Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you guys, both good answers. I just watched the video, good stuff. Then responsive design is the way to go.

Hey Robert! There are a few tools you can use to get a good idea of when an external link was created. opensiteexplorer.org (a Moz tool) will give you a "date discovered" date. ahrefs.com will give you a "first seen" date. majesticseo.com will give you a "first indexed" date. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a "first discovered" date when you export "recent links." Between those 4, you should be able to find the link you want.  Webmaster Tools is free but will be limited.  The others show you some data for free, but require a monthly subscription for all the details.

Hi Esteban, You got it! Try running a Full SERP Analysis Report on the keyword. You'll get a snapshot of the SERP, as well as a breakdown of how each ranking page is doing on their rank signals. Feel free to come back here if you're not sure what it's telling you. Matt

We have a self-grown tool at work but when I was on my own I used Link Assistant's Rank Tracker and it's pretty good when you get it setup right.  I reported month on month ranking changes.  Still probably the best & easiest way to do it for clients - but check out services like SERPS.com as well.

Thanks, Takeshi!

That's the new way Google is displaying info on profiles and pages. Before they displayed "+1s", which was a metric which included your total number of followers + all the +1s your content had obtained. Now they've broken that out into total number of followers and total number of views. Who knows how long the new format will last, but we can assume that Google found those numbers to be more useful than the previous format.

I would look more for a site that has a squeaky-clean profile of its own (both in terms of its inbound and outbound links), has an appropriate page to link to you from and (for extra credit) is perhaps marginally related to your business (also in tech, for instance), rather than go on its numbers and try to shoe-horn a link in there, if that makes sense.

Hey Jonathan, I'm so sorry for the delayed reply! We've been having some issues with the email system that notifies us that a Q&A question has been assigned to the Help Team. It looks like you were able to get your listing published last Thursday, so it looks like you might be all set. If you are still having any trouble with your Local listings, please email us the CSV and the name, address, and phone number of your business for further assistance. Chiaryn

I'm not sure. But just an observation, you have more linking root domains nofollow or not for the first three specific generic anchor text money phrases than for branded terms. That seems a bit unnatural to me 1. because of the brand vs. generic contrast for 3 highly related terms and 2. because its exact match for high traffic generic and then the number of linking route domains for related anchor text terms drops off significantly instead of a smoother curve I'm not saying its penalty level unnatural. But in the context of the well known brands you're competing with, of which most of them above you I recognize, they likely beat you out on the brand metrics. Additionally, your first money terms are much more competitive from what I can see in terms of search volume than your second terms. Like clothes drying rack is getting 4000+ searches a month while the umbrella one is listed as 30. And trends confirms that contrast:  http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q="clothes drying rack"%2C"outdoor umbrella clothesline" I don't really believe in getting rid of links unless I'm walking into a clients site already penalized. Maybe one or two if I have control over them over time. I think you should pivot into brand building and testing different content assets for deeper links, video maybe? If they don't perform naturally at all, cut them or revise/enhance them. That will insulate you better from the risk of aggressive link building that's been done and help raise all phrases over time. And nofollow does matter. A lot. As well as nofollow vs. follow break down across brand vs generic anchor text in the context of your industry. A strong natural link profile example in your industry would be hard to find because your so niche competing with conglomerates. But being extremely natural (ie. not trying to have any control over the anchor text of sites linking to you at all)

Hi Kate, Thanks for your response. We submitted the XML site map. And yes, we did a couple of press releases. We will wait for this to improve.

Hi, Can you grab the IP addresses of the visits, e.g. from server logs? It could be automated scraping - Googling some of the IPs will shed some light on that if that is the case, as folks will have posted about this on other forums and cited some of the IPs. If it's a scraper, it might identify itself via an ISP name as well, e.g. when Facebook crawls a page, it IDs itself and the crawl usually comes from Palo Alto or Menlo Park, California. Coming from solely Miami and Chicago sounds suspicious or at least like automation - if this was natural US traffic, you would expect more geographical diversity, even if there was something that particularly interested people in those towns about your site. Andy is 100% right about images too, at which point you can move the images to another file location.

I don't know much about the various types of affiliate software, so I'll leave that to the experts. But I can tell you what Google says (at least publicly) about the "SEO value" of links on the sites of your affiliates. At an SMX conference, Matt Cutts (Google's head of web spam) said that Google essentially knows how to "handle" the major affiliate networks but that affiliate marketers may want to add nofollow tags just in case. (See the YouTube video.) What does "handle" mean? I would suggest that it's Google's aim NOT to have such affiliate links pass "credit" to the original site because Google views them essentially as paid links or links that are not placed naturally and editorially. Cutts suggestion to use nofollow is a way to stop this from happening for any smaller affiliate network that Google might not know about. Short version? I'd be highly skeptical of any claim that affiliate links help your "SEO." Sounds like snake oil. Given enough time, I project Google will become good enough that any link that is not 100% earned (rather than built) through good old-fashioned marketing and PR will not help websites (and may, in fact, hurt them). Moz also has a good post here with some affiliate SEO suggestions and further commentary on the issue.

You're most welcome, glad you found it useful!

Hi Neil, Through no fault of their own, some sites end up being blacklisted, so it is worth always checking this. A useful service is www.urlvoid.com. This will tell you if it is has any worrying markers attached to it. Marty has also given you some good pointers there. On top of this, check to see if the page is actually indexed by Google. Doing a "site:...." can often show interesting results. If a page isn't indexed by Google, there is normally a good reason why. -Andy

Hi Ruben, I hope you'll just love Moz Local! Yep, it looks like that # thing is everywhere. When, exactly, this happened, I did not notice.

Hi Nick, I believe there is no longer a "character count", but more a space or pixel limit - http://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/snippet-ascii-art.html This has been played out by a few people's experiments, so looks fairly solid - the limit relates to space, not character count. You could certainly try to create something that looked good both as a regular result and a sitelink.

Egol echoes what I was going to write. Would you trust someone else with a major portion of your website? What immediately came to mind was this MySpace incident with John McCain in 2007. http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/

Hi Jeff, Dug up some info for you in the links below. Chinese Web Design Patterns Smashing Magazine Article Chinese E-Commerce Sites All the best.