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I have made a content placeholder for a keyword that will  gain significant search volume in the future.

Until then I am trying to optimize the page to rank when the game launches and the keyword gains volume.

http://hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/

Is there anything I can do to improve the optimization for the phrase 'a link between worlds walkthrough'

A lot of my competitors are already setting up similar placeholder pages and doing the same thing. I have 2 fairly large gaming sites that will place a banner for my walkthrough on their site. I did not pay for the links. I do free writing/ other services in exchange for this.

I have been sharing the link socially. It has almost 200 likes and a handful of shares, tweets, g+ votes

I would say to use Google's disavow tool for a large portion of your backlinks.

For instance you have 42 links with the anchor text "<a class="clickable title link-pivot expanded" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="exhaust systems investigation" data-id="41149175134">exhaust systems investigation"</a>

What does that even mean in regards to your site? And they are all on spammy irrelevant pages.

Good luck cleaning things up

Delete the meta keywords for starters. Your page title is a bit long so try to shorten it if you can. You also have too many H1 tags on your page.

But the biggest thing is your spammy link profile. You have some really poor quality links going to your page

I find it interesting still, that they do not even remotely rank for some of this. Several of these keywords are not that competitive and they do not show up anywhere in the top 5-10 pages.

They have been doing some better link building lately in terms of guest blogging but still getting nothing that they actually target

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com

They get good grades from the on-page tool. The links are not amazing, but are not super spammy.

Yet it ranks for nothing they target

Any reason why?

I just changed the domains on one of my largest and oldest sites for branding reasons. I have the 301 set to keep the page structures and all.

My question is will the "likes" and shares and etc be kept via the 301 or will they have to be reacquired?

And that will redirect

domain.com/page1/ to domain2.com/page1/

and domain.com/morefolder/evenmore/ to domain2.com/morefolder/evenmore/

and do this for every page across the site?

Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions?

I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually

My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.

Easy fix, remove the meta keywords tag. Figured I would throw that in there for you. I would give it a bit more time. 3 months is not enough to tell anything.

Your on-page is not horrible, but there is certainly room for improvement. Have you ran any of the pages in Moz's on page term grader tool? If not I would suggest doing so.

Try building links to your inner pages and not just your homepage. I think that would do wonders. Also try increasing your social interactions

Footer links like that can end up hurting you. I have a web design and client site like you, but I do not put my link on all client sites. Nor do I use anchor text heavy links. Try building out some more links through guest blogging or promotional opportunities. This can help to balance out your link profile to seem less spammy

I do not think you would get much benefit from this. Your link profile would probably get all kinds of messy. And what if a bunch of poor quality sites start using that plugin and you end up having links on malicious, porn, poker, or other bad sites?

Plugin links and template footer links should be avoided now in my opinion

If you are wanting those pages to rank and not seem keyword stuffed then I would not have it listed again and again with the same keyword. Is there another way for you to edit the template or something to add the keyword and content in a more standard way?

I would fix those. Here is a good guide

http://www.ilmigo.com/fix-hfeed-warning-field-set-hatomentry.html

Fixing it will make sure Google is getting all of the data about your site that it needs which can help you

On top of what Blake said, after updating your page with some fresh content, you should do another push throughout social sites and whatnot. Refresh the page and get some new backlinks and shares. That will help out a lot.

It would probably be duplicate content. The page would be useful for people who stumble upon your site, but why would Google want to rank that page over the actual sources themselves? So your best bet is to add plenty of your own content to that page, or rank the rest of your site and link to this useful resource (not expecting it to rank on its own).

I would be willing to bet that they just not have their poor backlinks penalized or removed from ranking them. Give it time and keep doing things the right way

Thanks

On a quick look, they obviously have more links and a higher PA and DA. But as you pointed out a lot of their links are low quality. If Google has not disallowed those links, I am sure it will happen at some point and it will no longer help them rank.

Your on-page is much better but I would remove the keyword a few times. You have it on-page way too much. Neither of you are doing a lot with social stuff.

I bet if you were to do some legit backlinking and social marketing you would outrank them quickly

Well it is in their page title and within their site internal links a little. Also in meta keywords which is odd that they still use that.

What is your client's url?

We have not gotten any warnings from webmaster tools. All of these links were on the site before we started. And the number of poor links like that are fairly minimal. They do not have a ton of links to begin with and I do not imagine directory links, which were valid in the past, would harm them like this.

The links are not in the form of blogroll, paid links, irrelevant sites, link lists, or anything like that.

We have been building them links through guest blogging and local university discount programs.