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I just hope they give us some more time to get things resolved and roll this out slowly so that it is not like a major penalty.

I'll add to this that generally you're adding keyword rich anchor text to these links. If I was Google, this is something I would look for when determining if a site is relevant. It likely is 1 of the 200+ factors and likely what site you are linking to and how relevant is are other factors.

I agree with Ryan. That's great advice. One more thing I would add is to go ahead and pro-actively add some extra high authority page backlinks to the "about me" page. You want to ensure the Page Authority is higher than any other pages on the site that may out rank your author archive page. Just to make sure the pages you want ranking first are where they should be in terms of your websites pages authority. Hope that helps a little further, Joe

Hi, Thanks for the responses guys! There is some really interesting comments in there and plenty to be getting on with! Thanks again, Max

Hi all, Like I say, I was added as admin and I didn't even access the account and all my personal FB friends were sent friend requests. The only thing I did was check on my phone and read a notification to let me know I'd been added as admin. We don't have any third party apps running, and we can't locate any type of settings that would allow FB to automatically friend request all of the admins' contacts. Weird.

Hey Peter, It's generally considered a best practice to have your NAP at the top of your location landing pages, and I don't see any problem with you doing this and referencing the NAP again at the bottom of the page. Just be sure you're making each landing page unique and of as high quality as you can accomplish.

Hey Scott, That's a tough problem, but removing the phone number would not be a good solution as it is one of the 4 core pieces of NAP+W data that Google and customers need to see about any local business. I wouldn't trust a business with no listed phone number and expect most customers would feel the same about this. I like Bryan's common sense suggestions on this. What I would like to add is that your thread has made me curious as to what it is about the client's business that is making it so confusing to customers that they need a 15 minute explanation before they understand the business model. Maybe the very best thing to do here would be for you to coach the client into whittling that down to a 4-5 sentence explanation that takes less than 1 minute to explain. Think along the lines of an elevator pitch. No business should require a 15 minute explanation, if we're just covering the basics. Likely, what the client is experiencing is that it's necessary to then move forward from the basic explanation to the conversation that leads to discovering the fitness of a prospect and then closing a deal. While there is no way to avoid putting in this time, again, it comes down how the conversation is managed. I am thinking back to my own early days when I found it frustrating that I would spend a great deal of time listening to customer's issues and explaining my service, only to discover many minutes into the conversation that their budget did not match my fees. What I eventually learned from this was to mention my rates within the first couple minutes of the conversation. At that point, I would either hear, "Oh, I can't afford that." or "That sounds reasonable." This helped me determine whether a further investment of my time in the discussion was appropriate. It may be that your client is struggling with something like this and needs to refine her communications so that she can tell the difference between a good match and a poor one within a couple of minutes of answering her phone. One other suggestion ... have the client answer the phone and then put the customer on hold for 30 seconds. In that 30 seconds, run an automated on-hold message with music and voice disclosing the key components of the pitch. By the time the owner then takes the customer off hold, they will have heard the basics.

If you mean links to your site from some URL not on your site then you could do the following: Do a site:somesite.com/page to see if it is indexed, plus try and find in results Check the URL to you is clean - no redirects, no js, no frame etc Check their URL in OSE to see if there is any authority. Otherwise if Google is not blocked from the other URL and there is no no-follow links on the page then Google is not instructed to no-follow.  Therefore a small amount of link equity will pass - unless made negligible by The page authority is very poor there are multiple links on the page

Okay so if you have one root domain you can only have one robots.txt file. The reason I asked for an example is in the case there was something you could put in the robots.txt to differentiate the two. For example if you have thisdomain.com and thatdomain.com However if "thatdomain.com" uses a folder called shop ("thatdomain.com/shop") than you could prefix all your robots.txt file entries with /shop provided that "thisdomain.com" doesn't use the folder shop, Then all the /shop entries would only be applicable to "thatdomain.com". Does this make sense? Don

Above everything, Google looks for your user experience. If you have a ton of 302 redirects you will have duplicate content errors, If you start changing 301 redirects you will eventually create a spider web that is hard to navigate. If you set up your 301 redirects and have to change a few, you should be ok. If you set up 5000 redirects and end up changing 4500 of them or creating duplicate 301 redirects you will eventually have really slow page speeds and bad user experience which Google will recognize and not like. 302 redirects are not common or best practice. I would avoid them all together.

That is interesting! At Moz, we haven't attributed or correlated any organic lifts in our Facebook views when we turn off promotion. While Facebook maintains that they don't bias views for people who pay for ads, I've seen others make similar comments. However, I haven't seen any good studies on this.

Hello Ted, yes they can hurt your site in a number of ways. Site owners tend to make these links anchor text rich, so if you've got a link in your footer saying 'Blue Widgets' then effectively you may have 30+ anchor text links from your own site. And yes, anchor text backlink ratios are calculated with the inclusion of internal links from your own site. As you also mentioned, these footer links are draining the juice out of your main contextual links within in your main page's copy. Effectively, those nice internal silo links you send to your inner pages are being watered down by all of your dofollow footer links. So do I make all of my footer and menu links no-follow then? And there's the problem. You won't find definitive answers on this because it's grey hat. Google will tell you that nofollow links are links that you don't want to vouch for. So are you going to send a signal to Google that tells them you don't trust internal links on your own site because you added the nofollow attribute to them? And yes, whether the link is nofollow or not, it's still included in your overall anchor text ratios. Now we move into PR sculpting. Google will tell you not to do that, and that PR sculpting doesn't work anyway. Is that because it still works very well indeed? Why are there so many authoritative sites that still use the nofollow attribute on some of their internal links? Don't they trust these internal links, or are they channeling link juice to the pages they want it diverted to. If the rest of your link profile was pretty clean, and all of your offsite SEO was above board, then I think you'd be pretty unlucky to get a penalty from internal links coming from the footer of your own site. One of my sites is ranking top three for many medium to semi-hard keywords that uses PR sculpting. Every single menu and footer link is nofollow. So the homepage has about 30 nofollow internal links on it, and only two contextual links in the main copy that link to the other inner pages that I wanted to rank. That site has remained top 3 for over 1.5 years now without a hitch. This definitely isn't conclusive evidence by any means. The site itself is very strong and has great content too, but it seems as though all of the nofollow links haven't affected it negatively. And the inner pages that I sent all of the juice to are ranking #1 too. In my opinion PR sculpting does work but I also think it's dicey. In your situation, I would maybe just dial down the exact match anchor text and change them to partial match links. Google do devalue your internal footer links to a certain degree but there's no black and white answer. If your site is big, then your generating 100's of anchor text links, and although they're devalued, it's still a bit dicey.

I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/ Best of luck and let us know how you get on.

Hi There, I hope that this message finds everyone well and you are all having an amazing day! As mentioned before it is pretty tricky to determine why Google does not index a particular site. They are a bit secretive by nature so the issue could range from anywhere from the site being penalized by Google to an issue with ones hosting provider. As mentioned by some of our other amazing community members, Google Web Master Tools and Google Analytics are some very excellent resources. It does seem very strange that you would be routed to the question and answer forum. Hmmm, we have not heard of this issue before. If you are logged into your account you should be able to follow this link: http://analytics.moz.com/pro/home and be able to get access to Moz Analytics. Once here I would recommend entering in your site and checking out our crawl diagnostics section. This is an awesome portion of the site because it will point our areas of improvement with the site and general recommendations for improvement. Hopefully this helps and if you are still running into some issues please let me know. Have a magical day and I look forward to speaking with you soon!

Luckily there was a whiteboard Friday on this very thing: http://moz.com/blog/driving-traffic-from-facebook-whiteboard-friday just the other day. One of the tips from that video is, "Number 5, it is still the case -- this has been true for many years now across all the social media platforms -- that visuals tend to outperform non-visual content. When you have great visuals, the spread and share of those tends to be greater."  Perhaps instead of asking for likes you could drive engagement by getting your fans to post their own photos of their completed recipe (everyone takes pictures of food!) and then resend these through your Facebook page. This way you'll get the initial request reach, submissions, then return as people brag about their submissions that get selected within their group of friends. I'm sure you'll get plenty more ideas like that if you go through the video. Cheers!

Kathryn, All the advice so far is solid, and live by the link provided by Miriam. I would also suggest ensuring a few items. Solid directory management practices (Moz's new tool looks like a great start) will certainly help, including areas served on pages where possible (Google +, Yelp, etc.) Connect with and get links from local BBBs, Chambers of Commerce, and other local non-directory type business listings. If your cleaning services are commercial, and you have any .edu or .gov customers, see if you can gain any links from these sites. A blog article, a news item thanking you for a contribution, anything. Highly local, and a lot of value.

Yup, cache on the backend...ah, I should have known that one! Thank you both; I greatly appreciate it! Ruben