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Compile a guide on how to deal with toxic materials (links, references and all) and pitch to gov and edu sites for inclusion.
Cross promote with industry operators (builders, painters...etc).
DIY guides that people will appreciate. How to fix a simple problem or step by step illustration.
Yes you can get links like that - and you know what works really well? Lies and misrepresentation. I know because I have seen it. Basically getting the link "Google legit" way (e.g. not buying links) but totally unethical in every other way. For example I know of a team who says they are a doctor of physics at some university and bull their way into gov/edu listings on the basis of false identity. Once their client found out they were fired immediately.
It will not pick it up automatically, however if you go massive with it or somebody reports you and you get a manual audit then you could be in trouble. There is a way of getting links without asking for links - and that is to create a need and reason for linking. For example you can provide them with optional code snippets that would save them time explaining the rules of the competition (T&C?) and other handy devices which would save webmasters time.
It could be the case of different browsers hitting different data centres which have not yet consolidated their rankings.
Google updates public PR rarely these days... you could have a good site with PR0 for months so not a very good way to judge the risk or benefit that way. In fact if you have a history of buying links with same anchor text from high PR sites over a period of time you could trigger a penalty more so then with crappy little low quality links.
Well, one would assume that quality content = ranks well. It's kind of a loop, isn't it 
Demand is a very interesting point!
If there are 200 content pieces on a topic versus only 2 pieces of content and one is really good value would undoubtedly be much higher where there is less such content available.
Firstly URL effect is minor in comparison to the actual navigational hierarchy.
I give preference to short and neat URLs however www.company.com/category/sub-category/service doesn't sound terrible to me. What would be my primary concern is if this is how you get to that page:
Home > Category > Sub Category > Service (3 clicks)
If this "Service" is a key service to your client then it would be wise to create navigational wormholes to drill through from say home page or top level category page and label it as "popular" or within a piece of text.
In a website with 200-300 pages PageRank distribution and indexation should not be a problem (assuming you have decent links) so there is no huge need for flattening site architecture to the point where you have 1000 links on each page.
I have heard Matt Cutts validate this point in at least two or three of his videos stating that linking your main content from as high as possible is the key.
Not coming up for a term that is within your domain is not a good sign:
http://www.google.nl/search?q=spelenroulette&pws=0
At this point I am thinkiing penalty or ban, however ban is not the case as you still rank for an exact domain search:
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=spelenroulette.nl
Only 11 pages on the site (or indexed):
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=site%3Aspelenroulette.nl
Your site seems pretty poor in content and purpose so it could be an algorithmically assigned penalty. The thing is that my dutch is not that great so I cannot evaluate (I am also not sure if the new algo applies to Holland yet).
Link command shows no links:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=link%3Aspelenroulette.nl
You're in a very spammy niche and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of filter or penalty applied.
Search for: "spelenroulette.nl" -site:spelenroulette.nl brings 37 instances where your domain was mentioned (or perhaps linked) and they don't seem that flashy.
What was your link building style?
Yup. This is pretty much default view for all my searches now. The who and authoriship seem very important to Google right now. So if you're nobody you won't do well. Issue for start-ups?
It's better to sort out the problem in the source rather than patching it with rel canonical. One thing you can do to help the situation is to teach Google about your URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools:
Under ordinary circumstances I would just go ahead and do it, however lately I am seeing an increased activity of Google taking action against link manipulation. I would put proper disclosure on the landing page explaining why users are seeing it and if you do get in trouble it's a very simple explanation to Google.
If you, however, trigger an algorithmic filter then the solution is to nofollow all the links and wait for Google to pick it up.
If you don't want any dramas to start with use nofollow straight away.
I can tell you exactly what happened to one of our client's websites. We went into a similar debate over a .de and .com domain and as a result of inability to come to an agreement (between SEO and developers) both were released with no canonical handling whatsoever.
The outcome was good, perhaps due to a bit of luck. What happened was that Google figured out that this was another geographic region site and allowed for both pages to be indexed, cached and found in results (one for google.de and the other for google.com.au / google.com). So when I searched for the same sentence in "quotes" it would bring up both results without omitting.
If I can make an educated guess, it would be a mix of geo location (contact details, tld) and the fact that layout added a substatntial amount of difference to both sites (as one layout header, nav, sidebars and fotter were in german and other in english).
In what timeframe are you looking to add german translation to your pages?
You may also want to go to: Your site on the web > Link to your site and find the content which was linked most and best linking sites and ask people to link to a new URL. This will give you all of the value as 301 redirect does not necessarily pass all the link signals across (hinted by Matt Cutts).
If your competition is getting quantities of links and beating you while your your best content effort cannot level up... that might be what you need to do - get as many new c-block links using all means possible apart from buying links and spam (I cannot recommend those).
Article submission and directories are not my favorite activity and I do not believe in it - however there is ample evidence that sheer quantities can win.
The answer I gave you is simplified as I have not analysed your and your competitor's links in details (anchor text, authority, numbers, velocity...etc).
Having a TLD specific to a country/region makes sense not only from SEO but also business point of view. I understand what it means to start again and building links again from scratch however you have a good headstart and a super relevant link from your old juiced up site. Google will figure it out it's the same brand, country specific and will start treating it as a family of websites. Make sure you use all local signals (phone, address, business reg numbers and are present in local directories). When interlinking own sites ensure good disclosure is in place.
Sounds like Google likes this feature and will not remove it unless they figure users don't like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbpfjzEBAM
Good point and absolutely a must, though once you exhaust all that and have already a good content strategy and your competitors are still kicking your butt - what then?
Internally we go technical, big backlink profile analysis, do the maths and go hard and creative on links. It's kind of like brute force in some respect however within 2-3 months you're going up after many months of stagnation.
I see this all the time in highly competitive industries (e.g. insurance, flights...etc).
There have been cases though where we have seen quality beat quantities (in extreme differences)... still a bit of a mystery to me if I am to be completely honest.
I wonder how many Serbian SEOs on SEOMoz? Raise your hand everyone.
Pozdrav!
If I understand the question correctly you want to temporarily point people to the old domain while you wait for the new domain site to be launched and stay there permanently.
If the above is correct then solution is:
pre-launch: setup 302 from newdomain.com to olddomain.com
post-launch: remove 302 and setup 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com
This way people who visit the new domain from stationery and printed material will go to the old domain and still get the content they expect while Google will be informed this change is only temporary. After the new site is launched you break the temporary redirect and setup a permanent redirect directive towards the new domain and new site.
Your idea of link building may be very different from mine. Why in the world would you need to rotate proxies while link building? Please help me understand.
