Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Abdul,

Can you give a little more information regarding the circumstances you are seeing this? If it is any consolation, when I perform a search for the term [inverter battery] in Google.co.in, I see your inverter battery page at the bottom of page 3 (I do not see your homepage ranking). I am performing the search from the UK, with Chrome in an incognito tab.

Adam.

Hi Andrew!

Creating a scholarship is a great way of getting links from sites with a high domain authority. Whether Google gives more weight to .edu (or .gov) links is open to debate but generally speaking .edu sites tend to have a lot of authority due to the large amount of natural links that they attract (although this is not always the case).

One thing to be aware of, Google does not look at page authority (PA) or domain authority (DA) specifically as these are Moz metrics. However, they will give a good indication to the overall authority of a site as these metrics are closely related to PageRank, which is a Google metric.

It is not uncommon for internal pages on a site to have much lower authority metrics than the overall domain. This is not a bad thing and you shouldn't be worried about gaining links on pages that have a lower PA than the overall DA. It may be that these pages are newer and will therefore have less links than the home page resulting in a lower PA. So to answer your question of whether these links are worth it? I would say yes, for sure.

I hope that helps.

If you are seeing zero pages indexed  and zero traffic from search then I would assume you have perhaps verified and subsequently are looking at data for the non-www version of the domain.

Double check that the site listed in WMT is www.mormonwiki.com and not mormonwiki.com. If you are looking at indexation and traffic data for the www version then there may be something else going on and unfortunately I wouldn't be able to diagnose the issue without looking at the WMT account.

Have your rankings been significantly affected? You would need to perform a fair amount of analysis before you can conclude that the site has been affected algorithmically. You would also need to be sure that any negative impact to rankings is a result of poor quality links and not something else, such as on-page factors.

Using the disavow should really be a last resort and only if it has been impossible to get troublesome links removed. As the warning from Google states, the disavow feature 'can potentially harm your site's performance' so I would not recommend using it until you have performed more in-depth analysis.

Are you performing a link analysis because the site received a manual action notification in WMT? If the site hasn't received a penalty then there is no need to use the disavow feature. As Google states:

'This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.'

In terms of the crawlability of the site, where are you seeing WMT reporting to have not crawled a single page? A simple site: search of the mormonwiki.com domain returns about 65,600 results and I can't see any major issues that would prevent search engines from crawling the site. However, I would probably fix the issue with the robots.txt file. Currently, www.mormonwiki.com/robots.txt 301 redirects to www.mormonwiki.com/Robots.txt, which returns a 404 error.

Hope that helps.

Hi Clicksjim,

As long as you don't see a rel="no follow" attached to the link then it should be followed by search engines, therefore passing value.

As an extra minor detail, you might also want to check that the page hasn't been blocked by robots.txt

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi Simon,

You are actually talking about regex (or regular expressions) here in terms of matching. Using wildcards is a part of regex. If you are unfamiliar with regex then you can read about it here.

Also to reiterate, you can still find what you are looking for within the 'Top Pages' section of OSE. It lists all subfolders (or website section as you put it) along with the individual pages contained within these sections. A tip would be to sort the Page Title URLs by page authority (descending) as the more important sections are likely to be listed before the individual pages within each section. However, this is not always the case. To make it easier to find exactly what you want then just download the CSV and you can sort and/or find the data you need within Excel very easily.

Adam.

Hi Simon,

In a nutshell, no you cannot use wildcards in OSE.

There is also no need to use regex. You can easily see what you want by selecting the 'Top Pages' tab, which shows a list of your pages and how many links are pointing to each page.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Google autocomplete and the 'searches related to' field can be manipulated, however it is against Google's TOS to do so. Rishi Lakhani wrote a very interesting article on the subject over a year ago now. In it he shows how he managed to manipulate these results.

Hope that helps.

No problem.

Hi James,

First, run a crawl on your site. Is the /index.html getting picked up in the crawl? If so then it is being linked to internally. Check the navigation bar(s) to see if the link to 'Home' is linking to /index.html. Once you have found all the internal links linking to /index.html, you will then need to change these to point to the home page without the filepath (e.g. http://www.example.com/).

The second step would be to implement a canonical tag on both pages that point to the home page without the filepath. So in your example that would be as follows:

That is one way of solving any duplicate content issues without using 301 redirects via .htaccess. However, I believe there is a way to do this via .asp but you would have to search around for this. I did a quick search and found this page that might be of help.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Danny Sullivan's epic rant about link building.

Priceless!

Hi Andrew!

Creating a scholarship is a great way of getting links from sites with a high domain authority. Whether Google gives more weight to .edu (or .gov) links is open to debate but generally speaking .edu sites tend to have a lot of authority due to the large amount of natural links that they attract (although this is not always the case).

One thing to be aware of, Google does not look at page authority (PA) or domain authority (DA) specifically as these are Moz metrics. However, they will give a good indication to the overall authority of a site as these metrics are closely related to PageRank, which is a Google metric.

It is not uncommon for internal pages on a site to have much lower authority metrics than the overall domain. This is not a bad thing and you shouldn't be worried about gaining links on pages that have a lower PA than the overall DA. It may be that these pages are newer and will therefore have less links than the home page resulting in a lower PA. So to answer your question of whether these links are worth it? I would say yes, for sure.

I hope that helps.

Hi Shawn,

1. Yes it is good practice to list all urls.

2. As long as these urls are linked to internally then they will be indexed.

3. You only need to submit the index file not every individual sitemap. It doesn't matter which order the individual sitemaps are listed.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=71453&from=35655&rd=1

Hope this helps.

Generally it is considered best practice to separate words using a hyphen (-) rather than an underscore (_) as Google recognises hyphens as spaces. It also looks much neater using hyphens in urls as opposed to underscores which is why I advise using hyphens instead.

However, it doesn't really make a huge difference as Google can generally recognise the keywords without the use of hyphens. There are of course exceptions to this. The most famous example of this being www.expertsexchange.com. I'm sure you can see the issues with this domain.

Hope this helps.

Hi David,

At the end of the day a domain is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Sedo.com is a domain broker and it is in their best interest to get the most they can for a domain hence prices are slightly inflated on that site.

Just because your domain is only 4 letters doesn't mean it is worth big money. Several 4 letter domains sell on Go Daddy auctions for only a few hundred dollars. Although the domain is aged, which will help to increase its value, it doesn't really have much commercial value behind it and so is not really worth that much. Also, having checked opensiteexplorer the domain doesn't have a lot of authority or links pointing to it so to be fair it isn't worth the several thousands you are asking for it.

Adam.

I completely agree with Ben.

You can find a lot of useful info on the Warrior forums and there are some really good SEO's on there but you often have to wade through a lot of misleading information to get to the real pearls of wisdom. I probably wouldn't pay for acces to it either.

You should read this really interesting post about EMDs by Dr. Pete:

Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline?

In your case I would just stick to a .com domain with your business name rather than a keyword rich domain. Also if you are competing in the SEO industry and you do not already rank well for your key terms, then you will find it hard to rank regardless. SEO terms are highly competitive and there are several sites offering this service that will have invested heavily in their own SEO, making it very difficult to compete.

In terms of your other question, it is generally best practice to separate words in a URL with a hyphen (-) rather than underscore (_).

Hope this helps,

Adam.

There are certainly quite a few issues with the SEO of your site and many areas where you could look to improve.

Firstly, you mention that your site has been penalized. Why do you think your site has been penalized? I am not suggesting that your site has or has not been penalized but many people's first reaction is that their site has been penalized when in fact they have just suffered a drop in rankings. Having looked at your site, there are some issues that might have caused a penalty but I couldn't say for sure without more info.

So, have you been tracking your rankings within the PRO Dashboard? Have you noticed considerable drops in rankings for your main keywords? If so then this could indicate a penalty.

Have you setup Google Webmaster Tools? If so then have you received any messages from Google regarding a penalty or other issues? This will give you a clearer picture as to whether you have been penalized and why.

Having looked at your backlink profile, I can see several issues that could potentially have caused some problems. Firstly, your anchors have been massively over optimized with commercial terms. This was a massive factor in the recent Penguin update which Ryan has kindly given you a link to. You also seem to have a lot of spammy links from fairly obvious link farms which could also be causing you problems.

Finally, your on-page optimization could be significantly improved, I won't list all the issues here.

Anyway, I hope that's given you a few ideas to get started on.

Adam.

The answers you've been given are completely right and offer the right advice for your future guest posting.

However, in terms of your current situation and the blog posts you have already acquired. There are a few things you can do to promote those in order to gain more shares/likes/+1s.

First, you should make use of the advertising options with both Twitter and Facebook. You will find that paying for a promoted post/tweet could gain more exposure and certainly more targeted exposure than just posting to your own followers.

Also, you will need to think about the time of day/week you are promoting the posts on social media. For example, on Twitter, your followers may well be more active on the weekend after dinner time. If you are promoting your posts on a Monday morning, it may be unlikely to reach a captive audience.

You could also use blog comments from related blog posts to direct readers to your article. Obviously I'm not talking about spamming blogs with links to the post, but more trying to encourage readers of more established blogs to perhaps check out your article that may be of interest.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Hi Roel,

Personally, I wouldn't bother with this kind of strategy. First you have to purchase the domain, then pay for hosting the domain and all for what? Some extra link juice?

People get too obsessed with gaining link juice to increase their own PR and they forget the main purpose to creating links. Not only will the links (if they are good quality) help you in the SERPs, they can also direct valuable traffic to your site that could potentially create sales or conversions. How valuable is a link from an unrelated typo to your business really worth?

There is also the possibility that the typo link won't last long. Either the webmaster realises the error and fixes or removes the link, or the webmaster of the non-typo site notices the typo and asks for it to be changed. You are then left with a useless domain.

My advice, just focus on building good quality links.

Adam.