Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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?

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

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

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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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 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

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!

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?

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

Hi Guys, We have recently took a dip in rankings for some of our main keywords. We have had an SEO company look after our campaign but when we noticed we were moving down the rankings and not up we have decided to leave them. Our rankings dropped on the 7th January 2012 and haven't picked backup we are still #10 we were #3 on the 1st page... From what I can see using SEOMOZ and other tools our site has a good profile and is dominating some of our competitors when we look at our link analysis report. I was wondering if we submitted a 'Reconsideration Request' to Google would they tell us if we have a manual penalty against our site. At the moment we are struggling to work out what could be causing the problems. Thanks, Scott

Hello, I wonder if anyone can point us in the right direction. Our main domain name has got a good SEO profile the domain is 12 years old and we have some good reputable links. On the 7th of Jan our website dropped in the rankings from 3rd to 10th for one of our main keywords and from then onwards some of our other keywords have dropped. We have a lot of landing pages that target specific keywords which look like a template page but just with the content changed. Can anyone pin point what could of caused this problem or has anyone experienced this before and knows how to fix it. I personally think we have been hit by the panda. Thanks, Scott

Hello, We are due to get a link on the daily telegraph page (UK Newspaper) very shortly. We have just noticed there links are within javascript, what do you think of this link? | |

Howdy Guys, We are in the process of changing our sites structure dramatically, at the moment this is how an internal page / URL reads: Www.mydomainname.co.uk/ww.sys/pagename We will he changing our site over to wordpress very shortly and will have the correct permalinks in place. We are scared it's going to hurt our rankings as we are in the top 6 for a highly competitive keyword at the moment - the bouns is our domain name is 11yrs old and we have a PR of 4. We have setup all the 301s in web.configuration file just wondering if any of you have made a dramatic change like this and been dropped off the rankings.....

Hi Guys, Hope you can answer this question. Our website is currently on the first page in position 6 for a competitive keyword, domain is 11years old and currently has a PR of 4. At the moment there are 4 competitors above us one of which as two listings, they have managed to do this by creating a page dedicated to the keyword. E.g www.ourdomain.co.uk/key-word.html. Do you think we would achieve a good ranking if we built the same page but with fresh content and links pointing to that page? Cheers.