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Hi,

How many directory links do you tend to build in 1 month? And what do you look for in a directories before you submit?

I could build 2 links a day from directories but the thought of 60 links being built a month from directories shouts bad news to me.

I've had a look and come across a few directories with high DA/PA but at the end of the day they are just link directories, no content, lots of thin pages with lots of links pointing out.

A couple of examples of good directories would help.

Cheers

How important are social signals to SEO?

Are generating social signals a must? It seems every website out there has some sort of social sharing tool installed, everyone is after a like or a tweet.

Are we now looking at getting as many likes/tweets etc from real accounts as possible because actually they effect SERP's a lot.

Cheers

Apart from the SEO benefit from the link pointing back to your site in the byline, if no one clicks through to your site, shares or comments on the article then no it's not successful.

The idea of guest blogging is to generate exposure for your brand, I generally measure success by the level of shares, comments and click-throughs.

But that's just me.

Nice write-up Ryan, thanks.

Looks like an aggressive tool, I can see a lot of Webmasters running into trouble with this one.

If you contact a blog to get a link removed and then realise after actually I have made a mistake, or you login to a directory and remove it yourself and realise after you have made a mistake you can work on getting it back.

I get the feeling if you don't go through the process Ryan put down and you make a mistake with the Disallow Tool you wont be able to get those links back.

Dam, I did have a look first for a thread but must have missed it.

Oh well, nice work Irving

http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-disavow-links-tool-136826

Just thought I would share this.

Lets discuss,

Ex-Googler (Search Quality/Webspam team) talking about SEO.

http://searchengineland.com/ex-googler-to-please-google-with-your-seo-forget-about-seo-136800

The bit that got me thinking was 'title tag over optimisation' so what we looking at, shorter title tags with a max of 2 keywords?

And the PR quote, does relevance come above PR/DA/PA?

Thoughts?

Uh ok I understand.

I don't see any problem with this at all, your clients benefit from a do-follow link on a directory you run.

If they want a do-follow link they have to become a client or maybe pay a annual fee.

Done.

Nope, GWT is the fastest thing I have come across.

When I guest post I find between 2 weeks and a month and its in GWT.

I wouldn't do-follow the links pointing out, they are going to gain benefit from relevant traffic.

I think to gain the rankings you are after your going to have to store up juice, well at least at the beginning.

Plus why not push your services? If your delivering a free service for local trades then pushing your stuff through email etc is not a bad idea especially if you offer services in the area the directory is targeted at.

Just so I understand,

You have created a local directory covering a range of trades - plumbing, painting etc. You hope the directory ranks for relevant terms such as 'Painters Manchester' which will generate the exposure the directory listings will need to get noticed / generate business.

Is that correct?

Yeah its amazing actually what the change of a colour can do.

I've noticed that actually decreasing the level of content on a page so the message is more clear actually has had great impact.

Silly question I know but just wanted to talk about it, more of a discussion then anything.

How important is CRO to you? Anyone have any stats before and after?

Cheers

Ok,

Just so I got this straight,

You give them £1000p/m to spend, they try and lower the CPC lets say £1 to 50p which now means instead of getting 1000 visits your getting 2000 visits.

Yeah you would assume the CPA would stay the same and the conversions would double, if the traffic was still relevant.

The model is a little confusing even for someone who runs PPC & SEO.

Usually you would want a CPA model like you said.

You say you want to target a CPA of say £20 and you would be very happy if it came in at that. They then try and optimise the account below the £20 and slice off the amount below.

So before it is handed over its doing £25 CPA 100 sales p/m, agency takes it on, now its doing £15 CPA and 200 sales p/m. You win because your now doing more sales at a lower CPA and agency win because they are taking £5 on every sale because they are £5 lower on the target CPA you set.

Its also an incentive for the agency to push for more sales (which is what really matters).

Researching potential terms, best practises for targeting the terms onsite & offsite, tracking and analysing the data uncovered to expand the SEO campaign.

What's your monthly budget 'roughly' £100+, £1000+, £10,000+?

When you say only charge when they save you money, what do you mean, what's there model?

If you use:

inurl:.gov.au - it will only show results from .gov.au websites.

If you use:

inurl:.gov.au "Schools" - it will show results from .gov.au websites relevant to the search term Schools.

You can then use the above to track down the type of websites you want. Then you can install SEOMOZ tool bar (browser plugin) and turn on 'Show SERP Overlay'.

It will put a bar under each result with its stats, one is called DA which stands for 'Domain Authority'.

Does this help?

Like Carlos said most likely the EMD update.

See - http://mozcast.com/metrics and tab 'EMD Influence'.

Regarding your SEO people, you may not have access to your webmaster tools account but you could put your website domain so we could take a quick look.

It wouldn't take very long to tell if your SEO people are doing a good job or not.

Just so you understand a little better, Google puts some weight (From what I have seen, a lot) on a website which has an EMD (exact match domain) and that also targets that term.

I have seen websites rank with an EMD on the first page with little to no link building.

Google has just turned the power on EMD's down. As you can see from my link.

The reason why the guys above are saying your must have a poor link profile is because even when Google turned the power down, the link building you should have should of held you up.

So... EMD turned down, poor link profile (which should have held you up) = drop

Answer - Build your link profile up.

But it maybe something else until we can see your site, for all I know your whole site is duplicate content and you have been penalised.

It maybe the duplicate content, but you say last 3 days?

You don't have a exact match domain do you?

I think the image urls are stored in a table through mysql.

You could export the table, find/replace old domain with new and import it back in.

You would just need to copy the image folder structure over into the new.