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They have no shame when it comes to link spam LOL. You should know this by now. This person seems no different then the people that email blast cialis discounts.

I was doing a search for a similar topic for a site we manage that has gained 50k links in the past 4 months, and I came across this article. I was a bit shocked at the answers I saw, and some of the ones that were voted as good. It's an old article, but I felt compelled to answer since this is still a relevant topic.

The link structure you showed is completely normal, and I would highly doubt you would see any negative impact from a strategy such as this. New sites and updated sites over time always receive new links. It's not about "how many" but more about "from where". I will address them one by one:

100 directory submissions
Great, as long as you have tested the directories that you are being submitted to. If they have high spam scores and low domain authority, could be a risk. You should ask what directories you were submitted to and research them to see if they have a blacklist history or are penalized. If not, I see no issue here at all. When we launch a site, we submit it to up to 450+ trusted directories, depending on the SEO plan level selected. All directories have been tested via Moz tools and other providers, to ensure the link health.

80 bookmarks
Not sure when you mean by this, but as long as the places you are being added are trustworthy and somewhat related to what you provide, I wouldn't worry. Even non-related links can be beneficial, coming from the right source. Granted, everyone wants the perfect anchor text link such as "awesome product in CITY", but a "visit website" followed anchor link will not do you any harm coming from the right source.

16 search engine submissions
If this is a page or URL submission through Bing or Google webmaster tools, it's a total non-issue. People submit hundreds of URLs per day, or even thousands for larger sites.

15 Article submissions
"Submitted to where?" would be a better question than how many is good or bad. If these are legitimate articles through a legitimate source such as PrWeb or the like, you should have no issues. Just depends on where they are placing your articles, the article quality, and the linking domain.

46 forum links
Could be good, could be bad, depends on how you were linked to, and the trust factor of the linking site. See above. You may also want to see if the linked is followed because if not, it holds little value unless it was posted on a relevant forum as helpful advice, that has good visibility.

10 local classified searches
Not sure what this is indicating, but again, it depends on how the linking was done, and where the links are coming from.

As to the people stating that having a lot of new, varied links is a great way to get banned/penalized, just NO. That is not true. You want link diversity and many places linking to you, and in the business world, you can't always keep posting great blogs/posts/pages/articles hoping and waiting for the links to come to you.

I have also never seen a link campaign that got someone penalized unless it was just blatant disregard for link quality or lack of knowledge.

Hope this helps...years later lol. Or at best, it will help someone that comes across this article in the future.

Not to bring this topic back up, but is this still valued?

I understand the perception point of view, in that a lot of people still trust the BBB as a company that highlights good businesses to work with.

BUT, as the links are now no followed, and the price for the accredited profile is very high, is it worth it? I can see it being so for a contractor, but for an agency?

In looking up some stuff to answer that question, I found these requirements: 1. Ratings must be sourced directly from users.
2. Don't rely on human editors to create, curate or compile ratings information for local businesses. These types of reviews are critic reviews.
3. Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.Here are the guidelines: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review#review-snippetsDoes this help?

James,

I am assuming you have Moz Pro and are tracking all search engines? You can also look in Analytics to see who is referring traffic to you, and how people are getting there.

In my experience, Bing and Yahoo are a bit more spammy than Google, and like a bit more keyword heavy sites and domains. Of course, you should not go and stuff your site full of garbage, I just wanted to throw that out there.

I think there is some accuracy in that more people are moving to Google, you can see that in this link from Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/whos-really-winning-search-war-204651

To answer the question of "Could it be that my customers (largely aged 60+) are moving over to Google?" What you would want to look for is: Did Google take up the slack in the drop, or did you see a loss in Bing and Yahoo with no equal gain in Google? If you lost 20% of your traffic in Bing and Yahoo, but did not see that increase in Google, you may have some other items that need to be looked at.

Backlinks. Anchor text. Find people that will link to you using the words you want to rank for.

"Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for."

The above statement is concerning. If they have a good budget, as their SEO and design advisor I would say what needs to be said. Text can be added in a stylized way to help improve the SEO of any site without taking away from a good design. Google likes words, not CSS and images. Without a reference, it's hard to judge what can be improved, and how you should go about suggesting it to your client. You also mentioned rankings, but what do those rankings look like? Are we talking page one, or top 3?

We have a client that has an old G maps listing that keeps popping up. The newer listing (less than 2 years) has over 150 legit 5-star reviews, but the older, crappy listing (about 4-5 years old) with 5 reviews keeps coming up in maps. I noticed that Google has new options available, and you can now request that the listing be removed from maps.

In the past, this type of option did not "remove" the listing, but rather marked it as "permanently closed." We want to completely remove it from maps altogether but cannot allow the time to reverify and activate if it marks it as permanently closed.

Both have the exact same address and different business names. Both are located in our Google manager account. What is the fastest and most efficient way of getting this removed without risking the "permanently closed" showing up and having to re-verify/reclaim? Calling GMB directly?

Looking for a more advanced answer.

We have Moz Local, Yext, and a TON of manual listings outside of those two. All match, all are accurate and have the same info displayed.

I am wanting to know what influences the Google map listings directly. It's strange because you will also see businesses that do not rank organically on page one in search but do show up in the maps pack. And sometimes the opposite. Sites that rank in the top 5 not showing in the maps pack.

We have a client who's law firm is the highest google reviewed, on page two or three of St. Louis personal injury lawyer, but does not show in the map listing. Any ideas why this would happen or how to ensure they are viewable in the map listing?

I have noticed that some directory or profile sites are showing a longer than normal meta description in search results. How is this accomplished? All regular sites are only showing the normal amount, but these sites are showing a higher character limit in search results.

NGNz7

One more question, what about longer meta descriptions> I noticed find law and a lot of others allow longer metas to show in their search results in Google

Thanks Tim, we will look into this!

When searching in google via mobile, I am seeing urls changed to taglines. I have attached pictures that show the url in a web search, but a tag line from the mobile search. Does anyone know how to get a tagline to show in place of a url in a mobile search? Any advice would be appreciated!

uLkYWRx.png wljXRI3.png

That is good advice, thank you. I would still want to hear from a few more people just so we have a variety of opinions. It's a big and expensive switch, so all advice is helpful.

Hello fellow Mozzers!

Quick question:
We have been looking into changing our domain name into something a bit easier to read and recite. I think that we have found one, and it has a very long history.

The issue is that the new domain name removes one of our keywords.

Example, current domain name:
webdesignandcompany.com
We have built a lot of branding around this name.

Example of domain we are considering:
BLANKdesign.com (blank is to protect the domain name we are considering)

The new domain is over 20 years old, whereas ours is only around 7 years. I am wondering if we are shooting ourselves in the foot by removing the word "web" since that is a primary focus of our business.

The issue is that the current domain and business name are not very catchy, and hard to say in a phone call and remember. Feels keyword heavy and generic, but it ranks well. Really well. We would be doing a 301 redirect if we decide to change it, and we have Yext and Moz to help clean up all the listings.

My question is: Is it worth it to switch? Would the removal of the word web make it harder to rank number 1 or two, since people search for web design? Or since we would be leaving all the titles and meta the same, and that the domain is older than ours make that not an issue?

THOUGHTS?

Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.

I've never seen a site that was "unfixable" just some that took a lot longer than others to recover.

What steps have you taken so far, and also what methods are you using to track the changes?

Looks like your dev didn't block the dev site while it was being created. That sucks.

This is easy to fix. Make sure you have an updated sitemap file with recent change dates, and all the final URLs added. Also, go through Google's webmaster tools and fetch each new URL that has been added. If you still have a dev directory or folder on the server, block this with robots.txt.

Sitemap example:

<url><loc>https://DOMAIN.com/subpage/</loc>

<lastmod>2016-09-26T04:14:14Z</lastmod></url>

<priority>1.0</priority> (or whatever priority you want to set for the URLs)

<changefreq>Daily</changefreq>

As long as you have the redirects in place and they are working, you should be good to go. The only case where I could see this being a slight benefit is if you were using a keyword-driven domain, as you could see some slight exact match help in ranking (but I doubt it).

On the flip side, it is nice to have everything matching, so I would look at the time involved in getting all the links updated and see if is worth the time investment.