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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.


  • Id like some help, My site had a rank fall and I think I was penalized by Penguin, I compared running a 'Full SERP Report "and I see no reason for me to be in 4th place in the SERP.The Facts: I have a higher: Page Authority, # of Root Domains Linking to the Page, Domain Authority, # of Root Domains Linking to the Domain, MozRank, MozTrust My mT/mR is 0.955 against: #1->0.983 #2->0 #3->1.023 (but my mozrank and moz trust is higher My website is: https://www.soprojetos.com.br/ this occours since Nov 2015. I have 99 external links against: #1->15   #2->0 #3->11 Link to OSE:https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.soprojetos.com.br&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=What I think:I guess a have to Disallow some links that some crazy Real Estate Websites made to my website, but i'm afraid to do this, and id like an oppinion about why my website is not ranking first to "plantas de casas" and "projetos de casas" anymore, my competitors are not so well seen on google as me (according to moz) (sorry for my bad english i'm brazilian) Thanks in Advance

    | aneebelo
    0

  • We have recently moved from http to https - could this be a problem? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk As far as I'm aware we are doing everything by SEO best practice and have no manual penalties, all content is unique and we are not doing any link farming etc...

    | The-Present-Finder
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, We're working on a website for a manufacturer who allows retailers to reuse their product information. Now, this of course raises the issue of duplicate content. The manufacturer is the content owner and originator, but retailers will copy the information for their own site and not link back (permitted by the manufacturer) - the only reference to the manufacturer will be the brand name citation on the retailer website. How would you deal with the duplicate content issues that this may cause. Especially considering the domain authority for a lot of the retailer websites is better than the manufacturer site? Thanks!!

    | A_Q
    0

  • Hi If the quality of web pages is very good I believe rankings should reflect this. My domain is at least 3 years old.
    What steps would you recommend short term and long term in terms of how to improve page rank and domain authority? Thanks.

    | SEOguy1
    0

  • Hi I have a sitemap url already generated by SEO Yoast in the htaccess file, and I have submitted that to the search engines. I'd already created a sitemap web page on the website, also as a helpful aid for users to see a list of all page urls. Is this a problem and could this scenario create duplicate issues or any problems with search engines? Thanks.

    | SEOguy1
    0

  • Hi Does page rank and domain authority page rank drop due to duplication issues on a web domain or on a web page? Thanks.

    | SEOguy1
    0

  • I have the opportunity to have a link from a high DA, trustworthy, relevant site to a key product range that I am optimising on my website. The link will be in an article. I have one very simple question. Should I use exact-match anchor text?

    | AHC_SEO
    0

  • For the last couple years, i believed common knowledge that press releases was NOT the way to go for SEO. So I avoided it like crazy! Now, I'm doing some research and I realize that some (or alot) companies still create press releases to get the word out so that they can spread the message. I am going to be signing with some clients that are bigger brands and I want to do everything in our power to get the word out. I've done social outreach, commenting and cold emails to influencers before, but now I've been seeing some competitors using press releases with a little success, I want to ask the community, is there a method they recommend of testing efficacy of press releases? My biggest fear is using press releases then months/years down the line be hit hard by a penalty just for testing different PR sites.

    | JasonKhoo
    0

  • Hello friends, I am seeing a strange pattern. i register 2 new domain and make sites on them and add no backlinks nothing only put content and did on page seo right. After 1month of google indexing. both sites are not showing in search for the targeted keywords, but as soon as i add them to Google Webmaster tools they both automatically comes to the 16th and 24th number for their specific keywords. So my question is does Google give any advantage to sites which are verified and added into its webmaster tools in terms of seo or authority?

    | RizwanAkbar
    0

  • Hi. I have a number of posts that are ranking in google for several keywords. However the URLs contain numbers, for example 2011, 2014 and 35. I want to remove these numbers to make the URLs more updated. If I use the 301 redirect for old URL to the new one, will I retain the same ranking for these blogposts Or it can effect the ranking. Does anyone have tried this in the past? I would like to get your opinion on this. Thanks in advance.

    | techmaish
    0

  • Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.

    | RizwanAkbar
    0

  • Hi There, I am planning to Disavow one spam domain  but when check Google cache it shows my client domain name. So if I disavow this spam domain which link Google considered? Please help me. Thanks Satla

    | TrulyTravel
    0

  • Howdy, Moz fans, Today I received four emails from Google Search Console recommending I update WordPress. The message reads, "Google has detected that your site is currently running WordPress 3.3.1, an older version of WordPress. Outdated or unpatched software can be vulnerable to hacking and malware exploits that harm potential visitors to your site. Therefore, we suggest you update the software on your site as soon as possible." This is incorrect, however, since I've been on 4.3.1 for a while. 3.3.1 was never even installed since this site was created in September, 2015, so the initial WP Engine install was likely 4.3. What's interesting is that it doesn't list the root URL as the problem source. The email states that it found that issue on a URL that is set up via WP Engine to 301 to a different site, which doesn't use WordPress. I also have other redirects set up to different pages on the second site that aren't listed in the Search Console email. Anyone have any ideas as to what's causing this misidentification of WP versions? I am afraid that Google sees this as a vulnerability and is penalizing my site accordingly. Thanks in advance!

    | jmorehouse
    0

  • One of my client's biggest keyword competitors is using, what I believe to be, sneaky redirects. The company is a large, international corporation that has a local office. They use a totally unrelated domain name for local press and advertising, but there is no website. The anchor text in the backlinks automatically redirects to the corporate website. Is this sneaky or not?

    | JCon711
    0

  • In terms of content, this page is blank. Yes, there's a sidebar and footer, but no content. I've seen a page like this rank before. I'm curious if they're implementing something on the back-end I don't realize or if this is just a fluke? Etc. Also, the DA of the site is only a 15, so I don't think that's the reason. http://www.thenurselawyer.com/component/tags/tag/20-pasco-county-personal-injury-lawyers.html Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    1

  • Hi all, A site I work on was hit with a manual action penalty some time ago for spammy links built by a former SEO agency. It was a partial match penalty so only affected some pages - most likely the homepage. We carried out a lot of work cleaning up links and disavowed suspicious links which we couldn't get removed. Again, most of these were to the homepage. The disavow file was uploaded to Google last Friday and our penalty was lifted this Tuesday. Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. I've carried out the obvious checks - robots.txt, making sure we're not accidentally noindexing the page or doing anything funky with canonicals etc and it's all good. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? I'm thinking Google simply needs time to catch up due to all the links we've disavowed and sitting tight is the best option but could do with some reassurance! Any past experiences or advice on what I might be missing would be great. Thanks in advance, Brendan.

    | Brendan-Jackson
    1

  • Hello, I have been doing some research this morning and have come across Scrapebox, does anybody use them? What do people think of the comment poster? Thank you.

    | mblsolutions
    1

  • Hi Guys, I'm working on an site which faces some ranking problems. Although some of the problems have been mapped and will get fixed in the future I’m wondering if you could give me an second opinion on the amount of keywords used on the website. Although the texts reads “OK” I’m wondering if the site could experience negative influences of the amount of keywords used. Website: http://premium-hookahs.nl/ Main keyword:  waterpijp / shisha Besides the general keyword the secondary keywords get used a lot on category and product pages. I would love to hear your opinion!

    | Bob_van_Biezen
    0

  • I want to start a discussion about assessing the true value of a backlink. Here's a scenario: I've just started working on SEO for a new client. Once I've got the strategy stuff out of the way, I like to start by looking at backlinks that competitors have. I use Moz OSE (and other tools) and filter by followed links to the root domain. This gives a good starting sense of where competitors are getting links from. As I start to explore those links, I see some black-hat (or grey-hat) practices at play: display:none links, footer links, sidebar links, comment spam, etc. The problem I have is, there seems to be no way of knowing whether or not those links are responsible for boosting the competitors rankings. They come from sites that have good DA and PA, yet we're told that tactics like display:none and comment spam will either get those links devalued or may cause some sort of manual action. My question is, how do others evaluate the full spectrum of the value a link has that goes beyond trust, authority, and citation flow?

    | SEMbyotic
    2

  • Anyone have any luck in optimizing your site to show up in the Google Answer Boxes that popup for informational queries? (for example: "what is seo?") I've read many of the articles that have been written on the subject, and have been able to show up for many queries by a) ranking high organically, b) placing the question at the top of the page, and then answering it succinctly. However, for one term a competitor continues to show up in the answer box instead of us, despite their site ranking lower organically in the search results. Anyone have any experience/advice for replacing a competitor in the Answer Box? Thanks!

    | TakeshiYoung
    2

  • Hello, I'm starting to find some of our sites being heavily affected by spam referral traffic. I've been doing a bit of research, but it seems advice is changing all the time (or trying to sell me a service) Does anyone have any suggestions (or links to point me to) on the best way to block spam referral traffic (All our sites are Wordpress). Is there a way of blocking from past data or only future? Will blocking affect past moz data or is that permanently contaminated? I really don't quite understand what is in it for these spammers. Any advice greatly appreciated

    | wearehappymedia
    0

  • When it comes to SEO what can I put on a 404 page? I want to add content that actually makes the page useful so visitors will more likely stay on the website. Most pages just have a big image of 404 and a couple sentences saying what happened. I am wondering if Google would like if there was blog suggestions or navigational functions?

    | JoeyGedgaud
    0

  • i have the domain "region"familyholidays.co.uk for an upcoming site. i was pleased as its memorable and tells the user what its about.  i am targetting keywords such as: region family holidays region family hotels region famliy cottages region family campsites is it something i should avoid because of potential penalties. i will be adding plenty of good content and doing all the offsite things but dont want to start with a handicap with an emd? thanks neil

    | neilhenderson
    0

  • Confusing title I know, but let me explain. We are in the middle of programming a lot of SEO "action" tools for our site. These will be available for users to help better optimize their sites in SERPs. We were thinking about adding a "Ping" tool based in PHP so users can ping their domain and hopefully get some extra attention/speed up indexing of updates. This would be hosted on a subdomain of our site. My question is: If we get enough users using the product, could that potentially get us blacklisted with Google, Bing etc? Technically it needs to send out the Ping request, and that would be coming from the same IP address that our main site is hosted on. If we end up getting over a 1000 users all trying to send ping requests I don't want to potentially jeopardize our IP. Thoughts?

    | David-Kley
    0

  • Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....

    | Anthony_Howard
    0

  • Hello, In one niche, all competitors have fettish backlinks. Some of these sites have related products on them, some are just information, but some border on porn sites. I'm wondering which if not all of these I should disavow. There's quite a few. We're doing a non-manual penguin recovery based on link building like paid links, unnatural anchor text and doorway sites. Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0

  • Hello, In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche. The product descriptions are different with different product names. Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site. Let me know if Google is OK with this. We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog. Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK? Thank you.

    | BobGW
    1

  • My team performs SEO only in the real estate space. While doing some research recently we came across a semi-elaborate link building scheme by one of our competitors. This SEO firm built a dummy real estate resource site with lots of general content, nofollow links to brands (e.g. NYT, Fannie Mae etc.) for validation and links for high-valued keywords pointing to their clients' sites. Basically the whole site is a clever front to help their clients rank. Still, it seems to be working for them (at least for now), which I'm guessing is due to lack of strong competition and the site being quite old. Oh, and they also charge to become "affiliates" on the site, i.e. paid links disguised as non-paid. I reported the scheme via the Search Console. Anything else we could do? Have any of you had experience dealing with this kind of link scheming before? Any guidance is appreciated. Thank you!

    | willthefrench
    0

  • Hi, I'm working on a site that has video reviews of various places. It's general information/experience that most people possess and production-wise they are selfies. These videos are then transcribed and, voila... searchable content. My problem is this... how do I get large numbers of people to go to the trouble to make a 2 minute selfie? I thought about HARO, since one could work in a plug for something, but they have a site traffic threshold that this new site isn't at. Any and all ideas on how to efficiently generate this content for a new site with very little traffic would be appreciated. Thanks!

    | 94501
    0

  • I have a friend's website, ShowBizJunkies, that they work very had at improving and providing great content. I put the website in a more modern theme, increased speed (wpengine, but maxed out with cdn, caching, image optimization, etc)  But now I'm struggling how to suggest further improving the seo structure or building backlinks. I know trying to come up for those terms like "movie reviews" and many similar are ridiculously difficult, and requires tons of high quality backlinks. What is my lowest hanging fruit here, any suggestions? My current plan is: 1. Fix technical errors 2. Create more evergreen content 3. Work on timing of article release for better Google News coverage 4. More social sharing, sharing on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook Groups, G+ Communities, etc 5. Build backlinks via outreach to tv show specific sites, movie fan sites, actor fan sites (interviews)

    | JustinMurray
    1

  • So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it. Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword. I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so.... Can anyone help provide some insight?

    | juicyresults
    0

  • One of our clients works in the video game category - specifically, helping people rank higher in games like League of Legends. In spite of our trying to do things the right way with white hat link building, we've suffered when trying to compete with others who are using comment and forum spam, private blog networks, and other black hat tactics. Our question is - what is the right approach here from a link building perspective? Is it an "if you can't beat them, join them" or do we wait it out and hope Google notices and punishes those who don't play nice? Some test terms to see what we're up against: "elo boost" and "lol coach." Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who's dealt with a similar situation.

    | kpaulin
    0

  • Did anyone see any big changes around Nov 19th & 20th? Mozcast had some high temps around there. If you saw any big changes in organic search, any ideas WTH that was all about? Any guesses? One site I work with took about a 15% hit and has since sort of skidded sideways.

    | 94501
    0

  • I've been noticing some strange stats in Google Webmaster Tools for my forum, which has been getting spam queries with impressions and no clicks. See the queries in the attached images. This might be a motive for the spammers or scrapers. I set the date range to just 22 Aug - 22 Nov and I see very obviously the spike is due to impressions. Questions: What should/can I do? Is Google doing something about this? How to avoid this? o6gKB

    | SameerBhatia
    0

  • I recently wrote (but have not published) a very comprehensive original article for my new website (which has pretty much no domain authority). I've been talking to the publisher of a very high Domain Authority site and they are interested in publishing it. The article will include 2-3 follow backlinks to my website. My question is should I: Repost the article in my own site and then request a "rel=canonical" from the high authority site Not re-post the article on my own site and just collect the link juice from the high authority site Which would be better for my overall SEO? Assume in case 1) that the high authority site would add a rel=canonical if I asked for it.

    | wlingke2
    0

  • Hi, We're currently reviewing one of our clients backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic & OSE as we can see many toxic links. However we cannot find the links on the webpages that are listed on Google WMT. We have searched through the website along with checking through the source code. Should we still disavow the domain? Thanks, Edd

    | tomcraig86
    0

  • Hello! I have a fair few links on some of the old SEO 'Directory' sites. I've got rid of all the obviously spammy ones - however there are a few that remain which have very low spam scores, and decent page authority, yet they are clearly just SEO directories - I can't believe they service any other purpose. Should we now just be getting rid of all links like this, or is it worth keeping if the domain authority is decent and spam score low? Thanks Sam

    | wearehappymedia
    0

  • Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console.  We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!

    | NancyH
    0

  • Hello, One of our online stores has half the traffic that it did a month ago. What can I check and what can I do to troubleshoot? I can't list the domain here, but what would you suggest? Could RankBrain be the problem? So far I've Checked the functionality of the site including the checkout functionality Checked rankings for main terms, they seem to be holding Checked competitors, there's some sales but I don't see that cutting us off this much. Added content continuously for the past 2 months - quality, targeted, helpful Updated the home page text to be more helpful recently Checked for structural changes that would effect backlinks - found none. Analyzed Google Analytics, still looking deeper. What would you suggest as further troubleshooting?

    | BobGW
    0

  • Hi everyone, I am coding a Shopify Store theme currently and we want to show customers the size comparisons and personalization options for each product. It will be a great UX addition since it is the number one & two things asked via customer support. But my only concern is that Google might flag it as duplicate content since it will be visible on each product page. What are your thoughts and/or suggestions? Thank you so much in advance.

    | MadeByBrew
    0

  • So I have a site that operates in a very niche industry, reading all I can about building backlink, I've come out of the walls of text with a few tidbits, however they're not very helpful still, since the playing field is so small. Looking at manufacturer's sites, finding broken links or typos even, pointing them out in hopes for backlinks only goes so far. Guest blogging seems to have reached it's climax and is slowly rounding the toilet. They're active in social media, but due to the niche market, a few likes is the best that can happen. So most efforts these days are around creating helpful resources for users related to the products they sell. What other ways would you suggest looking into for building meaningful backlinks with other sites? In these niche markets, it seems very daunting to say the least, while competitors use their own sister sites for some backlinks, this site doesn't have any sister sites. What has been some beneficial backlink tactics you've employed for niche market sites?

    | Deacyde
    0

  • Not sure if anyone else does anything with Google Finance. In the last few months, I have been noticing a lot of spam sites filling the search results in Google "ticker pages". In this example you can see 4 or the 5 top results are from the same blog network with spun low quality content.

    | SuperMikeLewis
    0

  • Hello, I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal. I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site). Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! Best regards,
    Mark

    | uworlds
    0

  • Hi, So right now my vanity URLs have a lot more links than my regular homepage. They 301 redirect to the homepage but I'm thinking of canonicalizing the homepage, as well as the mobile page, to the vanity URL. Currently some of my sites have a vanity URL in a SERP and some do not. This is my way of nudging google to list them all as vanity but thought I would get everyone's opinion first. Thanks!

    | mattdinbrooklyn
    1

  • Hi everyone, Anybody have experience when you have some websites which stored in Google Webmaster Tool and they exchange links between sites. So is it good for sites? We are hosted on different server. Thank you so much

    | Jeepster
    0

  • We run a printing website www.fastprint.co.uk and have built a few decent tools such as http://www.fastprint.co.uk/adobe-shortcut-mapper/ and decent infographics such as http://www.fastprint.co.uk/blog/the-art-of-mixing-typefaces.html and had a fair few decent links from website over the course of the last 1 1/2 but we do not seem to be moving very far? If you take our site on sem rush (a decent percentage of our site traffic is through the above tools or decent blog posts so the number would be lower for E-commerce) http://www.semrush.com/uk/info/fastprint.co.uk+(by+organic)?sort=volume_desc in comparison to a few others http://www.semrush.com/uk/info/banana-print.co.uk+(by+organic)] http://www.semrush.com/uk/info/brunelone.com+(by+organic) Especially this site http://www.semrush.com/uk/info/instantprint.co.uk+(by+organic) I just don't get what we are doing wrong?

    | BobAnderson
    0

  • Dear MozPeople, I am just working on rebuilding a structure of the "news" website. For some reasons, we need to keep syndicated content on the site. But at the same time, we would like to apply for google news again (we have been accepted in the past but got kicked out because of the duplicate content). So I am facing the challenge of separating the Original content from Syndicated as requested by google. But I am not sure which one is better: *A) Put all syndicated content into "/syndicated/" and then Disallow /syndicated/ in robots.txt and set NOINDEX meta on every page. **But in this case, I am not sure, what will happen if we will link to these articles from the other parts of the  website. We will waste our link juice, right? Also, google will not crawl these pages, so he will not know about no indexing. Is this OK for google and google news? **B) NOINDEX meta on every page. **Google will crawl these pages, but will not show them in the results. We will  still loose our link juice from links pointing to these pages, right? So ... is there any difference? And we should try to put "nofollow" attribute to all the links pointing to the syndicated pages, right? Is there anything else important? This is the first time I am making this kind of "hack" so I am exactly sure what to do and how to proceed. Thank you!

    | Lukas_TheCurious
    1

  • Hello, I was hoping someone could help me understand if there is any point to submit a domain or subdomain to Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmaster Tools if the pages (on the subdomain for example) all have nofollow/noindex tags ... or the pages are being blocked by the robots.txt file). There are some pages on a data feed onto a subdomain which I manage that have these above characteristics ... which I cannot change ... but I am wondering if it is better to simply exclude from submitting those from GWT and BWT (above) thereby eliminating generating errors or warnings ... or is it better to tell Google and Bing about them anyway then perhaps there is a chance those nofollow pages may be indexed/contextualised in some way, making it worth the effort? Many thanks!
    Mark

    | uworlds
    0

  • Hello, I have read that it is vital for a site to be indexed in Chinese search engines that it needs to be hosted in China on a server with a Chinese IP address, is this true? The site in question is a .cn site, hosted in USA currently, but served via CloudFlare (which has locations in China). Any advice on how to rank a Chinese site would be greatly appreciated, including if you know anyone who I can hire to create a Chinese sitemap file to submit to Chinese search engines (and even optimise the site). Many thanks,
    Mark

    | uworlds
    0

  • hello everyone, can you please suggest Good Keywords for my client domain www.amojobs.com. Any one can help please ?? my client Need it urgent.. Thanx in advance

    | poojathakar
    0

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