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Yeah I was talking about desktop when talking about the sidebar, but in mobile it does move just below the main content and is still visible.

Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain).  In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are:

6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website).

So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page.  Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static?

Thanks!

I have a page that's ranking pretty well, and driving sales.  That page is starting to get 10+ comments per day and is starting to get quite long.  I was wondering if there is a point where I should disable the comments?  My gut tells me that people interacting with the page, and Google seeing responses with the users SHOULD be a good thing not bad.  But, then I think that a majority of the content of the page is no longer the article, but the comments.

All the comments are good, non spammy and directly related to the topic.  People just asking questions, etc.  Good engagement, I should be happy right?

Jack I will send you his email via private message.  Take a look there

I know a guy that does really good email outreach for a good price compared to most link builders.  He's over seas so the price is good, but the quality is just like an US SEO can get.  Manual outreach via email only asking to link to good content.  Sent you PM

Cant find it for the life of me.

Backlink profile isnt spammy at all actually, and June/July were our best months ever in terms of organic search so I do not think we were hit with payday loan update. We started losing organic traffic in August. Are you sure that penalization requires a manually review?

Didnt think about this, but i think you are right.  It does look like all these sites have been hacked

Back in July I had posted here that I thought someone was doing negative SEO against us.  We monitor our links on a daily basis, and a lot of toxic links came in quickly within a few days.  So we were pro-active and ended up disavowing those links soon after we saw them.  Shortly after that our ranking start to drop and we lost a good amount of traffic, though I do not know if its really connected since we only disavowed those toxic links and we weren't ranking FROM those links since they were disavowed so quickly.

Now, its happening again.  20 new inbound domains linking to us from complete crap websites with crap content and not done by us.  I want to disavow them, but I am thinking that maybe the first time we disavowed the links, it hurt us, and maybe disavowing now will hurt us further?  I think Google should be able to filter out this crap but who knows, too much depends on this being handled correctly.

Here are some of the crappy links:

http://optibike.com/?home.php=page/loans/student-loan-without-a-cosigner-2.html
http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?index.php=finance/loans/loan-for-you-3.html
http://www.nuvivaweightloss.com/?index.php=article/loans/300-loan-today.html
http://ecommercesalesmultipliersystem.com/?home.php=board/loans/fast-loan-with-monthly-payments-2.html

They are mostly duplicate content across a network of sites. How would you guys handle this?

We have a page which is outranking another page for a keyword that is very important.  The page that is lower in the rankings has far better content. I think this is happening due to links as well as the url structure.

domain.com/ranking/notranking

Here is the page we want to rank: http://bit.ly/1vqhSoZ

Here is the page that is higher in rankings: http://bit.ly/1vA1wXQ

So I think I should just move the content over from /notranking, to /ranking.  The content is clearly better on the lower ranking page but I think due to links the /ranking page is higher in SERPS.  So I guess my question is, would it be wise to move all that content over, and then 301 redirect the old page? Or leave the way it is and hopefully Google will get it right over time?

Clicky allows you to see IP addresses and is free

I thought this might be the case, and it could be.  When I run a semrush report, we went from ranking 1,400 keywords in July to 1,600 in Sept. So something is on the correct path, but obviously if the ranking is lower on aggregate for these keywords then we could be going backwards.

I am getting mixed signals I guess from the reports I am running and the actual traffic.

Are you referring to some sort of tool that will show you exactly "whats changed", or if I just took a look at the difference between the periods?  I know that our top 20 traffic generating keywords stayed roughly the same in SERP positions, maybe an overall minimal drop when you take an average of them.  We rank for some 1,600 keywords so cant manually check them all.

Is there an easier way of comparing now and then? I am importing into excel both time period and then just manipulating the data.

http://bit.ly/YGOCNr

This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive.  We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing.  We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank.  We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly.

Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO.  The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us.  Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found.  There was about ten of them from places such as:

sharklinks.info
bookmarkingforseo.com
compasslinks.info

We don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools.  Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc.  I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.

Thanks Chris for the response.  I agree with you as well, I think the links are coming only because its a legitimate scholarship opportunity from a business that focuses on helping people with their student debt issues.  If Google see this as spammy, it seems to me they would be making a mistake on how our particular business should promote itself.  I dont know what can be said about our commitment to the student loan disaster than "We really do want to help our users, to show that here's $2,000 to help pay for school".

A couple larger universities shared our scholarship on FB and Twitter and got us a lot of traffic and new links as well, seems pretty authentic to me and I believe google should look at this way as well.

Thanks for these links.  Lots of useful info I should have searched first i guess.  I agree with your take home message.

The organization revolves around helping people with their student loans.  We offer resources on how to avoid student debt, how to take action on student debt, and other tips for college kids.  The scholarship is something we would have done whether we got 5000 links to it or zero, so we arent doing it for the purpose of getting links.  That being said, its a really nice side benefit because we are getting some good links from it.

The scholarship helps promote our business and out commitment to helping address the student loan crisis in the USA. We could request the links be no-followed, but that seems to be drastic unless its clear Google penalizes this, no? Its not as if we are an auto repair shop offering a scholarship.

We work in the student loan debt industry, so providing a scholarship for our viewers makes total sense for our business.  Would links to this page be seen by Google as buying links? Does this fall anywhere into gray-hat tactics?

My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do. The scholarship really synergizes with our business model, but who knows..?

Content for the page is really where we are having a problem because we really do have most relevant topics covered.  As far as blogging, that's not a problem we can always find new "news" to write about in the industry.

So I guess I am talking more about the content, and not blogs.  If we aren't adding new content on a typical page, is that ok?

Lets say the website you are working on has covered most of the important topics on your subject.  How important is it that you continue to add content to it when there really may not be much that is so relevant to your users anymore?  Can a site continue to rank well if nothing new is added to the site for year but continues to get good quality links?