Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree Jarno! Option 3 looks and feels more logical than the others. I'd go with that as well!

Agreed!

It is always best practices to avoid keyword stuffing. Be sure to set each image alt attribute to describe the image itself. This will allow both search engines and visually impaired users of your website to be able to understand the description of the image. Might sound silly but my mother is visually impaired and may be looking for your site right now.

Best of luck!!

Hey Kirowski!!

Are you a (Medium or Higher) PRO member? You need to be at least a Medium Pro member or higher to get branded reporting. Go to "billing and subscriptions", then go to the "Subscription Type" tab. Here you will know which plan you have and can upgrade if need be.

Good luck!!

It's debatable these internal links seem like they are here for the user, I would check to see if these buttons get any clicks, if they dont you might not need them. Here's a recent WBF that should help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

Hi Daniela,

**1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? **

Run the seoMOZ report card to make sure your on page data is crawl able without too much error.

Also you have a PMD (Partial Match Domain), these URLs where recently punished if they had low quality links or unnatural link profiles.

2. Any suggestions on link-building please?

I would focus on a clean link profile (anchoring 50%-75% of you links as your Brand name or URL  )

There are many ways to earn links. SEOmoz is full of articles to help one rank, however what works in one niche might not work in another.

You can find the best bloggers in your niche (it could be a "malta travel blog") and have them share an article for you.. Maybe give them a free stay if they blog about you.... (This is one example of #RCS)

Hope this Helps.

I am working with a client in the dental space that has an existing (11 year old) website for his practice. His domain is tied to his last name, which he would like to get away from because he plans to sell the practice in the next couple years.

Backstory: Prior to taking him on, he was working with an SEO agency out of India that were built him quite an ugly backlink profile. Once we discovered it, we immediately notified him about the risk of a penalty if left alone. He was riding high in Google SERP's so of course, it was of no concern to him. Needless to say about a year ago he was inducted into Google's "manual penalty club" for suspicious links. His site vanished in Google and all! Hooray! But no, not really...

We met with him to discuss the options, suggesting we clean up his backlink profile, then submit for reconsideration. Based on the time we told him it could take to make progress and be back up and running, he wasn't very excited about that approach. He said he wanted us to rebuild a new site, with a new domain and start fresh. In addition, he wanted keep his original site live since it is tied to his already thriving practice.

To sum it all up, his goal is to keep what he has live since his customers are accustom to using his existing (penalized) website. While building a new brand/website that he can use to build a cleaner backlink profile and rank in Google as well as to sell off down the line without having his name tied to the practice.

Question: Being that he has an existing site with the company NAP info throughout and the new site will also have the same NAP (just a different domain/brand), is there a "best way" to approach this? The content on the new site would be completely unique. I understand this approach is iffy but in his situation it makes sense to some extent. Any feedback or ideas on how to best handle having two sites running for the same dental practice?

If any part of my question is confusing or you need further details to help make a suggestion, please fire away and I will be happy to give as much detail as possible. Thanks Mozzers!

Hi Heather!

There are some strong suggestions here, but I really like Donna's suggestion about the Barnacle SEO. Makes a lot of sense and the WBF was great!! Definitely look into that

Hmm... Which browser are you using? Do you have any add-ons or plugins active within your browser?

For example, I use Firefox and have had similar issues with Moz tools. After disabling all active add-ons (and restarting my browser), it worked! At that point, I reactivated each add-on (one-by-one) and tried to recreate the issue. I ended up finding the add-on that was creating the issue.

Not sure if this will help you with the issue but certainly worth looking into. Hope it helps!!!

It all depends on when you lost your rankings and if there were any recent changes that may have caused the drop.

Hi Neil,

Yes, Google does look at the footer and they actually look in the footer for spammy links. Heres a video for internal linking footers etc.. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

Hope this helps.

Wow Miriam, thank you so much for that detailed response. I appreciate all of your insight, you made some excellent points to consider and discuss with him.

The good news is he is open-minded and keen to staying up-to-date with the times regarding online search, branding, etc. So I think the points you made will be of great value when I speak with him.

In addition, about a year ago I went ahead and slowly began cleaning up his link-profile (against his wishes) as somewhat of a "loyal customer favor". What can I say, I think he's a good dude that deserves to shine! I don't normally do work for free but he's been a great client for a number of years and is easy to work with, unlike the majority we've encountered. I've been able to reduce the penalty down from "site-wide" to just a "partial" penalty. Working on it here and there, trying not to spend too much time on it.

The issue is, he is looking to launch the site for a presentation he will be giving tomorrow, so my plan is to block it from being indexed until I get a chance to meet with him and sort everything out.

Even if I block the site from being indexed do you think Google will see it and associate it regardless because the Google map is embedded and NAP is in there?

Thanks again Miriam!

If anyone else has anything to add or suggest, I am all ears!

I would not recommend these footer links just because Google might look at it as over optimizing.

I would run an seomoz on-site report and get as high of a score as possible.

Here is a WBF on internal linking structures that should help.

Part 1

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

Part 2

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

Hey Krankensigns!

Unfortunately no you cannot add users to your Moz account. But that is weird that they are still not able to login using your login credentials. Maybe there is a block since they are outside of the Western hemisphere. Im sure a Mozzer will chime in here and get you a fix

Good luck!

There was a Penguin (http://mozcast.com/events) update on Oct 5th. THis update was targeting sites with low quality links and search engine manipulative link profiles.

Perhaps adding the links together ended up pointing too many or a bigger ratio of low quality or non relevant links to your site... Or maybe the anchor link profile is now over optimized, the loss can be due to many reasons... I would recommend checking the new link profile and also making sure everything looks natural. If all is well and are still not ranking, you can send Google the reconsideration request explaining what happened.

Oh nice! I'll definitely check out that thread. Thanks!!

To clarify, since I am caught in a "who to please" battle of Client vs. Google, I was suggesting that since he "MUST" have the site launched by tomorrow morning that I block it from being indexed, which will allow me to launch it for him, yet, buy time to review with him the points you made and get everything sorted out with the old site penalty/duplicate NAP info before having Google come index the new site.

Does that make sense? Oy vey... what a mess lol

Perhaps you have your personal setting on

1. by authority, local citations, reviews, frequent updates, interaction as a brand (posting and interacting as the brand itself on Google +).

2. I've seen 7 and i've seen less I think it depends on the search query and device, mobile vs. pc etc...

3. Can you share a link?

4. No, because if you check the map it will show more results. Perhaps Google does not think others deserve to be there.

First you must diagnose you anchor links. Are most of them linking in using exact keyword phrases? or are they mostly linking in with your Brand Name/URL?

A natural linking profile is 50% brand keyword phrases and your URL, 25% Diverse anchor text (ie. how to "keyword"), 25% Exact keyword.

If you linking ratio is not like this it might be the cause for your problem. To fix this you will need to contact all the sites that are linking to yoursand ask them to change the anchored link to your brand name.

Hope this helps.

Hi Tim,

If the pages you are going to replace are still content rich on a similar vertical (old blue widget to new blew widget) you can do a 301 redirect which will let the search engine know that the page has moved and it will also transfer any of the authority the old page(s) has.

Hope this helps.