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There isn't much traffic at all as the link is actually in a sub-sub-menu in the nav (the strange things people do).

But I'm more concerned whether removing the link will actually have a negative effect on our SEO

Yeah it's linked with our company name so not too dodgey

We also have other sites linking sitewide with our logo, also not paid, just people are saying we are good place to get info from. Some of these are in the sidebar so could look like paid ads..

We have 10,000 links from 350 domains in OSE. Probably 97% of those links are organic. Do you think that would be causing an impact?

Thanks Irving. The issue isn't so much about removing all the links, but rather what to do with sitewide ones that provide a disproportionate amount of links from one domain.

Should they be dealt to, we could ask them to remove it or make it nofollow, or should we just roll on with the rest of our SEO work, and only respond to that issue if we see a manual penalty?

You're right about dodgey ones too, definitely worth dealing to them now.

Yeah that was my feeling too.

However their response is that we are being algorithmically penalized because we have a 10,000's of links from 100's of domains, so a large amount of those links are potentially site wide.

(1 site for example has 100,000's pages with us in their main sitewide navigation).

So to move forward with our SEO work we first need to remove the links that appear inorganic.

Could this be possible or do links only need to be removed when you have a link warning?

Hey there,

We have recently been in touch with a SEO agency that recomended we remove all inorganic links from our backlink profile.

Most of the links are pretty good but there are some news sites that have sitewide links to our site. The link is in the nav menu, as a useful link. We didn't ask for this link it was totally organic.

Also some link building in the past was focused on anchor text so some of the keywords may have been over emphasised.

Is it a good idea to go about removing all of the potentially inorganic looking links?

My concern is that we wipe out links that google are actually valuing. I still know sites are ranking #1 with much more dubious backlink profiles, and then there's this guy who removed his sitewide backlinks and dropped in his ranking:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/removed-site-wide-links

If a competitor decided to add negative links to our site, it would take longer to find and remove negative links than it would for them to add them. It seems odd that google would allow negative SEO to be that easy..

What do you think?

Haha well done

Yep this is very helpful. I see you have lots of good rankings too. Do you get a lot of search traffic from them?

Hey Francisco,

Yeah I agree with you on the exact match domain, and I think you're right about opting for the memorable brandable domain.

But what do you mean about using the homepage as a representation of all the landing pages?

How do you avoid the homepage competing with the sub pages?

Thanks man!

Hey Moosa,

Thanks for your response.

Wouldn't there be an issue of diluting my onpage optimisation if I tried to target multiple keywords on my homepage? (especially in this case where the keywords aren't very complimentary)

And with the sub pages wouldn't that then be competing with the homepage, somewhat cannibalising our SEO efforts across 2 pages?

Is it better to target main keywords on a site's homepage, or in a sub page.

I would usually assume the homepage, but if the domain for the homepage doesn't include the keyword is it better to have a sub page with an exact match URL?

For example we target the keyword "abc123"

Is it better to optimise the homepage:

brandname.com

Or create a page to target it:

brandname.com/abc123/

And leave the homepage to target brand keywords, but link to the "abc123" page.

Whats the best option?

Hey Sven,

Thanks these are some good ideas!

Just got to try and keep his 5-10 hours full, shouldn't be too hard, fingers crossed!

T

Yeah good thought, but unfortunately the guy is kinda new there too! ha

Im also thinking content creation probably isn't his strong suit.

Any other ideas?

I'm doing some SEO for a small company and they have a guy available to 'assist' me, but he isn't very SEO savvy. Also english isn't his first language.

If he could do 5-10 hours per week to help, and you were me, what sort of stuff would you show/teach him to do?

Thanks!

Thanks for your responses.

I had a look in OSE as per your sugestion Heather, and looks like they have a lot of directory submissions stuff, and the rest seems pretty natural.

However there was one thing that stood out. They had a bunch of different sites which had a link in the sidebar. All these sites were on the exact same wordpress theme and look like they could have been created by the company for SEO.Is that the kind of "shadow Sites" mentioned in the Google Webmasters pad that Alex linked to? The sites seem to have legit content, but have obviously all been created very quickly and used to generate links back to the site..

Any thoughts?

Is this legit, or should we be concerned?

Tomorrow morning I have a call with an SEO company interested in doing some work with our company. Its a larger company who do a lot of SEO work, and seem to have good feedback around the place.

But we have been very very white hat in our all our our SEO work so far, and some of their wording on their site talks about "Negotiations and acquisitions of link partners".. which gives me the feel they might be a little grey hat..

What are some good questions we should ask these guys to make sure what they are doing is legit, and not going to get us stung for anything?

And what sort of work should we get them to do, if we are happy to take care of content creation, on page optimisation and social media activities?

Thanks!

I have been asked to transfer a clients old domain over to a new domain with a new site. All of the inbound links basically go to the homepage, and the few links that dont go to the homepage on the old site, might as well be redirected to the homepage on the new site.

I'm wondering is there a "catch all" sort of redirect such as www.oldsite.com/* redirects to newsite.com. So any redirects we havent set up will automatically go to the new site homepage?

And secondly, whats the easiest way to the redirects up?

Can I just add it as a parked domain or addon domain in cpanel, and do the redirects in there? Or does it needs its own hosting for the old domain with its own htaccess file?

Any help appreciated!

Hey Diane,

Google will rarely penalize a site for it's inbound links. Otherwise it would be too easy for black hat SEO's to get their competitors penalized out of the SERPs. So it is unlikely that the free article sites will damage your SEO reputation.

But it may damage your reputation with Humans, the reputation that counts. Your articles should help to establish your position as an expert in your line of business, sounding like a 2 year old probably doesn't help.

Best thing is to get in contact with reputable blogs or sites in your niche and see if they will run your articles. Or else put the articles on your own site and promote them there to build your traffic up.

Outspoken Media has a good article on promoting your own content, should you be interested:

http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/how-to-promote-good-content/

Hi there,

I've redesigned a website for a client, but we are also changing domains and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the redirects from their old domain to the new one.

95% of their search engine traffic originally came through brand related keywords that landed on their homepage, and most of the remaining 15% landed on 3 other pages.

The new site has pages to replace these 3 main SEO pages, and I'm about to set 301 redirects from their old domain, but I can't figure out the quickest/best way to do it.

Is it possible to set up a specific redirect for the 4 main pages (Home + plus the 3 others) then a "catch all" type of thing for the rest of the pages, that redirect either to the homepage, or some sort of "Check out our new Site" landing page.

How do you do this, or is there a better way to set it up?

Thanks!

Will google actually be penalizing me for just targeting one keyword, hence the lower ranking?

Thanks Vinnie!

I have a site I launched a few months back, and the niche isn't all that competitive.

After a bit of work the domain is now sitting near the bottom of page 2 on google but it's number 2 in yahoo search.

I have been manually building the links but they are all targeted to just one keyword, and mainly have the same link text. Will this look suspicious to google, and should I be spreading my anchor text over different keywords?

Or is the reason Im ranking so well in yahoo be because they are just picking up more backlinks? 23 from yahoo but only 9 from google.