Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Going to throw hootsuite into the mix also. It's great value, offers scheduling, has a nice interface and has apps to support it on tablets / phones.

Hi Luia, Ryan's answered your question in terms of detecting penalties / shady link building.

I would just add that if you are going to guest post, it should be to reach the audience and less about the value of the link. Ultimately, if you can get readers to your site and interested in (and sharing) your content it's going to be much more rewarding on an ongoing basis than that single link.

Hi Huey, if you look around for "canonical URLs" you should get a lot of information advising you how to do this.

The easiest way to do this is with a 301 redirect via a .htaccess file. This can sort both the non www. and the /index.php issues.

I think Alice is right, it has the potential to become manipulated as with most link building methods. I have often considered whether it's even worth trying to avoid using the term "guest post" for this very reason.

If you are selective about which sites you post on you shouldn't worry too much. You will find targeting higher quality sites will not only improve the value of the link and the size of the audience, but it will also ensure you are creating top quality content which is worthy of being published.

Hi Vince,

I would recommend authors byline for a few reasons:

1. link diversity - more domains linking
2. more natural - less likely to be placed around other paid links
3. less devaluation - generally the first link from a domain is the strongest, a blogroll link wouldn't give you the value of a link * 1,000 (or however many pages).
4. Build relationships through posting

Create good content and share it with people, you will benefit much more this way.

Ben

Not sure about this, but I would say it was probably a glitch.

As far as I can see all the links on your site are followed.

Hi Marcus,

I would probably recommend the same answer that I gave to your other question. If the link could be viewed as paid for a nofollow tag is safest.

Are you paying for these articles to be syndicated? I would say it would really depend on how the syndication process worked as to how careful you needed to be.

Ben

Hi Charles,

I wouldn't have thought a sitemap could have resulted in a penalty. Unless of course it linked to pages which violated Google guidelines which hadn't been crawled before.

I would consider other things before sitemaps, what changes did you make to the site recently? Where there any algorithm changes around that time?

The last few months have been quite busy for the search engines, it's quite possible that it's just coincidental.

Ben

Hi Marcus,

At the end of the day it's your call. It's risk vs reward.

Google does always advise that paid links should be no followed. They are going to be obvious that they are paid for, it depends how likely you think they are to be flagged up to Google.

Don't forget that if your competitors see these links they may report you which could result in these being flagged up. Best advice is nofollow. No link is not advisable as you will lose a large percentage of visitors when they can't click through.

Ben

I understand where you're coming from, but I would personally spend as little time as possible focusing on the keywords tag. If there is any benefit to come from these directories it's going to be minute compared to the return from quality link building.

Competitors aren't going to be led astray by incorrect meta keywords, as most of the time you can tell what people are trying to target anyway.

Hi swimwithfishes,

I would imagine that recently they have been a bit more focused on responding to these with all of the updates and shifting rankings recently.

I haven't seen many very personal emails from them, as Gary said their first point of contact is usually an automated email.

It does strike me as odd that you have had two conflicting responses. A bit more information might be helpful.

Whenever I notice big fluctuations in rankings the first thing I do is note what changes I have made directly to site around the time of the change.

I also check for any recent algorithm changes to see if anything coincides with the drop.

There's an articles on the SEOmoz blog which you may want to look at:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

There's no obvious function in WM tools, but having a look round there's this option:

http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/BrainDump/Extracting-Google-Indexed-Web-Site-Pages-Using-MS-Excel/

But Google will only display the first 1000 URLs on a site query so you would need to adapt it lots of times. From the looks of it there's not an easy way.

There's maybe a tool out there that is similar to Xenu, but checks the index status in Google also. I haven't ever had the need for this so I'm not aware of one, but the chances are there is something out there.

Good luck!

There could be so many causes for these fluctuations. First off, are you using software to track the rankings or doing it manually?

Note that there's lots of personalisation that can affect rankings such as location, if you're signed in to a google profile and if you have visited the site before. If you were doing this manually these could be affecting the results.

If it's not this then it may have been caused by changes to the site. Have you made any recently?

Just checked how you have done it and I see what you mean - it's a bit tricky. One thing I noticed is that all that text is wrapped in a h1. I would take it out and put it in as standard content.

Also if you could take the text that is in your slideshow images and convert it to readable text that would provide you with a bit more relevant content on the site that may help.

Best of luck with it!

In that case I would suggest changing a couple and reviewing any changes in rankings as a result. This is one to approach slowly.

Not sure how you have access (are they paid?), but by changing a large amount of links at the same time it may alert Google to some suspicious activity. Large changes in anchor text can be a sign of changes to bought links.

Personally, I wouldn't change them all either. Even though the year is wrong, there's still going to be benefits. e.g. if you are trying to rank for "holiday in new york 2013", your rankings will still benefit from keywords saying "holiday in new york 2012".

Take it steady and keep reviewing the results, but bear in mind you may be better focusing your efforts on building new links with new anchor text.

Hope that helps,

Ben

Hi Peter,

I'd attempt some sort of export of both indexed URLs and actual URLs into an Excel file and try and remove duplicates.

You would need to look into it but I'm sure there's a way of matching and removing duplicates.

Other than that I wouldn't know.

Ben

Hi Benjamin,

I'd stay clear of the IMO. Quite a few paid networks have been devalued recently and I bet it's causing trouble for companies that have used them.

I believe the issue is that paid link patterns are becoming easier to detect and therefore potentially dangerous for sites that have them in their backlink profile. I'm sure there's still people out there getting good results from them, but I don't think I could handle knowing that rankings could be wiped out every algorithm update!

Ben

There's been a bit of dicussion about this before and I seem to remember that using CSS to push content up the page actually had a slightly beneficial effect on rankings.

It's mainly going to be an issue if your content is really low down on the page due to things like intrusive banner ads or lots of adverts.

Hi Paul,

It would be useful to have a little bit more information. Is the year relevant to the rankings? For example "euro 2012" would be valuable for a site trying to rank for these as the year is going to appear in the search.

Do you have access to all of these links to be able to change them then?

Ben