White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?

I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue? Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed? What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?

| RonMedlin

3

Finding and Removing bad backlinks

Ok here goes. Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder. 1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile. 2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it? 3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links? 4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing? My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed? I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake. Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.

| k9byron

0

Title Tag - Best Practices

I'm pretty new to seo but think I'm starting to get a decent grasp on it. One thing I'm really struggling with is how to organize the meta title tags on my website. I work in real estate and I'm noticing a lot of my local competitors that are ranking for the top keywords seem to using that particular keyword on every title tag within their website. An example would be www.paranych.com. Many of his internal pages have the word "Edmonton Real Estate" in the meta title tag, yet his home page is the page that is ranking for that particular keyword. It doesn't seem logical to have every one of my pages featuring the same keyword, but there are many examples within my industry of this working. Is the best practice with meta title tags to have your keyword on every title tag of your site or just the home page? Thx, Barry

| patrickmilligan

0

Does having the same descrition for different products a bad thing the titles are all differnent but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?

does having the same description for different products a bad thing the titles are all different but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?

| Casefun

1

Do shady backlinks actually damage ranking?

That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"? That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices? Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices? I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt? Thanks!

| yoni45

0

Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?

Hello there ! Everything is in the subject of this post but here is the context : we are a web agency and we, among others, build websites for our clients (most of them are shops). Until now, we put a link in their footer, like "developped by MyWebShop". But we don't know if it is bad or not. With only one website we can have like hundred of backlinks at once, but is it good for SEO or not ? Will Google penalize us thinking that is blackhat practices ? Is it better to put our link in the "legal notices" or "disclaimer" part of the websites ? What is the best practice for a lasting SEO ? I hope you understand my question, Thnak you in advance !

| mywebshop

0

Can a Page Title be all UPPER CASE?

My clients wants to use UPPER CASE for all his page titles. Is this okay? Does Google react badly to this?

| petewinter

0

Merging four sites into one... Best way to combine content?

First of all, thank you in advance for taking the time to look at this. The law firm I work for once took a "more is better" approach and had multiple websites, with keyword rich domains. We are a family law firm, but we have a specific site for "Arizona Child Custody" as one example. We have four sites. All four of our sites rank well, although I don't know why. Only one site is in my control, the other three are managed by FindLaw. I have no idea why the FindLaw sites do well, other than being in the FindLaw directory. They have terrible spammy page titles, and using Copyscape, I realize that most of the content that FindLaw provides for it's attorneys are "spun articles." So I have a major task and I don't know how to begin. First of all, since all four sites rank well for all of the desired phrases-- will combining all of that power into one site rocket us to stardom? The sites all rank very well now, even though they are all technically terrible. Literally. I would hope that if I redirect the child custody site (as one example) to the child custody overview page on the final merged site, we would still maintain our current SERP for "arizona child custody lawyer." I have strongly encouraged my boss to merge our sites for many reasons. One of those being that it's playing havoc with our local places. On the other hand, if I take down the child custody site, redirect it, and we lose that ranking, I might be out of a job. Finally, that brings me down to my last question. As I mentioned, the child custody site is "done" very poorly. Should I actually keep the spun content and redirect each and every page to a duplicate on our "final" domain, or should I redirect each page to a better article? This is the part that I fear the most. I am considering subdomains. Like, redirecting the child custody site to childcustody.ourdomain.com-- I know, for a fact, that will work flawlessly. I've done that many times for other clients that have multiple domains. However, we have seven areas of practice and we don't have 7 nice sites. So child custody would be the only legal practice area that has it's own subdomain. Also, I wouldn't really be doing anything then, would I? We all know 301 redirects work. What I want is to harness all of this individual power to one mega-site. Between the four sites, I have 800 pages of content. I need to formulate a plan of action now, and then begin acting on it. I don't want to make the decision alone. Anybody care to chime in? Thank you in advance for your help. I really appreciate the time it took you to read this.

| SDSLaw

0

Using an auto directory submission

Has anyone used easysubmits.com and what's your experience with it? Any other directory submission or link building tools that help automate and manage the process like easysubmits.com says they can do? I'm just looking at it currenlty and wanted to hear others thoughts before I get taken in by some black hat method that hurts my websites instead.

| Twinbytes

0

Article submission, and how to build backlinks for Ecommerce? [HELP]

Hi guys, I have a question, for high quality backlinks apparently you go to these article websites where you submit your site such as Ezine etc etc, however is it just one article you submit to these as it'll look like duplicate content? Also can I have it on my site first? How does it work? Also I run an ecommerce website, how can I build backlinks to each product, theres over 200+ products and 1.6k subcategories. I would like to rank for as many as possible but getting an SEO company to do this would cost to much. Any ideas on how I should go about it?

| InkCartridgesFast

1

Link Building using Badges

In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge) still considered a white hat tactic? I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective. Look forward to feedback from MOZers.

| Amjath

0

Penalised by Google - Should I Redirect to a new domain?

Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem. I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed. I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back. Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?

| penn73

0

Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors

Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.

| dean1986

0

How do you deal with spammy backlinks?

One of the web designers I work with asked me to do a preliminary site assessment on a small business website. The owner of the business had a falling out with his previous web designer and moved over to the one I work with earlier this year. The site has been redesigned but when analyzing the back links I discovered that the previous designer had created directories to create backlinks to the page. The PR 0 links from the site number about 150 and are from unrelated topic pages. So, it made me wonder, how much damage can spammy backlinks do? What is the best practice to deal with spammy backlinks if you find them?

| TheARKlady

0

Separate domain name for a subdomain?

I just created a subdomain to help our main TLD website. I was wondering if it's smart to create a separate TLD for this subdomain and set up a forward and build links to it. Reason I was thinking about it because it would be easier for people to remember instead of typing in subdomain.maindomain.com. But, I don't want the main website to suffer, since the purpose of creating this subdomain and it's content is to help the main domain. Any inputs on this? Thank you.

| FinanceSite

0

Is the SORBS-SPAM list a big deal?

Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?

| ayetti

0

Is using twiends.com to get twitter followers considered black hatting?

Hi, I've been struggling to get followers on Google Plus and Twitter, and recently stumbled upon twiends.com. It offers an easy service that allows you to get twitter followers very quickly. Is this considered black hating? Even if Google doesn't consider the followers as valid, am I likely to be punished if using their service? Even if it doesn't help rankings, it is nice to have lots of followers so that they will see my tweets which has the potential to drive more traffic to my site, and give awareness to my business. What are your thoughts?

| eugenecomputergeeks

0

Fake PageRank scam?

Had someone offering to place a link on their site for a monthly fee, claiming their site is PR8 - I checked the PR and it seems to be real, with no 301 redirect, but by looking at the site and their presence in google results, I highly doubt their PR is legitimate, but cannot find out how they faked it, and whether having a link on their site will have a negative effect on my site. Their domain is articledomination(dot)info Can anyone shed some lights into this ?

| gamblingau

0

Best way to handle expired ad in a classified

I don't think there is a definitive answer to this, but worth the discussion: How to handle an expired ad in a classified / auction site? Michael Gray mentioned you should 301 it to it's category page, and I'm inclined to agree with him. But some analysts say you should return a "product/ad expired" page with a 404. For the user I think the 404 aproach is best, but from a SEO perspective that means I'm throwing link juice out. What if I 301 him from the ad, and show a message saying why they're seeing the listing page instead of the product page? Thoughts?

| mirum_agency

0

White Papers! Is this still good for SEO

Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.

| AppleCapitalGroup

0

Can you block backlinks from another domain

Wondering if this is somehow possible. A site got hacked and created a /data folder with hundreds of .php files that are web pages selling all sorts of stuff. We deleted the /data folder and blocked Google from indexing it. Just noticed in Webmaster Tools that the site has 35,000 backlinks from other sites that got hacked with the same way. Is there a way to block these sites? I am assuming there isn't, but wanted to see if anyone ran into the same problem. It is a wordpress site is that helps.

| phatride

0

How to transfer posts from a specific category into a subdomain

Hi Guys, Is there a way in Wordpress to transfer or redirect a category and all posts under it into a sub-domain? Thanks in advance..

| Trigun

0

Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics

A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro

| SEOptPro

0

DropBox.com High PA & DA?

"What’s up with these dl.dropbox.com High PA & DA links?" You know, It's frustrating to spend almost an entire day getting a few great link backs... then to find out your competitor has hundreds of cheap & easy link backs for the keyword you are going for with greater Authority [according to SEOmoz's OSE]. So I ran a search on one of our top competitors in Open Site Explorer to gather an idea of where the heck they are getting all of their links. Please feel free to copy my actions so you can see what I see. Run a search in OSE for www[dot]webstaurantstore[dot]com. Click on the ‘Anchor Text’ Tab. Click on the first Anchor Text Term, which should be ‘restaurant supplies’ :: Then it will expand, click on the ‘View more links and details in the inbound links section.’ As you scroll down the list you will notice that they have a bunch of linking pages from dl.dropbox.com, all of them are .pdb files, for their targeted Anchor Text, restaurant supplies. Q: So my question is can someone please elaborate on what .pdb files are and how they are getting this to work for them so well? Also you will notice, on the expanded Anchor Text Page, that their 6<sup>th</sup> most powerful link for this phrase (restaurant supplies) seems to be linked straight from a porn site, I thought Google does not rank adult sites like this? Q: For future reference, does anyone know legitimate websites to maybe file an SEO manipulation complaint? Thanks!

| Burkett.com

0

What are good sources to buy traffic and video views?

I am looking into buying traffic for a website and I'd like to know if anyone has had a positive experience doing so. What are the best companies that sell traffic? I also want to buy video views. This is a trickier question. I upload the videos to YouTube and use the embed code on my website. I want the paid video views on my site so I get the traffic and YT gets the video view. Any suggestions? Thanks

| Storitz

0

Seo style="display: none;" ?

i want to have a funktion which shortens text in categorie view in my shop. apple is doing this in their product configurator see the "learn more" button at the right side: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC915LL/A apple is doing this by adding dynamic content but i want it more seo type by leaving the content indexable by google. i know from a search that this was used in the past years by black had seos to cover keywordstuffing. i also read an article at google. i beleive that this is years ago and keywordstuffing is completly no option anymore. so i beleive that google just would recognise it like the way its meant to be. but if i would not be sure i would not ask here 🙂 what do you think?

| kynop

0

Interesting case of IP-wide Google Penalty, what is the most likely cause?

Dear SEOMOZ Community, Our portfolio of around 15 internationalized web pages has received a significant, as it seems IP-wide, Google penalty starting November 2010 and have yet to recover from it. We have undergone many measure to lift the penalty including reconsideration requests wo/ luck and am now hoping the SEOMoz community can give us some further tips. We are very interested in the community's help and judgement what else we can try to uplift the penalty. As quick background information, The sites in question offers sports results data and is translated for several languages. Each market, equals language, has its own tld domain using the central keyword, e.g. <keyword_spanish>.es <keyword_german>.de <keyword_us>.com</keyword_us></keyword_german></keyword_spanish> The content is highly targeted around the market, which means there are no duplicate content pages across the domains, all copy is translated, content reprioritized etc. however the core results content in the body of the pages obviously needs to stay to 80% the same A SEO agency of ours has been using semi-automated LinkBuilding tools in mid of 2010 to acquire link partnerships There are some promotional one-way links to sports-betting and casino positioned on the page The external linking structure of the pages is very keyword and main-page focused, i.e. 90% of the external links link to the front page with one particular keyword All sites have a strong domain authority and have been running under the same owner for over 5 years As mentioned, we have experienced dramatic ranking losses across all our properties starting in November 2010. The applied penalties are indisputable given that rankings dropped for the main keywords in local Google search engines from position 3 to position 350 after the sites have been ranked in the top 10 for over 5 years. A screenshot of the ranking history for one particular domain is attached. The same behavior can be observed across domains. Our questions are: Is there something like an IP specific Google penalty that can apply to web properties across an IP or can we assume Google just picked all pages registered at Google Webmaster? What is the most likely cause for our penalty given the background information? Given the drops started already in November 2010 we doubt that the Panda updates had any correlation t this issue? What are the best ways to resolve our issues at this point? We have significant history data available such as tracking records etc. Our actions so far were reducing external links, on page links, and C-class internal links Are there any other factors/metrics we should look at to help troubleshooting the penalties? After all this time wo/ resolution, should we be moving on two new domains and forwarding all content as 301s to the new pages? Are the things we need to try first? Any help is greatly appreciated. SEOMoz rocks. /T cxK29.png

| tomypro

0

Why Do People Send In Fake Form Submissions?

I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . . ). It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense. Does anyone know why people do this? Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form. I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .

| damon1212

0

ScrapeBox

What is you opinion about scrapebox? I recently used scapebox ... are there any negative effects? My site is more then 1 year old...

| Alexsmenaru

0

How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?

A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.

| kevin1

1

Partners and Customers logo listing and links

We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites. I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software. But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.

| PerriCline

0

Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?

A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.

| AdamThompson

0

Can you set up a Google Local account under a PO Box?

I have a client that wants a Google local listing in a town he serves but does not have a physical location. Is it an issue to share an address with an existing company? Is is it better to use a P.O. Box? or is there a forwarding address company? Is this considered a black hat Local SEO tactic?

| BonsaiMediaGroup

0

Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?

I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark

| Markus111

1

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