Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Backlinks from authority domains is the fastest way to increase your domain authority. I would add that backlinks to a variety of your pages is a must as well. Great content will eventually get you natural links and increase authority, but it's not the fastest way. Authority increases with authoritative backlinks.

Links are good to have if you want to show up better in search engines, but linkwheels are essentially massive link exchanges that Google does not like. Now, can they catch you? No, not really. Even simply linkwheels are gaming Google right now. Trust me, I know, I get emails all the time about getting involved in one link scheme or another. I know the players, and they rank pretty well.

Google has frowned upon this type of activity, but I haven't seen them really do anything about it, so you do it at your own risk. One problem for Google is tracking them down. Unless a website has 100% of its links come in via exchange of some kind, there's no telling if someone is participating in this or not. I'd say you could probably get away with it as long as you get other forms of links from other sources. I personally don't bother, and Google doesn't like it, so again, it's your own risk, but I've seen it be effective for several websites.

I'm afraid there is no way to delete them. You get to ask a question of SEOMoz staff each month however, so rather than post this, I would ask them the question of if they can add a delete button or delete a question for you.

This may sound weird, but I think the answer to your question is no. Panda and its subsequent rollouts hit a few of my websites. But it seemed to me it was a page level thing, not a domain level thing. For example, Panda seemed to target some affiliate websites. I have lots of affiliate websites. Some of their rankings were untouched, while other pages suffered. Granted, any site that got hit by Panda got hit pretty hard. But oddly, several pages on those sites were completely unaffected.

To your point there, blogspot.com, wordpress.com and tumblr.com all have several sub-domains that were affected without the root domains getting affected, so what you are asking is if blog.mysite.com got hit, then did mysite.com get hit as well?

I think that just as pages rank and not domains, so were pages affected by Panda and not whole domains or sub-domains.

And this is a classic example of how URL structure can be so important. Do you use wordpress? If so, go to your permalinks and try and change them to static, non parameter urls. Then you don't run into that problem. The issue is you cannot redirect one to the other, only rel-canonical it. This should still work the same way and from an SEO perspective you should be fine though. I would still rather have nice urls instead though.

Any link juice to one url that has a rel=canonical tag to another url will not pass link juice I believe. Only a 301 redirect passes link juice from one url to another. the rel=canonical tag has more to do with indexing and avoiding duplicate content than it does redirecting link juice around.

bit.ly links are just 301 redirects. All the link juice that goes to one bit.ly url passes to its destination url for the most part. Like other 301's it loses a bit when it redirects, so always better to get direct links when possible, but sites like twitter might make this impossible for long urls, so take what you can get.

In the old Q&A set up your response was automatically given a thumbs up by you so that you got a mozpoint for every response you gave. Now you have to manually thumb up your responses. Why was this change made? Can we get it back to the way it was?

If your entire link creation process is asking 10 sites a day for a link, you can expect 0 and consider yourself lucky any time you get a link. I wouldn't even try 10 sites a week. Don't think of it as link building, think of it as relationship building. You cannot create 10 new relationships a day with new websites. You just can't. People recognize the non-spammy, relevant people reaching out to them. They also recognize the people reaching out to 10 sites a day just trying to get links.

If you're in it for the links, what incentive does that give the site you're reaching out to? You're just using them to further your own agenda. Do you offer a link in exchange? Then you are violating Google's guidelines and having too many of those reciprocals will definitely hurt you.

The key is to create synergistic, valuable relationships online. That's more than linking. For example, with my college football blog, I had lots of people approaching me to do link exchanges. I didn't really pay attention. So when I wanted to promote my blog, I approached a blog I knew was pro-BCS ( I am not) and challenged them. We posted our arguments and rebuttals. Naturally, we linked to the previous posts of the other. So they got links from me, I got links from them. More than that, we both increased readership by receiving visitors from each other.

Now if I want to promote something, I simply email them and let them know what I published and I know they will talk about it. I didn't just build a link here, I built a relationship. That relationship has results in more visitors, more exposure and of course, more links. That's better than just blanketing every college football blog and asking which will link to me.

So I would make a goal of trying to create a new relationship every day. Do a lot of research, come up with a good plan, and then execute that strategy. Webmasters are very open to new opportunities. You just have to present one to them in a way that shows value.

Do this and you can expect to come away with at least one solid relationship each week moving forward. Give that a try and see how it goes, I bet you'll be pretty glad you did.

There are a few things I would recommend doing to any website regardless of TLD to show geographic relevance.

1. Host your site in Australia. If you are in the UK and have a .com then at least make sure the site is registered with an Australian registrar and hosted on a server in Australia. That should be the first thing to do.

2. Be sure to put your Australian address and contact information on the site. Probably more than just the contact page...put that type of info in the footer so it is sitewide and Google definitely spots it.

3. Buy your .au domain name and 301 redirect it to your .com. I would even buy other .au domain names and redirect them to your .com. Be sure not to buy hundreds of existing sites and redirec them though, as this is creating doorway pages and is considered black hat SEO.

4. Focus all of your link building efforts on .au domain names. Make sure you are in Australian specific directories as well. If you have a location with a physical address, be sure to get into the local directories too.

5. In Google Webmaster Tools under settings you can specify your country and language I believe. Make sure you tell Google you are targeting users in Australia.

If you follow those 5 steps you should definitely increase your relevance in Google's mind to the Australian audience. Good luck!

Question is more like does Google's donations to Wikimedia imply they have some kind of relationship? Perhaps preferential treatment? Google seems to be very interested in keeping Wikipedia.com live. Wondering if that same concern transfers over to the algorithm in any way.

301 redirects will maintain about 90% of your blog's authority. The only way to retain it all is to get the links to point to the new URL, which is probably impossible if you have hundreds or thousands of them. Just set up a wildcard redirect that does a 301 of blog.site.co.uk/* to site.co.uk/blog/* so that every page redirects and is maintained. The worst thing you could do here is not transfer some of your content over and leave a bunch of 404's behind.

Good call, thumbs up for that I will overlook it as well, it would just be nice to not have to remember to do it all the time.

I wouldn't worry about anything. What you are describing is Google's defense against a Google Bomb. If they see way more links than they have found lately with identical anchor text pointing to the same place, they get suspicious. A little hosting site with no links suddenly getting some will not trigger any red flags. I would say do as many links each day as you can, you'll never get the sandbox effect or anything like that. As long as you avoid getting several hundred thousand links all at once with identical anchor text you should be fine.

There was this pretty major algorithm update over the weekend called the Farmer Update. You can read more about it from Search Engine Land here:

http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

If this applies to you, then it would definitely explain the drop in traffic.

At SMX during the You&A with Matt Cutts, Danny asked why the algo update was called Penguin. Matt said:

"We thought the codename actually might give too much info about how it works so the lead engineer got to choose."

Last night Google released their 39 updates for the month of May. Among them was this:

"Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm."

Whoa, codename twref2 for Penguin improvement? Is this giving us an insight about how it works? I would guess the ref2 means second refresh perhaps. But tw I am not sure about.

What do you think? Is there a hidden insight here?

These techniques work just fine. Panda may have hurt the quality of these aggregators and directories, but they still pass link juice. I would probably not pay for it, but there are a lot of free ones, and if you have a blog you might as well submit to them as it is quick and easy.

Depends on what you are looking at. When you look up the URL in OSE, it will show you linking domains to that URL, not to the whole domain. If in OSE you go to the full link metrics tab you can see everything on that url and domain, and all of those numbers should be in the toolbar somewhere.

That's pretty steep. You have to think about more thank link value too though. People looking for a lawyer may find you in the nolo directory. it may be expensive but it is a pretty fantastic link. Maybe do all the other stuff first, see how well you can do in the rankings, and when you're looking for something to put you over the top, try getting a link then. If you can get to the top without it, then great, you saved yourself some cash.

My understanding of site links is that Google will automatically generate them based on your internal linking structure.

Pages that appear in your navigation have a better chance of appearing there. Basically they will normally put site links to the pages with the most pagerank.

The anchor text is determined by the title of the page and the internal anchor text pointing to it. Get them matching and saying what you want and your sitelinks should say the same thing.

If you block a sitelink Google certainly can replace it, but there's no guarantee.

I'm guessing the T in tw could be term, text, title, time or trust. Those are common t words in SEO.

The W could be whois, whitehat, wordpress, wall, web, widget.

Just trying to get some ideas out there.

Submitting articles is a great way to get some backlinks. I would suggest ezinearticles.com, buzzle.com, and maybe a few other high quality article directories you can find. Here is a list: http://www.articlesdirectories.com/

You usually have to put the link in your bio/about the author section, so keep that in mind as you submit your articles to these websites. And don't submit several articles to the same category of the same website with a link to the same URL over and over again. Not going to do much good. Maybe a a few articles to each site with links to different pages of your site each time.