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I guess you're right, but does that mean that Google wouldn't consider this a black-hat technique just because the link juice is divided by so many links? I thought it would actually be the opposite, that having only 5 or 10 links passing juice on a page would be okay, but something like 600 would be considered spam. I don't know, but perhaps Matt Cutts has said something about this specifically. Regardless, have you, or has anyone here heard the phrase, "If your intention is to gain rankings in Google, then it's black-hat" Basically anything you do, such as listing a bunch of links like this without a nofollow link and asking to trade links, based on what I've gathered from Matt Cutts, is considered black-hat. If I'm wrong, please let me know. But let's assume that everything you're saying is correct. How can we make the most of this situation? For me, for example, I actually went to Open Site Explorer and checked into followed external links and sorted them based on Page Authority. This was actually the most powerful link going to the site (I believe I was researching Quirky.com) based on what Moz was telling me. If what you're saying is true, then shouldn't Moz's algorithm be updated to take into consideration the amount of links on that page, then perhaps also they can take that and divide it with the Page Authority for the page and give us a new number based on that? That would probably be a much more accurate way of ranking pages based on how powerful they are, or how much link juice is going to them. Maybe there's a way to do that now and I'm just not aware. Do you have any strategies you use for this sort of thing, dividing link juice between the number of pages on the site?

I submitted my site using GWT Fetch as Google feature. I understand that it takes time. Does Google prevent new domains from figuring in the search results ? It doesn't bother me since the site is just 12 days old. But i want to make sure i do it right so that eventually Google will send me search traffic.

If you have an online store dedicated to selling shoes in France, I would focus less on how to optimize and more on getting someone that is fluent in French and native to France. You are going to have to give that person the time to really translate your site from a French person's (someone that lives in France) perspective. All the site content. Once you have accomplished that and used the correct implementation of HREFLANG and the meta language content tag (for Bing), let it sit for the time being. See how much traffic it garners. Get user input, check internal search patterns. If you aren't already tracking internal site search, please do that. If you don't allow internal site search, add that and track it in analytics. Only then do you optimize for specific text.

Hi Guy,  I remember seeing you at SEOChat a while back. If you have figured out how to fulfill the giveaway with no problem then it sounds like a great thing. I don't see anything about giveaways that suggest that they are anything less than white hat. Almost everybody loves freebies.. So, I would go for it.

Thanks guys for your help!!

Hi To answer your questions: For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? This is really a "How long is a piece of string" question. It depends. If the site is for an established brand launching say a new site, then inbound links during that time could escalate to 1000s or tens of thousands wouldn't be unrealistic to expect. For an unknown, who knows? In one sense, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that those inbound links are producing results, both from people clicking on them and it benefiting your site from an SEO perspective. Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? Again, it would depend on whether or not the new site was for an established brand or for an unknown, but suspicion isn't necessarily based on numbers - although it would be fair to say that the higher the number the more it might flag up an issue. The main thing though is that Google's algorithms are sophisticated and able to detect link quality on the basis of a number of metrics, e.g. the social profile of a site. You could just have 10 links and it could flag an issue. I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have? As I said above, the more links accrued in short space of time, the more likely a yellow or red light might start flashing on Google's dashboard, but again it comes down to link quality which is evaluated on a number of metrics that will determine if there is an issue. I hope that helps, Peter

I don't think there's any harm in submitting a new/full list, even if it duplicates past lists. The URLs haven't been removed, and you did fix the tags. This isn't like disavowing links - it's more of a technical issue. Worst case, it doesn't work, from what I've seen.

Practically speaking, in my experience the difference ranges from a 1:1 relationship to a 1:8 relationship, which is a huge spread. A lot of SEOs I know, including our tools developers here at Moz, have shown an interest in Grep Words. Might be worth checking out if you were interested.

we doubled her traffic and were just waiting for the off site seo to start to have an effect but she said it was taking too long and went somewhere else. Hey... if bolding the keywords was a kickass method you would be seeing it EVERYWHERE! I don't do that on my site because it gives the site a bad odor. Don't worry so much about why she left.  Start thinking about how to handle it when she returns. These guys could build a ton of junk links for you. If you have copies of the files when you stopped work, you will not have to search the entire site to remove the code that these people have added.

Even before the Internet, the key to success has always been to build and promote a strong brand. Today, Google favors companies that have built strong brands online. (See the articles here, here, here, and here as examples.) Remember this quote from Google: "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." They key to creating a strong brand has been, is, and always will be through public relations and related publicity methods. What is called social-media outreach, content marketing, influencer marketing, and more today is just traditional public relations by other names. For an introduction to the topic, I'd suggest taking a look at my Moz post on the topic. I address: 1. Goal identification 2. Target marketing identification 3. Messaging and positioning 4. Media list creation 5. Press release development and pitching Doing PR is crucial to generating interest, traffic, mentions (with or without links), backlinks, likes, shares, +1s, tweets, and a lot more that all combine to create strong brand signals. PR is how a business and website generates these things organically and indirectly. In one context, it is earning links and not building them. This process is not easy (or cheap, if you outsource to a PR agency), but it is the best way to get such awareness and results for the long term. Good luck!

Why would you redirect the naked domain to home.html? I'd personally would have that home.html renamed to the default page that your server serves as the index, probably index.html and then look if there are any canonical tags in home.html pointing to the named domain + if there are any restrictions for robots to index the page, in the file itself and in the robots.txt file. If you can provide us with the URL, we would be able to check a little deeper. Hope that helps.

A lot of sites saw a drop in mid November but there was no announced update.  You can read a good discussion of what some site owners saw in the comments on this post: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-nov15-17689.html My gut instinct is that this was a refresh of the Panda algorithm, but Google no longer announces these refreshes so no one can know for sure. But, there really isn't an easy answer to your question as there isn't an obvious solution.

These are two different Search engines(bing, yahoo(powered by bing) and Google) and both have different Algorithms  of Rankings. I think you need to read this Post in details to get your Answer  http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/white-paper/ranking-factors-bing/ thanks

Thanks again for the reply. One other question, if i wanted to link my plumbers page to 4 different areas pages would the correct way be to the same keyowrds, example: plumbers london, plumbers essex, plumbers surrey & plumbers berkshire as these are the phrases  wish to rank for? Or should i vary the anchor text? Cheers

It's hard to say but I've seen examples where removing duplicate categories has improved the strength of the ones that remain. It does depend on the architecture/internal links on your site, what if any external deep links you may have and making sure any removed categories are correctly 301'd to the category that you keep. I've also seen examples where it's made no difference at all. If you've got as whole bunch of categories in your navigation I've also seen improvements in engagement by putting these categories in popularity order (Google Analytics can tell you which categories are the most popular). Make the ones that people are looking for easy to find. If you've got the traffic, it can be worth testing.

Hi. A mystery indeed! Have you recently upgraded or changed Web platforms or changed or upgraded what you are using for your site navigation?

Hi Kandice, It is as you say, campaigns with the asterisk are tracking all sub domains not just the www. I think this is only in the old campaign layout, I don't see it in the new moz analytics.