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Super affiliate here. While Everett and Thomas are right to point you in the direction of the FTC texts, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines are just that: guidelines. They're not law, not widely enforced, and Google largely ignores affiliate links so long as they're nofollowed. They don't seem to be quite up to the level of the sponsored links and content that bloggers must disclose to avoid a Google penalty (but again, that's Google's enforcement of their own guidelines, not law.)

Some merchants with affiliate programs will insist on clear and conspicuous disclosure if you want to remain in their program, but really their panic over the guidelines died down pretty fast after they were released in 2012. The one major exception that comes to mind are credit cards providers, which are exceptionally picky about compliance on this issue since they're subject to tighter regulation on the banking side of things.

All that is not to say that disclosure isn't the right thing to do - only that it's not likely to land you in hot water with anyone anytime soon.

As others have said, maybe, maybe not.

In my vertical, if "Macy's coupons" is the keyword, then everyone in the field puts that first in the title tag because the conventional wisdom is that it's the optimal placement.

The problem with that strategy is that everyone's title tags are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Literally nothing in the column stands out from anything else. Blah.

When we added a dynamic count to our titles, eg. "7 Macy's Coupons", and wrote them so they remained keyword rich while also reading more naturally, we observed two important things:

1. Our rankings did not change at all.
2. CTR went up.

The working hypothesis is that the number helps us stand out and the natural structure is easier to read and digest. It's optimized for human eyeballs just as much as it's optimized for ranking.

That's just one example, of course, and I'm sure others can line up with examples where the slightest change to a title tag knocked them back to page 30. I'd recommend testing it out.

When I search for "personal injury attorney" there are plenty of results that pop up that are clearly optimized for "lawyer." I'd say yes, Google clearly has connected the dots on that one.

It it's not 100% unique content that adds value to the page for the user, then it's not worth spending time or money creating it. Period. Do not copy from other websites, ever. Scaling page content is hard, it sucks, and did I mention it's hard? But there is no shortcut to this.

I'd move the older articles into a /archive/ subfolder (keeping a site search function available) and then exclude the archive from indexing. The pages stay up and can be found on site by interested parties while newer material gets all the glory.

Just because Google is choosing not to display your titles and descriptions doesn't mean it hasn't indexed them. It's content and in the source code. It's indexed. It's being taken under consideration for ranking purposes. Google ultimately controls what is displayed, however. Titles and meta descriptions are merely a polite suggestion.

There is no way to opt out of those rewrites 100% of the time. NOODP is only good for opting out of Dmoz descriptions, if you even have one there at all. (Most newer sites probably won't since inclusion hasn't been relevant for at least 5 years, probably longer.) It's not the only alternative snippet source. It's much more likely that Google will just find relevant text from the page itself to populate a description snippet, and NOODP will not block that. If Google is choosing its own snippet over mine, I don't always worry about it unless it's choosing something that's just flat out bizarre.

I also like to look at Google's rewrites as instructive. The algorithm is serving up something that it thinks is more relevant to your query, and these days, with RankBrain and the entire menagerie in play, it's getting pretty smart. So if Google is rewriting my description, which means that Google has decided that particular text is relevant, then I'm going to take notes on what text it's grabbing and seriously consider adjusting my own description to be a closer match to whatever Google is inclined to serve up. If Google is literally pointing out the most relevant text for that query, maybe we should listen, right?

My first thought is that this topic is already well-covered in a competitive vertical, and it's going to take a lot more than on-page factors to get it ranking well. Has the content earned any links? I see it's got 14 social shares, but the top articles for "moving tips" have more than 500, and a few have thousands. What are you bringing to the table with this advice that others aren't already offering? Can you organize the info in a way that's more shareable? Develop a functional checklist that someone who's moving can actually print and use? Can you pitch a news story around it to local media? Interest for "moving tips" seems to really spike in June and July, so you're well-positioned to coordinate with peak seasonal interest right now.

It could be either. I've seen bit.ly pop up in Ahrefs, which is how we found that ugly link scheme, but most of the time they list the site at the beginning of the chain.

Google is absolutely smart enough to understand the difference between uppercase and lowercase and ferret out user intent. I'd wager that a lot of people don't bother with capitalization when typing a query, so it would be incredibly important to get that right. I've never seen a difference.

Hypothetically speaking, it could be a factor if/when capitalization changes the meaning. Off the top of my head:

• spring vs Spring
• fall vs Fall
• split vs Split

But I would imagine that in cases like these, the way you're using it in the query is also providing important contextual clues.

"How can we duplicate that?"

It really depends on how those shortened links are being used, and I'd say that mostly you don't want to go there. I've seen spammers use shortened links as a way to mask their paid links and link networks... they build a bunch of burner pages on freebie sites like Weebly, then stuff them full of links to the bit.ly URLs, which then 301 (and pass equity) to the main site. So if you took that bit.ly link and ran that through a backlink checker like Ahrefs, it would have a ton of links pointing at it. When the freebie services catch on and shut them down, they just build new ones, repeat the whole process. It was a big problem with Patch for awhile. It's the SEO equivalent of money laundering. The Payday update seemed to kill most of it, though.

To Eric's point though, a lot of social networks use link shorteners, so pop one of them into your backlink tool and see where they're leading back to.

If you're thinking in terms of sprinkling good content in with crap content, you're already off to a bad start.

The solution here is simple: _Don't publish crap. _

Seriously, that's it. That's how you avoid a Panda slap. Shares have nothing to do with it.

Just because they're a bank with a large digital team doesn't mean they put so much thought into it, and I'm willing to bet that's the case. Maybe someone noticed an empty field in their CMS and took it upon themselves to fill it in. Maybe the digital team fought a losing battle with an exec and shrugged it off because it was an easy way to make a C-level happy without actually hurting anything. It doesn't matter because it's neither good nor bad.

Also, don't put any stock into the hype around the thinking that someone might use it to "steal" your keywords. Have you ever actually heard of a case where this happened? Where it hurt someone? No. It's a ghost story that SEOs have been parroting for years, probably based on some long ago throwaway speculation. Besides, you're a bank. No one needs to snoop around in your code to know what your target keywords are when it's that straightforward.

I'd point out that "home insurance" is actually a distinct keyphrase existing intact within "specialist home insurance"... so if it was me, all else being equal and contextually appropriate, I'd probably lean just a little heavier on the latter knowing that I'm actually capturing both at once.

I think the key with this approach is to be genuinely helpful and to avoid actually trying to sell a product. That's incredibly counterintuitive, but the product probably isn't the endgame for your consumer. What are they using it for? Be an expert resource on THAT.

The Home Depot blog is a really excellent example of this principle in action. Instead of selling their products, they're showing very creative and aspirational ways that people can use them. They did an entire DIY series on concrete. Concrete!

So they do all of these posts about concrete, but they're never pitching you a hard sell on it. The path to purchase is there if you want it, but really they're just focused on being experts on all of the wonderful, aspirational things you can do with concrete. It's very shareable and pinnable and I want every one of those projects in my home. They've planted the idea of buying concrete without selling it to me. It's very obvious they are an authority on concrete, and it doesn't matter that they're a seller. In fact, I'm more likely to buy it from them now because their expertise on it is clear.

So I started with that instead of outreach because when the content is that good, you can push it out on social and get a good response. You can share what you're doing with influencers and they won't mind because it's obvious you know what you're talking about. Next thing you know, they're coming to you for comment as an expert. The quality has to be there or you're right, you just look like you're pushing product and that does get tend to get ignored.

Data is the cinnamon of content marketing. It enhances your dish with a nice cinnamon flavor, but you probably don't want a big heaping spoonful of uncut cinnamon or the next thing you know you've launched a viral video meme. Or something like that.

A story without data maybe is a nice story, but it's also toothless. The internet is littered with baseless opinions and we don't really need more of that. You can make an opinion insightful, however, when you back it up with facts, sources, numbers. Prove a product works laying out a success by the numbers. I want to see stories that know when to lean into the data, the kind of story that chews your face off and then drops the mic.

Make an assertion, express an opinion, back it up with facts, but never forget that the numbers are there to support the story, and not the other way around.

Cinnamon... face chewing... it must getting close to lunch time.

First, if bad links are the culprit, then the issue wasn't Panda so much as it was likely Penguin.

If you have the links in an Excel file, then you're off to a really good start. Run them through a utility like Link Detox to see which are truly bad (there may be some gems in there worth saving). Reach out to every webmaster and request the links be removed. Then build and submit a Disavow file through your Google Webmaster Console.

Also, read up on how to use the Disavow Tool. And anything else Marie Haynes writes about Penguin is bound to be gold, too.

Super affiliate here. While Everett and Thomas are right to point you in the direction of the FTC texts, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines are just that: guidelines. They're not law, not widely enforced, and Google largely ignores affiliate links so long as they're nofollowed. They don't seem to be quite up to the level of the sponsored links and content that bloggers must disclose to avoid a Google penalty (but again, that's Google's enforcement of their own guidelines, not law.)

Some merchants with affiliate programs will insist on clear and conspicuous disclosure if you want to remain in their program, but really their panic over the guidelines died down pretty fast after they were released in 2012. The one major exception that comes to mind are credit cards providers, which are exceptionally picky about compliance on this issue since they're subject to tighter regulation on the banking side of things.

All that is not to say that disclosure isn't the right thing to do - only that it's not likely to land you in hot water with anyone anytime soon.

My advice would be to write for topics rather than for keywords. For example, if you're building one page for "red widgets", one for "crimson widgets", and one for "scarlet widgets", ask yourself if those aren't all actually the same thing. If they are, write one page instead of three, and talk about red widgets using supporting widget-related vocabulary, because the search engines will not be fooled, and even if they are you don't want to have three light, near-duplicate pages competing against one another. Write the best page about red widgets the internet has ever seen. Google is increasingly good at understanding context.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, you're posting spun content? Are you spinning someone else's content or are you spinning your own content?

Separately from that, social media has no real direct impact on SEO, and duplication through shares across social is kind of the whole point of social, so I wouldn't worry about that hurting anything. Nor would I seriously pursue it as an SEO tactic. The value of social to SEO is that it amplifies your content's reach, and more eyeballs on your content translates to more potential for attracting natural links. But the shares themselves do nothing to help SEO right now. In the future, maybe.

I recommend taking a look at the redirect path and server codes with something like the Redirect Path Chrome plugin. It shows you every step of any redirect chain. If it's a passing through 301 (or a series of 301's) then it passes link juice.