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Hi Tanja,

Keep in mind that the Adword Keyword tool is meant for advertising, so the "competition" is thought to be a better measure of paid competition, not the organic rankings you are trying to achieve.

The best approach is to use the KW difficulty tool to analyze the competition. Look at all the metrics. Run a complete report for your top keywords. Are the competitors pages properly optimized? Can you beat them anywhere? Pay close attention to title tags and inbound anchor text, as these carry a lot of weight.

I still get most of my ideas from Google's tool, at least as a starting point. I then try to find modifies that I can more easily rank for. There are 3 types of modifiers I can think of off the top of my head:

Let's use the keyword "running shoes" for example:

Type Modifier: "Wholesale Running Shoes"

Location Modifier: "Running Shoes Germany"

Date Modifier: "Running Shoes 2012"

By optimizing my page around specific modifiers (and you often can't find these in Google Adwords) you can rank more easily for given keywords. The more specific, the better.

Hi Kyle,

First of all, I can't wait for Marie's book! I don't want to recover any ground that she's already gone over, so I'll just share a few thoughts.

1. Has Google verified it's a link penalty? "Site violates Google's quality guidelines" could also refer to on-site issues like hidden text or doorway pages. Given the information you provided, it's most likely a link based penalty, but you never know.

2. Not sure from your description, but I almost always disavow entire domains using the domain: command instead of individual URLs. I've seen requests rejected because they disavowed not enough URLs when they should have blocked the entire domain.

3. I agree with Marie. If you've been penalized, it's generally safer to error on the side of disavowing too many domains than not enough. This isn't to say you should disavow known good links, but if links are questionable, why take a chance.

4. Also agree with Marie on submitting documentation about your removal efforts. Wrote a post about it here: http://cyrusshepard.com/penalty-lifted/  

(they tend to like everything in Google Docs files. Cuts down the risk of spam)

5. Minor point, but Google likes everything formatted in a UTF-8 encoded .txt file. I've never seen one rejected because of this, but I hear it happens.

6. I'm turning into a fan of Link Detox for toxic link discovery. Instead of running it in standard mode, upload a file of your complete backlink profile from Webmaster Tools and have Link Detox check those links. Sort the final list by hand - this means check each link! For hints, read Paddy Moogan's post about low quality links: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

Damn, we should turn this into a blog post!

Hope this helps!

Great question! Thanks for asking it here.

Short answer: yes, in most cases Google will see the keyword in your URL, as long as your parameters and crawling structures are configured correctly. (At this point, we have no reason to assume otherwise). But how much benefit you will see is debatable.

In truth, a URL with 3 parameters would be considered "overly-dynamic" and not ideal for SEO. There's a good chance Google isn't crawling that deep on your site and many of these may be missed. Check a few random URLs to see if Google has indexed them.

Also check Google Webmaster to make sure your crawling parameters are set right.

Here's the deal: Keywords this far out in a URL probably won't count for much in Google's algorythm. Any ranking boost you see will most likely be negligible. But this doesn't mean it's not worth it. You might get a rankings boost, and you also might see a higher Click-through rate in the SERPs as Google highlights keywords contained in the search query.

So what's the conclusion? Yes, adding keywords to the end of the URL is probably a good idea and you may see a small boost from it, but I wouldn't expect much more.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the detailed answer. Some good advice here, but I can't say I agree with everything. In particular, it's a pretty broad statement to say that Social marketing has nothing to do with SEO. We know Google uses social media to discover new content, social shares are highly correlated with rankings, and Google has incorporated many SEO-like features into Google+ that have implications across the broader algorithm.

Also, social signals are greatly incorporated into personalized results and local SERPs.

There's a few other points. But I guess we both agree to learn as much as you can and question conventional wisdom. We agree more than we disagree.

If you're looking for a more automated solution, or tools to assist, here's a summary of the tools mentioned in the post:

1. rmoov

2. Link Cleanup and Contact

3. Remoove’em

4. DeleteBacklinks.com

You can also use any number of services to dig out bad links, including Open Site Explorer or Majestic, but the aforementioned Link Cleanup and Contact tool is among the best.

After identifying bad links, many webmasters leverage Mechanical Turk to find contact information and even write emails.

These are just a few of the ways to tackle the problem - there are undoubtedly many more. Find the solution that best works for you.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Typically, spam links don't generate much actual traffic. Is it possible that what you're seeing in GA is referral spam instead?  http://www.optimizesmart.com/geek-guide-removing-referrer-spam-google-analytics/

Also, do you see the links in Open Site Explorer? This might help determine if the links are real or if the referrals you are seeing are "phantom"

Lots of good answers here.

Generally, there's not much benefit to doing this, especially if the domains are new as Streamline Metrics pointed out.

The risk however, is if the domains have a negative history associated with them. If bad links were pointed at the old domain, then those links will now point at your main site when you redirect them. If an algorithmic action like Penguin or an over-optimization filter was applied to the old site, your risk carrying that baggage to the new site.

Sometimes it makes sense to redirect domains.

• SEOmoz.com redirects to seomoz.org. Lots of folks type seomoz.com, so this makes sense.
• You migrate an old domain.

In general, however, there's virtually no SEO benefit to buying a previously unestablished keyword rich domain and redirecting it for traffic, rankings boost (unless on those rare occasions it's a very popular domain name to begin with)

That's a great question. I'll see if I can shed some light on the issue for you.

If I understand your question correctly,  you're wondering why Twitter doesn't show up as a backlink to your homepage, http://www.idyllic-software.com/, in Open Site Explorer or any of the other SEOmoz tools. Is that correct?

(I'm referencing this report here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?page=1&site=www.idyllic-software.com%2F&sort=domain_authority&target=domain)

It does seem strange, because OSE has indexed your twitter account. We can verify that here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=twitter.com%2Fidyllicsoftware

With a Page Authority of 48, that usually would be high enough for Linkscape to index the link to your site on your Twitter page. Unfortunately, Linkscape isn't foolproof, and sometimes it does miss links, especially if there aren't a lot of inbound pages to the linking page in question. (sorry if this seems like a circular argument)

My suspicion is because Linkscape has only indexed three inbound links to your Twitter page, there isn't enough Authority present to follow the links found there. The only solution is to build more, high quality links to your Twitter page to ensure the links get indexed.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the links are obviously there, Google can see them, and if Twitter links count for anything, then you are getting full credit, regardless if they show up in Linkscape or not. Oftentimes you'll see edge cases like this where a link appears in one index but not another. Moz is working on doubling the size of the current index, so there's a good chance you'll see your links in an upcoming update.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Keith,

Instead of answering this question, I suspect what you're looking for is a basic introduction to Google's Algorythm, and how everything fits together.

And although nobody but Google can really answer that, perhaps I can point you in the right direction. For example, it's important to remember Google uses over 200 signals in it's algorithm that all work together in a very complex fashion. A few of these we try to examine in our Search Engine Ranking Factors study.

You can never quite tell what factor pushes a website to the top, but often we have hints. One of my favorite tools is Moz's Keyword Analysis tool (run a full SERP analysis after the initial analysis) which will show you multiple data points and analysis to help you figure out why one result ranks higher than the next.

And not to dodge the question about Panda and the other updates, but they tend to work together. You can find more information about each here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Interestingly, there's a strong correlation between the number of nofollowed links to a domain and higher rankings, although the correlation isn't as high as with the number of followed links to a domain.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-1

Most well ranking websites have a natural amount of nofollowed links, but I've never seen any evidence that a 50/50 ratio would either harm or benefit you.

Regardless, you want to keep working to build good, mostly followed links. If you continue to do this, you should be in good hands.

Hi Luke,

Thanks for asking this question. There's been a lot of misconceptions around press releases lately, in the wake of Matt Cutt's recent statements, and I've been meaning to write a blog post about it soon.

I happen to use press releases for link building, successfully, quite a bit. The trick is realizing that the links on the press release sites themselves don't really help you, and can actually hurt you if you over-optimize (or even optimize) the anchor text.

Press releases distributed across a vast network of duplicate, low quality pages have the potential to create a very Penguin-like problem.

Here's a portion of my presentation from MozCon which addressed this topic:

http://www.slideshare.net/cyrusshepard/high-roi-content-strategies-for-seo/48

My three rules for press releases are:

1. Don't link to yourself (or client) using important keywords
2. Linking using generic anchors or your domain name is fine, i.e. http://example.com
3. The goal is not links directly from the press releases themselves, but from 3rd party sources that pick up on the news and write their own content about you - the way a press release is traditionally supposed to work.

In my opinion, if you press release doesn't earn links from independent 3rd party sources (news sites, reporters), or earn you significant traffic, then you most likely didn't have anything newsworthy to announce in the first place, and likely wasted your money.

The whole thing rest on newsworthy content. As a PR professional, I'm probably preaching to the choir, and I'm sure you understand better than most, perhaps even better than me.

In the end, don't fear the press release. They serve a legitimate purpose. Just use them the way they were meant to be used - by earning links instead of buying them.

I'm going to sidestep this question and say that the profile Google prefers is one that is earned, and not built.

Anytime you are able to choose the anchor text of your external links, this is a "built" link and no matter how much you diversify, you risk creating a pattern that Google can detect - if not now, then in the future.

The external sites that allow you to choose your own anchor text, in most cases (but not all) often are not the best link targets.

Is this realistic? For a lot of link builders, probably not. But the key is to diversify as much as possible. A lot of folks will tell you silly rules like 20% branded anchor text, but those rules have changed so much in the past 2 years, where will they be a year from now? Google keeps changing the rules to crack down on unearned links.

Regardless, I'll get off my soapbox and leave you with a couple of posts/videos I made about the subject of anchor text:

http://moz.com/blog/high-value-tactics-futureproof-link-building-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/click-here-seo

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

The link title element is not known to be a significant ranking factor. In fact, stuffing this attribute with keywords might even have the opposite effect.

This is one of those cases where you ask "what's best for the user?"

Hi CJ,

302s, by definition, don't have page titles (because they redirect - there's no title on the page)

So the URL listed there is the URL. This is a little confusing because of the formatting on the SEOmoz report. By default it displays "Title" "URL", but this obviously doesn't work in the case of redirects. Something our UX people should probably take a look at.

Anyway, whats more important is how to fix this.

1. Download your crawl report in CSV format.

2. Open the CSV in Excel or similar program.

3. Search for the URL: http://www.example.com/www.example.com

4. In the last column you'll find the "referrer" information. This is the page that the broken link was found on.

5. Go to that page on your website. Find the broken link. Fix. (unfortunately, I can't tell you how to do this step.)

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

"How can you get a D.A. of 45 using backlinks they get?"

Keep in mind that Domain Authority doesn't have the same strong spam algorithms that Google incorporates. Although there is a consideration for spammy sites, it's actually much easier to manipulate Domain Authority than it is Google (although in the future improvements to Domain Authority will likely mean more spam is discounted)

Unfortunately, manipulating Domain Authority in a black-hat way does nothing for your rankings. While Domain Authority remains one of the best predictors of how a domain will rank in search results, Google does not actually take Domain Authority into considerations. If your competitors are buying obvious unnatural links, it's likely they are not doing as well in search results as you might suspect.

If you're looking for long lasting results, better to have 1 good earned link than 1000 spammy one.

If I understand correctly, you have incoming affiliate links which don't work on HTTPs due to varnish, so you are redirecting them to HTTPs, where they do work. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Okay, first of all if you are serving up two versions of your site on any page (HTTP and HTTPS) without 301'ing one to the other, you should absolutely have canonical tags pointing to the HTTP. And without the affiliate tracking parameter.  (Edit: see thoughts below on NOINDEX)

As for 301 vs 302: Technically, to stay within Google's guidelines, affiliate links to your site should be nofollowed. In practice, sometimes they can offer a ranking benefit, but more than often Google discounts them. Regardless, if you abuse them for linking purposes it can come back to bite you in some instances. There's no clear answer, but keep in mind 302s may very well negate some of the link equity from these affiliate links (which may or may not be a good thing)

NOINDEX - My thought process is, if you don't want the HTTPS URLs indexed, and the link equity from the affiliate links isn't a consideration, then it's likely best to NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW the pages. This ensures they will be kept out of Google's index, keep crawl efficiency optimized, and deliver cleaner results. This also means the canonical tag isn't necessary. (and probably unwanted, as it sends conflicting signals with the NOINDEX tag) Keep in mind this strategy effectively kills any incoming link equity from the affiliate links, but does help keep you within Google's good graces.

Hi Jimmy,

I get a 404 when visiting the URL you gave for a sitemap http://www.mobbly.com/sitemap.xml

Is this correct?

Unfortuneatly, it's pretty common for Google not to index all of your images. It really depends on several factors - the uniqueness of the image, the authority of the page, how prominant the image is, the alt text associate with the image, etc.

Here's a good article about getting more bang from your buck with images - http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/01/23/google-image-search-traffic

Hi Clancy,

Best practices is to host your blog on the same domain, and same subdomain, as your main website. This offers so many long term benefits, you're almost throwing everything away if you consider anything else.

Depending on the technology you are using to construct your website, there are different ways to prevent your users from accessing your site, but there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you're using WordPress, you can simply install a maintenance or "coming-soon" type plugin to keep visitors out, and then install your blog on a subdirectory.  example.com/blog

If this isn't possible and you want to host your blog elsewhere, keeping on a subdomain as Jim suggested would be the next best alternative. Apart from linking to your site, there's not much else you can do to pass link juice between the two sites. You can, after your site launches, move your blog and migrate your traffic via 301 redirects.

Robots.txt files are sequential, which means they follow directives in the order they appear. So if two directives conflict, they will follow the last one.

So the simple way to do this is to disallow all files first, then allow the directory you want next. It would look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /test

Caveat: This is NOT the way robots.txt is supposed to work. By design, robots.txt is designed for disallowing, and technically you shouldn't ever have to use it for allowing. That said, this should work pretty well.

You can check your work in Google Webmaster, which has a robots.txt checker. Site Configuration > Crawler Access. Just type in your proposed robots.txt, then a test URL and you should be good to go.

Hope this helps!

The PR is legitamate. But the site itself is bad, bad news.

If you check whois, you can see the registration is only a few months old. So how did they achieve such high PR in such a short period of time?

A very smart (and un-named) colleague of mine suggested using spyonweb to check the Google Analytics and Adsense code of this site to see what other sites it was connected to. Looks like it's part of a huge link network all owned or managed by the same people.

(hint - use spyonweb to search for the Google Adsense code "pub-xxxxxxxxx")

Regardless, the site is obviously selling links at the bottom of the page. Although Google doesn't catch all paid links, these are so obvious that anyone who buys them is at huge risk of a penalty. A smart webmaster would be wise to stay away from paid link offers like this.