Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi David,

Directories are a difficult one. The recent Penguin updates (and to some degree, Panda) have pretty much destroyed the generic directories. However, the benefits of local directories and citations are still there! (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx)

With regards to the particular directory that you're querying. The quality is low, even for directory standards. You're probably doing more harm than good by mass submitting to 50 directories that are linking out to all sorts of drop-shipping / foreign / low quality sites.

Matt Cutts also made a video explaining how Google treats Paid Directories. There are a few good directories that request a review fee that may be worth it - BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo, but the rest are just paid links.

What your agency are doing isn't the darkest of black-hat SEO, but it's definitely low quality, lazy and against Google guidelines. 50 directories probably won't harm your site. However if the majority of your backlink profile is made up of directories, it definitely won't be doing your site any favours.

tl;dr

• Local Directories - Good
• Genuine Review Fee Based Directories - Possible Benefits
• Mass Submissions / Paid Directories - Bad

If you'd like to read more, I wrote a post about my thoughts on directories back in September that I feel still rings true!

watch?v=rKUlVquEImc

Hi Kami,

It's unfortunate, but a number of modern day e-commerce platforms still suffer from poor canonicalisation and multiple URL's.

If possible, rather than blocking off access to those queries via robots.txt or meta, I'd start by trying to specify a canonical URL when a query is created.

E.G

Query: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all
Canonical: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html

Failing that I'd try to implement a "follow,noindex" meta tag or via x-robots if you're any good with apache.

If that's still a no go, then try GWT, Google is getting much better at handling dynamic URL's within e-commerce platforms and you can specify which queries Google should ignore directly within GWT

There's a great post on Moz that deals with e-commerce and canonicalisation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/qa-from-ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues-webinar - I'd suggest starting there!

As a last resort I'd look to block the URL's within robots.txt, but this prevents crawlers from flowing freely within your site and can result in poor indexation.

Hi,

You need to connect your site to a personal G+ account. At the moment it's not possible to connect the rel=author tag to a business. You can connect the rel=publisher to a business page but it's not an ideal solution.

If you're ok with having the e-commerce authorship go to 1 person then the following posts will tell you everything you need to know about implementing the tag.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/

Hope this helped!

Hi Peter,

A couple of things - directories do work in moderation, however i'd steer clear of the majority of them. Local directories and a few high profile (BOTW/DMOZ) are probably the only one's i'd ever suggest you submit to.

Building backlinks can be done in a number of ways

I'd recommend you start by reading - http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011 I've also written a rather length post - http://www.sebastiancowie.com/seo/link-building/101-link-building-techniques-for-2011-inc-white-grey-and-black-hat/

With regards to your query about opensiteexplorer. The last index update for OSE was on the 9th of November, this tends to update monthly, so just because it's not showing in OSE, doesn't mean you haven't created a backlink to your website.

Has the site accepted your submission, and can you see the link on their page? If so, you've created a backlink!

Definitely seeing swings across the board in UK SERPS. Some clients way up, some down. A lot of sites that are ranking in the top 10 are using low quality blog comment spam, obviously purchased links etc. Looks like we've taken a giant step back.

Just need to look at results for a term like payday loans or short term loans to see just what's working at the moment.

Usually the fastest way to do this would be to first block that url off with either a robots.txt or robots meta tag, but as the page no longer exists i'd recommend going to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a remove URL request (image below).

That's all there is to it!

removeurl.png

Anything in GWT? Doesn't look like a penalty on the face of it and the backlink profile isn't too bad.

I had a client that had something similar happen to them when they released a duplicate of their site in a different country. Ended up having to do a reconsideration request and everything sorted itself out after that.

One thing I have noticed is the following two pages are identical and Bing returns the top 1 as the first result.

http://www.plussizeplum.com/plus-size-lingerie/plus-size-lingerie.php

http://www.plussizeplum.com/

I'd run through the site with Screaming Frog, check for any duplicate pages and make sure the canonical tags are in place becuase I can't see any on either of the above two pages at the moment.

I was going to write a long post about the lack of ethics and how they're basically creating competiting sites and you're paying them for the privilege but I think "Horse Shit" pretty much sums everything they've said.

Hi Guys,

I'm currently in the middle of creating a comprehensive blog post covering SEO Tools that I wouldn't be able to work without. So far I've got the following down, as I use these on a day to day basis and they make my job infinitely easier.

1. SEOMoz / OSE
2. AHrefs
3. BuzzStream
4. Scrapebox
5. Xenu / Screaming Frog
6. Excel
7. GWT / Analytics / Adwords Keyword Tool

What tools or subscriptions do you use on a daily basis and couldn't be without?

Hey C,

I'd like to start my response by pointing out, if you're trying to aquire links from sites that you feel have been generated for content purposes only, then surely it would be better to target higher quality sites? Sure these sites are working now, but it's better to invest in real content on real sites in the long run, as the effectiveness of this epidemic of low quality guest posting is going to come to an end soon.

However, I'm not one to judge and we've all been there SO to answer your question - When checking outbound links I tend to use either screaming frog or xenu then dump the export into Scrapebox. I check for anomalies and whether the pages that the sites are linking to are cached (occasionally PR as well). From there you can export the links into your favourite backlink checking tool (LinkResearchTools / OSE API / Ahrefs) etc.

Other Outbound Link Checkers:

Xenu
Screaming Frog
Wintzell - http://www.wintzell.net/seo-tools/domain-outbound-links-check.php
Bad Neighborhood Tool - http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm (Checks external sites as well so can take a long time)

Not sure what the averages are, but I think a bit of common sense goes a long way in this instance. If the site has 100 guest posts, and 3+ outbound links in the author bio per page + sidebar links, you know it's overkill.

On the otherhand the site accepts occasional guest-posts and consists of high quality content, then they may have the same number of links as most good sites will link contextually to relevent sources. So averages / figures don't really help in this instance

Hi Tyler,

I'm assuming these are all legitimate movies, or educations films that are free to download and not infringing of any copyright of course...

A traditional wordpress setup stores all post data within a MySQL database, and then any media file uploaded is stored outside of this database, so the only limitation you may hit is finding a host that will give you 500gb of storage space. You'd probably find something around the £20/month mark if you're lucky, but most hosts will question why you'd need such a large amount of space and aren't really serving any data + if you are hosting illegal files you'll leave yourself open to all sorts of legal trouble.

Forgot to mention you could use a service like dropbox or google drive insted for the same kind of price.

Hi Mark,

Can't help you with the "lack text content" but for everything else I'd recommend:

Xenu - Free

A1 Website Analyser - Free 30 Day Trial

Screaming Frog - £99/year

--

As a bonus when doing a content audit for a site, I'd recommend CheckDog - it's not free but a spell checker for your entire site is invaluable.

I'd agree with Marcus here. You may have the slightest negative influence on your results because of the IP address, but it's negligible. If there were low quality / spam / hacked sites on the same IP address you may find that is affecting your results.

Putting it another way, the time it would take to migrate from Cobalt to a different server you could invest in a bit of content or backlink building that would mitigate any negative effects that sharing the IP address may have.

You've probably already done this as well, but could you get in touch with the host and see if you can get a dedicated IP address?

I think you've answered your own question in a way. Link pages come in a variety of formats. Most universities / government / non-profit websites have link or resource pages. If you can get a legitimate backlink from those properties then you're doing it right!

If on the other hand you're targeting "resource / link" pages that are obviously trading links in an attempt to funnel pagerank or manipulate serps then steer clear.

Hi Allen,

After taking a quick look at the site in question and investigating the pages that are still indexed, i'd recommend the following plan of action:

Change your robots txt to allow the crawling of the offending pages in question
Change the response code from 301 to 404
Use the remove URL tool within GWT for all of these offending pages

Wait a few days, for all the pages to be purged from the cache and then if you're not seeing any results submit another reconsideration request. As it's most likely an algorithmic penalty there's not much they can do, but they may crawl the site again when it's clean.

Hey Peter,

Looking at OSE the site in question has "2,781" anchor text links for Zen Cart Skins, but the majority of those are sitewide. There are only 17 unique root domains contributing to that particular anchor text.

They are also pointing to http://www.zen-cart-skins.com/ which is 301 redirecting to MCC.

What i'd look at and try to reverse engineer is the 78 linking root domains for "computer repair" - the majority of which are blog spam and low quality.

With some high quality link building you should be able to overtake him eventually.

Hi Rory,

As I don't have access to the site URL or tools there's only so much help I can give, but what I would suggest is that you start by analysing the data within Bing webmaster tools and see if there are any issues within there!

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

There's no short supply of webmasters looking to guest post on external sites. What I'd suggest doing if you're looking to accept guest posts is sign-up to Blogger Linkup and MyBlogGuest as you'll be sent out in an e-mail shot and have the ability to "bid" on available guest posts for your website.

When I look for suitable sites to guest post on I tend to look at the design quality of the site, number of outbound links, whether the site is selling links, do they just accept guest posts, the quality of the other guest posts, PR / DA etc.

If you're looking to make it easy for webmasters to submit to your site I'd recommend having a "write for us / contribute" page that details your application process - e.g minimum words, what topics you're looking for, backlink rules.

Site design won't necessarily influence some submitters, but the better the overall site quality, the more likely you are to have higher quality submissions.

Hope that's been helpful!

Hi Peter,

Keyword density is something that you should no longer being taking into consideration when creating content. Make sure that they key term you're targeting is in the Title and at least once in the content and you're sorted, although in many instances you can see sites that are ranking perfectly fine based on backlink profile alone.

This can be shown by doing a search for SEO Consultant in Google UK. The first result doesn't have "SEO Consultant" once on the homepage.

If the content is semantically related to the topic you're writing about, I'd like to think that Google is adept enough at ranking the page of its own accord without resorting to "2-3%" keyword density.

Hi John,

Hope I'm not too late to the party! When checking URL's for their cache status I suggest using Scrapebox (with proxies).

Be warned, it was created as a black-hat tool, and as such is frowned upon, but there are a number of excellent white-hat uses for it! Costs $57 one off

I do take DA / PA into consideration and tend to set limits based on the difficulty of the niche I'm trying to build for and the availability of sites that may approve outreach attempts. So for incredibly difficult niches I will accept lower DA / PA as sites with better metrics may be more difficult to approach.

As a rule I'll try to approach sites with a DA/PR of 20+ but it's worth looking at every opportunity as some newer sites may be investing a lot of time into their site and it will eventually become an authority site that stops accepting submissions.

This all goes out the window for local / low difficulty terms though as sometimes a couple of low PA/DA links that are hyper relevent are more beneficial than chasing metrics alone

If you've got an older version of IIS - http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-IIS.asp or if you've got IIS 7.0+ then install the URL rewrite module - http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module then read - http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module

If the site structure is the same, then you can write 1 rule to redirect all the old pages to your new domain including anything after the trailing slash. If not then you'll have to do it manually (not too difficult if you use excel).

The only downside to doing individual redirects would be the additional server load, and time to compose the rewrite but if the site has a lot of backlinks, then the benefits from taking the time to redirect the entire site far outweight the negatives.

I'd also recommend verifying your sites within GWT (if you haven't already done so) and notifying Google of a change of address as well.

Regarding expiration of old domains. I think 6-12 months is a safe bet.

Hi Harvey,

Good job on the gov link

Answering your A/B test, although there are a few posts out there that have shown a reduction in visibility as a result of cloaking etc, but assuming you correctly implement the test there shouldn't be an issue.

I know most multivariate testers offer a/b testing based on referral URL so that shouldn't have an effect on the link or Google's opinion of it.

Ultimately Google engages in the same kind of tests and if you visit the Google homepage in I.E you get a little box asking you to install Chrome, so a minor test like this shouldn't have any negative implications.

VisualWebsiteOptimizer definitely offers referal URL testing and I believe Optimizely does as well - if you're a pro member you can get 3 months free of VWO or 25% off Optimizely packages

Hi Chunlei,

There are a number of tools that can help you source and keep track of your link building process. I've listed a few of the most popular ones below:

• Raven Tools

• BuzzStream

• Link Prospector

One of these should fit the bill

Hi,

Sorry to hear you're having issues, we've all accidently blocked off our site at one point or another I'm sure.

You've done pretty much everything you can do to get your site re-indexed. The only other thing I could suggest is to do a fetch URL within GWT, then take it a step further by submitting your URL and all linked pages.

If you haven't recovered within a week or so, then it may be an idea to do a reconsideration request.

Good luck!

Hi Chad,

Thanks for your contribution. Big fan of screaming frog myself.

I find Majestic isn't quite as accurate as Ahrefs, but SEMRush is invaluable and I currently use SerpBook but authority labs looks a bit better for the same price point!

If it were up to me, I'd be creating a new page each time. Then within the closing paragraph of each report I'd link to previous reports for those that are interested in the historical stats.

Think of it this way - SEO changes on a regular basis, if we went back and modified all our old posts to reflect the new data, then we'd have no archive of previous updates, or a single post would be so large, that no-one would ever read it.

++ You could have one "master post" in which you summerise all of your previous years reports. That way those that just want the abridged version can read that one, whereas those interested in the nitty gritty can see each year in detail.

Images attached should help You should recover to where you were previously within a week or so.

1.png 2.png

Hi John,

No worries!

If it's an in-house SEO for a small-medium company then all of the above duties can be handles but 1 person, but you may find that the actual PR side of things is done by someone else. If itis from a consulting perspective then you may struggle a little bit.

This is a complete blanket statement and I know a lot of fellow SEO's may not agree but SEO tends to be more logical whereas Social is more creative and the two tend to attract different personalities. If you can find someone that can do all of the above and enjoys it then you've found someone that would be able to consult as well as do the tasks at hand.

Most SEO's will know at least basic HTML and CSS or have the ability to search google to find out what it is they need to do + 1 additional language (PHP / Ruby / net).

As a lot of sites are now CMS based, a basic understanding of Joomla/Wordpress is highly recommended and excel is also an invaluable tool for most SEO's.

Hope that's helped

Fastest way to do it would be through a combination of Google Webmaster Tools and Robots.txt / noindex,nofollow meta tags.

Firstly if your domain hasn't been verified within GWT, go through that process. Then proceed with the remove URL request within GWT. (Image Attached)

You will need to upload a robots.txt and/or implement the noindex meta tag within the header of the pages you no longer want indexed.

Example Robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /offendingportal/

Example Robots Meta tag:

That should be enough to get rid of the offending content from within the SERPS and prevent it from being re-indexed.

removeurl.png

It will naturally with time. As you had the 301 redirect in place there's not much else that I would recommend aside from verifying both URL's within Google Webmaster Tools underneath Configuration there's an option to "change address". That tends to make the process a bit less painful.

If you've done that then there's really not mcuh else you could have done.

I agree with you that social and SEO are merging, but I do feel that while both should know each others skill sets, they are still two separate roles, for the time being at least.

SEO:

Technical Knowledge
Programming
Copywriting 
Link Building
Understanding Social Networks / AuthorRank / Twitter / FB / LinkedIn

Social:

Reputation Management
PR
Understanding how SEO & Social work together
Brand Awareness

Due to the relative intensity of both roles, if you were to work on both for a particular client, you'd be limited to a handful of clients. Whereas if the roles are separated you can handle a larger client base.

That's the way I see it anyway!

I believe there may have been a Panda update around the 9th/10th. One of my affiliate sites received a warning via GWT. Mozcast shows quite a lot of flux around that time as well.

That would indeed fix the issue. Although i'd check your internal pages as well to make sure the plugin that is implementing the canonical tag on line 9 is doing it properly sitewide