Welcome to the Q&A Forum

More than a year ago (August 2013) I got an "Unnatural Links Warning," I ignored it because I thought it was erroneously sent and that it was odd that there was no place for me to submit a reconsideration request in the Manual Actions section of Webmaster Tools. This happened for several of my domains. I am now noticing a lost in ranking (but not a loss in "ability" to rank). It led me to post this question in the Webmaster Help Forum, I really didn't get an answer though.

Here is a link to the Google Export of my links from zachrussell.net and protechig.com.

Any idea of what I can do related to this? Even If I did disavow/remove any questionable links, there is no place for me to submit a reconsideration request.

Thanks Lewis,

I get nervous indexing pages with very little content, some of these pages. Some of these "Snippets" have maybe a paragraph of text and 5 corresponding lines of code. Oddly enough, some of these snippets have gotten me organic WordPress leads. Just want some peace of mind

Thanks

Hello Everyone,

I'm starting a new WordPress-based community site WP Temple. As a part of this site, i'm going to be adding a "Code Snippets" Section which will show visitors how to do very specific things on their site. These snippets, by nature, will be small articles but contain highly-relevant for search. Should this content be indexed and followed, as well as added to my XML sitemap?

I appreciate the feedback!

Zach

I anticipate that I will get little traffic from this (my site is relatively low traffic as is). I do ultimately want to use it for another footer link that will promote a website that i'm starting that is focused on WordPress tutorials. That is my ultimate plan for content marketing

Thanks for your assurance.

Hello,

I'm a relatively active member for a website support forum for the Genesis Framework - studiopress.com/forums. Right now I have a plain text signature, but I am thinking about linking to my website (a WordPress Development Firm) with branded anchor text. I understand the risk of Penguin for non-branded, keyword-heavy anchor text -- but If I do this with simply a link to my website's homepage or Genesis development page, do you think i'd be at risk?

Thanks

Zach

It's easy to remove. I currently have the default setup in Yoast where I have (currently) a sitemap_index.xml file with a page_sitemap, post_sitemap, category_sitemap, and a portfolio_sitemap (my custom post type for portfolio items).

Hello Everyone!

This is a question about my site, which is running on WordPress. Currently, I have category page to have the noindex, follow attributes, as they have little unique content. I do have them currently in my sitemap.xml file, however. Should I remove them from the sitemap since Google technically shouldn't index them?

Thanks for your help!

Hello,

I've seen a similar thing. My client inconstantly ranked #1 for traffic cones for over a year, then this last panda update we got put behind by a big brand. Not completely sure why because the brand has almost no unique content on the page. Thanks google!

I agree, the only way I could think this would work would be if the robotx.txt file was on the root domain. I agree, check Webmaster tools, they will tell you under the sitemaps section about "Error: URL was blocked by robots.txt).

One thing to remember is that robots.txt is technically a suggestion to ask search engines not to crawl your site. They can choose to ignore it, though personally I don't know of any cases in which this happenned.

I want to start off by saying I'm a huge stickler for page load speed. Not only is it important to SEO but it is even more important for UX -- especially with bounce rate/conversion rate.

Again, this is all hypothetical, but if the two sites are identical in all other aspects, the page that has the fastest load time would rank better.

Just as a point of reference, using Vimeo/YouTube isn't the only other solution to making your site load faster. You can/should consider things like a CDN -- Especially for video if nothing else. Also, video itself shouldn't slow down page load time as the video itself shouldn't load until someone clicks the "play button"

Hello,

I've seen a similar thing. My client inconstantly ranked #1 for traffic cones for over a year, then this last panda update we got put behind by a big brand. Not completely sure why because the brand has almost no unique content on the page. Thanks google!

I would probably 301 the non-www version of your domain to the www version. This is your best bet becasuse if you don't already, you may have duplicate content issues arise in the future. Godaddy's DNS 301 works fine, i've used it before with no adverse effect.

What I would then do in Google Webmaster Tools is verify both domains, and specify the www version of the domain as the preferred version. This should solve the issues your having.

If you have any more questions i'd be glad to help.

Zach Russell

President, ProTech Internet Group

I agree,

Just kind of describe what it's showing of a specific picture. Just keep in mind the "real" use of alt text, Accessability for people without a monitor, if you keep that in mind, you should be golden.

Hello Lance

In general, a 301 redirect tells google, "hey, this page moved and is now at this URL." With that being said, here are some best practices:

If you are literally just merging pages into one, within reason, then there is no problems with redirecting them to the new page.

If your just completely trashing the page because it serves no value, than have the redirect go to the next category up, or, have the individual features page go to the features page once you delete them. I would ask myself this question, "If I was a user following a link that links to the 301d page, where would the next-best pertinent page be?"

Be aware of the number of 301 redirects any specific link has. Ideally, there should only be one.

If your concerned with link juice, which you stated you are, what is stopping you from contacting the webmaster of the site that links to that page and ask them to change the URL on the link, stating that you redesigned the site and the URLs have changed. The worst they can say is no, or nothing at all, or they can take the few minutes out of their day and change it.

A great way to do this is use OSE to get the links to any given page on your site, and then run it through one of the numerous tools to find the whois contact info of that domain, or just use their "contact us" page.

Hope this helps,

Zach

I agree with kadesmith,

If you have a PRO Plus or higher ($200+/mo) then you can upload your own logo. You will be prompted for this if you create a new campaign in SEOmoz, and I also believe this comes up when you create reports as well. SEOmoz also has specific things for image sizing recommendations, so just be aware of that.

I'm dabbling with link building in a non link-happy industry, traffic safety (IE Traffic cones, barricades, safety vests, etc...). We currently are doing #RCS in terms of giveaways for college students as well as discounts in a wider EDU Outreach campaign as well as legitimate guest posting.

I have started to use Link Prospector, and got a list of links/resources pages that we can get info from. I found some great links through here, including ways to get links from higher-profile .gov domains, but was wondering if it is worth it to go after the high(er) quality links/resources pages. By higher quality, I usually set a floor of a DA 25-30 and have a limited amount of external links per page. These would be for branded keywords (IE the company name/domain) and not exact match anchor text.

I'd really like to see how other SEOs feel about this.

Thanks

Zachary Russell

President, ProTech Internet Group

Hands down that CSS is the preferred way make dropdown menus. Google and on a lesser note, other search engines, have improved drastically with their ability to parse JavaScript / jQuery, and you may be able to get away with it, but it really should be avoided if possible. With the "new" CSS3 styles, you get almost any style you'd like with that.

SEOmoz recommends batch requests of 10 URLs according to their API wiki http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/url-metrics it states that any batch request larger than this will output a 400 error from the server.

Hope that helps!

Zach

Hello,

I would agree with what was said, this is DEFINITELY duplicate content, and is also exteremely Spammy. I unfortunately see this as well on a lot of sites, especially for local SEO, without getting in to detail of these strategies. My view of this is that these concepts are adding absolutely no value to the web, and really should not be done by any legitimate online marker as a means of increasing rankings.

Here is a recommendation, since I don't belive that the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach would be helpful, why don't you create specific pages for each zip code/locality, and create unique content for every page. As a rule of thumb, I try to have 55% of content on any given page unique. Some strategies that work for me is to use local landmarks and events.

I think as google's algorithm progresses strategies like this will be beaten down, but who knows how long it'll take for that to happen.

Hope this helps

Zach

I do agree that you may want to elaborate more, but "IF" it is a banner that has an internal link, meaning that the link on the banner is to your own site, you should be okay. If you don't have it already, I would suggest making relevant alt text for the image though.