Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Very generic question. it depends the niche, thje product you offer, what the market needs really.

From personal experience I have done all Link Research Tool webinars. The reward is that you become an associate, you learn tools you need to use for various link cases (from penalties to negative seo, to increase your rankings) and you become better at your job. I didnt even receive an email, i searched and registered on my own.

Their marketing was to release penalty case studies and promote them on Facebook and all the rewards mentioned above. It worked for me and they;ve made money from the agency i work for.

Try and adopt I suppose.

very well said...even in the micro niche area now affiliate marketers say "BUILD CONTENT" and treat your money site like a business. Industry is changing, google ban web sites with lots of amazon affilaite links etc. Content is king, period.

btw i assume he is not an affiliate marketer either. i have no idea if thats the case. I just put on my newbie glasses on and remember back in 2000 how I was trying to find a good software to rank me high after my onpage SEO was done lol

it is one of the many signal factors Google uses in order to decide if the site deserves a high rank or not. Definitely not the deciding factor. There are hundres of reasons you might not rank better than them apart the url keyword I mentioned above but I see this happening too often lately and when i read your question i thought to mention it so you know you are not alone out there

In regards to your second question the answer is yes, using the keyword to you url structure can only have a positive impact for various reasons as stated here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url

Hope this helps!

The idea in engaging with people in forums is to drive traffic, become a source of information and eventually achieve sales. been there done it.

Do not focus solely on link building, SEO now is more of a complete digital marketing package than link building.

Unfortunately I do not remember the source I saw this but I am 99,9% sure that signature links might be penalised by Google so i wouldnt go with that direction (should you insist in pure link building ofcourse).

hi Scott,

Is it possible to grab a screenshot of that note? Is it from Google? Or some other SEO agency/advertiser you got that message?

Hello,

i hate to sound pessimistic but I want to save you time. Buy a Wordpress template or so a bespoke design and move away from Joomla.

I had the exact same problem, 10-15 links a day exactly like yours. I did everything in my powers to fix it. Bough the plug in the community recommended, did redirects, I just ended up with hundreds of links every montH.

If someone else has a solution go for it but again your best bet is to move away Joomlart

Use http://www.plagspotter.com/ I am sure you will find it useful.

Make sure you select search for multiple pages and not just your main domain. You can also use the sitemap.xml link to make sure it track everything.

Hope this is helpful

Hello, I agree with Lesley here. Google stated recently that: “Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices.“

take a minute from your time and read this article, am sure you will find it useful http://www.atladasmedia.co.uk/blog/why-google-loves-responsive-design/

Thanks Thomas,

This was very helpful. I would love to see a few more comments making a solid case for Genesis framework over the traditional way of themes.

Dan.

Hello,

Do not fall to the trap of reporting your competitor, spend your time in being productive by focusing on your online brand building instead, find out what are people's concerns when looking for activation codes and create beautiful content that will make you differentiate in the market. Thats how you should be spending your time. Black hat SEO refers to money making sites. Its how much you spend VS how much you make till you get caught as most people said above. This is why most of the high PR links they have are rented and not permanent and they pay $100-$200 for them to be there. He can rank temporarily (yes temporarily, he will get hammered soon - SAPE links were finished last week and took all the web sites with them) but he will be gone/sandboxerd sooner or later while you will always be there. Sustaining your ranks and reputation will benefit your business much more than a rank one on google and if your boss cant see that, maybe he should join a quick marketing course

I recently had to deal with an identical case but I would never be able to tell you for sure unless I have a look at your google webamsters and google analytics data. Go and have a look at your site impressions, visits per and avg.position drops. Make sure that you have comparison on so you can see how your pages and keywords respond to last months.

Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much (have seen web sites with more not being penalised so this is not a rule) and it would be good to keep it a bit lower around 5-6%. That goes for your contextual anchor text links which in your case seems to be 80-90% of your profile.

All these ofcourse are guesses and speculation based on my experience, only your data will tell what happens but what Jonathan suggests above wont harm you, quiet the contrary it will improve your link profile.

It's been a VERY long time since I did a web site on Drupal but I  will give this a go. To start with can you please list me the modules you use on your web site? Most importantly do you use "Pathauto"? If yes I think there might be a conflict with your URL aliases. Let me know. Also is this Drupal 6 or 7?

I agree with Federico if we are dealing with a "manual penalty" case which seems to be the case since he is mentioning reconsideration requests. You have to remember that there is not a one size fits all solution for penalised domains, each client is a unique case that needs a unique action from your part.

For example:

1. Is the cost of your extra hours of work and the time he is going to lose in order to revoke the penalty less thanbuying a domain, uploading the site and rank it again.
   2) Is the domain a branded domain? If so you need to try and clean it, if not maybe worth changing it?
2. Does the client have referral web sites driving good quality traffic to the site? This is extremely important. For example one of my clients who got penalised (manual penalty) was getting 6000 visits a month from a referal web site Google pointed out as against their "quality guidelines". Needless to say I did not disavow the site and carried on cleaning the rest of the domain. Few months later the penalty timed out and client got back all his rankings and traffic, also impressions got increased on google webmaster tools.

Up to date everything seems fine.

Hi Christopher,

I think the answer is pretty obvious,the rule applies to anchor texts of specific keyphrases that are non branded. Google allows a higher threshold of brand name anchor texts because that's how people would naturally link to you. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice (way before Penguin release).

In the case of our friend here we have an EMD and 80-90% of his overal link profile with exact and contextual anchor text links. Also the exact key phrase he down-ranked is around 10% of the profile. I am pretty sure that there is not a rule set in stone with % for NON-branded keyphrases but **from my experience (thus not necessarily a  rule) **in the sector I work at when I had to deal with penalised sites this was one of the common features I dealt with.

Again, the answers are within his data!

Regards

Again check this with your developers as its been a while but I think it has to do with your setting on Pathauto (I cant log in to be 100% sure of what you've selected there). Did you install Pathauto after you manualy changed the url? or were both generated via pathauto? Also both pages have canonical urls set on those 2 different urls. Is this intended?

Sorry for blasting you with questions but as I cant see your dashbaord I am trying to get a clear picture

Hi Rove and thanks for the additional info,

Fact you got manual penalty changes the ball game and it depends how deep they will go to your profile. I have a bad experience with manual penalties where google even pointed it out branded anchor texts from PR4 web sites simply because they didnt want the link there. It took 4 reconsideration requests to eventually lift the ban. In that case I would remove those link, or submit without those links included and have the file ready for re-submission 10 days later or so.

The fact that you went through the asking/removal root SHOULD be rewarded as they would like to see the effort. Make sure you document everything and state that in your reconsideration request document (mines are roughly 2 full pages) and that you list them properly to your google doc exccel sheet.

I will be more than happy to quickly check your profile. Just bear in mind that majestic seo doesnt download all the links so I might miss something. The best tool to get your links downloaded is Webmaster tools which I will also be more than happy to review if you want. Send me a PM whenever you want with your domain.

Hi Luke,

I have used footer links a lot and I have never ever experienced a penalty. However there are a couple of things you need to be aware which might resulted in your ranking drops / re-recover.

1) footer links are bad for SEO when linking to other sites or when other sites link to you. There is no harm if you link to your internal pages/landing pages and besides search engines tend to ignore footer links 
2) Your main page is the page with most domain authority. The more footer links you add the more link juice you pass to those pages. If you added too many you might  over-dilute the home page link juice meaning an overall drop in rankings.
3) You have to remember that only the first link on the page to a specific URL is counted. So if for example you have on the main menu or content a link to product X as "product X" anchor and then you have on the footer a link "best product X 2013" with both links to the same product x page then google will ignore completely the latter as it's worthless.

In your case it is possible that you had many footers and passed all the juice to lets say 10 pages meaning no juice thus downrank vs pages with higher authority.

Just a guess, hope it helps!

Sorry for the late response, got hooked up with work

Try the 3rd option please which you delete old alias once you create a new one. Select the desirable URL as the new one and save.

Let me know if that solves the problem.

ps. If the old url is indexed and ranked you might want to set a 301 redirect just in case

Very constructive reply, I am sure you made him wiser for coming over our Q&A.

I will give it a go though:

There isnt a ratio which can be classified as standard SEO practise. All this is theory.

It makes sense that a company which run an active blog with loads of content, will NOT have an 100% homepage ratio cause that way you exclude your deep content from the link value and you wouldnt want to do that.

Assuming this is a ranking factor or a signal for identifying legit link profiles you would be looking for something natural such as 60-40 or so but that would depend on the domains that link to you.

For example I would expect web2.0 such as blogger and wordpress or article sites to link more often your articles than your home page while a donour page or a sponsored seminar page etc to link your main page than an article. I would expect the same in blog comments. Naked URLS of your articles.

See how many things come to acquisition?

Just to everything naturally and you will be ok. What I like to do is get high PR 5+ links for my articles and then pass link juice to my money pages via internal linking.

Thats not necessary an industry practise., Just what works for me and the niche I am into

Hello Andy,

To my experience if the amount is low there is no harm in paying them to remove the links, in the end of the day they will do some admin work and noone wants to work for free (plus they didnt put your links there - you or your SEO guy did). Google wants to see that you are doing effort in getting rid of all the spammy links and they expect that some people would ask money. make sure you include this to your reconsideration request document, at least I did.

A quick advise. Make sure you remove EVERYTHING that is spammy. That includes even one single article you spinned. Once you submit the reconsideration request they will dig in to see if you have any further faults.

A client contacted me recently and I removed roughly 80% of his link profile before submitting a reconsideration request. Google came back and pointed out an article from a spin blog which is not your regular wordpress spam crap rather a very high reputable authoritative site. While other people hosting articles do not have a "link warning" or "manual penalty" Google still says it should be removed.

Best of luck!