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Tons of great advice here.  My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals.  I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies.  It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive.  It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site. One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us.  All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced. So if it's relevant and helpful keep it.  Do you have Hotjar.  Allows you to see what peope are clicking on. SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary.  If it helps the users then keep it.  In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button. But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold.  So you must encourage that.  but remember Cialdini's jam experiment.  More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving.  You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals. How about  "Learn more",  "buy something" or 'back to navigation'

The only reason why I'd ever disable comments if I'm way to tired of getting them and having to approve them or I decided to stop replying to comments. I'll tell you why. Your page is ranking well for many reasons. One of the reason is likely due to that its a great piece of content. If it still continues to rank well and drive sales, then the 10+ comments per day obviously aren't harming its ability to do that, so why change the process of accepting comments? In addition, if it is a great piece of content, people are more likely to share it and you'll get more visits. I've seen many blogs where they closed comments because it was already a year or two old and it just seems they don't want to bother with the comments anymore and I really want to provide additional insight and yadda yadda; my comments are not going to hurt your post especially if it adds more unique and fresh content to that page only to help it stay fresh in Google's eyes, right? Unless you switch the position of your content and the comments around, the comments will have little effect on your page's rank and conversion rate. If you're happy with the way things are, let the comments keep coming. Use your spam filter, make sure you have "external nofollows" on comment URLs and if you really want to keep the value of your content strong, only approve the really good comments, not just the five word comments like, "wow, what a great post". Good engagement, you are correct. Fresh & unique content, Google likes. More social signals; a good thing.

On the campaigns page (the pro home) under the grey bar that says "Campaigns", there is a white bar that has 5 of 5 campaigns (or whatever number you have) on the left--all the way to the right on that bar, in light blue, it says "Manage Campaigns." Click that and you'll see where to delete (or archive).

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?

I see that page ranking for both "student loan forgiveness" and "loan forgiveness." So it looks like you accomplished your goal but may have in the process gotten the wrong page to rank now for "loan forgiveness." Can you give us an update? What did you do? Of did Google change its mind?

I would look at before and after dates in analytics and compare to see where your traffic loss is occurring. Have you been manually tracking the rank of your keywords over time?  have you noticed a drop off for a keyword that you would expect to be a high traffic driver? It could be that you have lost a referring link that was sending over a lot of traffic, was/are you doing any PPC traffic that may have had an affect on your volumes, sometimes people forget that PPC spend also drives organic traffic, so you would see a natural decline in organic traffic if you slow down your PPC spend.

Am I missing something? From the why you described it, I really don't see how this can be considered "buying a link" at all. If you told University X, we will do a scholarship specifically for your students, onliy if you link to it, then, sure, that makes sense. However, if the scholarship isn't directly tied to a particular school, then I don't see the problem. If this is considered buying links and can be penalized, then wouldn't that mean any contests, give-a-ways or sponsorships that a site creates, and then that someone else links to would be violating google's guidelines? Ruben

Hi Demi Is the blog on a sub-domain of the main site or a separate domain. If it is on a sub domain, then this counts as fresh content.  if it is not you might want to think about moving the Blog to a sub domain. Can you let us know Bruce.

That's what I did.  You can see the results in the attachment and should be able to figure how to replicate. ycDrxaQ

I think this could be an attempt at negative SEO.  But whether or not the links will hurt you is hard to say.  I see all kinds of odd links that just randomly appear in some site profiles, but these look like they were made deliberately.  One other explanation that is not negative SEO is if someone at your company, or a well meaning friend has ever purchased a cheap link building plan.  I've seen links like these appear as the result of fiverr gigs or purchasing one of those "buy 1000 links for $100" type things. Google says they're really good at determining whether negative SEO is happening and just not counting these links.  However, if this were my site, I'd probably disavow these once every 2-4 weeks just to be sure.  Make sure you disavow them on the domain level. If it is a competitor who is using xrumer or something similar to pepper the web with links to you then hopefully it will stop when they decide to give up.  There's really no way to determine who is doing it though as these really are all most likely automated. I think that anyone who is in a really competitive space like this needs to be monitoring for negative SEO regularly.  Again, I think in most cases it won't hurt you, but Google is certainly not perfect and I wouldn't take the chance.

it's a pretty good site. Youll get referrals from time to time. For niche topics, you can get more views since you will be higher up. Just add your site, it's basically an RSS directory, but owned by a former apple employee. lol

See, if you going to change domain name and aptly make correct 301 redirect to corresponding pages (following the same url pattern) of new site with same **content, title and description - **then you are home. Adding to what Mr. Robert said - you can also check on url hierarchy through Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming frog seo spider of your old domain and new site (post migration). Compare the link structure. If everything goes on well - you may experience 301 redirect working upto 99% and can almost see your similar rankings with new domain

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you. I don't think there's anything you can do against this, but I do have a few questions just to get a better understanding of what was going on, if you don't mind sharing. How much was your budget? For what match type? What was your CPC?  What location were you targeting?  What niche are you in?

They want to keep ownership so they have the classes, framework or whatever for reuse for future clients, increasing their profits.  But I think that is slightly different to having a licence agreement and as you say with that model you could become prone to unreasonable fees.

Hi Demetrios, I'm not sure if this has been answered as it is coming up unanswered; however, I just tested it and it appears to be working correctly for the /news/ page (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.studentdebtrelief.us%2Fnews%2F); however, the author tag is not on your main domain. If you add it to your main domain as well, I believe it will resolve all of your problems. Thanks, Christine DeGraff

Anyone else with some feedback?

This is probably the best advice you will get, because, everyone has a bias answer about who is the best at something.  SEOMOZ has a great list, sure there are many not on their, but take a look at that and you may find one you really like. Do the following 1. Scroll to the bottom of your page. 2. Click Recommended Companies 3. Click web design and choose for yourself.  

I apologize for not seeing this somehow it passed right over me.  The large advantages for using a managed WordPress host our primarily speed, security in the form of powerful firewalls and if they get through that which they do very rarely do every one of them uses http://sucuri.net/  this allows them to know if there's any malware on your site and have it cleaned and running perfectly at no cost to you. You get hosting that is built around just WordPress an incredible abundance of WordPress knowledge at your fingertips and the idea of you have enough toward about without having to spend what would amount to a real lot of money in order to get a WordPress site to load in under one or two seconds consistently both nationally and internationally. I highly encourage you to read not just the pages I've sent you, but everything on the sites that are about the host. http://wpengine.com/fast-page-loads/ https://www.zippykid.com/benefits/speed-fast-wordpress-host/ https://www.zippykid.com/benefits/ http://websynthesis.com/features/ https://page.ly/features/ For instance I'm currently writing a Moz blog post on the subject so I can't give out too much information or I'd be self plagiarizing I know it's unfortunate. I best advice is go to their websites I think everyone of them has a done a wonderful job of informing people of their benefits. I also should tell you that I have an account with every company am about to mention. You cannot go wrong with any of them. Pay attention to the band with and page views you are allotted and know that some of them are maybe a better value than others. Regardless you can rest assured that all of them will do a great job.  My other piece of advice is contact them and ask them why they're the one you should pick. Take a lot into account as to how much time they take to get back to you I will mention this is public knowledge automatic has invested in both WP engine and Zippykid. However web synthesis is still an excellent choice as is Page.ly  All of them run on top-quality hardware and are built only to host WordPress because WordPress has a database unlike a pure HTML website the time it takes to access the database with caching on the server where somebody has spent a great deal of money to have that website cache so in the event of a person going to another page you have removed what made WordPress slower in the 1st place many of them have content delivery networks built-in the ones that have CDN's built-in also have a lot more going on on the server side meaning you have a faster host the more solid website. all of them use Nginx instead of Apache you can run a website with 10,000 visitors on  Nginx with merely 2 MB of RAM Apache uses far more than that for 5 people. I hope you can do some more research I recommend using this as a research tool as well because I cannot use my own content look at the hosting section on my website there's an FAQ at the top as well just click the FAQ you may also private message me of course if you have any particular questions that I cannot answer here I'm sorry for that. http://www.blueprintmarketing.com/hosting/

The value of any one link is tough to measure, and it's often not what we'd hoped for. I think Google tends to look at the entire profile and often depreciates new links, adding in their value over time. The days where a couple of strong .edu or .gov links would make all the difference are in the past, IMO. I don't know the company or offering, but this focus on .edu and .gov links and $500/link just makes me uneasy. You mention the links are contextual and that education/government are relevant to your business, but my gut reaction is that this may not be money well spent. For the price of a few links, you could build content that might attract hundreds of links. Valuing any given link is an educated guess at best, but Rand had a decent post about it a while back (post is from 2009, but much of it is still relevant): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link

If the website you are looking at is the one in your profile, then I'd look at improving your content so that it is easy to digest.  Right now you have really long articles that aren't broken down with different headers.  So, I can't quickly scan it to see if I even want to read it. Anyway, a blog alone isn't going to succeed.  You need to create a social media presence to gain attention for your blogs, and make them super easy to share/like/tweet/+1.  That way they can potentially go viral.