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Hi Taysir, Going on Google's wording, that blog post is correct - you do come across instances of people claiming disavowal has worked well when they've disavowed links they weren't responsible for building. The problem is convincing Google that you weren't responsible ("_If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action" - _there's a possibility that you can claim until you are blue in the face that you were not behind the links Google dislikes, and they still refuse to lift a penalty). I would go for a reconsideration request first if I were you, as the blog post recommends. I also consider disavowal a last resort when link removal fails - it was foreseeable that people would disavow without doing any other work (and I'm sure Google saw that coming too). For context, at my former agency we would spend months removing every bad link we could find for new clients before filing for reconsideration or using disavowal. One came to us with over 7,000 bad links in early 2013; we removed and removed and finally had the penalty lifted later in the year (it was worth it - it was a high-value domain otherwise). Explain everything you have done or tried to do in the reconsideration request. Be honest but as concise as possible, and cite your actions with things like spreadsheets of sites researched / contacted / failed to respond. In short, that blog post is also how we dealt with disavowal at my old agency. I'm sure it works for some people who disavow things they weren't responsible for, but the misuse I have seen of the tool is also really high. One person told me once they had disavowed one link in their backlink profile "to test impact." Ah... that's not what it's for.

Thank you, I did not think it would have been an issue either but the customer did not like seeing that on the report and wanted it fixed. I will look into how to setup a robots.txt file to take care of this. Michael

Hey! Great question (sorry for not getting back to you sooner). The issue isn't your ad copy, or likely your landing page, but the keywords that you're targeting. As with venues or any arrangements offline, costs are significantly higher as soon as "wedding" is thrown in. I have had a similar experience with a client who was advertising on wedding rings -- low quality scores, higher CPCs. When you hover over the status bubble next to your keywords in Google, it should tell you exactly where the issues are. I just checked one of my 1/10 QS KWs and it said my landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected CTR were all below average. This is likely the same for you. I would work on testing your ad copy. But, you need a good adgroup structure for that. Here's my suggestion: I would put together one keyword with exact match with three different ad into one adgroup. That way you can start to isolate the issue. Is it the copy you're using? Can you get a higher CTR for that? Is it the landing page (it's my unsolicited opinion that this page does in fact need some work for a happier customer experience, but always be testing!)? Is it the keyword itself? What are your competitors writing in adcopy for this keyword? What are your ad extensions? What are their CTRs? Can you edit them to be better? For this test, you might want to just run these one keyword adgroups on the google network only, so that way you have an accurate understanding of the amount of traffic that's coming through and how they are interacting with your site. Not that the search partners network impacts your QS, but it will impact your results that will effect your tests (unless you plan on splitting the data by network + search partners).

Thanks for the heads up on robots.txt. I also think the attribute landing pages will not provide the same user experience as the layered navigation pages. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the matter. Cheers!

Greetings Pamela! This is nothing to worry about at all.  UTF-8 is simply a type of character encoding and is set in the websites to instruct web browsers on how to interpret the character encoding.  See- http://screencast.com/t/s4I2RNsgqUh As it's not negative and perfectly normal, there's no need to change it at all.

Wow that actually worked!!!! Thanks you have solved the issue!

Hi sobercollege! Thanks for asking for help on this. We've noticed a trend with some issues linking Google+ accounts to your Moz Analytics campaigns, so we already have some engineers working on this bug. Because of the frequency of this bug, we've created some status notes on http://health.moz.com with some simple steps that can help. To dig into this further with you, we're going to open a help ticket for you so we can correspond over email and keep your personal campaign-specific information off of the public forums. See you soon in email! Koos

Great thank you

Hi Pedram, It looks like 508 compliance is legislation in the US referring only to federal agencies and their information technology properties, so unless you are building for a federal agency, this won't be something you need to worry about. Looking at your profile, it looks like your company supplies government clients but isn't a federal agency, is this right? (I was looking at this page http://www.learningtree.com/government/.) If you are building for a federal body, the act refers mainly to accessibility issues and is part of the Rehabilitation Act (not the Americans with Disabilities Act as might be assumed). Sorry to link to Wikipedia, but information on the full act (with links to 508) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973 Hope this helps! Perhaps check with an internal person at Learning Tree who knows about compliance issues relating to your government work, but I do not see where contractors to government agencies are included in this. I could be wrong though.

Hi there, Links do pass PageRank, but they don't drain a page of the PageRank it already has. If you link out from a page 100 times, it doesn't make that page 100 times weaker. Think of PageRank as coming in two forms: that which you accumulate via being linked to, and that which you can pass on because of your accumulated authority. The only way in which adding more links to a page can be seen to be "damaging" is that if you link out 100 times from a page, each linked-to page receives roughly 1/100th of the passable strength from that page (links in footers or similar won't receive as much). However, if you link out 1000 times, each linked-to page receives 1/1000th of the passable link strength. Therefore, if you want a page to rank better, you need to consider whether you're diluting the amount of PageRank it receives due to the high number of links on other pages, not on the page itself. Is this clearer? Sorry it's hard to explain, but we basically believe that PageRank comes in two forms: one which a page accumulates and one which it can pass on, and passing PR on doesn't weaken the page itself.

Hello David, As Matt says, it does happen; but it has been quite a while since I saw them pull from DMOZ. I have seen everything else lately: Meta description drawn from content and not making sense when the Meta description on the site has nothing wrong with it. Title Tags that do not resemble the one from the sites, etc. Matt is also correct on the quick fix for blocking DMOZ or Open Directory Project (the odp in noodp). I would suggest if it is particularly disconcerting that you put the Meta tag in and then go into WMT and do a Fetch as Google on that page. While this is not the reason Fetch as Google was put in by Google, it often helps reindex quite quickly. All the best, and good luck, Robert

I like #5 for the reasons you've stated.  Also keywords in the URI string aren't as strong a ranking factor (in my opinion) as they used to be.  My 2 cents.

Hi Imedia, I agree with Sam: don't use this for your location-less service areas. Use it to highlight your physical location.

You're welcome Reed. I am into my 14th year now, although got my first taste of UX & Design back in 1997. So much has changed! -Andy

Hi there, A relatively old post on this from the Moz blog might be of use: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization Have you done any link building to the primary vinyl banners page? When a range of different pages rank for one query, it can often indicate a problem with the strength of the primary page, with site hierarchy not favouring that page as the canonical source of generic information about the topic.

Anyone?

I'm pretty sure it was February, when Yandex announced that they will no longer be using links as an SEO ranking factor. This was expected to hit March this year sometime - I am guessing this will be what has happened. -Andy