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On one of my sites I provide a free tool to other webmasters to use that allows them to copy some code to use the free tool on their website and under the tool on it says "Powered by: mysite.co.uk" with a link to "mysite.co.uk". Now I have no real control over which sites can come and use this free tool (a tool to test how fast an internet connection is), on the whole though it is aimed at a specific niche but a range of sites do use it which means good or crap sites can pick up the free code to place into their sites. The link to mysite.co.uk is now always mysite.co.uk as the anchor text, I used to use the websites name (which is the actual name of the URL - link to site at end of post) so the links were keyword rich but only to my sites genuine name, however I now just leave it as the URL to my site. I am not aiming to do anything untowards with the linking other than to get the acknowledgement that it was provided for free by my site, however I'm wondering if google etc will be able to tell they are natural and not dodgy? My site is: http://bit.ly/MsNQwS (n.b. a new improved test is being created before anyone says it's not accurate). 🙂

Hi, I am just in the process of purchasing a site from someone. The site has a global target audience (well global English speaking anyway). The site is on a .info domain and is currently hosted in Germany. Checking on SemRush it looks like 70% of traffic comes from English speaking countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK). Now I need to move the hosting to one of my own when I change ownership of the site. Now does it overly matter where I choose my hosting as currently it is hosted in Germany (around 4% of visitors from Germany) but I want to do my best not to knock any rankings but I was thinking of moving it to a UK or US based host but still want to keep a general worldwide userbase. As the US accounts for the largest part of traffic (39%) would I be best choosing hosting based over in the US or does it not overly matter too much (I am in the UK so most hosting I use is UK based). I have read a number of posts on server location but most seem to be for site which have a country specific target audience. Thanks for your help! 🙂

I'm after a fresh set of eyes and any suggestions to help me with my site on what next I should be doing to help increase rankings. The site is: http://bit.ly/VR6xIm Currently the site is ranking around 9-11th on google.co.uk for it's main term which is the name of the site. The site is around a year old, when it launched it went initially up towards positions 3-5 but has since settled at around where it is now. I have a free tool webmasters can use to implement our speed test into their sites which also includes a link back to our site in it to recognise that we are providing the tool for free, I periodically change the link achor text so it is not always the same anchor text that every site uses. Is there anything obvious I should be doing or that is missing that would help with my rankings? *Just as a note, I am not after a review on the actual speed test on the site, a new one will be developed to help further increase accuracy.

Hi, I have a site, downorisitjustme (dot) com It has over 30,000 pages in google which have been generated by people searching to check if a specific site is working or not and then possibly adding a link to a msg board to the deeplink of the results page or something which is why the pages have been picked up. Am I best to noindex the res.php page where all the auto generated content is showing up and just have the main static pages as the only ones available to be indexed?

Is there any SEO benefits from registering a previously expired domain name that is still linked to form an authorative source and 301 redirecting it to another site on a similar subject? Obviously first benefit is giving users who are clicking on the link to be sent to a site on a similar subject that just to a dead link.

I have re-designed one of my sites, the old site is all static pages on a Windows server, I have made the new sites and it is on a new server and is running on Wordpress. I have just finished testing it and so am nearly ready to switch over the nameservers to the new server, however I'm having some problems with 301 redirects. I have tried to set up a few 301 redirects on the new server to test before I change nameservers but they don't appear to be working. I would have imagined that they should (even though the actual page isn't hosted on the new server) or am I being very stupid here and I can't test a 301 redirect until the nameservers have been changed. Redirect 301 /magazines.htm http://.../~account/magazine-freebies Obviously the above with the stars (*) is the server address and route to my account.

A couple of my sites have recently been hacked with the hacker managing to overwrite lots of my pages with their own spam products and also adding in lots of (hundreds) pages that they have created themselves. I have rectified this in so far as removing folders that the hacker used to over write my pages so my original pages are now back showing the correct content and also removed all the hundres of new pages that they had managed to instantly add. I appreciate that google will find and re-crawl all my genuine pages so the correct content is being displayed and indexed for them but what is the best method for dealing with the hundreds of extra spam ages that google had managed to crawl but have now been deleted so there are loads of 404 page not founds in google?