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What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA? Well, if I were going the directory route I'd first look at the relevancy of each directory to what I'm selling, meaning that I'd look specifically for sites in my niche. From those, I'd use PR and DA to determine strength and possible penalties (i.e. if the DA is insanely high and the PR is non-existent, perhaps steer clear). PR isn't a great metric, as it's updated infrequently and may well be sometimes obfuscated to avoid it being used as a link-selling metric but comparing it to other things like number of links and Moz figures can be useful still. I'd then progress to more generic directories that had categories relevant to me and do the same thing - order them in terms of perceived strength and likelihood that their intended user-base was interested in what I sold. From the directories I chose, I'd look very carefully through their links - you're judged on who you're linked to alongside, so get rid of any that link to what you'd call low-quality sites, parked domains, etc. I would be willing to bet that sites with good rankings who have gone in for directory SEO are ranking largely because of other factors, as directories are not something Google likes to put a lot of weight into anymore, and has become better at picking out. And as "holistic" as it sounds, I'd choose directories based off of whether I'd want to be listed there if SEO didn't exist. It's just a case of this tactic having been used so many times for spammy purposes that search engines end up devaluing it or being quite suspicious of it. What is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link? Not very much in that a Google rep would likely tell you that sponsors / donors' links should be nofollowed because money changed hands in establishing the relationship. But this will likely be just one page on a website, and for many businesses the number of links won't be astronomically high. If the outbound link numbers are very high, they might attract webspam team attention. As an SEO, I've done FAR more to encourage sponsor linking than go around trying to nofollow these links, however, as have most people. We haven't got to the stage yet where Google has put out memos about this being not-white-hat, but that's what a webspam team member would likely say. I'd still not link out from a site to my sponsors using their commercial anchor text ("car insurance", "mobile phones") - I'd link with their names.

Hey Brandon! If you're a local business, there are likely 2 types of links that would be most relevant to your business. These would be local links and industry links. So, a local link might be your local chamber of commerce. An industry link might come from something like a national organization that represents your industry. Obviously, it's great to get mentioned in local news, local blogs, etc., too. The main thing to concentrate on with this is that you are publishing content or joining organizations that precisely relate to your business and its location. The ideal is for these things to happen naturally. If you are targeting a state, that is not considered a true local search. Local search relates to cities - not states. So, from your query, if you are a BBQ restaurant in Colorado, the local element of your campaign would revolve around Denver, or whatever city the restaurant is in. If you want to gain visibility for your BBQ keywords and the state of Colorado, you'd need to approach this organically rather than locally, hoping to show up in the organic results rather than in the local pack. So, you might produce content about the history of BBQ in Colorado (like, Basque sheepherders in the 1800s BBQing or whatever) or make infographics comparing the best BBQ restaurants in the state based on some criteria or write article about statewide BBQ contests, or what have you. Hope this helps!

Hi There Just to clarify, by definition there are not doorway pages - doorway pages function by redirecting the user to another page than the one that was indexed. These would just be additional pages indexed that more or less show the same content as other pages. That aside though, it's good to still question their validity. What Etsy is doing is a bit more complex and I wouldn't compare your site to Etsy (unless it's going to be millions of pages with hundreds or thousands of categories). But Etsy is doing something slightly different than what you're describing for your site. If you want to create the silo effect you can simply "nofollow" any links you don't want them to continue crawling off of the homepage. And in general I would try to control everything through good architecture. Now, for Etsy, if you have two similar pages showing in search - one a /search/ URL and the other a /Market/ URL - that, in my opinion is not ideal. I would noindex the search pages that are also duplicated by static pages.

Even Moz's grader doesn't take all factors into account, but the biggest issue you are likely missing are links, could be external or internal or both.  Make sure you have a few different keyword variations linking to the page, check the backlink profiles of a few of the top pages to make sure but I bet they have some anchor text links coming in that you are likely missing, giving them more relevance in the eyes of google.

There is no right or wrong here.  It is how you feel comfortable laying out a site.  A menu with every page on a site can be a disaster for a user experience, but if it's not that many then it's fine.  You could do a single services page and then just add links in the context (assuming a paragraph or something for each term.) or you could do a secondary menu for instance on the right side of the page that links to the particular pages.  Whatever makes sense to you and users, I won't speculate without knowing the full sitemap.

If your scroll, is not that large, them you can load all the html with the page and display it on scroll. this way it is all indexed, but if it is truly a lot of data and you are using ajax to get this data, then you need to ask yourself, do I really need the content indexed. If yes, then Johns idea is a good one, albeit not necessary a nice looking one, depending on the design

Thanks for resolving this. It works now. Thanks again!

It depends how quick you want to get a penalty. Any link you can go out and get in numbers is very unlikely to be off any value, and may get you penalized now or in the future. Search Engines are simply not interested in these sort of links.

Hi DoMiSol, I've added the AdWords conversion code to the "thank you" page and I also added a Goal in Google Analytics whose counter is increased every time the thank you page is reached. This way I can track conversions with both AdWords and Analytics.  Is that correct? Yes, as long as you have added the Google Analytics tracking code to the "Thank you" page so you can track that specific goal. Should I import back in AdWords the goals from Analytics, as suggested in the AdWords account? Linking your Analytics account with Adwords has a lot of benefits. The main reason to do so is to be able to see a more comprehensive view of your AdWords post/click activity such as: Bounce Rate: When someone sees only one page or triggers only one event. Avg. Session Duration: The average time someone stayed on your site. Pages/Session: The average number of pages viewed per session. % New Sessions: The estimated percentage of first-time sessions. Access to  awesome Remarketing lists from Google Analytics In terms of tracking AdWords conversions use one or the other, not both. Do not import any goals that you are already tracking through AdWords Conversion Tracking into AdWords, this can create double-counting and duplication, which would make your conversion data misleading and hard to interpret. ================================== I have another landing page with a form in the website, where I send users coming from organic search, so I set up a second goal in Analytics for the thank you page of this form. Yes, you are simply tracking a new action from a different form. Is this the reason why I am supposed to import in AdWords the analytics' goals, so that I could see both kind of conversions in both accounts? _In theory yes (as explained above). But I would not import your organic goals into Adwords, there is no reason to. _To make it simple, remember this: AdWords tool will track ONLY your AdWords conversions. Analytics will track conversions from ALL your channels: Bing, Social, Email etc. As long as you have the proper tracking & tags implemented in your URL's. ================================= 3) But the most important question is: If I send both PPC/organic visitors to the same landing page is there still a way to separate PPC from Organic conversions? Yes, as long as you have auto-tagging enabled AND Adwords conversion tracking in the pages that you want to track. Google will track your PPC data separate from your organic - Google Adwords adds a "GCLID" (Google Click Identifier) to the Destination URL. This is a globally unique tracking parameter to pass information back and forth between Google AdWords and Google Analytics, this includes UTM parameters, click to conversion and cost data for your paid campaigns. ================================= I hope this information is helpful. Cheers, ~Barbara

In case anyone stumbles upon this in the future, I just remembered the source I couldn't recall when I first posted this... paper.li Still open to other suggestions if anyone has one. Erik

Some brilliant tips in here for finding toxic links that tools often don't bring up. it's worth noting that many backlink tools like Moz only crawl the parts of the internet that they feel are "important". When I worked at an agency that crawled its own backlinks (i.e. we had a tool that was similar to OSE and Ahrefs but was in-house), we did the same thing for our regular crawls. We'd do "deep crawls" that went far further only when necessary, usually due to inheriting a client with terrible spam links and needing to see the extent of the damage. The model and method taken by commercial tools has benefits and detriments. Moz, Ahrefs etc. do a great job, but they do not update as regularly as Google because they don't have the same processing power or storage as Google does. Moz's OSE updates somewhere around once a month with the team working to make this as quick as possible. If OSE were to include every forum page on every subdomain on the entire internet, this would be slower. Going off of what we would do for our every-day tool that was similar in many ways to OSE and its friends, we took a very comprehensive snap-shot that included the entirety of what appears to "matter" on the web and a selection of the deeper parts of the public internet. We did not index or show every .blogspot.com page online. For 99% of backlink analysis, this is fine and always will be. It's when you're faced with really bad spam that you need a more comprehensive view of what's out there. Majestic has a reputation of including more of this stuff in its reports, although you say you've already used it. The criticism of Majestic is that they often include stuff that was taken down a long time ago, or where pages have been offline for a long time. For the times when you ned a deeper view, Marie's suggestions are fantastic if you don't have access to a tool that can crawl deeper.

Thank you for your response

Hi Karen If you drop us an email - hello @ linkrisk.com i will arrange for a trial account so you can give LinkRisk a try Maria - You are 100% correct - No tool will get you to the finish line - If we can get people 75-80% there then a manual review to eliminate false positives then you are on the right track - You would not believe what we see disavowed! Alex - I would love to see a list of the 22 link sources - We have hunted far and wide and we did not get to 22 Happy to be proven wrong though - Also happy to answer any questions any of you may have Thanks Gareth (it is Paul's name on the account!)

Good suggestions on this thread! What I would be sure that you are doing is that if you have a unique landing page for each office, you are consistently using the acronym for that specific business on that page. So, in other words, your landing page for the office in NM should consistently refer to the business as Keller & Keller LLC. This does matter. Presumably, you will have linked from the NM Google+ Local page directly to this landing page and if Google sees Keller & Keller LLC in both sources, it will confirm the identity of the business for them and lower your chances of merging and duplicates. Hope this helps!

For anyone searching for a similar topic: The plugin mentioned above is not in sync with Facebooks new developer guidelines. But I found this is working: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fatpanda-facebook-comments/

As the others have said, redirecting domains with no backlinks (and even domains with just a few backlinks) will likely not be useful at all in terms of making the destination website rank better. I dealt with a client a few years ago who literally had thousands of parked domains, all with names somewhat related to their industry (for example, if they were in the sports betting industry, they owned thousands of domains like expertfootballbets.net). We completed a backlink crawl for each of these domains and threw out those with no links or too few links, first checking that there were none with particularly catchy names in the list. Then, we filtered through to find those that actually had good or passable links and decent names. The remaining list was pretty short. We sought (with budget) to build actual sites on those domains. They were basically affiliate sites for want of a better description: they were not "microsites" in that they didn't take away from the business of the main domain and the content wouldn't have been better off on the main site. From the many thousands we started with, I think our build list was about 30 sites, which was appropriate for the content and industry. I would imagine that most parked domain lists would end up with far fewer than 30 workable websites. Obvious misspellings or old company names should be redirected, but for usability purposes. It's much more work, but actually using the domains is much more useful in the long run, if that's possible, than just redirecting. As altecdesign says above, you're better off reinvesting the hosting / registration elsewhere for domains that have no other noticeable value.

Thanks for the help everyone. I kind of forgot if I'm redirecting it, then there's no problem with the old page. Thanks for the confirmation and the reminder! I appreciate it. Have a great Memorial Day Weekend! Ruben