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.

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

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

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 am working with a company that their domain name is the same as the head term. For example, if I was going for the head term coffee, and my site was coffee.com. This is specifically in the medical space, and i'm competing directly with Web MD and The Mayo Clinic, my advantage on the term is the EMD. We have a legitimate site with thousands of pages of relevant content, and I am starting a guest blogging campaign on relevant health sites. My real challenge is when I go for anchor text links should I ideally go for [head term] or [headterm.com] as the anchor text. Thanks in advance for your insights Zach

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

I am in the process of revamping my company's website. I do WordPress Development, Design, and SEO consulting, and i'm running into a sort of writer's block when wring my services pages. For example, my page on WordPress Security has 388 words of "body" content, and I feel from a content perspective, it serves it's purpose, but from an SEO perspective it is considered a little light. I really don't know what the SOP is here, because, I've literally seen competitors sites have a page on "WordPress Security" rank on the first page of Google with absolutely no content, an empty page. I see a lot of the Moz posts are huge, thosands of words, and I know they perform very well (and they also have ton's of links / PR...etc) and I just want to do the right thing. I know sites like http://www.seerinteractive.com/our-services/search-engine-optimization have relatively short info pages as well. Thanks in advance for your feedback. Zachary Russell President, ProTech Internet Group

Hello everyone, My name is Zachary Russell, and I run a Philadelphia based WordPress Development and SEO firm, ProTech Internet Group. I have been doing work lately, and have been neglecting the fact that my own site needs work, I have now changed that. I have done a complete redesign and started repurposting content to have a well-rounded content strategy that can appeal the the widest possible audience. My issue I'm having now is this: I have both a Google Places page and a Google +Local page for my business , Obviously duplicate listings are a problem, but I don't know which one to get rid of. They both have 0 reviews and limited +1s, I just don't know which one I should delete, and which one I should push to get more reviews moving forward. Also, moving forward, would it make sense for me to have a Google +Business and a Google +Local page?I don't know if this would cause any conflicts either. Thanks for your help and have a happy new year! Zach Russell President, ProTech Internet Group

Hello, I'm looking for some new ways to build links (IE, letitimate not spam), and I know sites featuring a site that I created would be an interesting way to do so. My question is this, the StudioPress Showcase pages http://www.studiopress.com/showcase/baltimore-print-studios link back to your site with an image, with some "Almost URL Alt text". How valuable would this link be, given that the DA is 97 and the PA is in the upper 40s Thanks Zach

I am in the process of redesigning my website, and I have been working on the Genesis framework a lot lately, so I used the Genesis framework to make my new site. The URL is http://protechig.com As I look at the H1 on the page (homepage only, every other page has solid h1s from an SEO perspective.) The first thing that I see is that the home page H1 is a links (to protech's home page). The second thing that I see is the the title text is replaced with an image (my logo) and there is a text-indent:-99999; and overflow:hiden; I just want to know from an SEO perspective if this is okay, and, if it isn't, what I could/should to to rectify it. Thanks Zach

Hello Everyone, I'm in a situation that I have no idea how to handle. I have only really dealt with RWD, and not a mobile-specific site. Anyway, I have a client who is launching an m.domian.com for their mobile site, how do I add/configure this in WMT? Thanks Zach

Hello Everyone, I have taken a few clients recently that i'm doing local SEO for; I'm curious of what the best tool is for keyword tracking with local intent? I have heard things about WhiteSpark and MicrositeMasters, but I have no idea what is the best, is SEOmoz's tracking good for local? Thanks Zach

I am curious, what is the best way to link things from an SEO perspective 1. Full Path; http://yoursite.com/links/alink/ 2. Absolute Path /links/yourlink/ 3. Relative Path ../yourlink/ Just curious if there has been any quantifiable data on this. Thanks Zach

Howdy Everyone! Since i've seen the MozCon presentation by Richard Baxter at SEOGadget, i've been completely amazed by the links extension for Excel. I tried this morning to give it a try. Unfortunately, I cannot get it working, and was hoping that someone here could help me out. I know it's out of the usual "realm" of questions, but I figure it's worth a try 🙂 I successfully installed the addon and entered my Access id (as "member-xxxxxxxxxx" member is in my id) and the secret key. I then downloaded the "OSE" excel spreadsheet" just to make sure I get all the calls right (as I know the doc works) Once I do this, and enter anything in, I get the "an error occured: the remote server returend an error: 401 unauthorized. I then went into the config file (as the setup doc suggests) and disabled run time caching (or at least set "SEOMOZ_API_use_cache_YN":"N") and the SEOMOZ_API_timeout to 100000 from 60000. I have also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the addin, along with regenerating the MozScape API Key Anyway, i'm not an excel wiz, and would appreciate any help that I could get on this. I'm also about to experiment with SEO Tools For Excel if anywone wants to check that out. Thanks in advance Zach Russell

Hello Everyone, I made a post a few months ago about one of my sites, Poker On A Mac dropping off the face of google. I found out that it was hacked, and redirecting traffic from google to other, pharmacy websites. Doing some research, I found out it was the WordPress PharmaHack, and we ended up recovering from it. Now, since October 23rd traffic has went down again mainly organic traffic, I tried to see if it was hacked again, with the same thing and their was nothing I noticed. I was wondering if anyone could give me any insights as to why this happened? Thanks Zach CwFda.png

Hello, I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos. I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way? I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it. I'd appreciate any help on this matter, Zach

I am in the middle of optimizing sites for SEO, and am wondering how big of a factor it is to get page load speed under 1.5 seconds? I am prioritizing tasks and I want to know how much this could affect trafiic? Thanks

Hello, The site i'm referring to is http://www.pokeronamac.com, it was hacked via something called the "WordPress Pharma Hack" http://theblawblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/restoring-a-pharma-hacked-wordpress-site-wp-3-4/ We restored it as far as I can tell, but if anyone can confirm this by doing a site search and not getting redirected it would be appreciated. You will see that some search results still show up as spam, but when I click on them, they 404. I want to know If I should submit a reinclusion request, I wasn't notified by WMT of malaware, so I want to know the SOP here. Thanks Zach

Hello, On 9/11/12, we submitted a reconsideration request to Google for http://macpokeronline.com, at the time we received penalties from both penguin and manual removal. We have since worked on cleaning up our link profile, and  got this response from Google: We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.macpokeronline.com/. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take. I honestly don't even know how to take this, we always showed up #1 while doing a site search, so it is kind of irrelevant to us in this case. Is this the reply of them accepting our request? Thanks Zach

In a previous post I made, I was able to determine that one of my sites; http://pokeronamac.com/ was hacked and was feeding spam perscription drug content to search engines, then redirecting to another site when clicked on Google. I then contacted my web host, and, after they did a scan of our files, they determined that something within the wp-includes directory was compromised and malicious. They removed the file, though they weren't able to determine the source of the attack, or how they god in (should we be scared?). Anyway, its been several days now ~5 and if I do a site search the spam pages still show up, but the redirect is no longer working. At this point, I am at a standstill, because i'm loosing traffic on my site by about 90%, and google hasn't sent us any warnings of malaware or the like. I know I was recommended against this before, but should I attempt to submit a reconsideration request, or should I just wait it out? Thanks for your help, Zach

Hello Everyone, After looking at one of my websites, http://pokeronamac.com/ I noticed that there is a significant drop in all traffic to my site. I cannot figure out what the exact source is, as we received no warnings in WMT, and as far as I know there are no major updates released in the last week or so by Google. I took a look at the content section of GA and I saw that virtually all of my content was seeing a decrease in traffic, meaning that it isn't specific to a few pages, which leads me to believe that it is an algorithmic penalty. My confusion was that there was no changes made to the website in the past few months, although, on September 10th (5 days after traffic dropped) I updated the meta descriptions and titles site wide. I don't believe that the penalty is from Panda or Penguin because we actually experienced a positive influx in traffic during the week of April 25th. I'd appreciate any insights into helping me recover from this so I can get the visits again that I had before. If any other metrics are required, i'd gladly provide them. Thanks Zach Russell 8NBwn.png

Hello Everyone, I've been using Google Analytics for some years now, and I never really used it in an advanced way (alerts, goals, conversions, etc...) I was wondering if there was a good place for me to learn GA so I can start using it to it's full potental. Thanks Zach