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Is a natural link profile a ranking signal? No. You don't get better rankings because your link profile looks "more natural" than another website. It's more of a spam signal. If your link profile looks unnatural, you could get penalized. But there's no scale for being more or less natural, there's just natural or unnatural.

A natural link profile has a variety of backlinks. Those links come from a variety of sources. Those links have varied anchor texts. Those links have varied placements on the different pages. Those links are pointing to a variety of your internal pages. The links come from different types of websites.

As far as showing link totals and growth in a graph, Majestic SEO is great, but it's easy to do yourself in Excel. I do it that way because Majestic goes back 4 or 5 years and sometimes I'm more interested in just seeing progress over the last few months.

Also make sure you 301 redirect every page of the old site to its counterpart on the new .com site. So many people just redirect their home page but forget about the rest or don't know how to do it right. And you don't just want all your old pages redirecting to the new home page. Every page should go to it's .com counterpart. Make sure that is going on and that will help you avoid losing too much in the rankings.

I don't really get what you are saying here. The content of your promo subdomain is going to change every 5 days? If this is the case, you want to do SEO for promos generically. If you have a hat promo for the next 5 days, you will never rank for hat promos in 5 days. That and if you did rank for it in say a month, then it won't even be hat promos anymore anyway, so your ranking would go away.

Do SEO, just do it for whatever your website is about, not for what the content will be for the next 5 days.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

This is the only one in all of my wordpress blogs and I've never needed anything else. I doubt you need so many. I wonder if all of them ping Google at once and that might even piss them off and ignore you. Not sure to be honest, but my blog posts are indexed within a minute or two.

If I understand correctly, you have a site with several pages that discuss different models, and each of those pages has this same spec list? You are not being hit with a duplicate content penalty. If you were, every website in the world that does reviews would be hit hard. I just did a quick search on treadmill reviews. Look at those results on the top page. They all use the same specs on all their pages. Treadmilldoctor.com and treadmillreviews.com seem to use a near identical system to each other even. Yet none of them have duplicate penalties.

WIthout knowing your website, there is definitely some other reason you are not ranking anymore. There was a new algorithm change that could have affected you.

These links are helpful because any link from a good domain is a great thing to have. OSE may not find them if those pages are blocked by a robots.txt file or password protected or something like that. Without seeing any URL's I can't really tell you for sure. But these are good links to have. Be sure to get higher PA and more relevant pages linking to you as well though. Having a good variety helps.

If you can get a low value link for minimal effort, why not? You would get a high quality link with maximum effort, right? If nothing else you demonstrate the variety in your backlinks that Google loves to see. It's ok if not every link you get is the best possible link. It's ok if it doesn't have the best possible anchor text. You got another domain linking to you that is also linking to your competitor, so you're leveling the playing field in a sense. Go for it.

And if you're worried about Google, don't be. A few directories hosted on the same server don't raise red flags. A network of thousands of sites operated by the same person with an intricate link scheme, now that is something to avoid.

That is a whole lot of questions so let me do my best to sum it up for you.

Your new pages are not ranking because new pages don't just rank. The quality of your content helps Google know what phrases to rank your pages for. The links to that page determine its relevance and authority, or how high it will rank for those phrases.

Putting up new content just because does not guarantee any rankings. Are there internal links to these pages? Are they in your sitemap? Do they have any external inbound links coming to them?

Make sure you have internal links to these pages as well as external links to them. Make sure the content is more than just original and well written- it has to be optimized. Make sure your title tags are all unique and keyword rich. These types of basic SEO practices should be followed first and foremost. Then if nothing is ranking like you think it should after 3 months, you can look at other things.

I would imagine that if they have been indexed but aren't ranking that they just need some optimizing and some link juice. That tends to get pages ranked pretty well.

Brent, this seems to be a very ambitious undertaking. Those look like some big keywords that sound somewhat competitive. Here is what I would recommend for your questions:

1. Based on your goals, I would target the photography words as opposed to the photographer words. You'll probably just as easily rank for both if you have one, but still, someone looking for a photographer wants to see a small sample, then some contact information and pricing packages. Sounds like you just want the casual passerby to stop and stay a while. So I would focus on photography.

Your question about which terms to target is all of them! Make your home page photo blog or photography blog. Then make a category for each keyword you want to target, black and white, abstract, etc. Get each category page to rank for its keyword. Then you don't just pick one, you can do it all.

2. Photography over photographer(s)

3. Not enough keywords to focus on. A quick search for photography and you'll see a lot of different types of searches, from religious to nature to animals to objects. People look for all kinds. I would find all the different types people search for (That you actually do) and then create a category for each one so that you can upload your photos into each category and get that category page ranking for that particular term.

These are bigger keywords, but one key to SEO is deep links. Don't just link to your home page for one keyword. Get links to all your pages for all your keywords. This is why you should have a robust keyword list to start as you have already. You're on the right path.

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.

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.

Andrew, I haven't done this because I worry about having multiple employees and interns roaming around looking for good sites. They will undeoubtedly find the same websites and contact the same people and then we could look like spammers. Is there a safeguard against this so that they all avoid the same sites?

My first knee jerk response to this post is to target the part about purchased links. If you have paid links, then I would remedy that problem before I look at anything else.

Do you have a lot of adsense on this site? I've been hearing left and right that a lot of sites that got hit hard were those with 5 or 6 adsense units on one page. Excessive ads drive users crazy, so Google could be torching you for that.

As for the auto generate dupe content pages, Google may or may not have found them. Were there links to these pages? Do you know how Majestic found them?

If you never linked to these pages it is unlikely Google ever found them. Google tends to only crawl content with links or found in a sitemap. If you never had links to those dupe pages and they weren't in your sitemap, I doubt it is causing the problem. Plus if that were the issue, you probably would have been torched long before this algo update.

There is SEO benefit to forwarding these domains if they have any incoming links. If so, a 301 redirect to your main domain could send some link juice and help rankings.

If these parked domains aren't even indexed by Google and have no links, then there is no SEO value in a 301 redirect because Google won't even know about it anyway. I would still do it as there is no harm that could be done, that's for sure.

I would recommend against doing any kind of meta refresh, as Google frowns upon those. Just 301 redirect the parked domains to your live website and it will either do nothing or help a little, but it can't hurt.

I don't think I quite understand. You have a website with a blog as part of it. There are pages on your website that have the same title as the tag pages of your blog, right? If that is correct, you have a few options.

1. Do you use WordPress? If so, get the all in one seo pack plugin and you can change the format of your blog's tag page titles. You could also put a no index tag on these pages.

2. Block your tag pages with a robots.txt file.

Or you could do both. That would be my suggestion. Change the titles of your tags, no index the tag pages and block them with a robots.txt. I find my tag pages are pretty useless anyway so I don't care if search engines find them or not.

Right now I train my interns and new hires on 5 techniques:

1. Appropriate blog commenting the right way

2. Saving social bookmarks

3. Submitting a website to a directory

4. Publishing articles with links

5. How to build up, maintain and use a Twitter/Facebook/Digg/StumbleUpon profile for SEO

Are there some other lower level link building tactics you have tried to teach interns or new hires?

I haven't seen any impact on my sites or on my day to day searches. I think most people took the line that 12% of queries were affected to mean that 12% of websites were affected. Far from true. I think while 12% of search queries may have seen the rankings visibly change, this does not mean 12% of Google's indexed sites were affected in some way. I think this was a handful of sites that accounted for a lot of long tail search results.

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!

The secret to good SEO is to stop wasting time with automation tools. SEO simply cannot be automated and left to a robot. If it could, none of us would have jobs

If it automates directory submissions, bookmarks, articles, blog comments or anything else, it's useless and should be left alone. Far too many SEO folks waste far too much time tinkering around with them...only to figure out they are useless and that they wasted a lot of time. The Onion comically gives us another great way to stop wasting time:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/openminded-man-grimly-realizes-how-much-life-hes-w,19273/