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how can i check for negative links

I think the answer is different for each business. For SEOmoz, Twitter is our primary social channel. That's where people come to ask us questions, where we promote our posts, announce site outages, etc. Our customers use Facebook to communicate with us about 1/10 as much as they do Twitter regarding our site. I don't have the traffic stats in front of me, but I know for communicating with our customers, Twitter beats Facebook hands down. And I know for other companies it is just the opposite. They'll have all kinds of conversations with their customers on Facebook, and nobody talks to their Twitter account. Try it out, see what works for you.

tried searching the internet for a template and not come across one with k2 that is a newspaper template, this is why i have asked the question lol. With reference to getting a custom one, at the moment i cannot afford one for at least two years.

cheers for this. it is always hard to decide how much content to put on the home page as i would like google to keep coming to the site and seeing new content. what i was worried about is, the small content i have now, not sure if you have looked again, but i am worried that the content is not enough for google to come along and say wow we have new content.

thanks everyone, that has been a great help.

To my mind you already have "sponsored" articles, they are just for one of your owner/contributors e.g. http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/gastric-hypno-band/the-secret-to-weight-loss-is-inside-you-says-gastric-hypno-band-expert#.UEd-5cHN9X8 Adding other sponsored links would only diversify the content, potentially get more quality content on the site and make it a better user experience. To me you could manage the relationship with the readers and outside businesses your team are involve with in ways that visitors will gell with more.  This covers the top banner (which looks like an external paid banner when someone is on the home page rather than something a regular contributor is involved with.  There are loads of spammy looking gastric band promotions out there and you have real potential to both improve this site and generate more trust with potential gastric band purchasers by showing the relationship differently so they see the person behind the product and banner.  Also I see it is a Liverpool number that is given, I do not know whether Gastric band some of the other services that those involved in the site provide are local and the extent that they are fine to be purchased by people across the UK and beyond - If services are localised around Liverpool then having the ads in such a dominant place may not be optimising your ad revenue (which could always be put on Adwords Display Network and optimised around Liverpool if that is the case.  I tried to click on the banner too for more information and it did not lead to more information.  I wanted to know enough in answering this question to click on in and not being able to annoyed me (only a tiny bit) but would add to user experience and improve conversions. Also whether you think you do or not, you do sponsored posting and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that from a user experience perspective as long as you convey it in a way that meets both the needs of advertisers AND viewers. I think you have been given the right advice in terms of optimising conversion from an individual visit but the wrong advice more generally.  As well as a new visitors clicks you also want to engage with them so they dont hit the back button, facilitate social sharing and provide a quality user experience so that they are going to engage more with the site then you want to have less banners in different places than you do currently.  You want to make it easy for people to share the articles with others and enable your readership to grow which can make all your advertising perform better. Others have mentioned that there was some slightly dated content that was still high profile, this is obviously bad for the type of site you are doing.  You also mentioned in a positive sounding way that it was all your own group of people that were writing content which is actually a bad thing  and the two points are connected.  Would I keep coming back to reading posts at SEOmoz (before I became pro and come to use the tools) if it was just Rand and other staff posting?  Perhaps but no where near as often.  I have welcomed the whiteboard fridays with different perspectives and different expertise, I like the fact that I get access to hundreds of experts here with different perspectives and this would not happen without guest contributions.  Also it means you can have much more content without having to write it all.  Ok you might give a link away but as long as you ensure that the articles are of high quality and only a minor proportion are clearly sponsored (and do not make this too deceptive) then all you are doing is making your site better with more varied content and sponsored posts are less damaging to user experiences than big banners. I will stress that I am completely not the demographic for your site.  If I had my way google would give out moderate penalties for articles less than 1500 words and bigger penalties for articles less than 1000 words and gossipy type topics would also get google penalties unless searched for explicitly so "news" would not give xfactor or celeb stories in the SERP results. Also the most relevant people for you to get views from is your users and it does not look like you have all that many links to your site at present which will be harming your SEO.  You may want to look at getting some sponsored articles and enhancing SEO as well as addressing some of the user experience issues. But it is a pretty good site considering it is no-ones main concern.

Hi Diane, We're not aware of problems with the site being slow, but we have had some problems with Rank Tracker. When you're having problems with a tool not working properly, visit our Help Hub at http://www.seomoz.org/help and use the "Contact our Help Team" button and our help desk will be sure to get back to you. The Q&A is more for how to use our tools, and SEO in general, and while I try to look at every question here, it can sometimes take a couple of days before I see everything (especially on a weekend).

Take into account what Keri says!!!!

The page rank for your website is 2, thats what i can see. Most important thing for you is to see if there is any  dramatic change in traffic, rankings and pages indexed by google. You also have to check inner pages PR, if these pages also have drop in PR as compared to  past? Do also check for warning in google webmaster tools. If Answer for above questions is NO, don't worry and focus on your Linkbuilding and other SEO efforts.

thanks for this. tried onlywire and do not like it. what i am trying to do is, when i have a news piece, i want to be able to post it to many places as possible for them to then go to the site to read the rest of the news

thanks for that kerry. yes i read that the other week after your suggestion and that is why i have been pointing the links to the right section. But what i have been thinking of, because the home page is the latest news and articles, i am wondering if i should point some of the links to the home page to help me increase in page rank. as most of the links could be classed as relevant to the home page. i have about 5,000 links to carry on with, so not sure if i should choose around 800 of these links and have them to the home page. This is my problem, i have a lot of links coming from the same sources, so for example we get a great deal of traffic from huffington post, they comment on a lot of our articles and produce our articles on their site, so if i have 100 links from them coming from different pages on their site, would it be a good idea to have these pointing to my home page or just choose one link to go to the home page. i would recommend people reading the article above as it produces great advice on what to do with the links many thanks keri

we get a great deal of traffic from huffington post as they run with a lot of our stories which is great, so a huge amount of traffic from there and from other sites. But i want to try and tap into the bookmarking sites as well as the ping services

cheers keri, i have read the information and i am now putting it in place and see how things move along. i have gone through all the 404s and i have found that i am losing around 9,000 links. it will take me a long time to get all the links in the htacess file. and i am just about to post a question about my hosting company as they are telling me that i need a new server over this so i am not sure if i should stick with them or move my site, but anyway, thanks for the help on this 404 problem

hi, cannot remember exactly what date but about a year ago. before that we were number one but our hosting company messed up when they upgraded the site and we lost over 10,000 pages. since last week we were number five in google and now we are number seven. if we redirect all the old pages will that not slow down our site and also will google not like it when we redirect them to the home page when the articles are not there, also how many redirects can you have in your htaccess file

hi thanks for joel. i made a mistake by not listing the new page which is http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/heathrow-news/british-airways-announce-leeds-to-heathrow-flights I am currently sorting pictures out using photo shop, but not sure why type of font i should be using. at the moment i am using ariel but do not think it looks correct

The site was slow for me- Social signals like twitter , facebook, pintrest etc should be encouraged on every post

You could put a small "latest news section" on the HP. Or just select on the specific page a more frequent update setting on your sitemap. Should get it crawled quicker.

good news, the content has been removed. i contacted the website they did not reply and contacted the person the website was working for and told them we would take legal action as we have done this before. they replied and have instructed the website to take down the content. now a question. shall i still contact the hosting company and tell them what has been going on so the site is closed as it seems they are dong this to other people. this company behind the website is working for a hypnotherapist by building links and driving traffic to the site, would love to know who the company is. through checking i have found yesterday that the same company had taken a large number of content from us but now they have all vanished. this is very wrong and i am just wondering if the hypnotherapy company knew what was going on or not? this company seems to have different websites building links pretending it is fresh content. would be interested to know more about them and what they have been charging to steal our content

thanks for that. I was just wondering as when i checked another website i could see a few links coming from there and it puzzled me