Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
I'm not above re-visiting an old blog post, but like PeterM22 said, make your comment useful and relevant. Sure, you're kind of using the blog for a backlink, but in exchange you're giving them some content that will pull in a long-tail visitor one day. Or at least that's how I justify it in my head.
Strategies for dealing with external duplicate content are overviewed here.
A much bigger concern is duplicating your OWN content. I know it sounds kind of silly, but it is a very real issue, especially since Google's most recent update (Panda). Is there more than one URL for any page on your website? Does http://website.com direct to http://www.website.com? Do you have canonicalization problems related to pagination or something similar?
These issues are discussed in-depth here.
If you think that your issues may be related to on-site or site architecture factors, the best thing you can do is hire a qualified SEO consultant that can assess these issues and make actionable recommendations for correcting them.
Maximilian -
If Google has devalued some of your links, there's no way to "recover" these links. That's the bad news.
The good news is that this happens to websites every day, and it's not by any means a permanent penalization or anything of that sort. All it means is that the time and effort spent to build these links was squandered.
What can you do to speed up your recovery? Switch the way you think about link building. Directory submissions are useful, but they shouldn't by any means comprise the majority of your link building strategy.
I would suggest reading this article cover to cover. It will teach you the proper mindset you should have when approaching linkbuilding, and it will give you dozens and dozens of ideas to get started with building high quality links from relevant, authoritative domains.
Replace directory submissions with strategies like writing guest blog posts, creating amazing content (linkbait) and subsequently promoting it on social media and social bookmarking websites, and/or creating a widget that would be an invaluable addition to any website in your industry. All of these are covered under the "Content-Based Link Building Strategies" section of the SEOmoz Professional Guide to Linkbuilding that is linked to above.
Welcome to the forum, Benny. The answer to your question is that you can probably replace these links and have the value come back, and you may regain your rankings.
I have to caution that this still may only be a temporary patch. Link buying is a big no-no as far as Google is concerned, and their Webspam team is working every single day to find and bust websites that sell paid links. Even if these links are still working now, there's no guarantee that will be true in the future.
The REAL ANSWER to your question is that you shouldn't renew these paid links, or any paid links. Spend your time and money to build good, high quality links from relevant websites for free. You'll never have to renew these links and they'll stick around forever. Learn proper link building techniques and you'll never have to spend another dollar on a link and your rankings will be better than ever.
Sound promising? Get started here, with SEOmoz's Professional Guide to Link Building.
You know what's cooler than selling a million knives? Selling a BILLION knives.
Micah and EGOL are giving specific advice relating to choosing your domain name, but behind their advice is a much broader mindset: think big picture.
Why do you expect to get most of your traffic from generic search terms? Why not make it your goal to get most of your traffic from branded keywords?
Make Slycers a household name.
When you get into the link building phase, don't think about the link. Think about the brand. Think about the community you are reaching in building a link. Think about the exposure you are getting for your product.
When you're writing a press release, don't consider the links it might bring in. Consider whether or not this is really newsworthy content. Whether or not this could get picked up by national media. Whether or not your story is interesting enough to get the kind of exposure you're hoping for.
When you're creating content, don't think about optimizing it for Google or Bing. Write for your customers, for people looking for a better kitchen knife. Don't think about "keyword density" or "PR sculpting", think about engaging your audience and developing a website that visitors will find useful and entertaining.
When you're running your social media campaign, don't think about the traffic it could bring in. Think about engaging your audience and building a following. Think about turning influencers in your niche into brand advocates that are in love with Slycers and are telling everyone they know - not because you asked, but because they want to.
Do these things, have this mindset, and this whole SEO thing becomes dramatically simpler.
Trustworthy paid directories are a small part of a linkbuilding campaign, but I wouldn't necessarily discourage them. The more trusted ones, such as Yahoo, Business.com, Best of the Web, BBB OnLine, and JoeAnt, aren't bad links to have by any means. If you have the budget to make it happen, go for it. If not, don't fret - just keep building great quality links from authoritative domains, and you'll outrank your competitor eventually.
Also, definitely heed the advice of the other posters and make sure that your on-site SEO is up to par. That can certainly be what's holding you back.
There are tons of reasons why your website might see a drop in rankings for certain keywords. Here are a few:
Increased competition in your niche pushed your website down as new websites started to rank above you.
You have been building low quality links and they have been devalued by Google, causing you to lose hundreds (thousands?) of keyword-rich backlinks.
Your website has been affected by a Google algorithm update. For one reason or another (duplicate content? shallow or nonexistent content on some pages? too many ads / too big of a "footprint"?), your website is being seen as less trustworthy, and this has affected rankings sitewide. (Note, some rankings would be maintained, particularly for keywords with low competition.)
You were logged into your Google account when you saw these rankings, and your website was appearing higher than it typically does because of your personalized search data. When you logged out and checked your rankings, you noticed a "drop" in ranking that was not actually real. (Okay, this one is unlikely, but we've all seen it before.)
I wouldn't use spaces in my image names, just because they will get parsed out into "%20", and that will make the URL path longer and uglier.
Option B is the better one of the two. The most important thing to remember here is to just be descriptive. You're already on the right path.
Here are a few great articles on SEO for images. I think you might find them useful:
I think it depends on the niche and the level of competition. My intuition tells me that the smaller towns around Portland should be relatively easy to rank for (depending on exactly how competitive your industry is), so option 2 could be pulled off without much trouble. I think it makes the most sense from a user perspective. This might take some convincing, and a bit of client education, but it may be worth the effort.
I wouldn't blame you for trying to implement option 1, however, given the concerns of your client. You don't want to stretch your page too thin in terms of content and the number of keywords you're targeting, and you don't want to go over 65 characters with your Title tag, but if you can make it work, it's not a bad solution.
Option 3 doesn't seem to make a ton of sense from a user perspective. I think given your question, you've already come to that conclusion on your own.
EDIT: I defer to EGOL. When this man gives you advice, listen to it.
Are all of these versions of your homepage? They should be 301 redirected back to your main URL.
The middle example appears to be some kind of parameter string. It's hard to say what you should do without looking at the actual website, but this could be a case where the canonical URL tag could come in handy.
A good place to start is SEOmoz's primer on duplicate content. It walks you through all of the potential types of problems and their solutions.
OSE has a tough job - they have to crawl every corner of the web, index it, and make the results available to thousands of users a day. It's natural that some links get left out, particularly if they are located very deep on a domain with thousands of links (directories, for example). You may be able to get these links noticed by building links to these links.
A better idea, however, is to just build higher quality links. Focus on obtaining links from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche. It's better to build one great link every day than a thousand mediocre ones.
That's quite good. The test is certainly no joke. I'd say they are already way better off than 90% of the "professional SEOs" in this business if they understand the fundamentals that SEOmoz stresses in that test.
SEOmoz's test is by far the best available, so you're already off to a good start. You may want to look into the Google Analytics/AdWords certification tests. I know they're not exactly related to SEO, but I'd sure want anybody doing SEO for me to know their way around Google Analytics.
There are also a few good lists of SEO interview questions that you may find helpful:
Hypothetical situation:
You write a guest blog post for a popular blog about your niche topic. The post is a hit and sends you visitors, leads, and social media followers.
Would you consider running a linkbuilding campaign to the blog post in order to help it rank better for its target keyword(s), given that the post has proven to convert successfully, despite the fact that the post is on a domain other than your own?
I know this probably isn't what you're looking for by any means, but I think it's going to be hard to really promote the contest given how small the cash prize is. It's just not exciting enough to really generate any sort of buzz, and certainly no press whatsoever. If you had a few thousand dollars in your budget and thought up some unique prizes for the top 3 winners, it would be much more marketable.
But I understand, budget is always an issue. I would try tweeting bloggers and influencers in your niche or in related industries asking if they can RT the details. Now is the time to call in any favors you have from personal connections or people you know in the industry.
You might try reaching out to niche amateur filmmaking communities, although I suspect you would have much better luck with a bigger prize. Though that's not really the audience you want to reach with this contest, it could help get you some better quality submissions, for content's sake.
Time to put that legal knowledge to work! Glad I could help - let me know if you have any more questions.
I want to say that I 100% agree with Ryan, but I will play devil's advocate.
There is a time and place for everything, including black hat SEO. If your goals are well-aligned with short term success, then black hat SEO is probably the cheapest and most effective option you have. To me, link building isn't an ethical consideration, but a business decision. If black hat tactics fit my goals, or my clients' goals, and everybody is aware of the risk involved and all of the options at play, then why not?
There's no doubt about it - these are paid links, and as Ryan said, they will eventually be addressed by Google's Webspam team, and when that happens, you're going to lose a large share of your link portfolio (at best) or receive a penalty (at worst). But there is no Matt Cutts fairy that haunts black hatters at night, preying on them as they dream of paid links and content farms. It's economics, plain and simple. I don't know what industry you are in or what your exact situation is, so it would be presumptuous of me to completely rule out black hat SEO strategies.
That said, I've yet to encounter a situation where I've needed to resort to black hat tactics, for personal projects or client work. Just sayin...
As far as both duplicate content issues and dynamic parameters, you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag instead of the noindex tag.