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Hi Ken,

The algorithm is smart enough to know those links you're talking about are from a spam site, and more than likely you won't have to worry about them. If you feel up to it, however, Google has a tool you can use to disavow links you believe may be harming your site's ranking, You can upload a whole file worth of links too if you need to.

Rather than go through that, could you try something like a lightbox popup thingy? (I'm not a designer and don't know the real names for them)

Well, you might have me on that.

Back in the day of the original SEO Rockstars podcast with (ALL HAIL) Greg Boser (webguerrilla) and Todd Friesen (Oilman)  (circa 2005/6), I recall the order was believed/assumed to be by importance. I know that was a long time ago but I'd never seen anything subsequent to challenge that belief.

But here's content from webmasterworld that counters that information. Personally, I was never a big JW fan or a big believer in her technical knowledge so take the information in that article as you may. Maybe someone here at Moz can chime in on this.

Anyway, you may try the site:domain search operator in conjunction with a search term and that may give you the ordered list you're looking for. I'll leave it to you to determine whether that's true or not.

Yes.

It is understood that that "importance" is the primary order.

Basically, Google learned long ago that it couldn't exactly trust the (small, medium or large) business owner /marketer to be 100% truthful (or anything close) with the content they put on their own websites.  More often then not, the marketer would include content that didn't match their products/service just to try to outdo their competitors or game google. (I know--it's hard to believe isn't it?)

Measuring backlinks became a way Google could get some third-party input on what a website might really be about as well as how much more important one site might be than another. In that measurement scheme, unfortunately, there is no handicap for new or small businesses, though I imagine if there was, every multinational in the world would be trying to figure out how they could make themselves look smaller or newer than they actually are.  Of course, the link-measuring scheme was eventually gamed by marketers (we're just a bad lot, aren't we?) and Google began weighing other factors (as Nicholas links to) more heavily as a result.

Small businesses however, may get a foothold or survive in the keyword niches that don't support enough traffic for larger companies. It takes less authority (though usually just as good optimization)  to rank for those niche keywords, so while a new or local company is pulling itself up by the bootstraps to get itself established, they are usually best off targeting those more locally-oriented and long-tail keywords than the more competitive ones.

The reason I ask about the seo folder is because "seo" isn't usually something that's separate from any of the rest of your site--folders, or otherwise. Rather, it's something that is integrated into the site's words, pages and programming so as to not even identifiable as seo--just proper best practices.

When a site's services pages are optimized, for example, they end up being just plain ol' services pages--it's just that keywords have been properly researched and utilized, internal link anchor text has been researched and properly implemented, page titles and metadata have been thought out, etc. The same goes for the homepage and all the site's other pages.

You may already know all this and I'm being overly simplistic for you here. If so, my apologies, but I wasn't quite sure from your question what you were looking for.

Hi VT,

A couple questions for you first:  How old is the site, how old are the pages, and how good/unique is the content on the pages vs. the blog post content?

The line is in the ratio of your duplicate content to unique content. I don't know of any hard and fast ratio rule but it is primarily the unique content that will be most helpful as you to build your site's authority against your keyword competitors.

Hey Miriam! S'been a while : )

So have you tried putting a new url in its place, with new/revised content with the same internal pages linking to it--and NOT using a 301 from the old to the new?

Hi James,

It may help your site as far as engagement numbers if your visitors frequent those documents but the fact that it's duplicate won't be lost on Google.  If you think it will benefit visitors by having it on your site, you could canonicalize it so at least it references the original from your site.

It could maybe, kinda be like an over optimization filter.  Is it a specific page that seems like it should be ranking but isn't?  The homepage, I might guess. Have you tried optimizing a new/different page for the term and pointing some strength towards it from other strong pages on your site?

That all sounds good...and you're competitive authority-wise with the top-ranked results?

Do you have swords in your domain name? Do you have lots of links with just the term "swords" as anchor text?

That would be the first step--push it onto HR's plate and have them write new ads and job descriptions. : )  But it's hardly likely that it would be sufficient, anyway, I mean your company may have authority in organic rankings for whatever it is your company does or makes and the likelihood that Google's going to push a page up for what is essentially a barely related topic (the job description) may be overly optimistic on the boss' part.

If you can show that at least the job ad comes up for the job title and company name, at least that might be something they can latch onto.

I've engaged with local marketing companies who had big plans for bringing in nationwide leads and had little care for developing their firm's local relevance. Nor did they have an understanding of the difference in difficulty for a small marketing company to convert local leads into new business vs. converting geographically diverse leads (which they struggled to get anyway).

As a small marketing company, the sweet spot is definitely local business and no doubt, in Greenville NC, there is more business than you can handle. There are so many ways to develop content that will put your firm directly in view of local businesses that need you and that will pay for your services. It requires an embrace of your locality and a creative exuberance for content about it and forgoing thoughts of leads coming in from all corners of the country. If you do those things well first, leads will come from other places.

You say you write blog posts about industry topics and trends. As I'm sure you've noticed, so does almost everyone else, right? Why not get creative in combining marketing topics with the life and times of the typical Greenvillian? I guarantee you will enjoy the writing much more and your traffic will start coming in from closer to home.

A company must pick its battles.  Is the company's ultimate goal to outrank sites that specialize in recruitment or is the company's goal to recruit the best personnel possible?  Why not put your resources toward your core products and services and let third parties do what they do best?

Hi Visabel,

And why doesn't the client want everything on one site? Just because of the "seo" folder?  Can you be more detailed about what the differences will be between the content on the two domains/websites?

You just sit back and let the money pile up!

Just kidding... There are plenty of applications out there that will ping your backlinks regularly if you want but there's not really that much to do once a link is established other than maybe maintaining a relationship with the webmaster/owner of the sites that linked to you.  From the way you ask the question however, it makes me kinda wonder about their quality. What kind of sites are you getting links from?

Have your keyword rankings changed?  As Sean pointed out, it appears that at least some of them currently look decent. If your rankings are where they were before but your traffic has decreased, are you sure that traffic that you lost wasn't bot traffic?