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Here's the definition from their glossary: LTS: The link target score (LTS) is a measurement of a domain’s overall relevance to the queries you created at the “Find Prospects” stage. We calculate a domain’s LTS based on the number and position of its occurrences within the SERPs. A higher LTS indicates that a domain has a stronger search presence for your queries, and often but not always this indicates higher quality and higher likelihood of being a converting prospect. It’s ONLY useful for comparing domains within a single prospecting report, and not for comparing prospects from one report to another. Domain PR is a better metric for comparing one domain to another across reports. Based upon that, this is just a relevance score based upon how frequently that domain showed up in your report. Use it as an indicator, but you shouldn't abandon a prospect due to a low LTS score.

Good advice Tom! I agree that no single metric (or even a combination) can replace the value you'll get from doing a manual analysis and using your brain to consider whether a site is a good, safe target or not.

Hi Tom, I read your blog post on this. Very helpful. Just wondering though, why use Majestic to download a massive list of links? Wouldn't Moz do the same thing? And Moz even allows you to filter out those that do not pass value? Wouldn't that be a way to have Moz sift out a much smaller list that in theory would include all the affiliate links? As they should not be passing value because they are paid links?

This question has been correctly answered here:

Good answer Ryan. Moreover, Howard, remember that Google - via John Mueller - advised that if site A is penalized, simply deleting it and cloning in a new domain B but not having solved the issues that cause site A being penalized, that won't "save" domain B from being penalized too after short time.

I agree with DC1611 that your site is a bit over-optimised. I would also consider rewriting the text to make it more concise and natural for human visitors. You could break your text down more with meaningful sub-headings to make it easier to digest - maybe a few more pictures as well. What is your ranking around that keyword? One suggestion I would make is it that you add local buisness schema  http://schema.org/LocalBusiness. I can see that you have built your site on WordPress - I would recommend that you spend some time reading and implementing things from this post - http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success It will show you how to easily handle any duplicate content issues such as with tags as DC1611 mentioned in his response. Hope this helps...

Are you able to determine the date(s) on which your decline started?  Often correlating that with the dates from the Moz algorithm guide can help: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change A quick look at your backlink profile definitely has me concerned for Penguin. SEMRush.com shows a big drop in traffic that coincides with May 2013.  Given that Penguin updated May 22, 2013, then this makes me think even more that Penguin is the problem. There could be other issues though too.  I see a lot of sites that work hard to clean up backlink profiles but they can have other problems as well. My main concern is that I'm not sure if you have good links in your profile. I'm not saying that you don't, but when I look at your links sorted by anchor text, they all seem to be self made links that are only there so that Google rankings can be manipulated.  If Penguin has hit you then it means that those links are discounted.  (It also means that a filter has been placed on your site so it can't have a chance to rank well again until you clean up your links and Penguin reruns.)  I see a lot sites that clean up their backlinks and then wonder why they didn't recover from Penguin, when really the issue is that there is nothing left once the cleanup is done.  Hopefully that is not the case with you!

How Howard! Mozbar is showing the # of all links to all pages on the root domain. In OSE you are only seeing the # of links to just the domain in the screenshot. Ryan is correct about the 25 link limit per root domain. Between 22 root domains linking to you, there are 2112 links. You can see the full breakdown of Page, Sub-domain, and root-domain metrics here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons?site=www.24hourpassportandvisas.com Hope this helps!

Most of us SEO practitioners have had clients come to us with that kinda "hack" on their site....poor security or using just plain bad SEO wanna-bes might be the cause...so yes as Matt said here, tighten up your site!!!

It just means that you have those things on separate pages. Google indexed them so like Laura said, you need to put a noindex tag so Google can stop indexin those page After that, wait for it to disappear. It's not that critical if you feel like you need to remove it from the index asap.

It all looks okay from here too. It looks like you could do some more link building (it looks like you have 4 sites linking to you), and definitely try and get some more Google reviews (again, you have only 4--try to get 10), and keep producing quality content for your website (3 tips on taking to your kids about getting braces...or whatever it is you do ;-). You're in a competitive space, in a big market! You're doing well, keep it up.

Always keep this in mind ... If you follow the rules and do things the right way, as they should be done you will be better off in the long run. As Google tightens up its rules and makes changes ... each time they roll out an update YOUR website should improve in rankings. If you want to skip the hard work, take the easy route, buy your way in or resort to jumping the line with black hat tactics ... then please don't act surprised when these updates hurt your rankings or get you banned all together. Remember the old saying, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is !  Adding a bunch of likes from people who are not your raving fans can actually do more harm then good. Lets take an example of 2 websites looking to grow their social media. 1. Client #1 decides to take the high road and put the time in every day or a few days a week to engage on social media. Posting content, liking other pages, getting followers and organically doing the right thing to attract true fans of their work or products. After 1 year this company has only 500 followers. But these are real followers who love the brand, like and share the posts and buy from the company. The social media accounts have a high engagement rate from the fans. This sends great signals to search engines to improve rankings. 2. Client #2 decides to take the easy road and pays some social media promo companies to get them 5000 fans after 1 year. These are not raving fans, they are most likely fakes and made up accounts not going to engage with your posts or comments. These people were encouraged to like your page for other reasons then true love of your brand or products. These social media accounts will def. have a very low or no  engagement rate from the so called fans. This low engagement with so many fans will be seen as a poor signal and possible hurt and def. not help rankings. At the end of the year the account with 10 times less fans, but real fans will have more engagement metrics and make more profits than the business with all the fake fans. The business with the made up fans will have engagement metrics that are very poor in comparison.  If search engines put a ranking signal on social media engagement ( which we think they do more than we realize ) The company with a large fan base and no engagement will be worse off than the company with less fans and more engagement. Take your time and do it the right way, you and your clients will be better off in the long run. Always take the high road - the road less traveled leads to a richer reward in life ! In all aspects of your life and work, including search engines ! Hope that helps, Joe

"Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that." "Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results." This information is from Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst. The only problem with duplicate content is that Google has to decide which copy should rank highest.

Thump up! Exactly what I was thinking..

My recommendation is not to use every social media web site available and just stick to 2 or maxim 3.

Hi Howard, Infographic sites have a lot of Domain Authority, but Google decreased the value of these as a lot of people were developing infographics for backlink purposes. Because it's image based, you're not going to get hit with duplicate content issues. However, the best use for infographics is to get social sharing/engagement pumping. You can watch this video and read our case study on how we used an infographic to get heaps of earned links. http://searchfactory.com.au/blog/case-study-skyscraper-technique-sfgettingsmarter/ All the best! Stel

Addition to any concerns about Google, Pinterest has been making efforts in order to end keyword stuffing. They are working to surface more content to users based on what they're interest in and working on their search efforts. Keyword stuffed pins will get an algorithmic-style penalty in that Pinterest won't recommend them in either users' Pinterest home feed or in search. To my knowledge, they have not banned anyone for keyword stuffing, but I imagine at least making spam reporting easier on the platform will be coming soon. (At least that would be my guess.)

You're not being dumb. I had a typo!  Sorry. Slide 21. I'll edit my original comment to so someone else doesn't run into the same issue.  Cheers!

The best way is to use a crawler like Screaming Frog to detect all broken external links. These links need to be corrected, because it's bad for user experience, and if it's bad for the user experience, it bad for SEO as well. If the main reason of broken links is like the example above, because the products you mention on the page don't exist anymore, you will have to update each of these pages, not only removing the links, but also updating the description and putting links to the newer products. The question is if linking to your suppliers is a wise idea from a business perspective. You probably do a lot of efforts to get visitors to your site, and when they are trying to decide which product to buy, you send them over to the site of the supplier. Once they are on the supplier site you can only hope that they will get back to you once they make the decision which one to buy. Personally, I think your site would offer more added value if you would list the main products on your own site and add some value, like you would do if somebody would visit a physical store (which is the best model to choose, the difference between brand A/B, which A/C to choose on which budget, ...etc). rgds, Dirk

Hi there, thanks for your question! Monica is correct in that Google will pick snippets out of content when they feel it is more relevant to the search query than your meta description. In this case, you don't have any header tags, and I'm not sure where "teaser" is coming from, exactly, as you do not have any crawlable text on your home page. If you read the documentation Ryan linked too, though, it will confirm that Google can pull descriptions from many different sources, including references to it elsewhere on the web. What I would do is thoroughly read the documentation Ryan linked to, and work on optimizing both your title tag and meta description according to Google's recommendations. Think about what would be most helpful to someone searching for your brand in the search engines. Along those same lines, you may also want to consider using a different coming soon plugin, beefing up your placeholder content, and collecting email addresses for people interested in receiving an email when the new site launches — which could include a coupon, etc. The plugin you are currently using is for new websites (not established sites temporarily down for a redesign), its text is not crawlable, and the content (displayed in a single image) is not very useful for human visitors, either. If this is an established site, I'd recommend looking into the Coming Soon Pro Plugin by SeedProd, which is more SEO friendly (including crawlable text) and reading up on the difference between its coming soon and maintenance modes. Hope that helps! Christy