Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The death of SEO has been greatly exaggerated at least as far back as 1997: https://plus.google.com/117235644077949816393/posts/ccq57PqfYXm h/t: Wil Reynolds I think EGOL's comment ends the debate.

What worries me is that the easiest way to apply such a penalty is probably to devalue links that appear to be part of an author box (one of several easy to spot footprints of most guest blogging). This isn't the best way, but it would be incredibly easy to do.  If that happens then it would really be a case of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", but we've already seen this year that Google is happy to do this if it discourages manipulation. I've always assumed that when the spammier end of guest blogging is addressed it would be through a wider algorithm. As Alice suggests, value could be removed from this as a result of a wider effort to tackle low quality sources - and this would be fair. This year though I suspect that "fairness" in the algorithm has gone down a couple of places in Google's priorities and that the idea of "the greater good" has become a higher priority. If that is true then anything that is a link building strategy becomes a fair target - even if it causes wider damage. As always - time will tell !

As Collin already states: this is just part of the regular old discussion about 1) subdirectory, 2) subdomain or 3) different domain. So SEO wise you should think about that. But also, you should think about how your desktop version of the website related to the (tablet?) mobile version of the website. There's multiple approaches: Responsive design (all on the same domain, using the same URL's) Separate mobile website and desktop website Mobile website on subdomain (m.blaa.com) Mobile website on separate domain In order to help you choose, see below: Responsive design vs. mobile website For regular websites using responsive design is a good solution. Except for the case in which the HTML and assets are quite large for a mobile device to load. In that case I always prefer to use a mobile version of the website on a subdomain. I believe this is the best solution for high traffic websites which need to show quite some content per page.

Hi Marcus, I would probably recommend the same answer that I gave to your other question. If the link could be viewed as paid for a nofollow tag is safest. Are you paying for these articles to be syndicated? I would say it would really depend on how the syndication process worked as to how careful you needed to be. Ben

Hi Marcus, At the end of the day it's your call. It's risk vs reward. Google does always advise that paid links should be no followed. They are going to be obvious that they are paid for, it depends how likely you think they are to be flagged up to Google. Don't forget that if your competitors see these links they may report you which could result in these being flagged up. Best advice is nofollow. No link is not advisable as you will lose a large percentage of visitors when they can't click through. Ben

Are your blog and your shop on the same domain?

If an entire structure is changing then it depends to what depth. Basically, are there rules you can apply? i.e. domain.com/products/[product-group]/product-name/ to domain.com/[category]/product-name/ If there are rules like that then it reduces you work to pattern matching URLs and redirecting them accordingly, and I can post you .htaccess entries. If the product names/URL and categories etc are changing then it may boil down to redirecting each URL individually, which for an e-commerce site will be a huge manual job. On the upside, you know for certain URL A --> URL B. Let me know what applies and I'll let you know what to do Have had to handle domain moves (we are just about to do it again for our own site) so I know it's a headache you want to get right first time. Oh and make sure you've got BOTH the old and new domains authorised in Google Webmaster Tools before you do the move

Hi Liam, There is always a natural delay between crawling and indexing, and it's rarely instantaneous. Although I can see why you'd want a news site to be getting indexed pretty quickly. The one thing that stands out is from the example is the <changefreq>tag, which you've got set on 'never'. This is essentially for archived pages, and tells crawlers that it's low importance (even though you've given it high priority). Even if you're not intending to change the article, I'd still recommend giving it a change frequency of 1 month so you're inviting the crawlers to come and check it more often. Saying that, this doesn't mean that if you set the frequency to hourly that the crawlers would come back every hour, as they'd soon figure out that nothings changing.</changefreq> Really I'd have your home and catergory pages on daily, the articles on monthly, and the static pages on monthly or yearly. In terms of getting them indexed quicker after the crawl, this is just a case of establishing trust and importance from the search engines. They need to know that you have news content that requires a quicker indexed. You can gain this trust by providing regular, high quality pages. When their crawlers pick up that there are new pages going live daily you will see the index get quicker. Depending what CMS you are using, it is also worth getting a script or plugin that pings the search engines with an updated site map every time a new page or post is added. I've done this through Wordpress and articles get indexed within 4 hours. Again though, it didn't start this way and it only got this quick once I was putting up 4 posts a week like clockwork. Good luck. Cheers David

I don’t see any problem with SEO competition in general but i guess there are few things that should also be considered as important: Only white-hat tactics will be used to build links and content to the website No low quality link building should be done Content should be unique and original and should create to enhance user experience and not search engine experience. I also feel that instead of measuring 1^st page ranking as an indicator, the success of the project should be based on number of leads a project generates at the end of the project. Hope this helps! I think with the ideas given above.. i don't see any point where this competition go black hat!

Thanks, Rand! Like I said, it's difficult to find any recent information about TLA or TLB at all. I hadn't even heard about the link penalty or the sale. I've skimmed over Scott's experiment and will watch your video in a bit. Honestly, I'm not surprised that the experiment worked. One of my clients was recently surpassed by a competitor in the SERPs for one of their "bread-and-butter" keywords. The competitor very obviously bought links...and lots of them, too. Especially in a post-Penguin (even post-Panda) environment, I found that a bit disheartening. Though I don't wish bad things on anyone, I'm hoping (and betting) that Google will quickly pick up their "unnatural" links.

If these are new sites they will be passing very little authority, these will also be site wide links. If you are going to do it then id "nofollow" them.

If you dont have control over these links then I wouldnt waste my time trying to remove them. A better use of your time would be creating higher quality relevant links which will eventually dilute the bad profile that you currently have.

This one just don't pass the sniff test. Think about it -- does a site with "This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified." in its disclaimer seem like one that would get such a high trust from Google? What about a post about Las Vegas that offers few details and no outbound links? OSE does update about once a month. While it's not updated every day, you're not going to see something go from a DA of 5 to a DA of 95 (which would correlate more with a PR of 9 or 10) in just a month. Google has guidance on what qualifies a a high-quality site and questions to ask yourself at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html. Some of the questions are excerpted below. This site doesn't meet many of those guidelines. Would you trust the information presented in this article? Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature? Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site? Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors? Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis? Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? How much quality control is done on content? Does the article describe both sides of a story? Is the site a recognized authority on its topic? Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care? Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? For a health related query, would you trust information from this site? Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic? Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics? Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail? Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Yea, I'm not planning on using it - just trying to understand it. The result that I'm talking about sometimes shows as the last of the first page or the first of the second page. It's the result with gtcrew.com as the URL. The same thing happens with another search result with the URL arbiterrecords.com that shows on the second page. When clicked from Google, it goes to the product page of a different website. But, when visited directly, it goes to the proper site. Are people hacking these sites somehow, changing title and meta descriptions, and somehow setting up a redirect when the site shows as a Google result?

Never mind! I see many responses to my same questions already on the forum! I will do some research on my own!