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Hi John, Here are a few reasons why you got a "0 percent link acquisition rate": The email pitches are all self-promotional (doesn't add any value to the recipients). You may want to try sending an email and just simply describing your content, then ask the target if he wants to see the page. Give him the link (if the content is uniquely useful, he will not hesitate to link to you). The potential linker is not interested to your content (you need to qualify your list of link prospects before sending emails to them). Make sure that the people you want to reach out to are interested to see, share and even link to your content. No pre-engagement activities. Tap into the radars of your target linkers first. Comment on their latest blog posts (with value-added insights) and subscribe to their email lists. This way you can increase the odds of getting a link from the prospect since you're not a stranger anymore to him/her. Check out this resource for more tips. Happy linking!

I'll use the list to help with SEO, especially building links.

Thanks for the lengthy response Jarno - your advise is much appreciated. I think we will give the slow disavow approach a go first, esp given the risks associated with changing domains.  A steady approach seems to be safest at this point. Thanks again for your input.  Regards, Prue

Suggesting subfolders without considering the peculiarities of the site jusrt because it's a "best practice" is not the ideal thing to do. Even if subfolders have sure advantages, their use can be not technically affordable or even good for effectiveness.

I agree with Keri.   You already  have a site with traction.  Improve it.  Add pages that compete for new products, new keywords.  They will be immediately competitive. Why start a second site with ZERO traction?   It can take a few years to get a new site ranking well.

This is really helpful Samuel, thanks. We don't have this in place on many websites, and this was always about building brand, but a no-follow mission seems a good course of action. Much appreciated.

Yeah, I don't really like the 'theory' I listed, but sometimes you aren't left with very many options. If a business has been trying to go out it organically for as long as the OP has, then maybe it is time to consider something farther outside the box.

Lubov, I do feel you improved your titles here. Using the Engineered Brown Wood as the start of your title seems logical to me. The Cipressa in the old title, what does that  refer to? A particular type of wood or product name you use? Using London in the Title might tell your users where you are but they don't tell them who you are. Danny Dover's book suggest you use | Companyname/sitename at the end of the title. I implemented this for several websites and the results seem to work great. However, when you do that and implement it throughout your site you don't mention London. But you do refer to it in the footer. Why not implement your entire contact details in the footer of the page? Then you can leave london out of your title tag and you have it in your page footer. That is what I would do. Hope this helps you some. regards Jarno

Hi Remko, Sorry for the late response. Currently you have fietstassen.nl and loodgieter.nl as duplicate content. (as far as I see, you do not have a cross domain canonical, nor a 301 redirect telling Googlebot which version they should index). So it might be a good idea to implement one of them. (301 is usually easier ) Gr., Keszi

Domain and Page Authority were created by Moz (formerly SEOmoz). I would not trust anyone elses number on that. From what you have here, you have a website for a company that for all intents does not exist and it is in one of the most unscrupulous areas of the Internet... Loans.  I think the issue is likely somewhere within that. Best

To be honest - it's very difficult to see the difference between your site & the one of your competitor, except that his site looks a bit more modern. Content & Images are almost identical, it seems you are both taking the information from the same source. I doubt your competitor is doing something on your website; I think he's doing exactly the same as you are doing, just in a slightly better way. In fact, it seems that there are a lot of other players who are doing exactly the same - like http://www.salarpuriasattvaeastcrest.org.in/ Your site has a .com extension - and also exists as http://salarpuriasattvaeastcrest.net.in => duplicate content. Homepage also exists as /Default.aspx The recipe for all these sites seems to be the same - take an exact match domain - put some images & the content from the one who is constructing the building and than hope you get the first position. Looks like gambling to me - sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. If everyone is doing the same thing, you should try to differentiate and try to be better than the rest build a brand - use one url for all the projects you promote & try to build links to this url instead of doing this for each project make sure that your content is the best - best images (properly tagged) / best original descriptions / advantages / ... - put yourself in the place of potential buyers - what is the info they need all these sites seem to offer the content only in English - even if the potential buyers probably master the English language, add versions in the local language (which can already differentiate you from your competition - even if everybody is searching in English) hire a better web agency - make sure your design is a bit modern move the important content to the top - now the contact form is always on top & the important content is on the bottom of the page not sure what mobile usage is in India - but again - you could differentiate yourself from the competition by providing a responsive site, fit for mobile devices & tablets read the beginners guide to seo from moz - it contains ton's of valuable advice on how to do on-page optimisation. You mention that your competitor doesn't do a lot of SEO, but your site has some room for improvement as well rgds, Dirk

Maybe the site of the competitor is a new (or rather new) site and maybe they even use black-hat tactics which they get away with at this point. On of my client experienced the same. The competitor used very black methods to get a lot of pages ranked (splitted up words like vacuum cleaners and vacuum-cleaners for every page). I advised my client to be patient and keep focussing on what is the right thing to do. For you I have the same advise. Don't focus on your competitor but focus on your own site and business. Focus on Social Media, on getting new high quality links, on improving bounce rates, time on site, CTR etc. If you have done all of that then your site should start outranking him completely. Years ago I read a nice article about the value of SEO. It stated that if 2 websites about the same subject both want to rank for the same keyword. Website A has only 10 backlinks, no social profile, no on page SEO, etc but still ranks no.1 Website B has 1000 backlinks, good social profile but also no on page SEO. Then all of the sudden website B gets ranked no 1. The values stay the same. How to improve website A again ?? Build massive links? Could be! Start using Social? YES! but most importantly start using on page SEO. By doing that correctly you improve the value of everything else. Internet Marketing is not  about backlinks, not about just some titles, meta data and keywords but the one amplifies the others. Make sure you do everything because it amplifies each other. Regards Jarno

I don't like trying to solve problems without specific domains and example KWs so I can do a real diagnosis but let me suggest a few hypotheses (I would not suggest all of these if I could see the URLs.) You don't know what they've disavowed - they could have, for whatever reason, disavowed their own cross-domain links. Disavow says "ignore these links" which is (if you're not an SEO) basically the same as nofollow "don't pass juice to these links."  So they may have made a (poor) choice to disavow their own links but it may be working for them. Competitor 2 has at least 1 redirect.  Could be a site with 20 million links for all we know.  Could be nothing. Can't tell the site speed, titles, content or any other on-page issues with any of the sites.  You could be over-branding (Panda issues) or smashing the site with keywords. Sometimes Google doesn't make sense. Ahrefs only picks up around 10-20% of all links from what we've seen. Hard to make estimates on what Majestic, OSE, & Google see without the domain info. You're assuming this is a link issue - but honestly we just can't tell yet.  Not enough info to fully diagnose.

Sounds like they are wanting to make turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/ their homepage, which is quite strange. "Keyword stuffing" URLs like this will not help SEO in any way. I would advise against it and leave the homepage as turtlesforsale.com. eg. for other pages on the site: turtlesforsale.com/state/city/ is better than turlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale-in-state/turtles-for-sale-in-city/ Like most things in SEO, think of what is better for humans. The first example is much cleaner and easier to read, and for SEO purposes, there would be no difference between the two if all other factors were the same. A similar question was asked (and answered very well) here: http://moz.com/community/q/url-seo-better-directory-structure-vs-exact-keyword-phrase

thanks for the reply. I can understand your point but the issue is that there are hundreds of sites for each of hundreds of keywords. It is almost impossible to contact the webmasters and report that their sites are hacked. They also keep on adding new sites

If it is in their footer, than I'm guessing that a link to your home page is best; unless the home page to your store is separate and you want the authority to go to that page (i.e. you're trying to rank the store higher in the SERPs). I would try and get highly relevant, contextual links to deep pages of your site from them, if possible.

clicked on that competitor URL and it's plain jane junk... if you create a real site with great content you should go by this EMD site in time... and DO NOT copy this p**spoor example of serp manipulations either!!!

This post last year gives a good answer throughout.  In summary yes it does but the edge gets taken off the link 'power', just as a 301 doesn't pass 100% http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice

Sorry, I'm not seeing the bad URL(s) in the cache. Could you provide a sample Google query that's showing the hijacking URL? Are you trying to prevent future hijacking or undo the SEO damage done by the previous hijacking? Sorry, I'm not completely clear on what happened or where you're at in the recovery process.

The title should be pretty unique and is a huge ranking factor. It should fit to the content and (imo) to the h1 tag. The content of the description isn't used for ranking, but makes the differnce between click or no click. What I also saw: it is better to have no Meta Description (if the content is good enaugh) as often the same Description. I saw many many pages ranking bad, wich fast get a bit better when I made the descriptions unique. So it may be a ranking faktor how unique the page is. Wich means everything - content, pics, titles, descriptions ... I am running a lot of tests wich take a look on that