Any of these?
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
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I do hope Ryan gets "Good Answer" and/or "Endorsed Answer" for this... hint, hint
Getting great links is the way to go, but that can be easier said than done. Primarily you want to attract natural links through the promoting content, but you can build links too. Have a look at these tools: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php and http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder
lol well that would be a niche where you'll get some link troubles. But yes you're right it's very likely that some of those outgoing links are causing the issue. Any site that is spammy or in a spammy neighbourhood needs to be removed. Do you really need to keep any of them? Reciprocal links really don't do a lot for you anyway.
"What are some steps of your own 12-steps that help you detox from this addicting lifestyle?"
There are none, you're stuck with it now... resistance is futile, embrace it!
If you started five months ago you might not have read this yet, get it and read it, it will help you quench some of your SEO thirst for knowledge
There's tonnes of research out there on the purchasing/buying process/cycle.
Here's a good one: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/understanding-t.php
I'm sticking with my guns on that PR is a bad metric to judge stuff on so I'd definitely go for the relevant sites... even IF PR is still of anything more than a tiny value, relevance kicks ass over it.
Thanks. I think I can see where the main problems are... you have quite a few ads and loads, and loads of outgoing links with very little unique content. The majority of the content you have there is fed in through affiliate programs and so will exist in many other places too.
I would suggest that you separate a lot of what you have on the homepage into different categories and landing pages, at the same time as adding some static and unique content on each.
After doing that, fill out a re-inclusion request with Google.
Usually when people think they've been penalized it turns out they haven't and there's just some other issue but I think you most likely have been penalized in this case.
When you say it has a lot of link partners, do you mean it has swapped links with a bunch of link farms?
Can you share the site address, I reckon it will be easy to spot which ones to keep and which to get rid of.... keep the ones to relevant content for a start
Can you tell us the domain?
Even though inline uses less code than usual, I'd still say always go for an external file so there is less code to crawl though for your content. The cleaner the code, the better. Inline is still more code than just a linked external stylesheet.
*Edit: Oh and CSS every time over JavaScript
Some.
I think that's all anybody knows right now lol.
I watched a seminar from Distilled's LinkLove set where it was explained that in an experiment, a bunch of retweets boosted a site with just one link above a competing, similar site with a lot more links.
The topic as a whole though seems to be in discussion a lot at the moment, with blogs, etc... talking about it, and of course research being posted here at SEOmoz.
I think the general consensus is that it has value, and that value is likely to increase, but I haven't seen anywhere as yet where there's much agreement about just how much value there is in it. I assume we'll be seeing something soon enough though
Please do anybody correct me if I'm wrong, it would be great to see if there are any hard & fast stats out there.
There is the ranking factors of course... which provide a good guideline: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-4
Haha yes EGOL and Alan, along with a couple of others on here... I would certainly trust their answers above any paid experts too. They should form some kind of SEO A-Team!
Well I'm pretty sure, in fact I know, that I've answered questions before with an answer I thought was correct and then found out through others on here that it was in fact incorrect. I'd like to think that happens every time I'm wrong but possibly not (partially so the person who asked the question gets the right answer, but mainly because I like to know if I'm wrong about something).
So yeah, certainly I've given wrong answers accidentally but then there are people on here who are far more experienced than I am who I'm sure wouldn't make that same mistake. From spending time on here you get to know who the people are who really know their stuff and so I would trust their answers a lot. Also, I think most of us will be able to intuitively tell if something "seems wrong" and would question it.
I would recommend you visit conceptfeedback.com
There's a free and paid service. Paid is relatively inexpensive for what you get, but if you give some reviews yourself then you can get reviews in return from others, some of which are design and UX experts who provide comprehensive stuff. Well worth it I think
Wow that's a big, bold move! I don't know how to answer it but if I were you I'd wait until you get a few, nice and comprehensive answers on here before doing anything to drastic. Either that or use a private Q&A question to SEOmoz staff if you have any points spare to do so. With such a large change, you want to ensure you're doing it right.
I'll be interested to see the answers you get for this.
I wouldn't worry about the PR. It won't be due to content changes anyway, since PR is based on incoming links only and has nothing to do with what you have on-page. We've gone from PR 4 to PR 5 with the update but I don't care as I practically ignore PR now anyway... can't wait for them to hopefully get rid of it. It's one tiny metric which isn't a true reflection of what they have anyway. So much more that matters.
At the moment you have a direct link from the homepage to the quickbooks hosting page with anchor text in the footer. Above that, you have some body content about quickbooks hosting (still on the homepage), put a link in there to the quickbooks hosting page. Body content links are better than footer links by far.
Also it seems that you've had the following URL's for that page:
/quickbooks-hosting.html
/host-quickbooks.html
/hosted-quickbooks.html
Were/are these all the same page just with URL changes? Have you put 301's in for them so that both older URL's point to the new one?
Yeah there is no longer any difference in the eyes of search engines between sub domains and sub directories, they're seen as the same thing now... so no SEO benefit in changing.
Haha brilliant! I'm totally with you on that. And since Matt doesn't tend to divulge much (and half of what he does is cryptic) that would put Rand as source number one, or I should say Rand & co... all the staff and associates, etc... on here are pretty much a fountain of knowledge. I'd be screwed if I didn't have SEOmoz to learn things from.
Righty, I've been on a mission to clarify... it seems there's a lot of conflicting views on it. I mean I know there's conflicting views on pretty much everything but these views all seem to be from very good sources, so now I don't know what to think... I'm on the fence!
There's some discussion in here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4176006.htm
Along with this: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/backlink-age-seo-factor/9943/
It's a difficult one, but it doesn't appear to be in the ranking factor survey, which is a shame as it would be interesting to see what level of agreement there is.
Anyway, Rand's is more recent than Ann's so I guess it would make best sense to follow his
Thank you for pointing it out, I would have been none the wiser otherwise!
Ah, okay. I've heard it said a few times and assumed it to be correct but clearly I should have questioned it. Thanks, I've learnt something new from that
If it's not a spammy site in a spammy neighbourhood, and there's not tonnes of other links on the page (and it's not from a page called links.html lol) then go for it I reckon
They'll get more from it but neither of you will get that much anyway from it being reciprocal. There's a good chance it'll pass a little value at least so I wouldn't say no.
Having said that, much like what EGOL has said, I don't give requests I receive any time to get that far, they get deleted from my inbox as soon as I get the gist that it's a link request, although that's primarily because of the vast amount of spammy link requests I've received.
That crossed my mind too, it's even got canonicalization issues lol
It does seem like it could be put together and marketed by someone other than Google, posing as them. But then I doubt that would get very far.
Surely that would depend, it sounds as if it's not actually all dupe if there is simply similar content.
What do you mean by "similar" content?
Wow, what is this, and how did it spring from nowhere like that?!
I see what you mean though, game changer for sure... undoubtedly it will be in the toolbar, etc... soon too.
I'm pretty sure that is a glitch, there seem to be teething problems with it in a few ways but I'm sure they'll have it sorted soon
They will be getting more from this yes.
But, you need to consider where the link will be, not just on what page of the site but where on that page.
Will it be on the footer, a side bar, in body content?
Also, how many other links are on that page, what text will be surrounding the link?
Mainly though, above the issues of the Moz Rank, etc... is the link of any vale through relevance? If it is of value to users then take it no matter what the MozRank is, if not, then you need to consider that they will be getting more out of it than you. Maybe suggest that your link is on their homepage, whilst the link you give to them is on a weaker page on your site.
I would say try to educate the client but I know where you're coming from, some clients simply don't want to be educated on it. They heard from their mate or read in some forum that something is important and that's all that matters... I've had a couple like that lol. Thankfully though, they seem to be few and far between, with the majority of clients wanting to understand it all as much as possible which is great
Well I guess it will be a while before enough awareness really spreads about PR not doing a lot... but, I would assume most of those requests are from people who don't know that link acquisition should be based on a lot more than PR (and PR being at the lower end of the links value). Possibly those same people who are still trying to trade links based on PR... the ones that send the spam emails lol.
Sorry Mark, neither of us meant to offend. It's just that as Ryan said there really aren't any shortcuts with it, so when you ask for quick ways to build PR it's easy to assume you're looking for a shortcut. So Ryan was just trying to give you some good sound advice there, since a lot of people do ask similar stuff and don't understand about there not being shortcuts. Plus PR building really shouldn't be anywhere on the agenda for an SEO anyway since it's of such little consequence to any outcomes.
Then you'd be selling links based on PR, which doesn't make much sense. I get spam emails offering links from high PR sites, but we all know that it doesn't work that way. A site may have high tool bar PR but really have very little trust and authority, with links that are next to worthless. At the same time, a site may have fairly low PR but pass great link juice.
PR isn't up to date, and it's a single metric (a quite unimportant one) among hundreds. I would look at MozRank over and above PR every time, along with the age of domain, the site's own rankings, the number of links already coming off the site, where my link would go, and so on...
People do buy links from high PR sites but only because they don't understand that it's almost meaningless nowadays. It's kind of a scam selling them on that basis.
The check list is below:
1. Don't worry about PR
That's it
Honestly, don't think about building up page rank, think about your business objectives and goals, then create strategies based upon them... no strategy would include building up Page Rank, and Page Rank really doesn't mean a lot anyway so there's no purpose that a campaign in building up PR can serve really.
If it's not a competitive keyword, or a phrase that's unlikely to be found elsewhere then it will rank them all. They're all indexed and they're all relevant to the query. They wouldn't all rank if other sits had that same specific word string.
I've never seen or heard of it actually happening, except one example I was given where it was attempted but ended up boosting the competitors rankings. It's highly unlikely to ever be an issue in my opinion.
There's a lot of code to crawl through before you reach the indexable content. I remember reading somewhere that there is a way to externalize viewstate, that might help.
You might want some internal links with the keyword in the anchor text pointing to the page... i.e. your sitemap could, instead of just "home" be "Tampa DJ Homepage" or something.
You don't have many linking root domains, and of your incoming links, you need a few that have the keyword in their anchor text too.
lol thumbs up for that... have a look at Alan's stuff through-out here and you can tell he's hardcore SEO to the bone
That's a kind of "How long is a piece of string?" question I'm afraid. One that nobody can ever really answer. For one, you can't really say it will ever appear for any particular keyword. You can make an educated guess based on the competition, the factors around the site itself and the content, along with a whole bunch of other stuff... but even then it's difficult to put time scales on things like that.
Also, what SEO is being done, who is doing it and how much do they know about what to do.
Even if you get page one, that could mean position 9 or something, so you still wouldn't get that much traffic. Once you're there, how long will you stay there??
There's a lot of info needed to get anywhere near even making an educated guess.
Edit I just had a look at your site, you seem to be aiming at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and more, but your headline on the homepage is:
And your title tag is similar. This is not good!!
If I were looking for airport parking at Heathrow and saw your title tag in the serps, I wouldn't click as at first glance it looks to be Manchester only. If I did click, I'd instantly see that headline jump out at me and I'd click the back button.
Just thought I'd better let you know.
Being ad heavy is not going to help you anyway, Google doesn't like ad heavy and if it's too obvious that the article is there to get clicks on ads then your rankings will suffer (and it is ad heavy).
Did you write the article yourself, or have it written? I mean so it's a unique and original article? If it's just a slightly altered copy of another already existing article then that won't help a lot.
Hi Gary,
See Dejan's answer here, I think it will help http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-recent-discoveries-or-observations-on-the-official-line-of-incoming-link-penalization
Haha excellent... if we had forum sigs in here, mine would be:
"If I don't reply to your email don't call me on the phone... I will not be nice to you and you will hear my employees laughing in the background." - EGOL, 2011
Something that meets all of the following criteria:
With that lot covered it wouldn't get deleted instantly
Major faux pas, never part of the game.
It's definitely a serious violation and at some point there will be a penalty for it. It will arrive in a spam workers list of sites to go through some when, and they'll see it and slap it. There's just not enough spam workers for that to be fast, and maybe it hasn't been reported enough or even at all to get into their lists yet.
It's too much of an old trick to ever work, and keyword density, etc... doesn't do squat now anyway so there's no point.
You'd do well to study this a bit http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-1
It has many answers to your Q.
I'm pretty sure that links don't have to actually refer any traffic to pass value. You'll probably find that the majority of links that aren't on new/fresh content sites such as news sites, etc... don't refer much anyway. We know for example that the age of a link counts, and an older link can be worth more. When you think of some of those static sites out there that never change but still have good authority (especially for their niche) but don't get tonnes of traffic due to their industry, demographic, speciality, etc... They can pass some great link value even though some of those links will simply never get clicked.
If Google were to assign higher value to links that got clicked more, we'd only ever see sites at the top of the serps that had links from news sites, other sites that might well be most relevant would be held down.
Take a website or page about something obscure, an interest that somebody might have in an uncommon area of archaeology or something. Now let's say the site has great authority in its obscure niche, but of course gets very little traffic due to its obscurity. That site linking to another similar site would be excellent in terms of link value for the similar site.
Usage data might come into it beyond us clicking from the serps, and going into it with us clicking through as referrals too, but I wouldn't think it would have that much effect.
I wouldn't even bother with using PR to judge the value of anything. For a link I'd check it's moz bar stats, age of domain, number of root domains linking in, and where on the site, and on the page you get to have a link... plus how many other links are on that page.
I also hope you're not paying too much for a directory link... couple of quid at most