the link information that I need. For that I'm coming here.  This is a great tool to monitor your rankings and monitor your competition. You do that by setting up your competition in moz. I think in the link analysis.

I hope that helps.

Rob,

Thanks for replying with your thoughts.

I making less per hour than that.

Even as I was writing I was thinking about time.  I can get much of this data through another tool that i use and pay a hefty amount for. I get the mR, pA, and dA.  But I don't get the links that my competition is linking to them. I did go through that a bit last night and posted links where they had links. That's time consuming but at least i have the information now.  I could have got those from the free version but they also have good links past the first five. To go there I need the pro version.

I have a lot of ways of getting the ranking info and in real time. What I don't have with those tools is a history. I don't have good on page information but I found the pages I want to rank well already are optimized. So I'm getting that part mostly right.

I do save time on the ranking information and I learn a lot here. I may stay for the learning. I think I'm at the intermediate level in SEO now and it is hard for me to go beyond that. I'm not going to get it from any of the online courses or membership. I find i often now more than they do when I do try them.

Now what is this "keyword data report" you're referring too? Do you mean the keyword ranking? I'm not following you. i searched MOZ for that term but didn't find it.  I'd like to know more.

I don't use Google's tools for much of anything. I use one tool with an API to SEO Moz that now cost $100 a month that I use for keyword research and it is better for that purpose than anything I've seen here so far. But it provides little information on competition and I'm a competitive creator. I don't like it when someone beats me. With this, like MOZ says, its like I can read their mind. I don't think you can beat this tool for that.  Nothing I've seen does, well on tool might and provides even more link information but it their database is not updated very often so the data can get stale.

I signed up because i had a site in a highly competitive niche. I was beating sites like cNetm DPreview and Amazon.  Then I went from a number one listing to a number 51. That page is recovering and I did get some help here. I don't know if I got the right answer but i got some help, made some changes and that keyword is back to 17 in about a month. Hopefully it will continue its climb.

This community is very helpful and I don't think its open to non pro members?

Thanks again for your time.

Francisco,

Thanks. I'm not trying to get SEO clients just yet. I'm using it for my own research. Luckily this isn't my only income. I am suppose to be retired but then I found IM. haha

I keep going back on forth on this.  Thanks for your thoughts. There is a value that can't be measured in $$$. Learning. I know a lot about SEO but there's a lot i don't know too.

I've spent most of the day on SEOmoz today.  In part that is because it may be gone in a week.

That cost splitting idea sound very good to me if it is allowed in ToS.  I didn't see any where that I can setup an Sub account. I like it thought, thanks for thinking outside of the box.

I don't know what I"m going top do. I have until Monday to decide.

Again thanks for your time and thoughts.

I got confused when I was writing this or just a case of not keeping it simple.

The only competitors i care about are on page one of Google. So I can find their links by just putting them into OSE. Duh  However, it does work to export it and do a search.

I found this on the MOZ site.  It confused me.

"Whereas MozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links, external MozRank measures only the amount of mozRank flowing through external links (links located on a separate domain). Because external links can play an important role as independent endorsements, external mozRank is an important metric for predicting search engine rankings."

In the tool bar and other places in Moz am I seeing the combo Internal or the External and how do I get to each?  Maybe I'm just reading this wrong.

Here is an example. It seems to be of little value to rank for:

The word is "tool competition" and has a search volume for exact match is 46 and the CPC is over $17.

However when I google that term I saw no ads on my US or Philippines IP addresses. So I'm GUESSING that there are ads targeting a website of high value.  I know very little about AdWords.

Doesn't have much to do with SEO now that I think I figured it out.

I'm a newbie here. I've got a week left on my free trail. I really like SEOmoz, I might even love it a bit.

I'm trying to justify the cost. I usually don't spend money on my Internet Marketing.  I've done it through finally buying some tools to help me get there. Massive change in the last year. I'm a long ways from getting rich YET though. I've gone from $30 a month to $1000 a month in a year. So I think I'm on my way now.

I'm trying to figure out why I should continue my subscription and actually start paying for it. If I were a developer I can certainly see why but the cost would so go way up. I'm in the lowest level package with only five websites. I have 10 I'm working on. I know that's probably five to many at one time.

I'm having a little trouble justifying the cost at this time.

At my income level $100 a month is significant. I can see the value of seeing where my competition has backlinks. Sometimes my competition is Cnet. haha Well, I can beat them on a specific page at times. Hmm, can I search the URL list for links? Perhaps i can if I export it. That didn't occur to me. Now that could be of use if I can find my keywords. If their link is on Amazon though, I'm going to have trouble getting a link there. Maybe I should work on less competitive links but I made good money last month with one page that was beating them. WAS beating them.

How do you use SEOmoz? How do you justify the cost, that is offset the expense. If its not making me money i don't see the value. I can get a lot of this information for free but it sure is easier to get it here. Which saves me time. And the other tool i use isn't that good and not always reliable and slow.

I've got a week left on my free trail. I had decided to let it go but now I'm reconsidering. $100 is a lot for me and I need to spend more on SEO outsourcing. I wonder if I wouldn't be better off dropping it for a while and then coming back. This certainly isn't mean to be a critical post at all. I'm looking for reasons to stay and make better use of it.

Thanks for the thoughts,

Rusty

There you go, that's what I saw. I was seeing warnings from google about duplicate titles and descriptions. I know how to change the category title but don't see an easy way to change the description. You do that for each article? How?

Tags and categories can cause duplicate content. If it causes a penalty or not, I don't know.

On smaller sites I've seen the same page listed in the top ten search results for some of my sites. I think this is exactly what Google doesn't want.. I love it but I think Google won't.

I use a plugin on my WP sites called Platinum SEO that allows me to mark tags and categories as noindex, follow. I'm not sure that's the right thing to do but i do it.

I started doing this after noticing i had a lot of duplicate titles "warnings" in Google Webmaster Tools.

Long ago, I read where a Google employee said that if your website has links to the same content Google would not penalize you. That is basically what a tag or category is. Being paranoid though and seeing the duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools, I started dong that just to be safe.

I had a digital camera site take a beating on Google this month. It is slowly coming back up. I had noticed I had more than one result on page one in several cases before I got the smack down.  I had failed to setup my categories and tags as no index in the plugin mentioned above. I have no idea if that caused the spanking Google gave me. The articles were 80% original but i had pulled some content from Amazon without re-writing it so that might have caused it.. I really don't know. Its a fairly new site and I've seen that before so it might just be the Google dance.  Rankings are now improving I went to number one to number 53.  Back at 15 now.

I see the results in SE Cockpit which I am pretty sure that they get it direct from AdWords though.

I'm not bidding, I'm trying to evaluate the buying keywords. You know, needle in the hey stack. High CPC with high search and low competiton. (number of competitors is NOT an indication of competition strength. I don't even look at numbers for competition analyse.

I'm mostly curious why I see people paying huge fees so often on keywords that just happen to have low volume. If it was a brand name for their website, I could understand but usually it isn't.  I see this a lot, perhaps I'll go dig out an example or two. Looks like I need to.

I'm seeing a lot of keywords with very little traffic but high, sometimes very high cost per click in AdWords.

Can someone explain to me why this is common?

I'm researching buying keywords.  With the low traffic they seem like little value but when I see people $20 a click it seems like high converting and thus maybe worth going after. But the high cost is just not making any sense to me for many of these keywords.

Thanks.

Thanks, I also use Statcounter and have been using that by just browsing the list. Wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something here. Hmmm, I need to upload a picture too.

I'm looking or keywords that I may have failed to target.  It would seem that the traffic data SEO MOZ provides could be  a source for that.

I thought I'd look at: URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search and URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search but I can only find the top 10 results or each.  I already know my most popular keywords, I need to find ones that are not getting as much traffic as they could.

Is there a way to dig down deeper into this? I'm having trouble finding the value in this information for the top 10. What am I missing?

Thanks!

Oh I laughed about blaming it on the kids but personally, I think it is more likely the dog.  haha

I don't THINK I have a think content issue. But I'll re-write those features just to be on the safe side.

I think I built too many links too fast, thousands of them and then stopped. I wont do that again. I think it is a sudden decrease in link velocity. I've have struggled with link velocity a lot and finally, I think I understand why it is important to continue with it.

You touched on it. To me it could look unnatural but like I said a small site could be popular and get lots of links. Another SEO expert told me that is true but if the backlink velocity drops to fast it could be that Google takes that as a signal the page is no longer popular as well as the possible natural linking problems.

I will continue with my blog network, slower but better quality than the others I built.  However, I will also work on the duplicate content issue. I have lots of content with no links just  to help with the thin but now I realize that a page could still be thin too. Will make things a bit better if I do that too.

As always, I'm all ears.

Yes, I made them no-index follow. I've now removed the no-follow on category and tags but that's the way it was before. the drop.

As for the duplicate content, only the bullet text is duplicate. That's 105 words out of 890. That's 13% and it is too high for me. I'll re-write that and resolve that just to be on the safe side.  Its really two of the bullets that are causing it. But I'll change them all, looks like I got lazy there. I'll check the other articles on the site as well to make sure I didn't do that on those.

The duplicate content issue is as clear as mud. Now I know that Goggle says they don't penalize a site for duplicate content on other sites. Of course, that doesn't hold true for autoblogs. But that doesn't seem to be true when one considers backlinks. I'm uncertain. You seem very knowledgeable and I'm sure you are. What you basing the statement that onsite duplicate content will not hurt you. I'm pretty sure I've read on Google site itself that they HATE that. The reason they do is because of having the same page show up in the SERPs more than once. And I clearly had that going on before.

Yeah, It was Matt Cutts, I just couldn't remember his last name.

I'm really having trouble with this issue and based on what I've seen around the web, I'm not alone. I've got one fairly large site with over 1500 indexed pages. Google Web Tools showed a LOT of pages with duplicate titles and it took me forever to get those to disappear. Finally they did after I removed the index for categories and tags.

I'm having a lot of trouble with canonical URLs. I know I'm not alone. i've read much and understand little. I learned the most for an SEOmoz help link.

If I understand it, the intent is to tell SE where the main article is. I turned the canonical option back on in SEO platinum but then turned it off again.  I'll show you why. It gave me two different links in the header. One for my category and one for my article.  That seems counter productive to me and exactly what I don't want to happen.

Thanks for all of your help.

I probably shouldn't have marked your message Good answer as that made the thread answered. LOL oh well, I'll know next time. I don't want to take up all of your time.

Thanks very much for the help.

I'm really glad you brought up the no no-index issue.

Most of that was probably created after the drop and I'll tell you why I did it to hopefully learn why I shouldn't do it.

I no-index privacy policy and disclaimer earnings type pages. I do that because I don't  want those pages to dilute my money pages. Is that a mistake?

I also went in and usually do it from the beginning and set tag and categories to no index. I'm not sure when I did that on this site but I think it was after the drop. I'm not sure. The reason I do it is that seems to create duplicate listings in the SERPs.  Or I thought it was afraid of duplicate content. Is my thinking wrong on that? I see the same pages/articles listed when I do site:domain.com and sometimes I get two listings for the same page on page one of Google. One for the article and one for the tag or category. I use SEO Platinum to accomplish this I also removed categories and tags from my sitemap using the xml sitemap generator plugin.

On the scripts, now that is something totally new to me. I'm pretty sure I did that after the drop. When I did site:domain.com I saw a lot of them listed. My robots.txt file looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Sitemap: http://bestdslrreview.net/sitemap.xml

This is likely what is causing the no index on the scrips/plugins. So I should remove those to lines? I'm going to go ahead and do that since I was never sure that they should have been there in the first place.

Also I do not include categories and tags in my sitemap, should I start including those in the sitemap?

Thanks very much for the help. Sometimes I over think when I don't know exactly what the answers are.

Thank you. I think it will come back too but the too many links issue.....

I have always wondered about that and I seem to get different advise.

I forgot his name, the Goggle guy, Matt ??? most of you will know... He wrote a post indicating you can't link too many times.  That is what most of the people that say you can't build to many links to fast base their advice on. But to me, I've always wondered if it makes since to have 2000 links to a site with five articles. Then I reason people could love a site with only a few pages, I'm sure that happens naturally at times?

If you're right, then I've made it worse because I've been building more links but aiming at higher PR sites when I do it. I've got a lot of links from PR 0 sites but in open site explorer it appears I have a pretty good natural looking distribution of links across different PR sites so I'm not at all sure.

I'm all ears if you and others have more to say to help me with this issue.

My site bestdslrreview dot net was ranking number one for Canon T3i. I was amazed considering my competition. Canon T3i was at number 3 to 5 usually for US traffic.. Canon 7d review was ranking number 2 and Canon 7D was on page one.

Canon 7D keywords dropped about 10 places but Canon T3i Review dropped about 50. and same for Canon T3i.

I worry about a number of things, including thin affiliate site but I don't know, my articles are original. I also worry about to many links with my keywords in anchor text.

My on page results from SEOMOZ look great to me. This drop was my main reasons for going ahead and signing up. Hoping I could find out what happened.

The site is only about six months old. I waited probably three months before doing any significant link building.

The good thing is, I was ranking high from Black Thursday until a few days before Christmas.  It can't be someone else just started doing SEO as I fell far too fall. Some kind of penalty.  I had Google do this to another of my sites once though and after a couple of months it bounced back for most of my keywords. A site very much like this one.

Is this just the Google Dance?

Thanks