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Hi Sam,

What day did your rankings drop (this will help determine which update hit your site)?

Here are some possible issues that could be hurting you with Panda or Penguin:

• You appear to have a link exchange directory for doing link exchanges: http://www.dfwgolfcourseguide.com/links.html Suggest removing the links directory and don't do link exchanges (it's OK to do a few with a couple high quality, relevant sites).
• The course pages don't have much unique content,and the content they do have is also on other sites: http://www.golftexas.com/golf-courses/north-central/burleson/southern-oaks-golf-club.htm Suggest adding unique content to each course page.
• You may be using too many keyword anchor texts. A natural link profile typically has more brand and url anchor texts than keyword. See http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.dfwgolfcourseguide.com and https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/anchor-text?folder=&q=dfwgolfcourseguide.com&oq=dfwgolfcourseguide.com and http://www.searchenginejournal.com/anchor-text-optimization-case-study-whats-natural/43404/ and http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/46936/
• Your links appear to be mainly from blog comments, directories, and link pages, which tend to be low quality links.

Oh, OK. Well, there is some risk there. As William mentioned, you could possibly be penalized for what probably looks like manipulative linking to Google.

Do these links use keywords or your brand name as anchor text? If the former, the risk is even higher.

If the sites are unrelated (topic-wise) to your site, that also increases the risk.

Between profile links and article marketing, it sounds like you'll be building a pretty low quality link profile - one that could be susceptible to penalty.

If your client has a very limited budget, I'd suggest that they write and provide you quality content that you can use to gain some higher quality backlinks (i.e. guest blogs, etc.).

Perhaps they could also get links from partners, vendors, etc.

I'm not saying you shouldn'tpick up a few links from user profiles on established sites, but I would keep that a small portion of your link building efforts.

Moz Authority metrics are based not on the total number of links, but the authority each link passes. A page with links from 5 high authority pages will generally have much higher authority metrics than a page with links from 5 low authority pages.

Will the 3rd case necessarily have a higher MozAuthority than #1 and #2?

Probably, but not necessarily:

• It's possible to get links from low authority pages on high authority domains, which would only pass a small amount of authority.
• A page with a lot of links will pass less authority to each link.

My answer uses some generalizations, here are more details on the specific metrics:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

Oh, so each of the 80 sites includes a link to a different relevant, quality site? That should be fine!

We have some clients that would fit into this category. I can't share the URLs due to non-disclosure setups, but I can share the basic strategy we use.

Basic strategy is to brainstorm interesting topics that are at least tangentially related to the topic at hand.

For "elevator doors in chicago" we could use topics like:

• Top 10 Most Epic Movie Scenes That Take Place In An Elevator
• 10 Smartphone Apps To Make Your Visit To Chicago A Breeze
• 7 Videos Of Elevator Pranks, Bloopers, & Accidents
• http://www.prettycoolthings.com/2008/03/27/the-worlds-coolest-elevator-rides/

Hi Felix,

Having more than 100 links on a page is usually not a problem, as long as you're not doing anything shady (it doesn't sound like you are). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0

Keep in mind that PageRank flows by being divided among each link on the page - so having more links means less PageRank flows to each one.

If you can provide one of the URLs, I can provide more detailed input.

~Adam

I wouldn't necessarily worry about it, unless you have other reasons to believe something has gone wrong. SEOmoz's index fluctuates from month to month, so it's possible that a few of your good links didn't get indexed in the most recent index.

FYI, a link from http://chime.in/ doesn't count as a PR8 link, unless you got a link on the homepage, which is PR8. You have to count the pagerank of the actual page that has your link. Also, I think the links in Chime are nofollow, so they don't count at all.

Social bookmarks, directory listings and forum posts from an outsourcer are probably not good links. Good links are links you get editorially - guest blogs, linkbait, content marketing, high quality directories, etc. Good links are a lot harder to get than posting a bookmark or submitting to a directory. Don't get discouraged, though - there are a lot of good resources that can help you.

Here are a few resources that come to mind:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/the-content-marketers-guide-to-web-content/

http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/

http://myblogguest.com/forum/about_guest_post.php

Love the fresh data sources SEOmoz is building for us. However, I'm frustrated by the lack of scale the tools offer.

Let's say I have 30 competitors I want to watch (which is pretty conservative - if we're targeting 100 keywords on a site, we could easily have 100's of top 20 ranked competitors). If I have to run individual reports for each using OSE and Fresh Web Explorer, that would be hours of work every day/week.

Ideally, I'd like to see a campaign feature where you could add 2-200 competitors to view in one report. You could view recent links (from FWE and JDL) for all competitors on one handy report, and sort by various metrics. So for example, if you wanted to view the top 10 links your competitors have gotten in the past week, you could see that in 30 seconds of work, vs many hours of work.

Any others who think this would be useful?

Any ideas for how we can use the data in such a way without this feature?

Hi Kat,

You may have been hit in the Penguin update on Oct 5th.

1. Your site is definitely way "over-optimized" or keyword stuffed. The keyword "Modelling" appears 77 times on your homepage, plus 4 times in the page title. Your internal links structure is also keyword stuffed.

2. Having the page content under the huge big call to action and form on top of the site is not good for users or search engine rankings.

3. A quick check of your backlinks shows they are mostly keyword anchor text links from directories and other lower quality sources.

To be honest, it looks to me like you're headed in the wrong direction SEO-wise and have likely been hit by one or more algorithmic penalties.

Sorry to be so negative.

Hope this helps!

~Adam

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Be picky and find the higher quality blogs on MBG.

2. Get on Google and find the high quality blogs in your niche. Contact them and negotiate getting them to publish your guest posts.

3. Get in Google and do searches for things like "guest post [keyword]" to find good sites that accept guest blogs.

Ben, I would go ahead and change your setup. Having a large amount of duplicate content (that isn't really relevant) across your site certainly isn't going to help, and it could hurt you. I would link to a static page as you mentioned.

It could just be due to fluctuations in the size of the SEOmoz index and which of your links they indexed this month.

OK, so you don't want your linkbait page to displace your sales pages in the rankings.

Personally, I would just try to adjust the optimization of the linkbait page so it ranks for keywords other than my primary money keywords. But I suppose noindex,follow would work as well.

Or better yet, like chocolate ice cream and hot fudge sauce. Mmmm.

3 weeks of downtime or DNS issues is an incredibly long time and is absolutely unacceptable for any webhost. I would say definitely move hosts. No matter what it takes, make it happen.

I would expect there will be little or no long term effect on the site's rankings, but I'm not 100% sure (I've never worked with a site that had severe uptime issues for more than a couple days).

My suggestions:

• 7 social bookmarks. Not a good way to build links.- 30 Website directory submissions. You should only submit to a few high quality relevant directories. - 4 guest blog posts. Good, if on high quality sites. - 3 press releases. Not a good way to build links, should be done to help gain press coverage. - 8 blog posts (on 2 dedicated wordpress blogs). Good, if the content is really high quality and is being shared and linked to. - 4 articles published in high ranking article directories. Not good. - 3 social profile with links/blog comments on .edu/.gov with links/classified ad links. Not good. - 1 slideshare presentation with links. Good, if it's getting shared and linked to.

In my experience, the best hosting companies aren't the best design firms and vice-versa. I would tend to choose one company for design and another for hosting.

It's OK for a page to specify itself as the canonical URL.