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Hi There Without seeing your website it's hard to tell for sure. But a 403 error usually has to do with permissions (who/what your server will allow to access the content). Have you recently put anything behind a password? If you have Screaming Frog SEO Spider you can try setting it to Googlebot as the user agent and try crawling your site. You can also use a header checker like URI Valet to see what server response is returned. It sounds like Googlebot is getting one response while normal browsers are seeing it fine (200 codes). If you are absolutely not sure, and can not share your site name, I would contact your webhost to look into any issues with the server. -Dan

Google has an example in their blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

Hi, Thanks for your answer. That is why I was very surprised, I had built some links from relevant sites pr4-7 and got traffic through all of them as well. So now when i constantly adding GOOD content, adding new relevant links, receiving more from g+ and corrected most on site issues (what u have with new sites) still my site is going down. It does not seem right.

I can also approach this a different way: Would you ever link to your competitors? Would a good piece of content for your blog or site be worth giving them a link?

I'd tend to agree - this used to be a bigger deal, but as IPv4 space runs low and more and more sites share IP addresses, Google has had to be more forgiving. I'm slightly concerned that the 20 domains are all duplicated, though - that could start to look like a link network. If it's just one site and you have a solid link profile, it's probably no big deal. In most cases, Google would just filter those links and they might even filter the domains (basically, they'd be ignored). If you're seeing this situation repeat itself, though, that's a different matter.

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If you can then, by all means you should get a link from the homepage. This would be far more powerful back link compared links from internal pages. Higher the PR, higher the link juice passed. By the way, a back link from an internal page with PR 2 is not bad either as most of the time, your back links from an internal page would have a PR of 0.

One link?  Don't worry about it. When Google penalizes sites it is almost always for link building done on a large scale.  They're looking for linking schemes. There are many large brand sites that have huge budgets for advertorials and have hundreds or thousands of such links.  These are the ones who need to worry about being penalized.

Thanks Kevin

I think you can use it in your title, but I would only pick one.  I would probably use the city first in my title "Chicago Car Loans | Website Name" "Atlanta Used Cars | Website Name" In your body text I would also include variations of these keywords to keep things honest.  you want to write content for your users and you keep your SEO inline with that.

Hi Bob, You are getting some very thoughtful answers here. I thought I'd pop in as we've chatted so much about Local SEO. Thought I would add...if this client is Local, remember that he must NOT duplicate the address or phone number on these websites. In other words, if his legal business name is Bob's Appliance Repair and his main website uses his NAP, no part of it should be replicated at Bob Fixes Heaters or Bob Fixes Washing Machines. He would need to obtain completely different addresses and local area code phone numbers for the other businesses. I do not recommend getting suite numbers in a situation like this, because the services rendered are the same or similar and Google would likely catch on that something was odd. I will also add, I have seen local businesses make an absolute mess of this concept of multi-sites or micro-sites. The end up with a bunch of neglected, thin or duplicate content sites. It would be so much better if they put their money/effort into building one really strong website to which new elements are being added on a regular basis. In my experience, local business owners who want a multi-site approach have either come across bad advice somewhere or have an excess amount of energy. If you can step in with great advice and funnel that great energy toward them building a killer on-site blog, you may be able to save them from being spread too thin and assist them in becoming an authority resource in their field.

Thanks for letting me know. Would stop it immediately. The reason I am asking is that the way the system shares it make it suspicious.

Thanks for the responses. I'm pretty sure it's no accident, but I just can't find any evidence of anything that makes sense (to me). I'd love to know if anyone else has any ideas. Thanks.

I think the best way to ensure an SEO friendly title for your images is to change the name of the original image to the more SEO friendly one before you have uploaded it, thus not having to bother with redirects (which are best avoided as much as possible anyway) at all. If the images are already there and you can't change the title for whatever reason, is it possible to re-upload them with the new title? It's generally advisable to be as transparent as possible and keep things as simple as you can, so I would personally stay clear of the redirects, but it probably wouldn't do a whole lot of harm. Hope this helps!

When all else fails, use the disavow tool http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath

I got the same issue. After the 8th of May, my blog traffic drop nearly 20%. I haven't practiced any black hat seo method. I saw that few other webmasters also reporting the same issue.

I would look at moving your link profile to include a lot more benign links like your bare url or things like "click here."  Typically people try to stay below 20% with keyword rich inbound links, and you appear to be a lot higher than that. Anyway, I would look to see if manual action was taken on any page on your website.  Several websites reported getting the warning off an individual page, but many others got it for a site wide penalty.  If you can't find one you might want to move forward with getting more benign links to not be over-optimized.

I'd suggest you go with pages for Websites and keep your personal profile for yourself. You can link from your personal profile to your Website too under the "Contributor" links (and you can list as many Websites as you need). To verify the page with your Website, you will need to add a reference from your Website to your page. Just like Facebook profiles and pages, when you like a Website you follow that Website's Page (if any) compared by following a person or being friends with.

First off, if you're diagnosing a Penguin or Panda (or any Google algo) related problem, start by installing Chartelligence on Chrome.  Now, whne you log in to Google Analytics and look at traffic, this plugin will let you overlay the Google algo change dates overtop your traffic chart.  This is a HUGE help at spotting which algo hit you. I doubt keyword stuffing on the page is the problem.  You have to get REALLY nuts with that to get in trouble, honestly. Sitewide links will get you in trouble, though.  Get those removed, and then give it a month or two.

Hey Sha, Thanks for that. It would seem that would be the best bet.