Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

Hi Alan,

From the sounds of it, I believe you are missing the crucial element of adding the reference before the -site: operator.

For example I want to search for all references of [seomoz] minus results from the actual site (seomoz.org). Therefore, my search would look something like this:

seomoz -site:seomoz.org

Hope that helps.

Hi Pete,

Personally, I always try to encourage site owners to incorporate their blogs on their domains rather than create a new domain. This way your blog will benefit from the domain authority of your existing site and your existing site will benefit from the (hopefully) fresh, updated content of your blog.

Hope this helps.

Adam.

You need to go to the 'Research Tools' tab, then click on 'Crawl Test'. Simply enter the url of your competitor then you should receive an email within a few days containing a CSV file which should contain all the info you need. You can run 2 crawls a day.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

You absolutely should not make the links nofollow. Google does not mention making the links no follow and as far as I know, I don't think the guys at SEOmoz would recommend you to make the links nofollow. This is because you would miss out on link juice to these inner pages by making the links nofollow.

Here is a link which will provide you more information about using rel="next" rel="prev"

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Hope this helps,

Adam.

I believe

allinurl:fit OR fitness OR crossfit OR health OR strength OR shape OR workout OR muscle OR sixpack OR bodybuilding

should work.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Many have their own views on whether exact match (or similarly broad match) domains are still worth getting.

Personally, I would always advise to go for brand domains and work on building your brand. This is because Google is attaching much less importance to exact match domains, although some may argue this point with evidence to the contrary. The recent Penguin update also had an effect by hitting sites with over-optimised link building practices due to over use of keyword anchors.

Ultimately if your company is called 'GreatestCompanyInTheWorld' then you should get www.greatestcompanyintheworld.com rather than www.broadmatchkeyword.com

Yes if I were in your position I would contact all the sites that you created reciprocal links with and have them remove your link from their sites. It is not enough to just remove their links from your site. Once you have done this you can then concentrate on gaining good quality links to replace the links you've had removed.

Finally, you can prepare you reconsideration request to Google. Check this link for tips from Google on how to prepare your request:

Tips on requesting reconsideration

Adam

Hi Nikolaj,

Having crawled your site there are no major issues I can see.

If you're targeting for your local city which I assume is Odense, you need to include it more on your homepage. I could only find 3 instances of the word Odense on your homepage which is probably not enough.

I did a backlink check and there appears to be no links to your site. Of course there may be some links which aren't showing up in the tools I'm using but this is an indication that you have nowhere near enough links.

I'm not sure if you already have done it, but you could benefit from listing your business in Google places.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

To be fair, your programmer probably doesn't have a huge understanding about SEO and has probably just misunderstood something he has read somewhere.

Yes h1 tags can be over optimized and can have an effect but the simple answer is, don't over optimize the h1 tags. Just because some people abuse them isn't a good reason to exclude them. In fact, I would actively encourage you not to exclude them as they are an important part of your on-page SEO strategy.

Hi Nathan,

Personally I think it is good practice to use canonical tags for all pages (even those without duplicates).

Although you may not have duplicates of these pages on your site, other sites may try to scrape the content of your site including its pages. As you have the canonical tag on these pages, any content scraper will also add the canonical tag that points to the page on your site. Therefore it is a good idea to have the canonical tag as a preventative measure also.

Hope that helps,

Adam.