Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The alt tag in links has no impact on SEO. So the answer is Anchor Text

Be careful though. I would suggest alternating the anchor text you target in your link building efforts.

Go for some naked urls and some branded anchor text in addition to the targeted keyword anchor text as this will make your link profile look more natural to google

It's not something you should stress too much over, but I personally like to use the /postname version as it allows you to keep the URL's shorter and makes it easier to stay under the suggested URL character limit.

It has to be something related to their recent algo updates.

This little chunk of text might be your problem as it is showing up on most pages - http://screencast.com/t/3SakXPlpL.

1. This is duplicate content.

2. It also looks like keyword stuffing

3. More than the suggested amount of links

4. Google might be viewing it as an excessive and unnatural internal linking strategy

I can't guarantee this is the main cause of the problems, but it might be contributing to it. Google's just getting way more picky about this stuff

I would say yes! Having the majority of your link profile be forum links can't be good in terms of SEO.

Your technique is a great idea, but I would incorporate some other methods of link building into your strategy. if you're willing to write great content (it sounds like you are) i would suggest doing some guest blogging on high authority sites.

Google wants to see a natural looking link profile. Links from forums are a naturally occurring thing, so they aren't bad in and of themselves as long as they are a small part of a great overall link profile.

I guess it depends on the length of the content. Typically, 15 occurrences is excessive, even if it alternated between the singular and plural versions. I would suggest developing your content around keyword themes using many variants, not just the singular and plural versions.

here's a blog post i did on the subject of keyword theming - http://searchsolve.blogspot.com/2012/10/developing-content-around-keyword.html 

if you think the association with the pages you're linking to is negative in Google's eyes, then go ahead and nofollow them. if you're linking to quality resources, it actually should have a positive impact on your rankings, not a negative one

Yes I'm sure it's the old title.

I guess it's possible that Google liked the old title better and is just ignoring the change?

I'll do some digging and see if I can find anything on the subject. Please share any resources you can find that address this

Is the site content identical to the old one?

Also, I took a look at your link profile and I found a couple incoming links that were landing in 404's.

I made some changes to title tags on a clients site over a month ago. Google has since crawled all the pages that the changes were made to.

Here's the problem. For some of the pages, the old title is still showing in search results.

1. Why does Google do this? 2) What can I do about it?

I like irving's suggestion to see if the webmaster is willing to sell the site. whats the link profile like? any particular high authority links that might be giving it the advantage over your site?

I'm assuming the rel="bookmark" tag doesn't have any SEO implications but I just wanted to make sure it wasn't viewed like a nofollow by search engines.

Thanks for the answer. That's a great suggestion as far as limiting it to great quality links because it's obviously very time consuming to compile phone contact info. Especially when a very high percentage of phone calls go unanswered. It's also good to know you have a colleague who is getting results using it. Thanks for sharing

Is it worth going to the trouble to contact webmasters in person by phone rather than just using email? If so, what has been your approach to link building by phone?

Are you asking for suggestions on plugins? If so theres a great plugin for that by WPMU http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/pay-with-a-like/

As far as SEO goes, if the page isn't crawlable anyways, i dont see how it could affect you.

I might be missing the point of the question

Would this kid be willing to log back on to the forums and remove his links? I guess contacting the moderators might work as well

With Googles new penguin algorithm, which is meant to filter webspam, it is very possible that you have been penalized for unnatural spammy links. There's a form Google has that you can fill out if you feel you have been mistakenly penalized and i dont think it would hurt to submit it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ

Be careful when hiring an SEO because Google is getting better and better at recognizing unnatural optimization and inexperienced SEO's often try to cut corners. Link building isn't easy and it relies on patience and hard work combined with great content that others want to link to. Heres a great article that you should read before moving forward http://searchengineland.com/link-building-means-earning-hard-links-not-easy-links-123767

I hope this has been helpful

Well Danny's right

From your experience, what have you found to be the most effective method for link building? It's starting to look like the only way to receive good links is by writing great content or offering great services and allowing the links to come in naturally (which is obviously the most important thing anway), but are there still any effective methods of getting valuable links through link building, apart from having personal connections and relationships with site owners?

While the links are nofollow, Google and Bing have both confirmed that links shared through twitter and facebook do have a direct impact on rankings. this was posted randfish of seomoz back in 2010 and i dont believe this has changed http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing-confirm-twitter-facebook-influence-seo. heres another more recent post by the same author on the subject http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings