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I've heard of #1 before. Never tried it myself, I suspect #2 is the culprit.

Thank you, i will not use this. Though i, like  many are left wondering what ways it can be done. David, i'll shoot you a PM.

Hello there,

I recently spoke to a contractor that offered me the following package, and i have to ask, in this post-penguin world, does it make sense to pursue this kind of linking? Or will it be considered spam. They said it's a manual submission process and they will 'do their best' to ensure that it's under a related category, but can't promise anything in regards to that.

What should i be requesting in this post-penguin world? How do i get quality backlinks that won't harm me given the current environment? Any help is greatly appreciated, here is the package info:

1. 900 links submissions = 450 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links - The links are built by manually publishing 5 Original Articles (500 words each) on 125 different article sites (each published article will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 10 keywords and 10 different URLs of your site to build the links.70% of our Article Sites have PR 2 to 6, all with different C classes IPs.

2. 300 links submissions = 150 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 4 Reviews for your site from 4 different accounts (we can use up to 4 URLs of your site to link back) on 150 Social Bookmarking sites, 90% of the sites have PR 2 to 8, all with different C classes IPs.

3. 480 links submissions = 240 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 3 Original Press Releases on 35 Press Release sites(each published press release will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 6 keywords and 6 different URLs of your site to build the links. All our Press Release Sites have PR 2 to 7 all with different C classes IPs.

4. 220 links submissions = 110 Guaranteed One Way blog links – These links are built by publishing 3 Original Blog Article (300 words each) with 2 back links to your site on 20 different free blog sites. These free blog sites are our sites (new sites with PR 0) which we are promoting to get the highest PR for them and your blog back links too.

Russ, thank you for that insight. Well now the next question is, should i rely on Places or Organic? Are there any stats out there on whether more people click on places links vs. organic?

Or am i worrying about nothing? Which is completely possible.

So according to my SEOMOZ dashboard, I'm ranking between #3-4 for one of my keywords.

My keyword is 'Boston Wedding Photographer'. My site is http://www.symbolphoto.com

I show up in google places, true. But i was wanting to rank organically. Am i right in the assumption that Google Places and Google Organic are not the same thing? SEOMOZ claims 3,4th but not organically(Assuming they aren't the same thing)

I get pretty good traffic right now being in Places, but i can't help but feel that organically ranking would bring more traffic.

Any suggestions or advice is greatly appreciated. TIA!

-Brendan

I don't buy the - "it gives competitors what you are trying to rank for"  arguement. Hell, all you have to do is go to a page title or look around a bit on some text and it should be glaringly obviously what they are trying to rank for.

.02

So i've identified some blogs which have a fairly high ranking and lots of traffic. They also allow anchor text in the name field.

Does it make sense for me to comment on these blogs, or does google treat these with less authority that true page links?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

TIA

I would love to find and SEO expert, a true expert, not a self proclaimed expert. And one that was willing to point me in the right direction to do the work myself and charge a consulting fee. Do these exist? I think they should implement that here on this site somewhere to find reviewed vendors for this type of work.

.02

Nope, if they did, i'd be in big trouble.

I think everyone gets these if you are ranking well. When i was on the first page for my terms i'd get all kinds. Even worse, they'd fill out my contact form posing as clients then in the body they'd describe some service they were offering, very annoying.

Hello All,

I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher"  i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position.

Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog.

He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file.

He also installed the following plugins:

Link Juice Keeper

NoFollow Free

The SEO Rich Snippets

Udinra All Image Sitemap

WP Robots Txt

WP-PageNavi

Add Meta Tags

These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help.

My blog link is :  http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/

I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located.

Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.

Hmm that's strange, i have done that and i'm still not getting anything... i'm starting to think something may be wrong. Anyone have any ideas as to where to start investigating this?

Hello All,

So i have a fairly decent blog http://www.symbolphoto.com/bl*g/      * replace with o.

However, i'm posting to it once/twice a week and i never ever see in my google alerts my pages being included. I do include my search terms in my pages "Bston Wedding Photgrapher"  yet, my page is never included. What on earth am i doing wrong?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

-Brendan

Well i think you need to help them understand the difference between the traditional realm of local people competing with them and possibly their storefront and with the new online search realm of people finding them via searches.

If they are a traditional business where people find them via their physical storefront and through other traditional means, then that will prove more valuable to them.

However, i'm assuming they hired you because business is down. If that's the case, you just need to make the case for using non-traditional methods including online search which will boost their sales. In which case, you really need to define what their keywords are before you find their search competition.

.02

Do you mean the local search results on the left side? Or do you mean the tan colored paid ads box on the right?

Thanks folks! Now i sit here wondering what to do with the extra domain.... hmm it's a highly relevant domain and lots of folks probably visit it by default. I'll have to investigate a good use, i suppose.

Ok, I guess it's what I expected. Does anyone else have an opinion on this? I'd love to hear any alternatives.

brend*n  at  symbolphoto.com     replace * with a

Thank you!

Hello All,

Wow, people answer very quickly, concisely and are well informed. Very impressive.

I have a question that may be a little different. I have a current site which ranks well, and has lots of links etc etc..

1. http://www.symbolphot*.com     **            * replace the * with an o**.

Key search term for this site:  "B*ston Wedding Photographer"

The second site i own:

2. B*stonWeddingPhotographer.com is currently empty.

I can do whatever i want with this site. I was thinking that since my site is mostly images, i could start a duplicate wordpress blog with the same images, but different page text and alt tags to the same images.

Obviously, since 'b*ston wedding photographer" is the phrase i want to rank #1 for, how should i go about leveraging the power of the URL? Do you have alternate suggestions beyond duplicating image content? I don't really see a way around that as it's ultimately the images i'm selling to potential clients.

And the last part of my question is, how strong are my chances of ranking #1 for "Bston Wedding Photographer"  while publishing good content on Bstonweddingphotographer.com ?

Forgive me as i'm new, is there a tool here on the Pro account which gives you all the URL's to the pages which are experiencing the issues you pointed out? Great reply btw, thank you for giving me a course of action!

Hello all,

First post here.

Site:http://www.symbolphoto.com

I'd done a ton of work to get my SEO where it needs to be, however, after looking at my traffic post April 15-22nd, it's gone completely downhill. I don't rank organically, which i'd like for one single term 'b*ston wedding photographer'.

What am i missing? I'm assuming Penguin may be a part of this, but i haven't participated in any link schemes... am i being penalized and if so, is it evident why?

Help is much appreciated!

• replace * with o.