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I have found that fixing problems pointed out by google leads to good things. I also learned the hard way that ignoring them for too long will eventually result in punishment. I would make any suggested changes, or at least try it for a while and see what happens.

First of all, sorry this Q is all in one block, but iPads don't like this site or vc/vs. When using the SEOmoz on-site keyword optimizer tool, it suggests at least one link to be to an off-site page. Would it be considered a link exchange if we linked out to an niche SUPER Authority sit that had a link back to our website? It seems like a naturally good strategy, but I'm afraid google may not agree. If the answer is no, there are many similar sites that mention our company in ver good ways, awards, etc.., but with no links. I would think this is a no-brainer. Personally I would like to eventually harvest all this press coverage to benefit our site. Btw, I was grey before I learned about SEOmoz, just like the rest of our niche. Now I'm shooting to be Snow White! Hopefully it works out. I also wrote two landing pages that I tried to SEO the right way. I would love to hear your feedback to know if they are truly effective and if they are actually white. I think they are, but don't know "all" the rules of being white http://jamproa.com/ideology/product-innovation.php http://jamproa.com/industrial-design/what-is.php Thanks!

Hello All,

A major magazine DA98 did an article in 2007 about a project our company worked on. The specifically named our company in both the printed and online (PA53) versions of our article. Even though this article is old, I think this has HUGE potential if we can pull it off.

Do you think it's possible to contact them and encourage them attach a link to our company name. Their newer articles are pretty good at doing this, but I guess in 07 it wasn't practiced by them.

What's the best way to approach this and who should I go to? Webmaster?

There is also a slight downside, the article does contain information about explosives, but not in a bad way. Could the search engines dislike this. I'm assuming not because of the PA and DA numbers for the magazine company.

Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

dmac

I agree completely, this will improve both credibility and speed.

From an SEO standpoint, I think each site needs to be written in the native language of the country that your targeting.

I would also suggest doing a little research on the cultures of your target countries.

example: China
Top search engine is not Google, it's Baidu
Facebook isn't accessible from China, they use QQ (600+ million subscribers)
Youtube isn't accessible from China, not sure what they use.
Adult sites are completely illegal in China
Don't comment about political issues, no such thing as free speech.

I'm sure other countries aren't as drastic as China, but the local cultures, trends, and laws will all differ from yours.

I have done this too with some domains we have retired, just trying to keep the link juice going. With a new domain, wouldn't you need to build some links to make it effective?

We are a US based company, but also do a lot of business in many other countries. Though most of our customers are in the states, many of our vendors are abroad. Our vendors need access to our website too. During a trip a few months ago, one of our vendors commented that our website took over 5 minutes to load.

I did some searching and found that putting our site on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) would solve this problem. We ended up using www.cloudflare.com for this. Basically, they put your content on different servers around the world and serve it up from the server that's closest to your visitor.

I tested our website during my last visit and the difference was AMAZING! Cloud flare also speeds up your website, but that's a different conversation. There was a little technical learning involved and a glitch here and there. Overall, I'm pretty happy with Cloudflare. BTW, you will still need to host your sites somewhere, Cloudflare is not a host.

Their basic service is free and they have a Pro version for $20.00 per month. I have the pro service, but could get by with the basic service if we were on a tight budget. I find the pro version is worth the extra 20 bucks.

This happened to me, almost all of my keywords dropped several pages all at once. It took a lot of digging, but I found out what was causing it, at least in my case.

I had been ignoring some pretty obvious crawl errors for a few weeks. After my keywords got dropped, I decided it might be a good time to go fix the crawl errors. Within a day of fixing them, my keywords reappeared and crawled back up to their original positions within a few days.

Again, not saying this is your problem, but it's pretty obvious to me that Google doesn't like crawl errors.

Our previous site was complete flash with ZERO html pages. It and all the other pages were PR2. I think we had PR2 because we had a nice site, but Google had no way to verify what was really there.

We redesigned our site and removed almost all of the Flash. This was about 3-4 months ago. Google dropped all of our pages from PR2 to PR0.

Spent a lot of time prior to 7/6 improving things here and there. On 7/6 our home page jumped from PR0 to PR4 and a few went from PR0 to PR2. Most of the other pages remain at PR0.

We are still improving many things on our site. I can't wait until Google re-rates us.  I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good thing.   

In the long run, changing the registration from a "person" to a "company" will give you added credibility. Especially if your trying to utilize the search engines places/local listings. They will send you a postcard to your company address. Once you validate the postcard you'll be considered a real player.

Keep in mind, that all goes out the door if you have a brandable personal name like Eddie Van Halen.

I was thinking of doing that too, but it's just too much work. This site only gets a little traffic, so I would need to build it up and then build something good to blog about. I'm just going to 301 it for now. Maybe in the future I will be inspired to do something better with it. Good thinking though.

THANKS!

That was my thinking too. I just wasn't sure if too many 301s might be considered a bad thing. I already have another 301. It used to be the same site as our home page, but 301'd it after I learned about getting beamed for duplicate content. THANKS!

I bought a domain a couple months ago while having delusions of granger. The domain is PR2, has around 30 decent backlinks, and a small amount of traffic. It also has one of our keywords in the domain name. I'm thinking of 301 redirect to our homepage. Is there a downside to doing this? We really could use the additional traffic on our site.

Agree 100%!!!

We got a VERY powerful keyword ranked #3 in Bing. Two days later, Bing sent me an email through webmaster tools letting me know that they dropped the keyword from us because our website had no content about this keyword. However, our website is almost exclusively dedicated with original content specific to this keyword.

I have never thought that a competitor could rat you out to the SE and get you dropped. That said, I find myself thinking this was almost certainly the case. I have no idea how.

The good part was Bing was kind enough to give me a way to solve the problem. I was out of the country at the time, so I ended up doing it though chat and email. It took a few days, but the person was extremely helpful and even gave me some good SEO tips. It took about a week to solve and get back on the SERPs, but I am still far away from my original #3 position.

The entire process took about two weeks. Getting a real human to verify our content took the longest.

I would have never been able to fix this problem had I not been using webmaster tools.

HMMM??? Good input from both of you, maybe a combination of both.

When to do site/index.php? It stands the most to gain and loose at the same time.

I'm thinking I should start with all the things that I know are blatantly "wrong" and fix all those things first. There is no way this could hurt anything. Then maybe do some experimenting with the other pages that are currently doing well and see what the results are. Then I should know what works, what doesn't.

We finished the re-design of our website a few months ago.  We have hired a few freelance SEO guys that were horrible. We then decided to pull the SEO work in-house.

I got nominated to do the SEO work. I started with what I thought was pretty good on-site SEO. At that time, with no experience, I was pretty proud of myself. I managed to get a bunch of our pages at top SERPs for long-tail keywords. Good enough for then. Now when I go look at the pages, I'm embarrassed to admit that it's my work. Please be kind. 

Since then I have been trying to learn as much as possible about SEO. I'm certainly far ahead of where I was a few months ago.

For the past few weeks I've been trying to focus my efforts on creating original keyword rich original content. Our competitors all have tried this, but their content is hardly readable by humans. Anyhow, we finished our fist article, it got indexed by G almost immediately and started to push our keyword SERPs up within just a few days.

Now for my question.  I have a much better understanding of on-page SEO and realize that I could make many improvements to ALL of our other pages. However, these pages are already doing fairly well with the SERPS and are moving up a few ranks a week. I'm very tempted to throw caution to the wind and completely redo all of our on-page SEO for our entire site.

Is this a good strategy?
Should I expect our SERPs to drop a little, a lot, or not at all?

I look forward to your response.

DMac

It's important to stick with one or the other. We changed from www to non www and saw a drop in our SERPS that lasted about 3 weeks. Google was still showing www on our home page only, the rest were non www. We found that all of our pages linked back to www.page/index. We just fixed that a few days ago and I'm guessing google will figure it out in a week or two.

Completely legitimate as long as you're not serving up one thing for the bots and something unrelated to your visitors.

You should try to 301 as many of the dead pagoes as possible to any relevant page you can find. This will pass on the link juice to the new page, especially if it's related content. Otherwise the link juice will be lost and eventually the search engines will drop those pages out of their index. I know doing a couple hundred pages is HUGE task, so I would focus on the most valuable pages first. Ryan is right, 404's is a fact of life. I think it's best to create a custom 404 that your visitors won't mind landing on. For this it's best to be creative, try to make them laugh or smile. Most importantly, give them something to click on. this will allow you to recapture an otherwise lost customer. The very last thing you want them to do is click on their browsers back button.Any visitor can essentially navigate to any of our other pages even though they didn't actually get the page they were originally looking for. Good luck!

Google hates duplicate content, so much so that you will have problems with two urls, let alone 270 of them. Don't bother trying anything funny, like spinning the articles, at least for now. When you submit your site for re-inclusion it will be examined by humans, not robots. You need to have a good story and a nice clean site if you want to get back into the game. Being that your sites are 98 percent duplicate content, that really means you have only one, maybe two, websites at best. I would make 301 redirects from all your other websites to your best performing website. This will show google that you have solved your duplicate content problems while keeping all the links from the other sites. Good luck! dmac

I think having a dash is no longer a negative thing. Matt Cutts has made many open public statements about using dashes in the URL. We currently have a domain in an extremely competitive keyword "keyword1--keyword2.com". it's performing extremely well after about three months. It's also a brand new domain. If you do end up going with the newer domain, make sure you use a permanent redirect (301) from your aged domain to your new one. This will pass most, if not all, of your link juice to your new domain. Google also tends to give new domains a quick boost in SERPs. This usually doesn't last too long, but could be a welcome surprise if your website of high quality. Cheers! Dmac