Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Internal anchor text would most likely not dilute your anchor text profile for good or bad. I believe a Google employee did confirm internal anchor text would not be penalized by Penguin...external sources pointing to your site with anchor text could though. So that paints a picture for you.

Don't forget to exclude pages that don't contain the information you are looking for - exclude query parameters which just result in duplicate content, system files, etc. That may help to bring the amount down.

Search engines and informed individuals are used to ?'s as like Takeshi said "query parameters" or "query variables". For everyone else it might look "questionable" (Sorry just had to say it )

Thank you for your reply and suggestions, actually ahrefs returned quite a number of links... what I don't understand is how you can see 350 links inside the "Just-Discovered beta" of OSE... I see just 23 links for the following URL: www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Ideas?

Thanks Miriam. I understand that all of this is dependant on the amount of competition, domain authority, and  links to specific pages, as it is with any page. The is and does stuff I think falls under the category of including as many variations of the related phrase as possible, which I also try to do with any page.

Hi Nwext, I want to be sure I understand what you are describing. I believe what you are describing is that only one local business is being shown as a local result for the term you are typing. There is an ongoing issue with this right now. Typically, Google shows 3-7 local results for local-type searches, within the organic results, but right now, there are a bunch of terms for which Google is oddly only showing a single organic result (termed a one box). I recommend you read the following on this topic to see if it matches what you are experiencing: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/10000-attack-bad-google-local-one-boxes.html http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/09/28/hummingbird-local-knowledge-graph-shitty-search-results/ This rather lame phenomenon appears to have something to do with the Hummingbird update, and it is definitely not creating a good user experience. Just the other day, I was looking for a hotel in a major city, and Google would only show me a one box. Clearly, this does not represent the diversity of hotels that exist in the city. Not super on Google's part! If this is not what you are describing and you are simply asking how businesses appear in the local pack of results, then the topic you want to study is Local SEO. It's quite a big subject! If you're just getting started, let me share an article I wrote for beginners: The Rudiments of Local SEO. Happy reading!

Unfortunately I don't think there's much value to be gained. These services are pretty tight about protecting user privacy. And, this is a totally horrible observation to make, I've found that the majority of people "spying" on me really don't know what they are doing. There are exceptions of course, but I find it's better to look ahead than over my shoulder

Great, thanks so much!

There was a similar question posted earlier. Go down to the Question "Unknown Links" and someone left a great answer

I'd have to agree with Peter here, this sounds like a very risky option. Google can and will pick up on link networks which most automated link software work from. May work short term but eventually this sort of practice could end in a Google Penalty.

Yes this is what I thought, but wanted some second opinions. Although I wouldn't actually need a wild card after BTS, as just leaving it open is the same as using a wildcard: /fish*..........  Equivalent to "/fish" -- the trailing wildcard is ignored. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt Thanks for the link, I'll take a look

In short - no. Videos can appear for any in the SERPs - and it will vary dependent on the keyword in question. If you're struggling to get about 5, I suggest you probably just need to build more/better links to see substantial increases.

Hi, no I haven't needed to, so to be fair to you (which doesn't come across in my original reply to you - apologies), you are right to be cautious. My thinking, based on what you said "I either haven't been able to make contact with webmasters, or they are asking money to remove the links", was that if you have done those things then you have done what Google asks in trying to mitigate the issues. In other words, you have demonstrated you have tried to do the right thing. In that case, then disavow is an option for you, but maybe, in hindsight, with 20-30 links affected that represent <5% of your backlinks, then you should do nothing and concentrate on further offsetting their impact by growing more good links. What I wouldn't do is pay for them to be removed. IMHO, for sites that are trying to earn money from holding sites to ransom then that only encourages more sites to ransom. If the site is asking for payment as a sort of "administration fee" (which I still think is unreasonable) then maybe ask them one more time. If the links are genuinely bad and the host site(s) have more than just yours, then they are endangering their own site by keeping them. I hope that helps. Peter

Hey Jarrod, I'm afraid there isn't anything you can actually do to tell Google you are the original author of your content, other than the tips Remus mentioned. However, there is a service that you can use to help you identify sites that are duplicating your content.  It's called Copysentry and it automatically scans the web to check for content duplication. You could use this, in conjunction with DMCA take down requests (as mentioned in Remus's post) to help to defend against this in future.

Hello BarrelRoll42, You should easily be able to find out if Google is indexing them by doing a site:yourdomain.com search on Google. But to answer your question, it sounds like you should probably delete them and let them 404. If Google HAS indexed them you may also need to use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools. One last thing. Please do start a thread for your own question next time, as we try to keep it to one question per thread. Thanks!

My site experienced a 60-70% drop in google organic traffic too, late on Friday 11th October/early Saturday 12th October, and hasn't recovered at all yet.  Is this when you experienced a drop too?  There doesn't seem to be any online chatter from anyone else experiencing a similar drop.  I had thought I'd managed to avoid any ranking drop following the latest Penguin/Hummingbird, but it looks like a delayed reaction!

No problem at all, glad I could help! Good luck with the site!

Thanks EGOL, Shane and Peter. The good news is that we own the domain, what isn't so great is that we don't own the hosting (Big lesson learned here). Some how I need to take control of the hosting. Thanks everyone for all your help, I'm truly grateful. Tom

Egol, You are a mine of information! Thanks for pointing out the LSI being done by Google. I'd been trying to get those semantic keywords in to my writing but I see that it's not really needed. "cat photos" gets me cat pics, cat images, cat photographs, cat pix so I can see that Google are interpreting the intent pretty well already. Steve