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Hi Avi,
I have also used youtube videos on sites without using the scheme.org video markup and they have been showing up in serps as well. There's an interesting article, where this was tested by an SEO who also concluded that you don't need the scheme.org markup for Youtube videos:
http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/
Considering Google owns Youtube, I guess it's no surprise!
Adam.
I agree, starting from scratch would be a quicker and easier option. However, by doing this the authority and value that has been built up on the domain will be lost. Ultimately I think it would be better in the long run to clean up the current site.
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.
You can use a simple browser extension that highlights no follow links.
Chrome: No Follow Simple
Firefox: NoDoFollow
Hope that helps.
Hi Ilya,
Are you sure you haven't disabled your public profile by accident? I ask because even when I search linkedin ilya elbert, I don't see your linkedin profile. - Ignore that, just checked again without personalized search and I can see your profile on the bottom of the page.
I can't say that I've ever heard of anyone having their linkedin profile penalized in google search before. Sounds a bit strange to me.
Adam.
With regard to your anchor text, the text that is hyperlinked as you put it, you should be using mainly brand terms as opposed to commercial terms. In other words 'http://www.companyname.com' or just 'companyname'.
As for blog commenting, it can still be a useful way to get some links as long as you comment on relevant, highly regarded blogs that don't just allow anyone to post. Meaning that you will need to create a relevant and interesting post that the blog owner will approve. Another thing you should consider is whether the blog tags all links as nofollow. If the link is nofollow then you will not receive any link juice.
Finally, if you are creating a link to a page on your site then it should be relevant to the comment you are making otherwise the blog owner may just reject your comment as spam.
Adam.
A crawl of a website will do this such as the crawl test tool from SEOmoz. This will crawl up to 3,000 pages and can be found under the research tools tab.
Alternatively you could use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider which will crawl 500 urls for free or for £99 a year, the 500 url limit is removed.
Both crawl reports will give you detailed info about redirects.
Adam.
You are correct that link juice will pass through your site as long as your site architecture is correctly setup. However, you can not rely completely on this alone. What you have been doing with social media is good and will help but think about trying to get your tweets retweeted by others, and your facebook posts shared by others. This will also help.
More importantly, you should be creating good quality articles that attract links from others. If your articles contain really interesting content and you have enough exposure through social media, then you should naturally attract links.
Adam.
I'm massively in favour of keeping these domains rather than using a 301 redirect. Although you can gain some short term benefits from the link juice passed on with a 301 redirect, you are much better off in the long term by keeping the domain and creating links to your site from the domain. Here's why:
If you 301 redirect the domain, no new content will be created on that domain and in all likelihood, no new links will be created for that domain and you may even lose links. Whereas if you keep the domain, you can continue to build new content that attract more links.
If the domain is in the same industry and has good rankings in search engines then why not capitalise on that opportunity? Now you can have two sites that rank well generating more sales/conversions for your single business.
That's my thoughts,
Adam.
It's hard to give a definitive answer to what is a 'really great' bounce rate. I find that bounce rates can vary greatly between industries, website types (blogs, e-commerce etc.) and even between pages.
Brian Clifton gives an indication of bounce rate levels in his book by use of a traffic light system. Less than 25% is considered green (good), 25-50% is amber (average) and above 50% is red (not good). I generally go by this rough guideline. So I guess really great could be considered less than 15% perhaps?
Hope this helps,
Adam.
Have you performed a crawl test? That might give you a clearer idea of what's going on.
'Would you say then that a link with 'Keywords' as the anchor pointing at http://www.keywords.com would be considered a brand signal?'
Not unless the brand/company name is 'Keywords' also. Even then I would be tempted to use any identifying business extension such as Inc, Ltd etc. So as an example,
Business is called 'Electric Fan Services' website is 'http://www.electricfanservices.com' and main keyword phrase is 'electric fan services' I would make sure the majority of anchors are either 'Electric Fan Services' or 'http://www.electricfanservices.com'. If the business was actually 'Electric Fan Services Ltd.' I would probably adjust the anchor text term accordingly.
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.
Let's say your brand is 'Ziggle' and your website is http://www.keywords.com then you could simply use 'Ziggle' or 'Ziggle Inc.' or 'http://www.keywords.com' or 'www.keywords.com' as your brand anchors.
Your website, even though it has keywords in it, is still regarded as a brand signal albeit not as strong a signal as just 'Ziggle'. Of course if you just used the commercial keywords as your anchor without the web address, then this is not good.
Ultimately, the point of the Penguin update is over-optimization, that is a very unnatural looking link profile. Therefore you have to ask what anchors to your site would look natural? It is of course absolutely natural to have anchors that contain your entire web address (http://www.keywords.com) even though it has keywords in the domain. Again, it does not look natural when anchors have been over-optimized with keyword rich commercial terms.
Personally, I try to avoid using exact match domains wherever possible.
Hope this helps.
Adam.
It would be very hard for anyone, other than those in the know at Google, to assign a value to this.
On the face of it, you would have to say that the .edu link would be more valuable considering what we know about Google assigning more value and trust to .edu sites but that's not to say all .edu links are way more valuable than a .com.
First, check both the .com and .edu in open site explorer to gain an indication of authority from SEOmoz's domain authority metric. You then have to assign your own value to the link in terms of relevance. Is the .com link more relevant to your site? If so, then it may actually be more valuable to you than the .edu link.
As far as I can tell, there does seem to be a few issues.
First, I'm not quite sure why you are specifying canonical urls. They are used to specify a preferred version of a set of similar pages. The pages you have put canonical links on do not have similar pages.
Second, your implementation of the canonical link is incorrect. You should put the link in the section of the non-canonical versions of the page. However, seeing as you do not seem to have similar pages, you should not be including the canonical link anyway.
Hope this helps.
I agree with Ben on this one. This particular link is of little value.
You should also be careful with your anchors. They seem to be over optimized with commercial terms and I will refer you to the recent Penguin update as to why this is a bad thing.