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what Miriam said here - "...what you need to have there is the local number as the primary number; not the toll free one...." IS SO VERY VERY important, eh! follow that advice!!!

In this particular case, I did not see a penalty assigned in Webmaster tools. Do you think that going back to westvalleyflooring.com would be a good call? floorscalgary.com temporarily ranked on page #2 or #3 and has now fallen back. This account has been a big challenge.

Lets see, I submitted, if it works then all the better Trying something new from today, read an article by Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen about the effects of personalising posts. My blog posts are well read by people in my industry, but there's a distinct lack of engagement i.e. comments, so I've added an image of myself to half of my articles so I can track the results, hopefully get more shares and some comments - though a pic of me is likely to scare people off lol. As always ur a star

In my experience, pure spam penalties are either super easy to clear or darn near impossible. The easy ones are ones where someone buys a new domain and doesn't realize that the previous owner of the site had used it for spam.  If this is the case then you can file for reconsideration, tell Google you are a new owner and they usually lift the penalty. But, if this isn't the case, then I'd be concerned. I've seen other internet marketing companies get pure spam penalties on their sites when Google feels that they are breaking the quality guidelines in several ways.  In my opinion it's like Google saying, "We don't want this site in our search engine results so we're going to call you pure spam and remove you from the index."  Usually pure spam is a mixture of bad backlinks, on site content that is not good for users and other things.  Your backlink profile looks very unnatural.  Every link I am seeing is anchored with a keyword like "atlanta web design" and "atlanta marketing". But, a pure spam penalty usually goes beyond the backlink profile.  I didn't spend a lot of time looking at your site but I've seen SEO companies get pure spam penalties when they are using techniques that are against the quality guidelines for their clients.  Or, in other cases, if the website is describing how to manipulate Google then this can invite a pure spam penalty. If you made the keyword anchored links then part of your recovery would involve removing as many as possible and disavowing the rest.  If you feel that they are negative SEO, then you still need to clean up what you can.  Google's generally good at not letting negative SEO happen, but if you feel that you are 100% innocent and did not build these links then explain what you can when you file for reconsideration.  Google is always interested in hearing about possible negative SEO. Only you know what kind of techniques you are offering to your clients.  If the methods that you use for ranking go outside of the quality guidelines then I am guessing that you will not get rid of the pure spam penalty without a complete change of your business practices.  (I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case, but I do know that Google doesn't treat pure spam penalties lightly.) Is the penalty related to the hacking of the other sites?  From what you have described I would guess no.

Simple...pick #1 - if the RD is not working they said - then you test it. Mount the site on various devices, play with the window size.... Does it change/adapt to the viewport? If so - and yes I just tried it on everything from my BlackBerry Passport to my 27" desktop monitor - then the oDesk idiot who claimed otherwise is NOT a place to spend any SEO dollars.... ...sigh....

@Leonie-Kramer Yes, we are using Wordpress. I can see if changing the slug to not include spaces may help. @lynnp I noticed that too! Usually our developer doesn't help with technical SEO problems like this, so I was trying to solve it myself But I will try to see if he can take a look at it. Thanks to both for your answers!

without a price, how can I determine if you are making the best offer...this IMHO is so important for commodity products...

Yep, seems right. I'd say you don't have enough authority yet to rank for a generic term. You would have to be #1 for "zing company" first i believe. But you are on the right path... just need to build more brand awareness and let google better learn the association between "zing" and your company. My guess is that once you reach a certain "authority", you should see your rankings jump for "zing".

Yep. 301 = permanent redirect = this page used to be here but not moved to this new location so lets pretend its always been this way (and transfer any authority to it).

yep

A part what the others wrote, I would not recommend to redirect the old penalized websites (if they were penalized) to the new domain, because the penalization will be transferred to it. What I'd do was to update the good backlinks from the old EMDs to the new domain, asking the owners of the "good" sites to do it.

Thank you for confirming Monica, we've been doing some high quality link acquisition to the domain in order to get a bolstered profile.  I strongly suspect this is some Penguin trails still going on.

Hey There! Once Localeze has told you they are releasing your listing there, please monitor the little blue circles in your Moz Local dashboard on the Published Listings page. Once you see the yellow Localeze circle turn white, this means the listing is available for Moz Local to assume management of. Once it turns white, please email our Help Team, provide your Moz Local account email and the complete name, address, phone number and website of the listing in question and request that we assume management of the Localeze listing. You can email our Help Team here https://moz.com/help/contact Hope this helps!

Ok, thank you.

Wow. I did some research. I stand corrected. Thanks, Linda. As far as your categories go, you could have: www.Domain.com/computers/notebooks/apple-notebooks/ and www.domain.com/apple-products/ On your category pages, I'd suggest adding unique content at the bottom of the category pages. A paragraph above the fold would help for ranking purposes, but may detract from usability and conversions.

1. Yes 2. Depends - If you going to be getting visits from that post then defiantly because visits can turn into sales which can be a better result than a follow link at times. Finally you may find the following Youmoz post handy - http://moz.com/ugc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-sponsored-content

This usually takes place when one of the mentioned links are newer than the other. Have either of these been linked to recently?

Thank you. That's exactly the answer I was looking for.