Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Edit: Someone beat me to the punch, here is the thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-webspam-algo-update-24-4-12 Let's just discuss it there. So Google has said they are doing another wave of algorithm updates that could impact anywhere from 3-5% of SERPs.  I saw it here: http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html Has anyone seen any changes?  I've heard from a few friends that their sites are bouncing all over the place, which seems to happy a lot during these updates.  We might not actually know the fallout for a few days/weeks/months. I saw a  few of my smaller sites take a hit, but most of mine have stayed the same. Anyway what do you guys think?  Sometimes an update like this can be a wake-up call to people who think they are doing white hat stuff but may be pushing the envelope a bit too much. Thoughts?

With the recent deindexing of blog/link networks, I was hoping to get the Q&A's take on what defines a link network.  Are all link building services using link networks? Would you consider something like: submitedge.com thehoth.com To use link networks?  They generate links for you, but most of the time they will do it with "decent" content, on sites like Wordpress, Blogger, Squidoo and other similar sites.  I don't think that most of their link sources are owned internally, but I could be wrong.  Some of them use profile links to send links to their articles, which is garbage. Would you suggest staying away from services like this all together?  I'd say that 90% of the services offered on submitedge might be junk, but a few look useful.  I've seen a few people at my company have success with them, but fully understand that it could be short term, and potentially inevitable that those links get deindexed. I'd like to potentially find a good link building service that could bridge the gaps between when I have time to write content and do link building, as I know the engines like to see a steady stream of both. Any thoughts?  Any other services you guys have used with some success?  I am not looking for sites like fiverr or anything quick/cheap.  I'd be willing to spend the appropriate money occasionally when I think I could use a few extra links, but don't think I need a regular link builder (as that's something I like to do).  I also don't want to go the route of outright buying links from other websites. Cheers, Vinnie

So I realize it's a bit of a short notice, but April 24 (next Tuesday), I will be hosting a Joomla users meetup in conjunction with Blogsvertise.  The first get together is going to be more of a social meetup, with not much specifically planned.  Topics that will be discussed: Joomla - everything from basics to advanced questions SEO - open discussion, Q+A,  networking Bloggers - Bloggers will be there, and can connect with other bloggers/companies. Anything else web related as well. The event is going to be hosted at the Blogsvertise office in East Brunswick NJ. There is going to be some free pizza and snacks, and should be a good networking event.  In the future we aim to get more organized, and have guest speakers and presentations, but for the first one we want to gauge people's interest, and see what they would want to hear presentations on. If you are interested you can reply here, or shoot me an email at vforvinnie at gmail dot com.  My cell is 848.992.3171 but I won't be able to talk until after 5pm during the week.  It is going to start at 6:30 and will probably run for a few hours. Cheers, Vinnie

I use a justhost.com reseller account to host about 15-20 of my own websites.  None of the sites are related, nor do I interlink or do anything blackhat with any of them.  All of the sites have unique content.  Some of it isn't great, but I didn't use a writing service on any of then, it was all written by myself. Recently I found a list of my sites (as well as about 200 others hosted by justhost) on a hacker website that listed the cpanel usernames.  I alerted the host and the issue is being fixed.  I am changing all of my usernames and passwords for all of the sites. Anyway, I recently took a look at some analytics and rankings and noticed that I lost a lot of my rankings on a handful of those sites recently.  I know there was the big de-indexing of junk blogs recently, but I don't think that is the case.  I can still find all of my sites in Google, they are just out of the first 50 results, when a majority of them were ranked from 5-20 in the SERPs. Here are three of the sites and their phrases: http://nintendoconsoles.com/ "nintendo consoles" - This domain I bought from someone so there could be some sort of sandbox period for it. http://webhostingfordrupal.com/ "web hosting for drupal" - This was a new register. http://seotirical.com "seotirical" - we don't show up, but all of the tweets and links to us do. - This was a new register. I realize these sites aren't perfect, and might not have been ready for the first page.  The Nintendo site is about 3 months old, but the Drupal site has been around for 8+ months.  I might try adding a fresh piece of content tonight to see if that helps, but I thought it was curious that it happened across the board with about 5-6 sites on my one reseller account.  I don't even know if the top portion of this post has anything to do with the problems, but I thought I'd see if anyone has insight. Cheers,
Vinnie

I have a series of websites that all feature a library of the same content.  These pages don't make up the majority of the sites content, maybe 10-15% of the total pages.  Most of our clients won't take the time to rewrite the content, but it's valuable to their site. So I decided to noindex, follow all of the pages.  Outside of convincing them all to write their own versions of the content, is this the best method?  I could also block the pages with robots.txt, but then I couldn't pass any link juice through the pages. Any thoughts?

I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way.  This is what I read: http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content?  I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit.  It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales.  I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer. I want to do this for a contact lens site.  I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions.  Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well. Would this be the best method?  Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it?  On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own. Cheers, Vinnie

I've been doing some local SEO lately and noticed something today.  When I do a search for "State/town name Cat Toys", I see the title tag of the website in the local results as opposed to the business name. I'm happy they are showing up above the normal results, but I wonder if having the brand name at the end of the site title impacts clicks.  For example: Site name: New Hampshire Cat Toys and Accessories | Cats R Us But in the places results the title is cut short because they show the address, so all they see is: New Hampshire Cat Toys and.... Do you think branding is especially important in local results?  Or less important?  I could hear arguments for both sides.  I realize the site URL is shown in green below the title, but it's not the same as having a brand in the title portion.  It also looks like some of the competition has just their name show up as opposed to their website title.  Is this something I can fix in Google Places, or is something Google does on its own? Cheers, Vinnie

Hi, Recently I've been trying to tackle an issue on one of my websites.  I have a site with around 400 products and 550 pages total.  I've been pruning some weaker pages and pages with shallow content, and it's been working really well. My current issue is this:  There are about 20 store brands of 6 products on my site that each have their own page.  They are identical products just re-branded.  Writing content for each of these pages has been difficult, as it's a fairly dry product too.  So I have around 120 pages of dry content that is unique but not much different from one another.  I want to consolidate but I am not sure how yet.  Here is what I am thinking: 1. 301 - I pick one product page as the master, 301 all the other duplicate products to it and then make one page of great content that encompasses all of them.  If the 301 juice gets diluted over time I might miss out on some long tails, but I could also gain a lot more from a great content page with 500+ words of really good content as opposed to pages with 150-250 words of just so so content. 2. Canonical - Similar to above.  I pick a master page and canonical the other pages to it.  Then I could use the great content on all the pages, and still have pages for the specific products.  The pages might not show up in search engines but would still be searchable on my site. 3. Coded solution - In my CMS I could always make a workaround where the  products still appear on the brands page (just their name with a link to the product page) but all the links direct to a master page. I realize all the solutions are fairly similar, although I am not sure which is ideal.  Option 3 is the most expensive/time consuming but it would drop my page total down to around 450 pages.  For a while now (dating back to before Panda) I've been trying to get rid of the low quality and outdated product pages so I could focus on the more popular and active pages.  Dropping my page total would also help in the SEO efforts as the sheer volume of pages that need links right now is high, and obviously the less pages I have the more time I can spend on each page (content and link building). So what do you think?  Should I do any of the 3, a combination of the  3 or something different? Cheers, Vinnie