Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Mozzers, quick question about link networks. I've identified quite a few, like these:

Build My Rank

Unique Article Wizard

Authority Link Network

Article Ranks

EZ Article Link

Socialadr

Linkvana

SEO LinkVine

Does anyone have experience using any of these? The basic premise is they own or their members own tons of different blogs. You write an article, give it to them, they publish it one one of those blogs. You include a link in your article. Done.

They charge a monthly fee to use and all that, so is it worth it? Anyone had any success with them? Finding mixed things on forums online, and since many of their websites like awfully spammy, wanted to poll the Mozzers and get your thoughts.

That's exactly what I was looking for thanks for your help!

A couple of weeks ago I created a Google+ page for my website and you can see the page here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/101532714567190382783/posts?hl=en

I was logged in to my account when I did so. I'm now ready to start posting on my page and I cannot for the life of me figure out how. I've tried everything I can find to update that page as the page, but I cannot use Google+ as the page. I have no idea how to post anything.

Please help!

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.

Over the weekend we learned Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia.com.

Last year I believe Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia. I now ask, is this suspicious in anyway, seeing that Wikipedia ranks so well in Google for so many terms?

There are several blog posts about it online here and there throughout the years, but what does everyone think?

Thing is the page came out of nowhere. Wasn't on the radar and then suddenly a few days ago was #1 for almost every way there is to search for this exercise bike. I've never dealt with black hatters in my own industry, so I wasn't sure how to determine if they are cloaking or what they are doing. They definitely did not get the ranking naturally and once they had it they redirected the page through an affiliate link. I just know something black hat is involved, I am just not sure what.

Sorry, I can explain. I informed the affiliate manager (we use the same affiliate links through cmtcr.com) and they suspended the account for deceptive practices. That first URL was redirecting to a cmtcr.com link, which is an affiliate link, which then redirected to the advertiser, proform.com.

Because the account was suspended, the first redirect of the URL to cmtcr.com still works, but the affiliate link is not redirecting to the advertiser because the account is suspended. But it formerly went to proform.com. It should get removed promptly at this point, but the question is how did it get there and why did it take their account and redirect being suspended to get caught?

Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these:

proform tour de france

tour de france trainer

tour de france exercise bike

proform tour de france bike

In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL:

www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike

Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com.

I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result?

PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.

I know everyone ever associated with the website and no one put the links there. We have no idea how they got there. Think its worth trying to get them removed?

I work closely with the last owner who had it its entire life. I looked it up in archive.org and from the earliest version of the site it has been him. He knows he definitely did not place the links there. I asked every employee that has ever worked on the site and no one put it there. It is baffling.

There are 362 linking root domains and these are the 5 I can find that appear paid. Likely not doing a lot of damage. Should I contact the group Keri found, MediaNews Group and get these links removed? Even worth it? I mean, they are obviously paid, so I would think this can be hurting me.

I think I may have a problem with someone trying to get me in trouble for paid links. If you look at the following websites, scroll to the bottom and look at the featured links area. There is a link to my website with my keyword on all of them.

mercurynews.com

contracostatimes.com

twincities.com

insidebayarea.com

marinij.com

Now I see a lot of the same links here which leads me to believe these sites are all owned by the same group. Also, 4 of the 5 are Bay Area news sites. The question I have is, are these links hurting me? I did not buy these and did nothing to put them there. I asked the previous owner of the domain who I am in touch with. He is the only other person to own it and he never purchased those links. My guess is a competitor is targeting me perhaps?

Just wondering on everyone's take on this. I really can't afford to be getting hit by these potentially penalizing links right now, not when the busy season is starting up. Should I try to get them removed? Does anyone have experience with this or know how it might have happened?

If I understand you correctly, you are putting navigation links to 80k products? That sounds excessive. Look at how they do it at newegg.com and that is a good example of how to implement navigation for a large ecommerce site.

Something to keep in mind here. Internal links mean almost nothing compared to external inbound links. You want to make sure your content is all crawlable and accessible. After that, don't worry about nofollow and silly things about internal links. NEVER nofollow an internal link. Think about what nofollow is, what it means, and why it exists. You are telling Google a page on your site is not trusted. Bad signal.

Worry more about the inbound links to your site than the navigation links. Make sure you have a sitemap and ensure your content is all crawlable and accessible. If that's the case, don't worry yourself over nofollow or other minute navigation optimization.

This worked like a charm! The site is on something called Zend cart I think and I had to sort through several Controllers but eventually found all the metaTag stuff in there and added a metaDesc variable next to them, unique meta descriptions on every page! Thanks!

Just not happening. I'm just not going to worry about it, thanks for your help

Yeah I took the ReweriteEngine On line out and just added the RewriteRule line in underneat that one. Although it doesn't say anywhere RewriteEngine On in the .htaccess file already, so not sure how that works.

The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in:

<title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title>

In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect.

How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:

It is not working for me. Nothing is redirecting when I add this to the .htaccess file. First I added it as you suggested at the bottom of everything. Nothing happened so I added right after another line of code that was already in there that started with RewriteRule. This is the line that was already there:

RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

Any idea what could be going wrong? Thanks in advance!

I can't find anything online that deals with this issue. I have a page getting indexed by Google at mydomain.com/widgets and I don't know why. No links to it anywhere. The page it is closest to is mydomain.com/reviews/widgets and so I tried to set up a 301 to point one to the other.

The problem is each individual widget review is at mydomain.com/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name and so when I redirect /widgets to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets it also redirects each individual product to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name.

Is there some way to just redirect /widgets without having it affect each product review? I cannot change URL structure either, nature of the site. Any ideas?

Yeah I hear that, in spite of the site owner thinking the affiliate links were hidden from Google so that they didn't look like affiliate links, we still got the shaft anyway.

My question then is in the post-panda world, since Google recognizes us as an affiliate site, are we getting hurt organically for that? Should we nofollow the links? Change them from javascript?

The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window.

This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page."

Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit.

My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.