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Thank you!

Hello there, Like Joseph says allot of people thinks that Google doesn't give them penalty for the spammed links. That is NOT true, i have ben testing that fact and actually even tho Google knows that a site is a spamming site, they will give you penalty untill the current domain / server IP is blacklisted by Google. To blacklist spammers theres actually only 1 way: Disavow the links comming from spammers, as more and other site owners will disavow the same domains / ip, the faster Google will blacklist them. If you aint sure how to Disavow and make sure you dosn´t disavow some urls that is known as a good site on Google, coz that can also make you suffer a penalty on youre rankings. So a good tip is to check the page Aut. and domain age, if it is an old domain with allot of Aut. You need to ask the siteowner to remove the links, after that and if they dont remove the link, you can Disavow followed with a message to Google regarding youre dialog with the websiteowner refuses to remove the link to youre domain.

Really great video, thank you!

Hi Calico, You're welcome, and that's good you're not seeing anything in Google Search Console to indicate a problem. Also want to highlight something you've said: "I will do the audit, but my first thoughts looking at it, is that the other fishing charters around me don't really do anything for SEO, so they will likely score low. " The purpose of you doing this audit will be to take the top competitor who isn't being filtered out for your most important keyword phrase, compare his metrics to yours, and then see if going through that process helps you figure out a reason why something he is doing is making him strong enough not to be filtered, compared to your business. So definitely do be sure you are picking that top ranking competitor who is showing up for the term most important to you. I'd really like to hear what you discover from the audit.

For lengthy-tail positions, typically you'll no longer see a dramatic drop. In truth, typically no drop in any respect. For some of the greater competitive positions, you most probably will see a mild loss.  Some businesses do see a dramatic drop--but maximum probable due to different elements like microphone reviews. Over time, count on to regain the positions of the one in case you recognition on UX.

Outsource to legitimate people only. Some use a script to babble together a bunch of nonsense, you don't want that. Some outsource what you outsource to them to fiverr and you get a poor quality grammar and spelling. If I were you, i would not just find a writer, but an SEO-savvy copywriter for websites. I would also give them #5 before they write the article. Just review it afterwards and publish, not a crazy deal of changes. This way the SEO-savvy copywriter can use the right long tail keyphrases and you won't screw it up by doing a final addition of your side to it. I would stay away from services provided by non-local entities to your locality...

Google drops the top trend site from their SERP. My blog also affected by it.

Can you please tell a bit more on "make it fun" part?

Thanks so much for letting our community know you're finding a lot of help here. That's wonderful! Sounds like you have some good improvements planned migrating to Wordpress. To me, it looks like location/contact could possibly be turned into a single page, making more room in your menu for a blog link, but that's a call you'd need to make. I can see from the blog post you've shared that you're looking to put lots of effort into the blog, so giving it a priority link makes sense to me! Good luck with all you're doing!

I understand your fears completely because WP + themes + plugins can be HUGE mess. Why? Because some of devs don't know technical and on-page SEO. I have seen themes where they put text "Comments" within H1 tag. At same time post title was encapsulated with H3. Things as hidden text, messy HTML codes, bloatware HTML are countless. You also can get server overloading, slow SQL queries and some issues. Can be performance issues, PHP issues, hosting issues. Running WP mean that you will get 10 CSS files and 10 JS libraries. And this is "best case scenario". Just imagine what is worst. Now add "upgrading" procedure where everything can be broken (or changed!) with just one click. Ah, and mine favorite - security exploits and hacking. Sound like "perfect storm". Isn't? Now i know that this sound scary. That's why you should see and review HTML code of WP before migration. Probably you will see potential for improvements. And this changes need to be patched over original files (i'm talking about theme or plugins). For theme is OK - you can make child theme based on original. But for plugins - you need to "fork" original plugin and make your own custom version. Then on each update you should "diff" your version and original to keep your patches and new code. This mean very strong backup solution plus local dev environment and extra work on each update. Also - it's year of 2016. Why you don't around for alternatives? I can give you suggestion - static site generators: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/static-website-generators-jekyll-middleman-roots-hugo-review/ As you can see i'm not giving answer Yes or No. I'm just giving you few extra points to think about. Just put cards on the table. PS: May sound negative little bit because i have some theme and plugins in past. One wrong choice and all SEO efforts can be ruined. Such is life... Glossary: "fork" - process of creating different version of something existing with some changes that doesn't exist in original. You can hear that devs are forking projects too. In your case - since you can apply your patches but on next update everything will be gone back to original. That's why you need to fork them. "diff" - process for checking difference between files/project and extracting/showing only difference between them.

This doesn't sound like buying links to me but rather giving a donation and receiving a link as a by product as a charitable deed. Would be surprised if this didn't do you more good than harm as stated above.

VOIP or adding another line to your cell would probably be the cheapest. There are call tracking options out there that can associate with analytics and CRMs but that sounds beyond your needs.

Thank you, all!  Your answers are what I thought was okay to begin with.  When I started reading Penguin articles, it was seeming that many things I thought were okay were not and it was really confusing. I did read that Point Blank article several months back and made a strategy to employ many of the concepts in there. I have around 14% anchor text that isn't just my company name and is some kind of keyword phrase.  Is that okay? The rest is some form of my website or company name.

That makes sense!  Thank you for taking the time to clarify!  

Thank you for sharing your resources with the community!

Hi Calico, If you entered the email address associated with your Foursquare account and then got the message that you no longer had any accounts needing authorization, then it sounds to me like you're good to go. However, if you have any doubts about this, please feel free to start a ticket in our Help Hub so that you can privately share your account details with our Help Team, just so we can double check for you. To start a ticket, go here: https://moz.com/help/contact and choose the blue 'Local' link and then include in your ticket: The email address associated with your Moz Local account The name, address, phone number and website of your business A summary of your question Via the Help Hub, we will be able to pop into your account and take a look, just to be sure all looks well. Hope this helps!

If it's just a few pages then I don't think it should be something to worry about. I've 301'ed thousands and it never affected me before. The problem with this though is you might have some trouble ranking for some (different) location based searches, or at least, to consistently improve after the 301's initial benefits stop. I always stay away from 404s as much as I can. Although it doesnt really affect your SEO if the dead link is nowhere on your pages but I still dislike it, personal preference. I won't be much help as this is all still trivial without seeing the actual pages and their functions. Treat it as a test though, you'll learn a lot from it.

I believe Google webmaster and GA are both trusted tools but if I have to choose one of them I will go with analytics tool as its real time where as webmaster tools take time to get updated. If you lost impression as well as traffic from search in a day you probably have to check your rankings and see if you lost rankings as well in-case of you probably knows the action plan. Also check the drop date and compare it with the Google penalty calendar to see if you are a suspect of Panda or Penguin. Hope this helps!

Nice, thank you for pointing that one out!

Hi, About your keyword pages, they don't have to sit on a main page of your website. For example you could include a link with something like "find out more information on XXX" then the link redirects them to the keyword page. This way you get to keep all the SEO benefits, but remove them from immediate viewing on your website. Hope this helps a little I too am trying to discover more about links so thanks for your post. Jason