Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Chris, Thank you for replying to my question. It is a difficult one, I think as a company we will have to go with a safer long term strategy and see how it pans out. Maybe a PR stunt, instead of exact match backlinks. Kind regards Rob

EGOL makes good points here. I've seen the opposite happen, too. An SEO firm links to the Wikipedia definition of website, and I can only assume it's meant to show the search engines that they link to authoritative sites. However, it really doesn't fit in the context of the site, and makes things appear very odd.

First you need to know what the links were, you might find alot of them were scraped content/spam/junk.  If out what links you have lost and evaluate if they are worth getting back, then find out why they were removed.  This has to be done on a link by link basis, there is no way to automate this properly.

Our Beginner's Guide to SEO has a section about links that should be helpful and get you started in the right direction. http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Would general running blogs, be considered a related niche for "running shirts" to google Well I'm not going to second guess how Google sees it, but from a logical POV, I would say it's fine.

Put your blog in front of people that are actually going to click through and read it, not to gain ranking. If you still want to submit to a directory, look through the lists provided by SEL and MOZ manually. See if the sites still have a high PR, and how your content will be displayed.

Has your traffic also dropped? Are you searching in an incognito browser, to try to minimize any personalization? Without knowing your URL, it's a little difficult to diagnose.

lol....  Something like that might get fantastic action if it is on one of the big newspaper sites.

In that case, use a canonical url and you should be fine. Have the canonical point to the page with no query string on it. You had me worried, I thought you might have a platform that needed the parameters to show products, then you mentioned you took them out in GWT. I have seen clients do that on the platforms that need the query strings and de-index all of their product pages.

Directories and forum posts as easy backlinks are being devalued more and more by google, so there often isn't a lot of SEO value for these links. Just have a look at this video on searchenginewatch: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2326161/Matt-Cutts-Using-Article-Directories-for-Links-Just-No But that's not to say that forums and directories don't have their place in a natural link profile, but you want to select decent directories and forums based on whether or not they will send the traffic you want to your site. For example, directories called things like "seobacklinkdirectory" or "freeseolinks" that promise followed indexed backlinks probably aren't being used by humans to find websites, but by SEOs wanting free back links. These sorts of links are not going to benefit your business or your site. But a nice niche directory where your audience will search for businesses like yours could add value, and maybe lead to some conversions. The same applies for forum posting - if you're adding value with your comments and subtly linking back to your site every now and again, you'll drive relevant traffic to your site which has the potential to convert. If you're dropping 100 links into a different forum each day before they ban you, you're probably not going to see any benefit.

Roger (the crawler for Moz) does not fill out forms. I can't see a way to find a listing without doing a search, and OSE would need to be able to browse these listings to be able to see them.

Thanks Travis, that's exactly what I wanted to know!  The links are definitely gone from my forum posts so I assumed it was a crawl issue but wasn't 100% sure.  Thanks again for all your help!!!

No Longer free. $149

Thanks for the response and I appreciate the information.

These are all great pieces of advice. You might also want to check out Moz's list of recommended companies. A lot of these companies offer link development services and should prove reliable.

Hi there, This is an incredibly broad question that you'd really need to hire a freelance consultant or agency to work on for an extended period for best results The issue of how and where to promote a new website is pretty much a cornerstone of online marketing. As far as link development goes, I would start with the link building category here on the Moz blog. There is link development and promotion content on there dating back almost ten years (clearly the older stuff might be quite outdated now).

Check out GWT and the links should be showing there. Google's got just a slightly bigger server farm than we have, and is able to crawl more of the web. Let your client know that while it's great for OSE to see the links and for the links to be counted in the score we give, your real goal is to have the search engines count those links, and that's what matters. We haven't been able to convince the search engines to ditch their metrics and use ours yet.

I agree with Andy, it's probably just a refresh issue.  To check if your site is listed on that website you can use search dommands.  Type this into Google using their domain, and your business name site:theirdomain.com your business name If you are listed, and the page is indexed by Google, it will find you.

I have to disagree that an "SEO specialist" would complete any of these tasks, to be honest. Lots of this stuff is done by robots and the "SEO specialist" (ahem) takes credit for it.   ... and the webmasters who want their site to receive genuine "bookmarks" or "shares" or "listings" have content that is either so skimpy or so bad that they don't need an SEO specialist.... they need a magician. Create ten pieces of unique content for specific audiences .... with the intention of having that content appeal to the user-base of those audiences. If you do what Jane suggests, and do it exceptionally well, you will not need an SEO specialist or a magician because your visitors will do the bookmarking, sharing and listing for you.  Visitors to websites love to tell their friends when they find fantastic stuff.  It makes them feel like Christopher Columbus or Indiana Jones and they wanna tell their friends about their discoveries.  Also, a busybody or a gossip can be better than lots of SEO specialists.  They tell everybody everything - but this works best when you have juicy stuff to talk about.

Just redirecting an otherwise inactive domain (no website, etc.) will not help the site you redirect it to much at all, even if it has DA / PA. Google reduced how much this tactic helped quite a long time ago. If you bought an active website, transferred its contents to your existing site or created a similar-topic area on your existing site, and redirected pages to their most relevant resource on your existing site, you should see some benefit. However, just buying and redirecting domains is highly unlikely to result in your rankings improving.