Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Matt Cutts has talked about the diminishing returns of multiple links from a single domain.  His video says that anything after 2 gets to be pretty minimal.

The other thing you need to consider is that site wide footer links aren't as strong as an in body link.  If you are doing your part to get legitimate in body links, through interviews or contributing to a blog in some way, then you are going to get farther than these site wides.

I ran into a similar problem with one of my sites.  I was up against a dozen web designers who have built hundreds of websites, but I was able to outrank them with just a handful of nofollow links.  They weren't great at on site SEO, which helped, but I knew that a lot of these links weren't worth much.

I'd use Screaming Frog to index my site, and then look at the internal links from each page.  You can see the number of links, the text used to link and a bunch of other stats.

Most of the time I see numbers like this when people have extensive menu's that include links to every page on the website.  So, I'd count the number of links in the menu and footer to see if that may be the culprit.

I actually specialize in automotive seo, but haven't really thought about it.  Anyway, I took a look at your cars.com link, and it registers as a PA of 1, which means it has very little authority being passed into it.  The reason why you aren't seeing these links is because the pages in which they reside have such little authority that the Moz spider does not locate them.  I've also never seen one of these links in Google Webmaster tools, so I would guess that they don't consider them very authoritative links either.

Consider this, though.  You are paying for that service, so those links are Paid Links.  It's also possible that search engines ignore them because they know this fact, and don't bother indexing them.  The only way to really get an idea of how important search engines feel those pages are would be to look at server level crawl stats.  Unfortunately, Cars.com would never share that data with you, and your rep would probably just give you a blank look if you asked.

If you have any questions about your dealerships SEO you can PM me.

1.Is this how I would optimize the titles?

Each page should have a specific keyword group you are trying to target, minus the about us page.  In theory your pages would look more like this:

Rates: Dog Walking Rates in Anytown | Business Name

FAQ: Dog Walking FAQ's in Anytown | Business Name

Etc.

You would then want to link to those pages internally with the their main keywords, if possible.  So, you would like to the home page with "Dog Walking in Anytown."

2.  Do people expect the title tag to be the same as the menu option they click?

People don't really pay attention to the title tags at the top of their browser.  The only time I check is when I'm bouncing between pages.

3.Should I not optimized the titles?

You would create unique title tags for all the pages to just make sure that they were unique.  Duplicates can hinder your site.

4. Should I not use the same keywords on every page?

Search Engines look at the whole context of your site as well as individual pages.  You will want to use the keywords whenever they fall naturally into your text.  You can then link them internally to the page that is most relevant.

5.Should I use a brand domain instead of a keyword domain?

Depends.  Is the person an active blogger, and will they garner a bunch of links from the amazing content?  If yes, then go ahead with a brand.  If not, keep it simple with an exact match domain.

I've had websites get rid of penalties, with a lower case "p," just by getting rid of their site wide links.  When we got rid of the links the rankings jumped from the 100's up to the top 5.  When the site owner put the links back up the site dropped back into the 100's.  We went back and forth several times with the same effect, so I'm positive that it was related.

Just an FYI, we pushed to get rid of the links altogether because every site had the same products, and sending them to a different website made little sense.  Also, the bounce rate on these referrals was over 50%, compared to a site average of around 20%, so the web visitors didn't enjoy it either.

Unfortunately, quality back links aren't going to come from a list.  The best kind are naturally earned with great content, but you can supplement this process with a great guest blogging process.  To do this you will want to find blogs in your niche, which would be anything about advertising really, and build a relationship with them so that they will accept your guest blog posts.  There's awesome resources out there for best initial emails to start this process, but I don't have any saved off hand.

The ideal option is actually getting links naturally.  To do this you will want to great engaging content that gets people to link to you.  This may be a list of the best 50 logos ever, or 10 reasons why you need a virtual assistant.  Anything that will get people to read it, comment, and then blog about it.

This would be the right approach.

I'd follow it up by following this guideline: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

For Vimeo Pro it suggests switching it to the old embed format.  Then create a video sitemap, and use proper microdata markup to try get a rich snippet in the serps.

I work with around 50 companies, and that's typically what I see.  My #1 listing will just get changed to a Places listing, but it will still be in the #1 position.

Whois.net is listed in the Moz Toolbar.  Click the wrench button, hover over domain tools and click whois.net

I agree with Tom on this point.  I'd create a short snippet, and just link back to the original article.  That way the traffic still flows through you, in case you have Ads on your site.

The only exemption to this for me would be if the content would be so amazing for my community of followers.  In that case I might accept the content, and just no-indexing it.  That way people in your RSS feeds can get it, and not have to jump over to another site, but you won't run into issues with Google.

The main intent with the footer link is to try acquire additional clients, so just having it in a blog post can potentially cost you business.  However, you do have to worry about over-optimizing yourself due to all the links with exact match anchor text.  There was actually a different blog post about this recently:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2239260/Using-Footer-Links-to-Diversify-Your-Backlink-Profile

In the article it suggested creating a page on your website specifically about this project.  This ensures that you link to a relevant page, in Google's eyes, as well as a relevant page for anyone that is interested in your services.  The blog also suggests no-following all of the links minus the one on the home page.  That way you still get a decent amount of link juice, but don't have to worry about a site-wide link.

+'s in urls simply represent a space.  Dashes are also used as a space.  So, there would be no impact.  You can find thousands of sites doing well in the SERPS using +'s.

That being said, if I was building it from scratch I'd use dashes.  Just easier to read for users, and there is a small possibility that it could trip up the search engines.  Super minor unrealistically small chance, but I put my tin foil hat on the same way many SEOs do.

I also agree with Dave.  My company works with dozens of local businesses, and creating targeted landing pages is part of the strategy for most of them.  The difference between original content and keyword swapped content is often the difference between first page rankings, and 3rd+ page rankings.  Take the time to write in depth content for each of these pages.  You will want it long enough to rank for your main terms, and any variations that may exist.

This would be a good place to utilize a canonical.  You can specify which one you want to be as the main source, and which is the duplicate.

This is the suggested best practice by many SEOs.  You will also want to go into Google Webmaster tools, and Geo target each of these subdirectories.

In the first month of a new client I go on a huge citation building spree, and I've never encountered an issue.  Some of the citations are directories, so I would say that you should have no problems.  Just make sure you just use the companies name in the directories, and don't try getting any keywords in there.  The links aren't worth much at all, like Jesse said, and trying to keyword stuff will just end up hurting your efforts.

I agree with the MadderPillar.  The third one tells you exactly what it's about immediately, which is why I think it is ideal.  Some SEOs report that there is a weighted system for Title tags, as well.  The first words in the title get more authority.  I've personally never experimented with this, but I tend to follow it to be on the safe side.

I would also suggest adding in some additional blog posts about this topic:

5 Things You Didn't Know About Shakespeare

5 Reasons to Go To The Free Outdoor Shakespeare

People love quick lists on Social Media, and 5 unique facts about Shakespeare would probably be worthy of a click from many people.

First off, don't split them up on different pages.  They are very relevant to each other.

What I'd do is target the main keyword in the title tag.  Maybe something like "Best Delivery Service in Singapore."  I'd also reflect his keyword in the H1 of the page.  From there you could use a variation in one of the h2's on the page, and just synonyms in other h2's.

You could do something like:

title: Best Delivery Service in Singapore

H1: Delivery Service in Singapore

H2: Why Choose Our Singapore Delivery Service

H2: Some Variation of Keyword

H2: Some Other Variation

Also, don't worry about the letter grades.  An "A" doesn't guarantee top rankings.  Aim for an "A" with the main keyword, and "A" or "B" with the variations.

Nofollow links still pass some authority, but no where near an in body link.  I commented on blogs like Website Magazine, and a few other real high authority blogs.  I just used my actual name, and didn't try optimize the link.

Ranking for web design is definitely a little different because of inflated numbers.  You should also keep in my that link analysis tools, like Moz and Majestic, don't find every link on the internet, and can take a while to discover some links.  Always take these stats with a grain of salt, and focus on getting quality links.

If you are working local you can always try identify links pages in your area.  I was able to get one from a couple historical societies and a mall just by asking for it.  You can also have a link in your signature on forums, but try to limit these since too many would look spammy.

I can definitely relate.  I work in the auto realm which is less trusted than the government according to a recent study.

Anyway, rather than just writing good content, go after viral content that people will share.  Maybe pull out an "Office Space" Esq campaign where you get even with office equipment.  Stapler vs hammer?  Monitor vs ground?  Projector vs office chair?  Printer vs a large amount of fireworks?

Then reach out to bloggers and humor sites to link back to your video.

I agree with Zora that by targeting the long tail you'll also optimize for the short tail.  To go further with targeting them all individually, that would depend on the competition, and the amount of variation of the keyword phrases.  Use the tools here on SEOMoz to find out the competitive level for those variants.  If it's pretty low, then one page would probably do, but if it's a tough search you would be better off creating more focused pages.

As for actually implementing a single page vs multiple pages, that would depend on context.  I would put "for sale," and "to purchase" on the same field, but clearance, to me at least, would be different.  If I were a consumer looking for a clearance product, I wouldn't want to land on just a regular page talking about buying the product.  I would want the page to match my search.

Latent dirichlet allocation is the newest school of thought on content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

Essentially focusing on contextual clues to reinforce the idea of what a page is really about.

Writing about Jaguar the animal, talk about fur.  Writing about Jaguar the car, mention spark plugs.

Here's a followup article to SEOMoz's that's quite informative: http://www.seangolliher.com/2010/seo/185/

It get's into the actual math of the data.

If the variations are for cities, then absolutely!  If they are for just slight variations of the words like "car dealers," and "car dealerships," then I would stick to just one page.

So, if it is like your example, and each page is for an individual city, then I would definitely have separate pages for each.

I know what you mean.  I work with pretty much all the vendors, and I can say that you should just be happy you don't have a Ford Direct site, which requires you to pay a "SEO Fee" to just change title tags.

Anyway, if you install the "Redirect Path" plugin on Chrome, which shows when you get redirected on a site, and what kind of redirect it is, you will see that the link to your dealership page from one of your VDPs on Cars.com is actually a 301 redirect.  Basically, they are doing their best to keep any authority from going to that page that would help the link back to your site.  They also link to the www. version of your website, which then gets 301'd to the non www. version of your website.  If, and how much, authority is lost with redirects is highly debated, but I usually go with a 10% loss of authority.  Basically, any authority that the link might provide is greatly decreased by these redirects.

This is just Cars.com, but I would guess the others are similar.  Do these links register in your Webmaster tools?

Do you mean URL wise, or content wise?

Google isn't going to penalize you for offering a relevant page to your customers.  Just don't overdo it with your content.  i.e. don't do this:

Company X has tons of Widgets for sale!  In fact, we have the best price on our widgets for sale, and will beat any other company with widgets for sale!

For example, if you are a Jaguar car dealership you are going to have to reiterate that you are actually selling Jaguars, and not just talking about them.  So, you will need to additional contextual clues of phrases like "for sale" and "to purchase."  Otherwise you might just appear as an informational site, and not an e-commerce site.

Depending on the tool you use, you should be able to see the density of phrases, as well as specific words.  However, keyword density shouldn't be your main focus.  You should consider the overall contextual relevance of your content, as well as the readability.  By focusing purely on density you could find yourself getting over-optimized.

EGOL is absolutely correct.

As long as you stuck to just "Brand" or "Brand +Keyword" occasionally you would be fine.

It won't hurt your site if that's what you are asking.  Will it rank well?  Really depends on how your organic writing style relates to SEO.  Is it broke up into sections?  Do those sections of decent headers?  Are their pictures?  Are the pictures named appropriately?

SEMRush.com has a tool for that.  It will only show the terms that you rank in the top 20 for, but it is a good starting point. From there you can supplement the rest of the keywords with Webmaster Tools.

"If I suggest that they make an H2 tag with SEO..."

H1's carry a little more weight than H2's, so I'd suggest using an H1 if you can.  Ian implied that, but he didn't outright say it

Also, the page you have listed has capital letters in it, which isn't ideal, but it's still fine.  However, the lower case version does 404.  So, any links that are sent to the lower case version will not result in you getting link juice to the page.  I'd suggest using a 301 redirect from the lower case version to the upper case one that you have listed.

lower case version:

http://lightsigns.com/uniko_manufacturing_limited.html

1. It's all about how diverse the keywords are.  If the difference is just "pizza bag for sale" and "pizza bags for sale," then one page would be enough.  Try to group your keywords together into like groups.  The number of groups you have is the number of pages.

2. The best way to utilize these pages would be to use internal links from these posts back to your main/money pages.  As long as you are writing content about something, and not just a rehash of your money pages, then you should be perfectly fine.

According to this article it should help: http://www.seroundtable.com/404-links-google-15427.html

The reasoning behind limiting the number of links is because the amount of authority that is passed by a page is divided by the total number of links on that page - regardless of nofollow or not.  So, the fewer links the more authority you are passing to each of those internal pages.  Answering your subsidiary question, there would be no SEO benefit from nofollowing these links.

That being said, usability trumps this in my book always.  Go into your Google Analytics, and see which of these links people are actually clicking.  If they are going into your drop down links, then leave them.  If they are only clicking on the head link, then consider chopping them.

It's tough to answer your question simply because I don't know your sites overall strategy.  What keywords are you targeting, and how are you targeting them currently type information.  This isn't something I'd ask you to do in a public setting like this forum

My personal suggestion would be to find a SEO Mentor.  Someone you can ask questions of to learn yourself, but not directly hire.  With the potential partnerships your site offers it would be reasonable for someone to take you under their wing in hopes of generating clients through you.

For cases where you are going from dynamic urls to keyword rich ones, it definitely pays off.

i.e. domain.com/112342 to domain.com/keywords

For cases where you are switching from underscores to dashes in the url, it might not pay off.  That would depend on how competitive the vertical is, and if your competitors are doing it properly.  In most cases this change would not be worth it, but if things are really intense on that search, and you can't seem to budge with your internal page, it might be considered.

I had a Car Dealer Group in Virginia that gave itself a penalty because they had all of their websites (around 20) linked in the menu a couple times.  Every time I removed them they would come back to the top of the search engines, and they would drop right back down when they added them back.

If you are worried about the site wides you could just nofollow them.  I think Matt Cutts has a video on that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTjN9x-by-I

I'm a little confused.  Are you guest blogging or leaving comments on a blog?

Facebook ads could be a good place to start.  You can target people that have an interest in different languages.  Drive traffic to the Mandarin site by targeting people who have expressed an interest in Chinese Language.  Continue with the rest of them.  You will want to experiment with different landing page and advertisement combos.  Find out what level of competency those ads are delivering, and create a message that meets that skill level.  Maybe something like "I used this one trick to learn Mandarin in X amount of time."  Create a video explaining how it works, and why it will help them.Expert = Refresher

Beginner = Learn

As for SEO, which also has great potential, you have some problems to tackle first.

1. All of your sites are use the same template, are hosted on the same account and show registrant.  This makes it obvious that you are creating your own link network, which is sketchy regardless of hiding this or not.  You then link to your other pages with keyword rich text.  These are two big signs of link manipulation, so you will probably get held back.

I would suggest moving everything to one site, 301 redirecting all the other websites to their new pages on the single domain, and building content out on that one domain.  Just 1-4 blog posts a week, nothing extreme.

2. Single page sites have been able to hide from penalties in the past because there isn't enough there to tell if you are spamming.  Well, things are changing, and Google is getting better at finding this.  Bigger sites with substantial content typically perform better.  Great content can help you beat out a decent amount of links.  One of my leads sites has 5 blog comments for links, but beats out sites with 100 linking domains just because I wrote better content than my competitors.

If your website is still hindered after this you will want to use a program to find your toxic links, and disavow them.

The grading tool is used as a 10,000 foot view of the page.  It analyzes to the webpage to look for the proper usage of exact keyword phrases throughout the webpage.  It is not designed to analyze for synonyms or variations of keywords.

If you wanted to score a good grade for the variation you specified, then you would need to through that exact phrase in your Title, etc.  Keep in mind, though, the grading tool is not an indication of great SEO, just an indication that you have used keywords in the locations most highly correlated with positive results.

You want to properly group your content together.  So, if the section of your website is "Career Resources," and all of these categories are in that section, then I would use the first URL structure.  It makes internal linking between these pages seem more natural, since they are in the same "silo."

The other benefit of the first style is if you used breadcrumbs.  By having no unifying sub-directory, as in the second URL structure, you are unable to push all the authority to a single page, which then pushes authority back down into specific categories.  Well, you still could, but your URL structure would contradict your breadcrumbs, and it would probably be harder to program the website to naturally build breadcrumbs.

Seconded.  The code is on the page, so page title.

The recovery days after you complaining is probably a coincidence.  They would have to get really lucky that your site just happened to get indexed right after they fixed something.

What dates did you see your traffic decrease?  From when to when?  That's the best way to figure out what kind of penalty you may have received.  If it doesn't match up on dates, then we can help you diagnose what happened from the work logs that the SEO might provide.

Cody

Hi Marie!  I loved your recent post about the difference between Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Link Penalties recently.

First off, I'd like to say that I'm still getting awesome results with my SEO.  I work on around 100 websites, and both my on-site and off-site techniques are improving the results.

That being said, I can see that the site level metrics are having a larger influence.  I work in a niche that has lots of different providers for websites, and most of them create tons of duplicate content.  The sites that are creating 1000's of pages of duplicate content have been hit hard in the past 6+ months, and it's getting harder to keep them ranking well, but the one's with great architecture are actually getting easier.

For a great example of a company taking the initiative on this I'd look at Autotrader.  They recently, within the last year I believe, decided to no-index all of their inventory.  They did this because all of it was the exact duplicate of what the dealers had posted in dozens of other places online.  Right after they made that change I saw a dramatic improvement in rankings across the board.

A) Is it Women's Widgets used naturally in the posts?  If you are going to use the phrase you might as well link with it.  While you don't want every link on the site to have the same exact anchor text, the threshold for onsite is very, very high.  It's when you get to offsite links where things get messy quickly.

B) I would not link with the long tail.  This would be like claiming that you are the best golfer in the room, but then telling everyone that this other person is the best golfer in the roof.  Doing it once probably wouldn't be a big deal, but I always aim to keep on the safe side of things.

C) I wouldn't use your company name as the link, but you could use words in close proximity.  This could help keep things well rounded.

Another thing to consider is the overall frequency.  If you have 5 pages using the exact match link, assuming it can be used naturally, then it isn't a big deal.  If you have 20+, then I would definitely consider keeping things well rounded with proximity links.