Hello,

I know you can add rel="author" to blog posts but has anyone tried adding them to normal pages?

Does it work?

Does it improve CTR?

Thanks,

Scott

Hello,

One of our sites have been hit by the first penguin update back in April and ever since then we have been removing links and submitting reconsideration requests...

It only seems to have affected our home page as some of our internal landing pages are still ranking OK in the SERPS #1 / #2.

I'm just wondering if we created a landing page for this keyword and drove high quality / relevant links to this landing page could we get it to rank higher than our homepage even though our Homepage is on the 5th page.Hope the above make sense.

Has anybody had any joy with this?

Great reply Don!

The main reason to ask the question really is for general knowledge.

Our main site was hit pretty hard in the penguin update back in April and we have been removing links and completing overhauling our website to try and get out of the penalty.

We / I was just checking this couldn't be effecting the panda update neither.

We are thinking of targeting the models slightly more though like "bwm 3 series warranty"

How do you fully test long tail keywords...

When I say they are the same template, here is an example:

http://goo.gl/PzoHO

http://goo.gl/6z5hJ

Let me know what you think of the above.

Howdy Guys,

We currently have around 19 landing pages that are near enough identical for each make of car.

The content on each page isn't identical but you can tell its a template.

Do you think we should change this and just target models instead of makes.

Thanks,

Scott

Great answer yet again Ryan.

Thanks for your detailed response.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

I wonder if any of you can help me out.I'll be shortly submitting another reconsideration request to Google.I've been working on removing bad / spammy links to our site http://goo.gl/j7OpL  over the past 6 months and so far every reconsideration request I have submitted has been knocked back with the following message:----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://goo.gl/j7OpL  ,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://goo.gl/j7OpL  for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines   .

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank    or participating in link schemes   .

We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration    in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum   for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've removed over 70% of all our links - we had some large sitewide links on big sites with exact match anchor text to our main money keyword, I've also removed a large link network that our previous SEO company setup.

Today I have completed an overhaul of all our internal links, near enough every blog post that we added to the site had a link back to the home page with an exact match money keyword.

1 thing that I did notice was when we got hit by the penalty it didn't affect every keyword we target just our main / most competitive keyword, yes some of our other keywords took a dip in rankings but not as much as our main keyword.

When I submit our next reconsideration request I'll also attach a spreadsheet of links that I can't remove either because I can't find any contact details / blocked by whois or I'm just not getting a response when I email them.

If anyone can point out anything else that I have missed or might have missed that would be great.

Thanks,

Scott

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yea, I'm keeping all correspondence in an excel spreadsheet which I'll submit with our next reconsideration.

Thanks again.

Howdy Guys,

I'm currently working through our 4th reconsideration request and just have a couple of questions.

Using Link Detox (www.linkresearchtools.com) new tool they have flagged up a 64 links that are Toxic and should be removed.

After analysing them further alot / most of them are link directories that have now been de-indexed by Google.

Do you think we should still ask for them to be removed or is this a pointless exercise as the links has already been removed because its been de-indexed.

Would like your views on this guys.

Hi EGOL,

Thanks for the reply and a really good answer.

Thanks again.

Scott

Mark,

Thanks for taking your time to reply.

Yea I guessed as much - I'll get started on converting it to wordpress!

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

Hope your all OK.

Apart from our main site we have a static comparison site that's now ranking really high for some of our big keywords.

At the moment the site only has 2 pages and I'm wondering weither or not to setup a blog on the site to not only increase the pages indexed but also increase our longtail keyword rankings...

I'll be able to create a new article aday.

Would like your input guys.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

I'm completing a overhawl of our website at the moment have a certain penguin killed our site for our main keyword.

I'm currently working on our internal linking as most of our blog posts have a link back to our home page with the main money keyword.

At present we have 3,331 internal links and our site has only 1,000 pages.

Can you get penalised for having too many internal links with exact match anchors.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Eyepaq,

Thanks for the reply.

By "knocked back" - I mean we have submitted a reconsideration request and they have said we still have unnatural links...

1 thing I remember is that we never received a message with WMT we actually filed for a reconsideration request and then recieved a message back saying we had bad links, could this be slightly different?

Thanks,

Scott

Howdy Guys,
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request.

I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up...

In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott

Howdy Guys,

I noticed a weird thing over the weekend - our main keyword has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we had dropped down to #79.

On Friday I decided to change some on-page optimisation and changed the title tag and some

tags.

When I've ran my rank tracker this morning we have jumped up to #62... Has anyone else noticed just a simple change boosts rankings?

Second Questions We took all our social buttons off the website back in January as no-body was using them but from a few recent reports I've seen having the buttons on the site help organic rankings...

Is this true?

Scott

Thanks for the reply Anthony.

I've just ran 100 of the domains though and they all have the same IP Address - trying to get old of the company in question is proving a little bit more difficult...

I've just been reading this interesting post about 1 of the main domains names tho, what do you think of this? Could this have a big affect on our site?

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/

Hi Guys,

Just wondering if anyone can help me out...

We have recently been hit by the Google penguin update and I'm currently working though all the bad / spammy backlinks that previous SEO companies have built for us.

I have come across 1 particular domain www.justgoodcars.com they seem to have a lot of different domain names:

<colgroup><col width="390"></colgroup>
| http://www.justpulsarcars.com/nissan-pulsar-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
| http://www.justpumacars.com/ford-puma-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
| http://www.justpuntocars.com/dutch-site/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom |
| http://www.justpuntocars.com/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom |

Now all of theses domains names have exactly the same IP Address?? Above is just a few I would say there are 100s of them.

Do you think this could have an affect on us?

Thanks,

Scott

Thanks Stephen.

That would be great if you could update this for me.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

I'm looking to purchase 1 of the above services and I'm just wondering which one you guys think is best?

Looking a ahrefs they seem to update there index more often.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Malcolm,

Thanks for the reply mate - i'll get looking for some new links today.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

I wonder if you can give me any pointers:

We have an exact match domain name that is ranking #5 for our main keyword and is getting some good traffic through the site.

We have just created a landing page for another keyword with fresh content that will be updated every week.

The question is, I've been building links to my domain name and I'm just wondering if we built another link from 1 of the sites we already have a link on and point it to this new landing page would this help it rank better or not?

Hope the above makes sense.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the reply matey - I'm not looking for an easy option It was just what someone has suggested to us.

I'm going to continue removing the links and see what happens on the next refresh.

Has anyone seen there rankings shoot back to what they were before the penalty...

Howdy Guys,

Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take.

For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet...

We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links.

I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site?

Or

Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them?

Has anyone had any success in 301ing?

Thanks,

Scott

Howdy Guys,

Does anybody still use prweb.com or prnewswire.com?

I'm thinking of signing up but just want someone else's views on the sites?

Thanks,

Scott

But they have asked us to remove the links that are un-natural?

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

So we have just received a message from Google confirming that we have an un-natural link profile.

We are currently in the process of gathering all our links and going through them 1 by 1, at the moment I'm just stuck deciding if we should remove this link.

It's a high profile PR site, its updated every day with quality news??

What do you guys think of this?

Thanks,

Scott

Hello,

At the moment were submitting around 3 - 4 guest posts a week to relevant, high PA and high DA sites and we are seeing some great jumps in our rankings for our microsites.

I would say 1 link on 1 site all the time, the more linking domains the better.

One thing I would say is try to keep a natutal looking link profile, don't over-do your "money keywords" push more brand and even add some naked links www.example.com

That's my penny worth...

Hope it helps.

OK  - We are about to start the process of removing some bad / spammy links.

Looking at OSE and WMT they both have different links? Some are the same but alot are different?

Which tool would you pay more attention too?

Or

Would you merge the 2 documents together?

Thanks,

Scott

Hello,

After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links....

Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links??

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Moosa,

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Yep I think that's what they have done really.

I'm going to remove all the low quality links that we have, the only worrying thing is now if remove alot of these low quality links will we drop even further?

We do also have another good domain that is currently ranking higher than us in the SERPS which has had no SEO completed on it.

Do we 301 our main site to this new domain??

OK where do we start?

Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company...

Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions,

tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site.

YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
Scott

Howdy Guys, I've just been listening to the latest edition of whiteboard Friday regarding the over-optimization penalty. I'm just wondering if we should remove alot of make specifc landing pages... For instance we have a landing pages for our top 20 cars... For instance "bmw keyword" or "audi keyword" What do you guys think? remove them and 301 the pages to the homepage? Thanks, Scott

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the reply.

We have seen a significant drop in rankings other the past few months, we have dropped from 3rd to 13th... I'm just trying to figure out what has happened and how we can get over this drop.

One thing that I have noticed when looking at our link profile our old SEO agency has signed us up for alot of Link Directoires - when I've been running this sites through Netpeak checker I can see that alot of the sites have been de-indexed via Google.

I personally feel that we just need to improve our link profile and we should see a rise in the SERPS.

If you could shed any light on this it would be great Peter.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Guys,

I've noticed that Google is starting to de-value site-wide links...

Our previous SEO agency sourced us a site wide link on a big website and at the moment within Google Webmaster Tools its showing 749,726 links from this 1 source.

Do you think this is too many?

Could this be being flagged by Google?

Here is the site: http://tinyurl.com/7bttw3b

Cheers,

Scott

Thanks for the reply mate - yep that's what I think it is! The strange thing is our biggest competitor WD have got amazing links from high authority domains but still can't get top!

Thanks for your response.

Looking at the copyscape there are a few copies of our homepage out on the internet, we have alot of car dealers that will just pinch content off our site and re-use it.

At the moment looking at linkscape there are around 3 copies.

Thanks for the reply.

Yep  I agree, but the annoying thing is - running and OSE on some of our competitors shows that they don't really have any better links if anything they are worse...

Our page rank hasn't dropped its still at 4.

Ok guys where do I start...

Lets go back 12months, so were in April 2011 and ranking 6th for our main keyword 'car warranty' things were going well, we didn't really move up or down the SERP and for our other keywords we were ranking well.

We decided to use an SEO agency to try and boost our rankings as we were getting ready to launch a national TV advert. It started off really well, we were moving up the rankings nicely and within 9 months we were 3rd for 'car warranty' we were happy!!

On the 7th of Jan 2012 we dropped to 10th in the SERP for our main keyword and we were gutted we contacted the agency straight away trying to find out what had happened - we got news back that a site that they were using for links (around 20) had crashed for the Christmas break and the links had been deindexed by Google, we were told give it 2 weeks and we should see them again... 2 months later we were still at 10th and they had changed there mind and decided it was a 60day filter.

We waited again until the filter had been removed and we still didn't move anywhere, with this in mind we have now left the agency and moved back to in-house.

So back to today - we are now shifting between 10th and 11th on the SERPS which Is causing us some pain.

I'm trying to work out what the hell has happened to our site, have we been penalized? Have we over optimized or is it just purely down to our link profile...

Here are some stats:

Domain Authority: 49
Homepage Authority: 59
MozTrust: 4.43
MozRank:  4.51

So looking at our campaign within SEOMoz our site does seem to be OK - we have a few little issues but nothing that is causing a problem to our SEO. Our hompage and landing pages all of a report card of A so I can't see it being an over optimization penalty.

Looking at our external links our anchor text is spread quite nicely between some of our keywords and our brand name.

I don't personally think we have been penalized and we don't have any messages within Google Webmaster tools, i wish we did that way I would know where to star!! haha I personally think its just our link profile - looking at our links through OSE they don't look too bad, yes there are some low quality link directories but there are only a few.

I think if we improve this and get some strong links back we should see an improvement but Its driving me mad at the moment and I just can't seem to put my finger on it, if anyone has got any ideas or could shed any light on our issue it would be great.

Sorry for the long message but I just had to explain our past and where we are up to...

Thanks!

Hey man, thanks for the response.

I'd say its quite competitive and yes there are some new people that have suddenly popped up on the first page.

The annoying thing is a lot of the websites that are ranking on the first page have very bad links a lot of them are blog comments and other rubbish.

We have changed some of the content but only to make it more SEO friendly...

Hi Guys,

Were wondering what to do about our main domain name, we were ranking quite high for our main keyword and before Christmas our site dropped to 10th and we have been there for a while - last week our site dropped again onto the second page.

The worrying thing is now our main domain name is now ranking 1 place above another domain name that we don't really use but its an exact match domain name for our target keyword. This exact match domain has hardly any links pointing to it and it currently has a 22 domain authority.

We are wondering if we 301 our main site to this exact match domain would it rank higher than the top of the 2nd page where we are now for our main domain.

Cheers.

I just ran an OSE on a competitor of ours that they have a few links from this website, http://www.tz-online.de/ would this not damage there site?

Hi Guys,

I was listening to the over optimization penalty Matt Cutts was talking about at SXSW over at Search Engine Land.

http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627#

Looking at my on-page reports through SEOMOZ I have A report cards for each page, will we be OK or do we need to take a look?

Thanks,

Scott

Hello,

I have been using a free trial of SEO SpyGlass and from what I can see we have a few low value links...

Do you think we should get these removed?

Is SEO Spyglass worth its money?

Hi Mate,

OK that's good news then!

Yea our dealer site is near enough an exact copy but it isn't indexed in google so it shouldn't cause a problem...

Cheers,

Scott

Hi Stubby,

I can't seem to find it for some reason... Is it on the homepage?

It would be great if you could send me a print screen.

Thanks.

Does anybody know a problem where you can see how your internal linkings look to the search engines?

Thanks for your help Stubby..

I've managed to find this content:

"It's a fact that a quality car warranty can save you money. Warrantywise offers the highest level of car warranty cover at the most competitive prices in the UK. Without a car warranty you could end up paying unwanted garage fees that could leave you with wallet busting garage repair bills. A car warranty from Warrantywise is a brilliant way to secure your finances and your cars future, no one likes nasty surprises especially when it causes problems both financially and for your everyday life. A car warranty is an ideal way to protect yourself and your car! Warrantywise are one of the best car warranty providers in the UK, with competitive prices, friendly, helpful staff and fantastic car warranty offers, you will not be disappointed with your car warranty policy."

But I still can't find that id="SeoHeapKeywords"

Yea I've logged into Google Webmaster tools and can't see any messages from Google at all...

I really want to find this hidden div as I can't see it anywhere...