Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

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

do you mean it creates 5000 new pages?

Little confused by your explanation...

same as with author, you just change ?rel=author to ?rel=publisher and it should be one very page of site as opposed to just articles/blogs with author.

If you are using wordpress and don't fancy editing your theme take a look at Yoast SEO

or use the badge option

https://developers.google.com/+/web/badge/

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)

I could be wrong on this, but its how I got it to work.

On all pages you should be validated as the publisher (assuming it's your site). and then within each post you are the author.

Tools like Yoast SEO Plugin are great at this kind of thing, as long as you are the sole contributor. Otherwise just add a link to G+ in each bio on a post ending ?rel=author - jobs a good en

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 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.

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

it depends what your website is for and also what org info you are showing. In most cases the address from the org can be on all pages but extra info such as opening times and such should be stayed within contact or about pages ... at least in general.

assuming use of wordpress here, if you use the seo plugin YOAST and then go to your categories one-by-one you can edit the descriptions and titles, removing your issue. you can also have the plugin do the work to some extent by exchanging category names into your meta tags but they obviously aren't as good as handwritten descriptions.

Index is the current number of pages in the Google Index, EC is total number of pages crawled (cumulative) over a given period.

Indexed will never be 100% of ever crawled for any site which has had pages removed, moved or url changed - this includes if you tell robots.txt to not index a folder once indexed (these go to ever crawled).

Hope that makes sense

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)

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.

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?

All I can say is welcome to the world of Short Term / Payday / Logbook Loans.

It's been a messed up SERP for a while and Google doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop it. Seen plenty of hacked sites up there for terms relating to these niches.

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.

If you have clear indications of what back links are spammy I would suggest going through the disavow tool. The obvious ones you mention that stick out are the article submission links and broken links on shoddy websites.

You always have to be very careful with the disavow tool though. But if you are seeing clear spammy links get rid.

In terms of a penalty, what do your keyword rankings look like? a penalty will more than likely come parallel to a rankings drop. Did you see big dips in ranking drops? Are you link building properly for the new site?

You may be finding that pagerank just isn't being passed over as well as you would have expected from the .co.uk. Doing some good quality content marketing and link building on the .com site will more than probably help.

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

It's possible but it's a lot of work and you would technically be competing against yourself. Just focus on getting a good website up and on the first page and in that top 3 position.

Check your visitor flow, see if more people are going to the pages you are trying to direct them too.

Look at your bounce rate and bounce rate / drop off rates at each step of their navigation cycle and you can see how changing your structure has helped.

I work at a development company and we have our own bespoke CMS system. We just want a star feature really, so we can hook up rich snippets.

If there is a plugin that doesnt cost much that would be great, getting one of our developers to do it here would cost the client more than they are currently willing to pay.

Hi Mozzers!

Let me give you a bit of background for my question. I currently look after two eCommerce sites and naturally I want to get them using reviews for products for customer interaction / content and rich snippets.

I am basically looking for a cost effective plugin that can plugin to our CMS system that can give us review functionality and will be compatible with rich snippets.

At the moment we use Disqus for the blog commenting system and i've heard this can be used for product reviews.

Any ideas would be great. At the moment our client is holding back due to 'lack of funds' so the most cost effective measures would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Hi Prime85,

The reason you won't see increases past those pages is simply because you have very little outbound links coming to your site. You can do all the work on-site but if your keywords are semi-competitive links are important and procuring those high quality links are what will drive you up the rankings.

Thanks,

Hello,

I think the issue you have here is that  you are taking lightly the amount of work SEO involves, especially if you are aiming to rank for keywords that bring in over 10,000 in a day.

A new website is going to need a lot of work to get to that point and if your uncle wants to make money he would be better looking to invest into a professional SEO agency / consultant who can provide him with the right tools and experience to get him to where he wants to be.

I'd very much go this way. Use a broader term for your homepage. Then on your separate service pages you can target more specific long tail keywords specific to the service and possibly the area you work in.

You need to see it as community building. Don't see social signals as "if I put our link on twitter and get people to RT it it will help rankings"

The idea is to put up quality tweets, interact with your followers and give them information on your company, help them when they have problems and build as sustainable and regularly updated twitter account. Create high quality blogs, put them on facebook / google+ and twitter, If you do this right your followers will talk about you, influencers will retweet / like / +1 and this is how social signals work.

It's fair to say at the moment Google pays more attention to their own social network, Google+, but it isn't as popular as the others at the moment.

The summary is just to be active, put good quality content up on your social networks and interact. Your social signals will follow

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.

Outreach. Post to your social media accounts. Try and get re-tweets, maybe areas such as social bookmarking and reaching out to other bloggers who might mention your article (if it is worth it to them)

You can't always expect people to come your way, sometimes you have to go after them and be pro-active.

If you are targetting seperate anchor texts and titles and totally different content it shouldnt be a problem. The only issue sometimes is that with the huge influx of links you get in a short space of time, it might give Google an indication that something 'unnatural' is going on. If you space them out I don't see why there would be an issue.

Yeah Google only works with 1:1 so maybe if you setup a Google account shared by both users and markup using that profile is the only work around I could think of, but could be messy.

The directories you mentioned are regularly updated and are a real 'source' of information that people want to use. With the changes it hasn't killed directories, its gotten rid of spammy directories that are just there for links.

With the likes of Yell and Thompson these are big companies and websites and their directories both online and offline and great resources and so they should have good rankings as customers would go to them if they needed a directory based website.

Google described it as "turning down" how much EMDs matter. So although they probably do have a LITTLE bit of bearing, its nothing huge, if you have a brand name use that, if your brand name is close to the EMD then that should be fine. Just don't expect an EMD to help you massively when it comes to ranking like they used to do.

I agree with the comments above put if it is a reputable and good quality site, would Google know if you were paying for if it's in your niche and good quality? I don't think so personally.

It's all about diversifying your anchor text and making sure sites you get good links on have your link within high quality and readable content that people would want to read.

Google can't see whether something is bought for or not, it can only tell what link is bad and gaming the system and which aren't.

The short and long of it is that Google seems to find your homepage more relevant than the page you linked. Maybe that's through keywords and content. Also the second page you want to rank for, the URL is very strange with the catlist at the end.

Is it a page that is standalone and static or is it a page that just grabs all the products in the list and puts them together in a template page? (if that makes sense)

SEO is not an exact science, that's for sure, but there are some things we can understand from looking at statistics and analytics and one of those things is that EDMs have lost some of their power and if you don't have good SEO to back that up, or you have 'slacked' on other aspects of SEO because your EDM was holding you up, then you are naturally going to see drops.

Like Carlos said, before the update having an EDM gave you ten points, now with the change EDMs only give 3 points, so if you aren't picking up points in other places, you are going to naturally see drops down the rankings.

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

I get this sometimes with another site. It happened a lot for some unknown reason then I fixed some issues that were already on the site such as having two versions indexed and it seemed to fix it. It still happens sometimes but my site is indexed and ranking so it's a bit of a weird one.

Just try and fix any other issues you might have on your site and get some links to it to try and get google to "notice" it.

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

There is one tool that can do things like this but I don't know the price range, but they are called Social Bakers and you can fully see what your competitors did and what of interaction they got and how. You can find them at www.socialbakers.com

(I'm in no way affiliated, just had previous experience talking with these guys and getting a demonstration of their product)

Can you link to a page in question and what keyword you target?

I will have a look for you if you can throw me over this information

Thanks,

I wouldn't necessarily call it a penalty. It is just that Exact Match Domains have been "turned down" as Matt Cutts put it. It means that Google doesn't pay AS much attention to them as they previously did and yes it may cause ranking drops due to it.

When you talk about moving over to another domain you won't 'carry the penalty' but you might not see any ranking changes because changing domain won't give you back what the EMD used to give.

You might want to look at your backlink profile. I have had experience of people having EMDs but having a poor backlink profile and it has dropped them down the SERPs.

Just be aware though the EMD is NOT a penalty by any means, it just means a ranking signal has changed and you have been affected, so focus on your other ranking signals such as links, on page optimisation etc... and get that improved to improve your rankings.

Make a file with that name without the extension and put a 301 redirect onto it. So you will have a live file there to redirect.

How a customer would interact with a website and how design can influence actions and conversions (use of site-wide contact forms etc...) is probably the main one for designers.

Making sure everything is simple and a customer isn't more than 3 clicks away from a conversion.

Just be aware Google still has the URLs within their searches but without descriptions. They still 'index' the URL but don't actually crawl the pages.

SEOMoz recently introduced Followerwonk. It's a really good tool to decide who are influencers in the sector you are in and makes it easy to follow them and find people worth following to build your twitter profile. You can also search twitter bios to follow people with the same interests. For example I was setting up an account for a new fashion website and searched bios with "Fashion, Online Shopping and Shopaholic" and the results were really good.

From there it's all about creating good content that people will want to read / retweet etc... and then the followers will flow

I'd say you probably need to look at how you are building links as well as the content on your site to see if it is spammy or not.

I haven't seen the site so it's really hard to tell what has caused the drops but in conclusion;

1. Look at your content, is it spammy, is it stuff users want to read or is it written for search engines?

2. Link Building, what kind of links are being built? are they spammy? (use open site explorer) look at creating a new link building strategy that focuses on quality.

If you want to talk further about it you are welcome to PM me and I can give you site a proper look over and see if I can help you