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We are conducting a large-scale Penguin cleanup / link cleaning exercise across 50+ properties that have been on the market mostly all for 10+ years. There is a lot of link data to sift through and we are wondering how we should prioritize the effort.

So far we have been collecting backlink data for all properties from AHref, GWT, SeoMajestic and OSE and consolidated the data using home-grown tools.

As a next step we are obviously going through the link cleaning process. We are interested in getting feedback on how we are planning to prioritize the link removal work. Put in other words we want to vet if the community agrees with what we consider are the most harmful type of links for penguin.

• Priority 1: Clean up site-wide links with money-words; if possible keep a single-page link
• Priority 2: Clean up or rename all money keyword links for money keywords in the top 10 anchor link name distribution
• Priority 3: Clean up no-brand sitewide links; if possible keep a single-page link
• Priority 4: Clean up low-quality links (other niche or no link juice)
• Priority 5: Clean up multiple links from same IP C class

Does this sound like a sound approach? Would you prioritize this list differently?

Thank you for any feedback /T

I understand the process. I was looking for concrete experience regarding the overall time line.

Community,

Has anyone here implemented rich snippets for clients/own properties and can advise how long it took for them to appear in Google

Thanks

When you say it works - what exactly do you mean?

SEOMoz team,

I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property.

Let's say you have

• brandname.DE (German site)
• brandname.FR (French site)
• brandname.CO.UK (British site)

Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google.

Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site?

/PP

Team,

I am wondering what people recommend as best SEO practice to inter-link to language specific brand domains e.g. :

amazon.com
amazon.de
amazon.fr
amazon.it

Currently I have 18 CCTLDs for one brand in different languages (no DC). I am linking from each content page to each other language domain, providing a link to the equivalent content in a separate language on a different CCTLD doamin. However, with Google's discouragement  of site-wide links I am reviewing this practice.

I am tending towards making the language redirects on each page javascript driven and to start linking only from my home page to the other pages with optimized link titles.

Anyone having any thoughts/opinions on this topic they are open to sharing?

/Thomas

Hello,

We have been doing some analysis around our backlink profiles for our sites and have been experiencing a massive discrepancy between what is reported as number of C class linking domains in OSE and the information returned in Google Webmaster tools.

For a variety of sites OSE is reporting numbers < 10 for C class linking doamins while GWT shows >100 unique domains linking (we confirmed that the majority of these links are in different C classes)

Is this simply a matter of the limited index size of OSE or could there be another explanation? It is interesting that the links that do show up in OSE a nearly exclusively sites that we own.

/T

As mentioned, the keyword is 1.FC Nuremberg which is naturally what users are typing into Google.

Quick question,

Assume my keyword is the German soccer team "1.FC Nuremberg". What is the best URL design to target that keyword?

domainname.com/1fc-nuremberg

or

domainname.com/1-fc-nuremberg

Any thoughts? Does it make - even a tiny - difference?

/Thomas

SEOMoz Gurus,

I am wondering what our best implementation strategy shoul dbe around linking up the Facebook Like button on our pages.

Essentially there are two options:

A) Linking the button directly to the Facebook Page of the web site so every Like is actually converting into a Facebook "Fan" which can be messaged going forward through our Facebook page.

B) Having them like the actual URL which might be more beneficial from an SEO and viral perspective as now a link to the actual URL gets shared on the Liker's facebook wall and it should also be easier to use that lIke for Google & Co. as it's tied to the actual URL not a random Facebook page given that search engines already convert those signals.

Both approaches obviously have their benefits. Are there any common guidelines on what is a better approach to take from a pure SEO perspective?

Thanks /Thomas

Thank you for the responses guys, it is very aligned with our plan.

Additional question that fits the context, are there any good "penalty checker" tools out there that would allow an easy way to pass by urls and it gives feedback if a site has likely received a penalty?

From our understanding, a serious penalty results in

• loss of page rank
• site being completely deindexed from Google

Are there any other signals?

Thanks /Thomas

SEOMoz community,

If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board.

While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4)

While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site.

My question two the community are two-fold:

• Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word?

• The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site?

Thanks /Thomas

Does anyone have any thoughts?

SEOMoz community,

I wanted to get your guys' ideas around what I would consider an unorthodox but potentially effective approach:

I am currently internationalizing a brandname domain by building up different CCTLD domains and assigning them to local server resources. In order to push the brand of the project, all international CCTLDs share the same root domain, however the main key word for each CCTLD is different.

My question is essentially if it would make sense to configure the root landing page of each international project as

http://www.<brandname>.<cctld>/<market_keyword></market_keyword></cctld></brandname>

rather than the typical approach

http://www.<brandname>.</brandname>

This would allow me to get the market specific keyword into the landing page URL. The root domain would have a 301 redirect to the keyword landing page.

Anyone has any experience with this approach? Does a true root domain URL get some sort of SEO bonus that would not justify the above approach or will the URL with the keyword in the path will have higher SEO power.

Looking forward to your responses - even if its just projections/SEO gut feeling.

Thanks /Thomas

Thanks for those references Ryan, I appreciate it. I will have a look tonight.

/Thomas

Ryan,

Thanks for your thoughts - I appreciate them, however I think this makes for a great SEO discussion.

The reason for moving to a CCTLD is mainly to increase search volume. We expect the search volume to go down in the intermediary but hope that it is a wise investment in the future. These are our reasons:

• Using a CCTLD will allow more SEO power in local search results for local keywords
• Using a CCTLD will allow us to host the site on a local physical server and separate IP
• Using a CCTLD should increase CTR in local markets
• Non-SEO Using a CCTLD should allow charging higher CPM rates

The reason for us doing this move is that over the years we have observed us being constantly outranked in local searches (e.g. Brazil) by sites that have

• less DA and mozRank
• local CCTLD (e.g. com.br)
• local server hosting

Their backlink profile was very similar to ours in a sense that both would get local backlinks from within the market yet we were not able to outrank them.

Do you have any quantitative data that would imply your statement of consolidating properties under one umbrella is the way to go for a highly internationalized offering that relies on local organic search volume?

Cost and Time concerns do not apply given the way our infrastructure is setup.

Looking forward to your and other SEO gurus comments.

Best /Thomas

Community,

We are about to move one of our most popular country sub directories from brandname.com/de/.. to brandname.de . We have just purchased the domain so while the domain has been registered in 2009 the URL has zero domain authority.

What is the best strategy to execute the move while being cautious about loosing too much organic search volume the subdirectory is receiving right now?

Obviously it will take some time to build up DA on the TTLD so maybe it is a good idea to keep the country directory for a little longer and start on the TTLD with just a static landing page, place some links, wait until it receives some DA builds up and then perform the move.

Thoughts?

/TomyPro

Yes, we already seen this giving an additional boost. Your physical server location will definitely help you getting local search rankings for that country. Our numbers will hopefully give an insight into how significant that boost is.

Shoggoth,

So how is the TTLD site working for you in the search results compared to the subdomain pages?

To my knowledge sub domains are the worst approach as you have to build up dedicated domain authority for the subdomains (as for TTLDs) without the benefit of improved local search results based on the local TTLD.

/Thomas

SEO Gurus,

There seems to be a tendency that whenever you need to optimize a project for a multi-word key phrase, lets say for example "hostels in boston" SEOs see it as a best practice to refelct the key phrase in the domain without dashes yet when being used in a directory/page name context dashers are being used? Does anyone have any experience to share on this topic what works better? From my experience using dashes has been quite successful in the past but I am questioning this approach for a new project I am about to start.

To clarify the question, in your eyes what would work better for the keyphrase "hotels in boston"

www.hotelsinboston.com

www.hotels-in-boston.com

Thanks /Thomas

Hey medico,

I am in the same boat as you and I am actually running an empirical experiment right now where I am testing how a switch from directory to ccTLD will affect search traffic. I should be able to post something on my blog soon and will let you know.

The feedback I got from experts was the same as presented here with the difference that in my experience server location does have a significant impact on your local search rankings. I am including this aspect actually in my experiment.

What I am doing is this

1. month: run uk country specific site under .com/uk/... on a dutch server

2. month: run uk country specific site under .co.uk... on a dutch server

3. month: run uk country specific site under .co.uk... on a uk server

Good luck with your campaign. /Thomas

Generally speaking, you will achieve the best results by consolidating your sites under one domain with a dedicated folder for each country as you described. I would recommend delaying the move until you are sure your sites are not under any penalty.

The advantage you will receive with a single root domain is the consolidation of your Domain Authority. It sounds like your sites were doing well before the penalty. The higher DA can help even further.

Thanks again for your thoughts. This is actually a topic I am very involved with. I work as a Technical Director in a large digital agency and our SEO team just recommended a large Fortune 100 customer to break their web property into market ttlds from .com/de, .com/es etc into .com .es .de using the same top love root domain. According to our SEO team DA is sort of shared if the same root domain is used. However, local ttlds will obviously give you better rankings in local Google engines.

My thoughts are the right approach probably depends on the size of your brand. If its easy for you to build up quickly DA for local ttlds are preferred. If you are a smaller player you might run better consolidating everything under one umbrella to share DA.

I am actually running an experiment for one of my projects where I am doing the ttld breakout for one domain to compare organic search traffic. the benefit with local ttlds is that eventually you can tie those to market-local servers which boosts again SEO in local markets. This isn't possible for directories.

Do you share my thoughts Ryan? As said, this is a very hot topic for me at this moment.

P.S. I will definitely reach out for recommendations - thank you.

Atul,

What I mean by it is that all domains hosted under the same server IP (=dedicated root server) have experienced significant ranking drops that seem tied to a global penalty.

However it is questionable if Google would be considering this a valid approach given the probability that other domains could be hosted under the same IP that are not associated with the to-be-penalized URL.

Atul,

What I mean by it is that all domains hosted under the same server IP (=dedicated root server) have experienced significant ranking drops that seem tied to a global penalty.

However it is questionable if Google would be considering this a valid approach given the probability that other domains could be hosted under the same IP that are not associated with the to-be-penalized URL.

Ryan,

Thank you for your thoughtful answers. Couple of clarifications:

The internationalized sites are each hosted with a different root domain keyword1.es keyword2.de - are you still confirming that this should not be causing duplicate content penalties? Due to the penalties we have been considering moving everything under one umbrella and manage local sites in directories e.g. .com/es/keyword1 .com/de/keyword2 - however until the penalties hit the url approach has worked very well for us. Any thoughts?

I should clarify the comment on auto-linkbuilding. The company used LinkAssistant to research potential partners, i.e. a lot of link solicitation emails were sent but the actual link building was still performed manually only with legitimate and contetn relevant partners.

We are not working with our old SEO agency any longer and have been reaching out to a couple of external SEO resources/experts but have not been presented with a conclusive, convincing concept to resolve the issues. I guess it takes a resource with experience in handling Google penalties to do the job. Does your company have that experience and do you provide such services?

Dear SEOMOZ Community,

Our portfolio of around 15 internationalized web pages has received a significant, as it seems IP-wide, Google penalty starting November 2010 and have yet to recover from it. We have undergone many measure to lift the penalty including reconsideration requests wo/ luck and am now hoping the SEOMoz community can give us some further tips.

We are very interested in the community's help and judgement what else we can try to uplift the penalty.

As quick background information,

• The sites in question offers sports results data and is translated for several languages.

• Each market, equals language, has its own tld domain using the central keyword, e.g. <keyword_spanish>.es <keyword_german>.de <keyword_us>.com</keyword_us></keyword_german></keyword_spanish>

• The content is highly targeted around the market, which means there are no duplicate content pages across the domains, all copy is translated, content reprioritized etc. however the core results content in the body of the pages obviously needs to stay to 80% the same

• A SEO agency of ours has been using semi-automated LinkBuilding tools in mid of 2010 to acquire link partnerships

• There are some promotional one-way links to sports-betting and casino positioned on the page

• The external linking structure of the pages is very keyword and main-page focused, i.e. 90% of the external links link to the front page with one particular keyword

• All sites have a strong domain authority and have been running under the same owner for over 5 years

As mentioned, we have experienced dramatic ranking losses across all our properties starting in November 2010. The applied penalties are indisputable given that rankings dropped for the main keywords in local Google search engines from position 3 to position 350 after the sites have been ranked in the top 10 for over 5 years. A screenshot of the ranking history for one particular domain is attached. The same behavior can be observed across domains.

Our questions are:

• Is there something like an IP specific Google penalty that can apply to web properties across an IP or can we assume Google just picked all pages registered at Google Webmaster?

• What is the most likely cause for our penalty given the background information? Given the drops started already in November 2010 we doubt that the Panda updates had any correlation t this issue?

• What are the best ways to resolve our issues at this point? We have significant history data available such as tracking records etc. Our actions so far were reducing external links, on page links, and C-class internal links

• Are there any other factors/metrics we should look at to help troubleshooting the penalties?

• After all this time wo/ resolution, should we be moving on two new domains and forwarding all content as 301s to the new pages? Are the things we need to try first?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

SEOMoz rocks. /T

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