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Thank you so much, it help lot..

I'd highly doubt it. You're spending energy getting a redirect linked-to and indexed, rather than the URL you actually want to rank. Point those links and that effort to the page itself and you'll get a far better return.

From what I understand, permanent links > temporary links. How it treats a link thats lost/found on the exact same page is a mystery to all. You should also take into consideration the time between a link lost/gained (e.g. if google didn't recrawl the page, it wouldn't have even noticed the link disappearing)

Good info, thanks all!

I specifically said "a blog or social profile." You're telling me that these are not worth having? If I have a blog or social profile and people visit such pages I think they would expect a link.

vtmoz, It is not the quantity of pages but the quality of pages. I would not put a number on pages. the more useful information you can give your target audience the more likely you are to rank higher. I would suggest the only main reason you should be comparing these metrics to competitors is how you can create content that is better than theirs. Look at those pages. Is there room for improvement? What value can you give to the target audience that the competitor is missing? This is how you beat your competitors and of course backlinks.

Hi Bob, I've gone through the process of building and optimizing quite a few different websites and I've found that the best backlinks come from good content. I've also done paid (supposed to be a no-no) and outreach link building, so I think I've got a good perspective across all the different approaches. My personal opinion is that at the very launch of a website, beyond just indexing and on-site optimization, it's a 100% must to have the site linked to on a few good directories or other sites that are connected. For every single site I've built, I've seen fantastic results with this initial push. I believe that all SEOs have a little cache of backlinks stashed away and we all use them sparingly whenever we need to give a new site that first push. With this little bit of a push, I usually see my sites begin to rank within 4 to 5 days on less competitive keywords. To be honest, I don't think that this initial paying for backlinks is an ethical issue or one that can be classified as 'black hat SEO'. I've found it practiced at the top level agencies and it's also something that's recommended in Rand Fishkin's book 'Art of SEO'. After the initial launch, then comes the real work. How do we get quality backlinks consistently? Reaching out to other webmasters in the same verticals has had some fantastic results for me as well. I typically do an outreach program that is personal and not a template-based spam fest. Oddly enough, I've had these outreach attempts even grow into marketing partnerships, and even business partnerships. I find that if you reach out authentically to other webmasters or business owners, they tend to respond much better. I've competed in large markets and also small ones, and I've found that it can actually be a problem for smaller market segments or industries, that you run out of other sites to reach out to. In my previous startup, I found that the source of quality backlink partners ran out after 3 or 4 months of research. At that point, I set up google alerts for specific keywords, and stopped my outreach program and decided to focus on content creation instead. This was where it really began to pay off in buckets. For that business and as a startup, I was able to create backlinks from not relevant sites, but even government organizations looking to highlight a particular type of business (educational startups in this case). Creating content like infographics and how-to articles was an extremely good investment as well. We publicized what we deemed to be good content out across our social media, and I found that these continued to generate backlinks even years later. The main reason why anyone would want to link to your site, is that you have something interesting or useful for them to share. I even used myself as 'content', giving interviews to online news portals and blogs, always asking if they would kindly do me a favor and link to my site as part of the article. We also got lucky with one of our seasonal articles. This particular article was shared on our social media and a reporter at the local newspaper came across it. That eventually led to an offline article published about the company, and since offline content eventually gets republished on their site, it also led to a backlink from an incredibly reputable source. I think that the reason why most SEOs tend to focus on paid or outreach programs is simply because of the amount of time it takes. Writing an email takes at most 10 minutes, while research, writing and creating the graphics for a good piece of content (video, written or otherwise), would take days and not have an immediate payoff. All said and done, I feel that a solid linkbuilding program should be multi-faceted and not be overly dependent on just one aspect. If you depend solely on outreach as your main source of backlinks, then what happens when you no longer have time to write emails? Eventually, you will still need to focus on content creation.

Hi Nicholas, Thanks for such a detailed response, very helpful! One question, regarding file size, what would be the largest that you would recommend? Cheers, Rhys

I don't know of any further updates about Fred other than what is here: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change However, over the last week (Mid May) there has been a lot of noise and fluctuation according to many sources. Let us know if there is anything we can learn by what you find out. Happy to discuss further if you share some details, but it would not be uncommon for Google to decide to push thin eCommerce pages down.

Hi there, The less 301's from external sources the better. The situation with 301's is like this: Page A links to page B but page B is redirected to page C (your page). If you reduce the second step (page B), you won't be losing as much link juice and you will make it easier for crawler as well. Reach out to the webmasters of websites which you have the back links from (pages A) try to convince them to link directly to the page C instead of page B. Hope it helps. If you have any other questions, let me know. Cheers, Martin

Hi Shahzad, Here is the complete process of cleaning your website from "URL injection" by Google: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/hacked/docs/clean_site?visit_id=1-636299342838938883-1291367479&rd=1 And here is some more information in case you'd like to read more about it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3311329?hl=en As far as there is all the information needed on the links, I will keep the answer as simple as that Cheers, Martin

Having been there and done that I would warn against having two or more websites selling the same products with the same titles, numbers, pictures & descriptions. If you must set up different domains with the same products then you must create two, three, (however many sites you have) different on page descriptions and preferable photographs, style titles, numbers and meta. You should also consider the fact that it is likely that the sites will share a server and have the same cross site company information. Both of which can send negative information to Google and other search engines. It is pure folly to expect to rank well for two or more sites selling exactly the same products with identical information. Not to mention the additional work associated with writing all the content, producing graphics and keeping the site up to date.

Honestly, we've seen such high flux in April -- including that week -- that it's really hard to pull anything useful apart. We have no confirmation of an algorithmic event (other than the usual "There are events every day" line). There was talk last week about "Project Owl" -- Google's multi-pronged attack on fake news, but it appears that only a part of that is algorithmic, and that part has been rolling out over the past couple of months. I don't think the flux from the week in question is related to Owl. Hopefully, someone in the community has some more insight on the vertical-specific data you're seeing.

I have taken his "SEO That Works" class and it is definitely worthwhile if you are serious about content-driven SEO. His methods definitely take an investment of time (and money if you are outsourcing) but the results he shows are pretty amazing. The SEO That Works class is also great if you are concerned about legitimate, white-hat ways to get authority backlinks.

This depends as some forums have all of their outbound links set to "nofollow", which mean they pass little to no SEO value. Quite a few are "dofollow" which means relevant forum participation that leads to a backlink to your website will help in terms of SEO value. Forum participation in general is a good practice if you can find quality forums for your industry and niche, I would just not overdue it with pointing links back to your site, unless it is 100% relevant and beneficial to the forum. For example if there is a discussion that is going on about a topic you happened to write a blog post on last year, you can reference the blog post and provide a link back to it in a comment in most cases. Be sure to read the guidelines for each and every forum you want to participate in, as they can sometimes have strict rules, also a good practice is to do 10 or some comments w/o links before trying to provide any kind of backlink to your website.

Thank you very much for this answer.  What I needed most is a good overall direction to take and you definitely provided that. I wonder if using canonicals to start 'centralizing' content might be a good way to round up the old versions of the site.  Yes, when I originally built the site it was by hand, each page individual .html and google still indexes those.  I removed them at the start of this journey and ended up with 24k 404s... who knew they were in that long!? Was great to hear of a similar experience... happy to hear more stories as well.