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I think what we are all trying to say is... as always with SEO ...

Quality Trumps Quantity

hang on Cody... things not to do "write something readable" .... i think you've mixed two lists into one!

Tom's point is spot on.

Syndication is a great traffic driver, no doubt - but it also means that the content usually worth a little less. Also implementing the canonical tag can be away around this but it will mean that the "copy" of the content will never get a chance to rank, though it will still drive some traffic.

The answer is always original content across the board - if you must repost on your own website use the canonical to point to the other site - show the love.

off topic: i was once asked "if i add a picture of a cute cat to any post would it become unique content?" ... answers on a post card to "sill questions here"

in my experience, and i've a fair bit with WP, the majority of malware comes from plugins which get updated and become infected themselves. Wordfence certainly can help with this problem, but a regular securi scan will too.

My advice is deactivate and uninstall any plugins you don't really need or use - this will make the site faster and more secure.

Once the malware has gone you can do as you have and ask for relisting or wait it out, google will come back and check. Manual reviews will take a few days to come back I believe, though it depends on the nature of the malware - if its believed to be complex it will be manual if its just one file being "naughty" a robot may scan your site to take a look that it's gone and it could be up in 24-48 hours.

Whilst some of it is better than it was, the way it deals with pages is still flawed.

For example most pages are using the url format .au/#!chauffeur-hire-perth/c1ay9

#! is a "hashbang" it means it's being dealt / served through javascript and as such isn't readable via search engines - in addition to this all pages have a canonical of the homepage and so would never rank anyhow...

As much as it may not be what you want to hear, its never likely to rank well - i certainly don't forsee it ever ranking in the top 3... sorry

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Being transparent: I have never been one to support the likes of WIX or others of a similar nature. The templates they use are built to cover so many bases that it will never really please anyone completely. Also the way in particular WIX deals with pages is concerning in particular - others do it too i should add.

sorry to be the messenger of bad news.

this depends on the size and nature of your site. For instance if you've lots of posts about a topic within your site (say "social media" or "email marketing") it is best to have them as a category and your post title to follow. Otherwise you could have issues in that you end up needing to put "email-marketing" in each post url ... which isn't pretty to do manually

most obvious thing is that they tend to link to one another heavily. use open site explorer to check the major links going through and see if one domain points to the others you are thinking about and then check the others.

also check their code and see if they are doing anything funny, like cloaking information - another common blog entwork trick

only you can really test the position out, for different ads the conversion rate will change as for keywords i think.

You'd be best to check every 24 hours i would think rather than wait a few days - especially if you are paying more.

not really my point - my point is categorisation on large sites is helpful to search engines and users. WP does this very well and I utilise it a whole bunch on my sites that use WP

Comments from William and Darin show the two different types of blog commenting. Let me expand:

Type 1:

Commenting on any blog you can get your hands on linking back to your site (those that will let you): This is the kind of blog commenting that you should avoid like the plague. It will do you no good and will simply be a waste of time these days.

Type 2:

Commenting on blogs that mean something in your industry and commenting with content people want to read: Like with any kind of content, if it is content people want to read it can be valuable. If you are selling running shoes and you build your authority on an athletics blog and your comment is contributing to a conversation and a link to your site is relevant and valuable to the users then by all means this is the kind of blog commenting you want to involve yourself in and can be very beneficial in the long run.

Hope that helps.

not necessarily, overall good rank factors would mean that semantically you end up in the same place - you maybe the best at your term but they are best at relating to that term (if that makes sense)

As tom says 404 errors are not the end of the world.

if you are concerned then as long as the relative urls have remained the same and the root directory is all that has changes a 301 in bulk should work, though if you've changed categories or something it may not work so well as a single entity and 100 would be the way to go.

Something that you should do, if you've not already, is within webmaster tools make sure you tell Google you've changed your url (configuration > change address) - it also has a mini guide on the steps you should be taking, including to register your new domain on webmaster tools.

But again, as tom says, if it's not destroying the user experience and isn't a huge annoyance for visitors don't worry too much about it.

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Just for your reference a full url redirect (aka changing say abc.com to abc.net - moving all directories and urls in one go) would look like

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.abc.net

are those links in another navigation too?

If so remove them from your footer, it wont damage internal link juice flow as SE's tend to only look at the first link to a page from another page (aka having the same link 20 times on a page has no more effect than having 1 link to that page).

If they are not elsewhere I would consider looking at moving the nav to be more effective and reduce the number of links - for example instead of city you could have region or state etc.

Looking at the site it has been cached on the 1st February and is in english, have you recently changed it over to German?

It seems possibly that Google hasn't cahced the updated version of your site recently, you may just need to wait for it to be re-crawled.

I sniffy some billy bull in this article, not least because of the website itself clearly being anti-google... maybe they should have read the latest ruling from the EU regarding favourance of it's own services anot happening before it posts this stuff...

pinch of salt - and all that

interesting to note on it's about page it uses microsofts logo but the blog doesn't mention bing ....

mmm odd try http://digsitevalue.org

you will find these smaller sites aren't really amazing though and are hit and miss to a large extent

sorry i couldnt be of more help

pointing a folder would involve some DNS changes (to the CNAME record) - i think.

You would be best asking BC - it would be a similar process to pointing a subdomain to BC.

If you host a solution you are not always stuck in time, for example I use things like WooCommerce which is always being updated with new features and gives you great controls.

And just to clarify I am not saying that you cannot do the things YOU may want to do, but there are things that unless you've controls within the server you can't do - like implement GZIP for instance which can be a big deal on big sites.

it was once worth more than it is today for SEO means - to be blunt.

It's worth listing on there but there are probably other sites more related to your niche which would be worth more time and effort. Yes get listed and update Technorati but unless you are at a loose end don't spend hours trying to please them.

fyi http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-reports-stalled-16756.html

not that i know of, would be a cool feature though. So pop over to feature request section and let Moz know

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests

it's possible that GA, being as it is, doesn't give whole information and is aggregate info - for example if you look on GWT about what your website keywords are it talks about variants of words and not exact words. It is possible therefore it does the same in GA and one of the "like" keyterms does rank at 3 or 4... it's also possible that the data is upto 90 days out of date on GA. Both of these can and do effect both Moz and GA

14 including spaces

Joke, use it naturally, the same in your title and content -do not force keywords into your content or descriptions, Google knows when it's being manipulated and over the past few years has cracked down on keyword spammers hugely.

my favourite is https://www.quantcast.com/

its in general quite accurate for small to medium sites (aka less than 1M per month) after that the larger the visit numbers the more wonky it becomes

If they haven't affected you this far, i'd say just leave them alone, they don't seem to be doing any harm.

Usually, you will find social media sites (of any type) will give no-follow links. So they don't (in theory) pass link juice - however, they are still helpful for ranking, getting visitors and even getting your site indexed.

The prime example of this is G+, through making sure it's not posted to other social media sites or to a sitemap, it is possible to see that when you make a post on Google+ to a new page or blog within a few hours it get's indexed / a robot visits - this is even faster if people comment about the post and share it. At least in my experience.

As SamCUK says though, build your author profile and show you are a real person with great content and the rest will follow. Great content and good use of social media will mean you will naturally build both follow and no-follow links (as of course does deliberate link building)

Ok generally < so not to miss any questions

The links you describe to some extent could be considered manipulated, unless they were sites previously and have since been redirected - which is perfectly valid. However, if they have always been redirects then they are unlikely to have gained anything from those links - In my experience if someone links to a page which is redirected since existence (and google generally knows this thanks to its vast database) then it is unlikely to pass juice - but as i said if it was say a blog post on another site but the site has since moved it will carry some juice.

If you want to investigate that further nip to http://archive.org/web/web.php and enter the url which is being redirected - go back into its history (across the top) and see if a page exists there or not.

So to your main question, are commentluv links worth it. Basically it's hard to tell whether they or any other comment system offering a similar function are worth it. As with many website comments in general the links maybe set to no-follow and so not worth anything to search engines, but thats not to mean they are totally worthless - people still see and click them.

And finally, my advice is never to just look for one type of link (such as one from commentluv comments) - it's the same with any kind of link, if you manipulate a search engine by biasing towards something hugely their worth to you will diminish and your time wasted.

always look at the bigger picture.

that could help but would just shift the issue elsewhere - but it's worth a try.

if you'd like a chat in a bit more of a private setting head to my profile and send me a message in private, or go through to the company site and get in touch that way.

if many show 1 url as duplicate this could be due to non-ww and www redirect issues or be related to dynamic urls (common for paginated pages)

if these are the case fix the redirect issue to either non-www or www and fit in a canonical tag to paginated pages. (google is your friend for finding code)

Myself, I usually create another email address that doesn't mention the client nor the agency. From there I send my pitch for the link saying I represent a client that is in the X business and would like to link through high quality content on the target site.

From that respect, if you are putting in an Author Bio you could use a premade bio or your own bio that again doesn't have to mention client or agency.

completely agree. also a domain doesn't mean its your companies name, in many cases it can be but not always. good luck.

Just looking around your site, the code seems ok - to a large extent.

But you are missing a sitemap (handy to point to all urls) and a robots.txt file

Also just clicking around i don't see 400 pages? is there a subdomain or folder you aren't linking to from the main site?

Few things... make sure you have a sitemap that is always upto date and submitted to search engines - this will encourage them to view your content first and recognise it as belonging to your domain.

In addition to this put links in your content to other parts of your site, if it gets scraped it will probably be with the links in it and so anyone actually wanting real content can get through.

If there are thousands from the same domain coming to your site, disavow the base url and also report that url for spam (it's your copyright). In fact if you notice a small site scraping you, do that after you've tried to contact them.

If this still doesn't stop them look at your logs and see where their crawlers are coming from and block their IP's.

On one of my old site I blocked the whole of China at one point because it was constantly being barraged by scrapers and people trying to guess account passwords.

Hope that helps

It's dependant on what the directory is. Yes Google doesn't like paid links, but some customers may still use online directories so from that aspect they are good. Look at a directory and see whether they are ones your customers will use.

As William Lau said, Directories, for ranking, don't work as well as they used to anymore.

hide it using a robots.txt file - though you could also use the noindex meta tag ... this being said search engines in general recognize sitemap pages and aren't too fussed by them, its a good jumping off point for them to find info.

do the above, if you also want to get rid of the "related videos" afterwards on the embed url add

?rel=0 to the end

two limits to be aware of here

1. Google won't index a sitemap larger than 50mb
2. Google won't index a sitemap of more than 50K urls

There is no need to link in html to your sitemap if you are submitting it by webmaster tools, though a poke can be helpful from robots.txt which would look something like :

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

and go under your various statements (should be the last thing)

Hope this helps

There was a good discussion on this very topic a week or so ago. You can find it here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-widgetbait-no-longer-valid-at-all-according-to-the-new-quality-guidelines

The thing to remember is that the HTML version should only ever be used for users and not to redirect robots if they hit a 404 on your .xml file. The reason for this is that search engines may still see the file as 404 after the redirect or a 301 redirect, if the later you then have an issue of search engines thinking it was there but is now the html page. Which of course is not a good thing.

I would advise ensuring the fall back never happens to robots / spiders - if the file is just a 404 SE's will return to it, they may not if it is 301 redirect.

in terms of categories, they are more reference points than definite areas, that is why you can actually input anything you want into there. so yes taxi is a go-er

the difference between the two is that one dictates you saying "we serve within 5 miles radius" it includes every city and town in that area... the second says we only serve this town or city ... (state country etc). the radius is more for local businesses and locations for companies who have multiple offices or shops.

that is correct

If they have access to the domains they will, if they are that kind of company, delete them. If they are on blogs where they have outreached to webmasters etc.. I think they will probably leave them be, as it would be a lot of work to get rid.

Another big problem, which some 'snake oil' SEO's use is to build links to a URL that redirects to your site. That means if you cancel, they just remove the redirect and you lose all your links.

By the sounds of it they have done outreach and i'd be leaning more to say you would probably be safe if you cancelled, but again I wouldn't be 100% certain without being able to have a look.

Have a chat with your SEO consultant and maybe just ask how they build their links.

I would suggest "flower pots- plastic flower pots with free delivery" ... reasons same as above, though I would suggest possibly using "plastic flower pots with free delivery | brand" to remove the repetition which can often be seen as spamming and keyword stuff especially as you are then likely to use the term again in your meta description and url

The first thing that springs to mind is your robots.txt file. Is robots.txt blocking something it shouldnt be? it sounds like it might be if Google literally can't get onto your site to crawl it.

When was the last time your individual URLs were indexed?

in GWT ensure you have removed the directory / subdomain from listings / index. (under optimisation > remove urls).

May take a week to kick in but if your 301s are working and robots is in place it will work.

In addition to these ensure you are using canonical tags pointing the the live location not dev.

Just to add a discussion into here.

People say paying for the link is against Google guidelines etc... But how does Google know the difference between a paid and unpaid link? they both look the same in the eyes of Google surely?

How can an algorithm know if you've sent some money to someone over Paypal for example? Surely its only differentiating between poor links and good quality links?

this sounds like a bug more than anything to me - maybe the moz team can shed some light on this.

The only time I've found a difference in ranking for caps vs non -caps is due to semantics and google knowing things like "church" and "Church" are different entities - in your own example though this wouldn't be the case ... hence i think its a bug.

mmm a puzzle

Congratulations

I've really started getting into the community and helping others too and it is very gratifying and also helps broaden my own SEO expertise as well as coming across new people in the community.

Congratulations on your top 100 and I hope to get there at some point myself too

I assume that your website curerntly in old.domain was formerly of www. my question is do the 301's you have in place point to old.domain or to the new page within www.domain ?

you wouldn't get penalised as such, it would just take a while for them all to be indexed - it maybe more advantageous to spread them over a few days - say 1000 per day such as to even give google a chance.