Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Chris,

You might be better off checking out the API discussion board here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293196-developer-discussion-group

Or contacting the API support via api@seomoz.org

Good luck!

I vote for adding it to your existing site. This way you are continually adding new, quality content to your site and hopefully earning links in the process!

If you have it external to your existing domain, you are effectively splitting your domain authority and doubling your work in promoting two sites.

The quality of the site is more important than the TLD, I don't think it should be much of a consideration.

You may see some benefit regarding localization in terms of getting high number of appropriate country specific TLDs. But, once again, quality still counts.

However, I often notice that sites with poor backlink profiles tend to have a lot of .info domains from directories.

One hour of downtime is not going to cause you losing all of your rankings.

I would advise having a look at the date you lost the rankings (is this tied to a drop in traffic in Google Analytics? You can get a date that way) and seeing whether it correlates to a date of a Google algorithm update.

On my very brief inspections, your links look like mostly directory junk:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=4sharesite.com

So it's possible you may have been penalized by Penguin, but you need to inspect that further.

Regarding bit.ly, from their FAQ:

_bitly works by issuing a "301 redirect": a technique for making a webpage available under many URLs. When you shorten a link with bitly, you are redirecting a click from bitly to the destination URL. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine-friendly method for webpage redirection, and is what bitly uses. Because bitly doesn’t re-use or modify links, we consider our redirects to be permanent._So you're fine there. Re your own short links, you'll have to check whether they are redirecting or using cannonical tags.

In OSE it looks like you only have 2 external linking domains, you could try contacting those sites directly to request they remove the links to your site.

Regarding your rankings, try focusing on trying to get a dozen really good links and make sure your content is all unique then see how they improve.

Checkout:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

If you can't afford a pro membership you can still get a decent amount of data from the free membership.

Otherwise you might want to take a look at the links reported by Google Webmaster Tools, you can download the links Google reports there by going to Traffic > Links to Your Site > Who Links to your Site - then click More.

You will then be able to download the current list, or even just the latest links.

I think it gets a bit spammy when you have 2,3 or more dashes in a domain name, the only reason you'd need that many is to make a super keyword rich domain name.

In this case the spacing is definitely a better option for readability.

As above, until Google release a disavow link tool, the only way to remove a link is to have it removed from the linking website. Have you tried contacting the sites directly?

These may be worth a look in:

http://www.paddymoogan.com/guest-posting-search-engine/

http://www.sourcebottle.com

http://www.bloggerlinkup.com

http://www.helpareporter.com

The most recent one is from 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

You'll have to re-create it.

You can delete the current one if you need by going into the campaign > Overview > Campaign settings. Scroll right to the bottom and click delete.

Good call

I think you know the answer and hinted as much. If you were to create new pages, you'd be creating those sub-pages purely to try manipulate rankings. Considering they are just keyword variations you'd probably end up with very similar (duplicate) or low quality content on them. You'd be better off creating one awesome page and optimizing that with an instance or two of each phrase

Good luck!

These links are not editorial earned but I have mixed feelings about them, here's why:

I don't have a problem when a designer ads one text or image link with their brand name in the footer, as long as the client is happy with it. If you've designed an awesome site that link may act as lead gen.

However, I have noticed designers getting a bit crazy with this and adding multiple (2,3,4 more) keyword rich text links (web design, web development, web deigners location etc etc) in footers which I really do have a problem with as they are only there for one reason. It looks spammy on the client's site and may actually get their site penalised.

Forget about forcing 4 subpages of low quality content just because you read that somewhere.

If you don't have the content don't create subpages.

Instead of rehashing you might want to have a read of these posts in regards to your site-wide footer links:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

Probably depends on how much stock you put into siloing in site structure.

One factor to consider is the length of category and sub-category names. If they are quite long your URLs can get long and ugly and you may be better off with the second option.