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Good point to disavow the domain.  I've also seen sites fail at reconsideration because their disavow file was improperly formatted.  Be sure you're using a .txt file. I'm of two minds about the popular idea of getting links from as many sources as possible.  I think the thought process behind this came from a while back when WMT really only showed a small sample of your links.  But, since WMT added the ability to download your links, the numbers have been much more inclusive.  A few months ago John Mueller said in a webmaster forum thread (damned if I can't find it now) that in most cases it is ok to just use the links from WMT. Lately, in some cases, when you fail at reconsideration you get an email from Google with a couple of sample links that they want to see removed.  In every case where I have seen this the links are ones that are present on the WMT list. What I have seen though is that if you spend a couple of months working on your request and then file for reconsideration, Google will often reject the request and show you as an example, new links that WMT has picked up.  So, when I do my requests, I always go back and get the latest links and assess those as well. I personally don't think that Google wants webmasters to have to pay for subscriptions to external tools in order to clean up their links. I used to use a combo of ahrefs and WMT links and have always done well.  For my current projects I am using just WMT.  My theory is that they will do just fine, but we'll see!

For example, consider a page that ranks well organically and receives (relatively) decent traffic from search. However, this page has poor engagement metrics compared to other pages on the site, does not convert visitors as well as other pages on the site, and doesn't have any external links. Would you consider deleting this page? I would improve the page. Beef up the content, add seductive links to get traffic to a more valuable page, add adsense to earn money if the traffic is low quality. Which metrics do you use when auditing a site and considering a web page from removal (bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit, linking root domains, visits, revenue per visit, etc.)? If someone brought me a site that needed help I would do keyword research to determine if they are covering the important queries for their line of business.  If they are not I would have a content plan to get them covered.  If they are covered but performing poorly we would improve those pages. Looking at the numbers you suggest is like cutting off a foot because you have a blister on your toe.  Decide instead if the foot is valuable.  If yes, cure it.

It really isn't that simple though, is it? We're always at the mercy of Google's Algorithm and, unfortunately, the search engine is still in a certain state that it can still give preference to websites that don't have great content. In fact, websites with rubbish content.

Hi Trenton, Thanks for writing in. Unfortunately, we aren't able to provide search volume data for keywords within out app at this time, but we are looking for a solution to include that data in the future. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this causes! Please let me know if you have any other questions. Chiaryn

Thanks Theo! I'll try to go in order here: 1 - Not selling anything, but serving ads. It has a small affiliate shopping functionality that is hard coded into the HTML, but with a max of 3 links on a page for those.  2 - Search=43%, Direct=25%, Referral=32% 3 - Visitor interaction are comments or social shares.  4 - I'm somewhat of a noob, so I don't really know what to call a conversion here?  5 - The IA seems to be pretty good overall. There are categories in the top nav, the content is easily readable and at a good text size, a fairly common site overall structure and aesethic-wise. Is it appropriate to mention the site in question here? It's not a traditional "client" of mine so they're open to any help.

Did you know that some shopping cart buttons can be embedded in pdf documents? You can also place links in your pdf documents to direct traffic to product pages. Or you can extract the info from pdf documents and publish it on the bottom of your product pages.

Hey, Yeah my webmaster is already set to focus on UK visitors

Thanks. I thought that might be it. Definitely was considering that one. Great to know it's worthwhile.

Well I do hope this is the case because I'm outranked by really sh*tty websites. Lots of them are 2-3 pages websites hosted for free on webs.com. Some of these pages have been taken down by webs.com yet they are still ranking in the top 10 after 2-3 months.

Hi! Generally, the Q&A forum is a place to get advice. For specific SEO work, we recommend that you hire someone to help with this.

When I search your site in Google it shows me 82 results against my query “site:domain.com” so it seems like Google is slowly crawling your site but you are right the rate of crawling pages is quite slow and to increase this here are few things that you should follow Strong Internal Linking It is important to have a strong internal linking between the pages if you want Google and other search engine to crawl your page. Please check if you have a strong and powerful internal linking between the pages Xml Sitemap The other thing that is missing on your site is xml sitemap. The idea is to add an xml sitemap and add it in Google webmaster tool and this will indicate Google to crawl different areas of your website with no hassle Hope this will help!

Ask the people who answer the telephone at the business office of this website.  They usually know the crazy ways that people ask for the product and the many alternative names used for them.

This pretty much defines link farming and spam. Drop the 50 EMDs and put all of your efforts on the main site. Normally I would look at both sides of the coin, but this is just blatant spam.

If you 301 redirect the old category page that had the bad backlinks, you will be indirectly pointing those bad backlinks from the old category page to the new one. If it shows as 404 in webmaster tools and you are no longer using that page, that means it is displaying the correct error. It should eventually be removed from Google's index if it is still in there or you could remove it from Google's index in WMT if you wanted to. Hope this helps. Mike

301 redirecting shouldn't be hurting you much unless you are getting 3 or more 301 redirects on the same URL.  When you string together a bunch of 301's you stand the chance that Google will refuse to follow it after about 3 so in that case you would be in trouble. Other than that you should be OK and once Google reads the 301's they will eventually deindex the old pages and your 301 ratio should go down. I agree with the earlier response though that you should be mindful about changing product titles too many .

Seems like this is a great way for the clients to see personalized results with their sites climbing towards the top!

What SEO is to me is a tool in the marketing arsenal.  That means optimizing the site to get the most value throughout the chain.  Choices abound.  What if getting ranked second instead of first means more profit for the business/client? However, the non-SEO world thinks of SEO as "the way to get ranked first on Google."  That reminds me of the old South Park episode titled Gnomes.  You've seen it before with a slight modification... 1. Collect Underpants 2. SEO? 3. Profit! I run away from this mindset as fast as possible any more.

What I'm seeing is the overwhelming primacy of relevance. I've seen sites with links from a mere 10-12 websites get top 4/5 positions (beating sites with 50 times as many links) -- because those few links are deemed highly relevant. A key metric appears (from what I've seen) the referring sites/pages having part or all of the referring keyword (or a variation of it) in their url.