Hi Ben

Before developing the website itself, a good question to ask would be if the client is ever likely to run offline campaigns, such as print advertisements.

The reason being is that quite often it is hard to measure the impact and reach print advertisements have, along with calculating return of investment.

However, if you had a new domain, you could direct all your offline traffic (and only offline traffic) to this new domain. Therefore, whoever finds it you can be fairly certain that it is a result of your offline advertising.  I suppose the downside of this is that it can detract from building the 44-16 brand itself.

Another option would be to develop the new domain as a free, all-encompossing learning resource for film and production editors.  Develop a set of tutorials and best practice, but then invite other industry people to submit their own user generated content for use.  Maintain a level of impartiality, but by no means hide the 44-16 ownership.  You could even throw in a forum, should there be a demand for one.

To me, I think it would be quite valuable as a business to say that not only do we have a film and production company, but we're also the gatekeepers to one of the largest film and production communities in the UK, partnering professionals together around the country.

Those are just a couple ideas - the main SEO consideration needs to be that the additional website could function as a website in its own right.  It has its own content, its own approach, almost its own primary focus, with the secondary of course to help 44 16.  If it looks too much like a feeder site that's just linking in to the main domain for SEO benefit, it could be dangerous.

Hope this helps.

PS - Awesome cat.

Hi Rich

You could try some search operator queries, try some of these out:

Keyword + intitle:“write for us”
Keyword + intitle:“contribute to”
Keyword + intitle:“submit” + inurl:blog
inpostauthor:guest + keyword
inpostauthor:”guest blog” + keyword
inpostauthor:”guest post” + keyword
inurl:- “write for us” OR “write for me” + keyword
“become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site” + keyword
“Guest Article” + keyword
“Become guest writer” keyword
“Become guest blogger” keyword
“submit a Blog Post” + keyword

Hi Kevin

The Keyword Planner does a pretty good job of this now.  If you select any of the options and type in your keyword, you'll get the search volume.

Next to the "Avg. monthly search volume" there's a little graph icon.  Hover over that and you'll get the last 12 months and the average search data for that month.  There you should be able to see any peaks or troughs.

Hope this helps!

Hi Vince

What happened when you disavowed the links? Have you submitted a reconsideration request and has the penalty been revoked?

Until you get a message saying the manual penalty has been lifted, it won't matter what you do to your rankings or links - they'll keep on going down.

I'd definitely keep the disavow file in there (and add to it if needs be) and keep filing reconsideration requests until the penalty has been lifted.

It's worth noting as well that sometimes these bad links will be powering up your site.  I mean, one of the reasons people use bad links, for black-hat reasons, is because they can and do work.  However, they're not sustainable in my eyes.  If you've built a site with bad links, you're effectively a ticking time bomb and that's probably not the healthiest way to do business - at least in my opinion.

So disavowing those links could quite conceivably been the cause for the drop in rankings (even if you didn't have a penalty), but you're much healthier in the long run.  My recommendation - after getting that penalty removed first and foremost - would be to replace those links with high quality and authoritative ones, as you have mentioned.

Hope this helps.

Hi Brian

If the domain has expired, it should only be a matter of time before Google recrawls the page/domain and sees that the link is no longer present, therefore discounting the link from your link profile.

You could have a look and see if this has happened by typing into your address bar (if using Chrome) either:

cache:example.com
site:example.com

The first one will check to see if the URL is cached and the second one if it is indexed.  If a cached version of the page no longer exists, the link has almost certainly been discounted, whereas if the domain is no longer indexed it would be safe to assume that the link will be discounted soon by Google as well.

I hope this helps - sorry to hear of your previous agency resorting to such backhanded tactics.