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I'd like input from other experienced inbound marketers on Ramonk's suggestion. Basically, since I have 15 or so backlinks, I could find two quality niche directories and get one dofollow link from both of them. I wouldn't feel comfortable with more than two. But those aren't editorial at all, so I have a lot of hesitancy about that. Same with a couple of linking root domains from niche forums. Suggestions on if these links would be helpful at all?

Personally I'd no-follow them, you don't want them to pass on any ranking factors so no-follow the links if they are driving traffic. If they don't drive traffic then get rid of them. Moosa is right though, you need to use other tools aside from WMT because that doesn't show a complete list of links to your website.

Hello Vinay, Please see Mashable for an example: http://mashable.com/2013/4/ They have pagination links at the bottom of the page and use lazy loading / infinite scroll. Adam Sherk has a good post about this: http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/seo-tips-for-infinite-scrolling/

Hello Travis, I'm on the same page as you - I just wanted a third party's opinion. Thank you!

I see this question has been answered years back from now. But what's the importance of this issue in today's world. I just got a client's website and he want to add SEO optimized content in the scroll bar at the bottom of the page. I don't know if that's a spam or not. Can you please suggest me. I'm eager to get a proper answer. website is: www (dot) zdhsales (dot) com

In general, I would link out to websites as needed and as your users might find valuable, rather than trying to link out for SEO benefit. The method of creating a links resource as EGOL suggests above can be valuable, but if you're going that route you should make really, really, really sure that you're creating something of value (and something that will be updated regularly), and not linking out to every site that asks or that will link back to you in exchange. In general as far as linking to other websites goes, I would just do it where you otherwise would anyway and don't worry about/try to get any SEO benefit from it.

Hi, Yes you can contact the owner to ask for removal. It might or might not be worth your time. You can do that too. Or actually the best way to do this proactively in the future, if you are using wordpress, is using RSS footer option or manually set this up that will display the original full link of the article, this way it is automatically there as the scrape your RSS feed. This would be my top pro-active suggestion. You can do this manually with Google Webmaster Tools and/or Copyscape, or also you can set up Google Alerts for each most that you have done that will notify you when the content is scraped. For detailed info how to do some of this see this article also make sure to read the comments they are informative as well: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/ As far as actively fighting this, many say, it is not worth it, as long as you take precautionary steps to make sure that you always outrank the scrapers, with methods such as the RSS footers for each article you publish. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the great answer. I never had a site drop Domain Authority yet so got worried. I'll keep an eye on the trend and watch my competitors closely.

This might be a shot in the dark not knowing much about your site - can you check in Google Webmaster to see if you accidentally removed your website using the Remove URLs tool? I know of someone that accidentally did this when copying a pasting a URL, but accidentally only copied their main website address and not the full URL (oops!) and their site dropped out of Google SERPs rather quickly. Just a thought...

before I could tell you the best way to get your ranking backup I would have to look at your site. I Would bet you that because you have bad back links that you try to remove you might've missed a few. "There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial." Google it is a $40 billion a year company that has the resources and ability to figure out if it's a paid link or looks like a paid link. They will find out from other sites using similar services paid links are one of the worst things you can have in my opinion. Do a title tag like this is spamming running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes using something like Shoes - Walking - Running - Cross-training would be a better title tag "Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines." This is normal for Google will change your title tag to suit the queried keywords. It is supposed to help you. "We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT." Are you only using Google Webmaster tools to try to figure out if you have for 404's? when you say blogs I'm assuming your meaning posts? when you delete blog posts and other parts of the website you're essentially deleting interlinking, back links that you may not know about, your changing your website structure. If you have not corrected all possible 404's or at least most this will hurt you quite a bit. For instance when people redesign their site and do not 301 redirect properly even sometimes when they do 301 redirect properly they go down drastically in the SERPS this is because Google does not trust change immediately. if you scroll down you'll see my answer in this post and its relevancy to changing parts of the website and Actually trying to keep your site rank. http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch " We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu." That might not be the wisest idea. I would strongly recommend a site audit. if you give me your URL I will run it through some tools for you and give you my opinion. Sincerely, Thomas

Taking a hit for manipulative tactics is usually something of a percentage game, one you don't want to play. The competitor may have an older domain and a stronger backlink profile. Sooner or later, even the larger brands get hit. It was was a few years ago, almost to the day, that JC Penney was outed by the New York Times. This prompted a manual action. Your competitor may well fall to the next Penguin filter. I've seen manipulation in a number of industries, sometimes it just takes time. Other times it takes someone with a little more clout. Though we can likely count on Penguin becoming a part of the algorithm, and we will most likely see another Penguin filter.

Have you tried tools such as pingdom, page speed insights or yslow? These can all give you a good idea where to start.

Greetings, I am going to weigh in here, not because I am any kind of Yoda at all, but purely from a common sense point of view. I hope that's okay. I would deduce that if anyone was able to know when a domain was released and how soon it sold thereafter it would have to be the domain registrar. So, let's say, hypothetically, that some domain registrar decides they are going to start publishing a list of domains that were released for sale and then sold immediately. Then let's say Google gets a feed of that list and just automatically, via the algorithm, discounts every single one of those domains down to PR 0, and strips them of all potential link authority value... I'm sure you can see dozens of problems with that scenario. Here are just a few: 1. No one can really evaluate the new owner's identity or purpose without knowing who the new owner is. If registrars disclosed that information, I can't even imagine the number of privacy issues that would arise. 2. The assumption would be being made that the new owner is not the same, related to the old company. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where this happens. 3. Google would be making the assumption that the selling of the domain to a new domain owner was to end the business. Again, there are probably many many instances when this is not the case. It seems to me that Google, nor any other search engine, can reasonably deduce the motives of a new domain owner. I mean, there are some smart folks at Google, but I don't think clairvoyance has entered the algorithm yet. Consequently, it probably seems more reasonable to let expired domains retain some of their value with the belief that most business owners are only going to buy domains relevant to their business and that end users will cast their "votes" for how well these new owners use the real estate by exhibiting either engagement or bouncing and viewing another site. Eventually, the algorithm will more or less accurately sift through the results and serve up results that visitors find engaging. Sure, maybe it works for a year, two years, hell, even three years. So maybe this approach is viable, for now for a website or a page that just seeks short term benefits. But, if what you are building is a business that you want to last, a brand that you want to matter to people 20, 50, 100 years from now? Then I think there are far better uses of your time, effort and resources.

WOW!! This is indeed a very long question! Let me start with the bad news that Google is tightening the space for low quality link builders and website that are using low quality spam but they are not finished and you will see some websites here and there (even in some busiest niches like SEO) that websites are ranking on money making keywords on the basis of low quality spam. The websites that are ranking for the terms “SEO Services”, “SEO Company” and related keywords sometimes contain hidden links in their link profile (not one or two but tons of them). If you notice these SERP positions over the period of time you will notice that these websites does not stay there for a longer period of time and results will change after every few months. The website, I was noticing 5 months back is nowhere for the term “SEO Company” at that time it was ranking on the first page somewhere above the fold for this keyword. Ok, so now your second question simply divides 2 type of SEO the unethical SEO and the ethical SEO. Both works well but one is short term while other is a long term game. Now it’s up to you, how you want to play! About Guest Blogging, yes Mat Cutts said its dead but, I have my personal opinion on this and I still believe if you can create value from your guest posts, you should go for it! I shared the detailed review on my site: http://www.setalks.com/guest-blogging-dont-panic What are the high quality links that required hard work? There are actually tons of examples but I would love to share few of them! -          http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-get-on-national-tv This talks about how to get on National TV and obviously this much have given him tons of links as well. -          Here is the post that will talk about how you can get links naturally to your website: http://www.setalks.com/natural-links -          This broken Link Building guide links are hard to achieve but valuable: http://moz.com/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible -          Read this, where experts are sharing that best link building tip ever: http://digitalphilippines.net/link-building/ Hope this helps!!

I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop. If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.

Hi Curtis, Thanks for your reply. Well to be more specific the domain would be: freecarfinder.com/cars-that-start-with-a/ The domain is new so it has not authority whatsoever. The domain is not that long but it's not really short neither. The content on the page is pretty small where the exact keyword that's in the URL is mentioned in the heading 1 and twice on a small piece of text that explains how to use the page to search for results. Totally agree best practise is to test it out. I do see that our competition is using /starts-with/a and is ranking really well with it. Maybe the best option is to create half of the pages using the exact keyword in the URL and half with /starts-with-a/ to see which one performs better?

Hey Andrew, I tried using www.thesitevalue.com and every url errors out at the last step, resulting in a site value of $8.95. I've noticed this on various sites, including sites I know have way more value than their domain alone Have you experienced this? Do you use any other tools?

Moz does have a list of recommended agencies that's a good place to start looking. If I were you, I would look for bay area companies and then call them with your questions about specific types of sites.

Unfortunately we usually appear to learn more from huge problems than from nice and successful experiences... That’s the massive profit on sharing; we can profit from others experience! Cheers [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/yhmjs1P][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/yhmjs1P.jpg[/IMG][/URL])

To start with, I'll ask are you looking at google.com or google.co.uk? At first, I just assumed it was google.com, which shows me local results for Worcester, Massachusetts. However, I then saw that your site is hosted in the UK, and I needed to go over to google.co.uk to generate local results for Worcester, England. Since others have commented on the off-page elements, I'll point out a few things I noticed related to on-page optimization: 1.) The primary keyword you mentioned of course makes your domain an exact match domain, and the influence that those have in search rankings has of course fluctuated quite a bit over time (see http://mozcast.com/metrics, click on "EMD Influence") but on the whole, has diminished and doesn't nearly serve the advantage it used to. 2.) Looking at the pages currently ranking for [driving lessons worcester], they all appear to be very locally relevant companies based in Worcester (applies both to Massachusetts and England). The first page even has map results. Your site doesn't appear to have any locally relevant information, or a local address, phone number, etc. It appears that Google made up it's mind that local businesses should get the upper hand on this query. If you are in fact based in Worcester, I would highly recommend adding your name, address and phone number to the footer and a contact page, adding local schema markup, gathering locally relevant links, etc. 3.) Only your homepage seems to be optimized and it is only for that one keyword. The rest of the pages appear to pull in "Driving Lessons Worcester" as a default ending to the title tag, which just results in every page having that keyword make up the majority of the title tags. If you flip through the site search results for your site, you can quickly see why Google might devalue your site for that keyword. I would go through and optimize other pages of your site for longtail variations and other keywords, and get rid of that default title tag ending. In short, Google probably sees your entire site as trying wayyy to hard to rank for a single keyword, which may have raised a flag. I hope that helps!