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Yes, those "pop-ups" are crawled. Search engines are already smart enough to interpret lightboxes just fine, which is the name of that kind of "pop-ups".

Based on what you said, you built a private link network, which is strongly forbidden by Google and even if you didn't get caught, you may in the future with that strategy.

If I were you, I would took down all those blogs and move only the good posts to the main one, if you fill your main blog with "crappy" or thin content, you could get that site penalized.

Move only those articles that are worth moving and then take out all those blogs, with no 301s or canonical, just kill them. If you use canonical, they still have links to your main website (link network - forbidden), if you setup 301, then you get hundreds of unnatural links, which again, results in a private link network. and I advise against both.

Hope that helps!

Yes, it does. Google penalizes links that pass pagerank and are built unnaturally, like those ones you mention. You should have the IT company set ALL those links to nofollow, that will accomplish both the company goals, avoid/remove a penalty while still providing the municipality site a way to go to the IT site.

Hope that helped.

PS: check if the IT company received a manual penalty under WMT to verify, and if they did, fix the issue adding a nofollow to ALL the links and then file a reconsideration request.

EDIT: most likely, if those are the only links you have, you received a penalty, as a devaluation happens when you actually have no control on the links, but in this case, the IT company placed the links on purpose.

No, it shouldn't mess with the snippet. Snippets aren't created from the content of the XML feed, but from the video markup in the site. The sitemap only allows Google to easily identify the videos in your site.

As for the robots.txt question, there's no need to specify the video sitemap location, you can if you want, but that won't give you any "boost". Regardless if the videos are youtube hosted or not.

Usually forums are so spammed with links that they are really worthless. Those links will likely help the users but not your SEO.

You can use robots to disallow google from even crawling those pages, while the meta noindex still allows the crawling but prevents the indexing of those pages.

If you have any sensitive data that you don't want Google to read, then go ahead and use the robots directives you wrote above. However, if you just want them deindexed I'll suggest to go with the meta noindex, as it will allow other pages (linked) to be indexed but leave that particular page out.

I think Yoast has an option that allows you to force the rewritten URLs. Check its entire configuration, it should be something like redirect ugly urls to... I don't remember. But it should be under Permalinks.

How about myblogguest? You decide where to publish your article from the offers you receive from blog owners... You only need to pay for a membership, or as a blogger, you can publish others' articles without any paid membership.

Before accepting an offer, check they blog offering, their reputation, their previous posts, etc. Just don't take ANY offer, look for the good ones.

You can also do some outreach for yourself. If you are writing the content, simply contacting the blog owners asking to post your article (include the article, as many receive hundreds of "shallow" requests) should work. At least I am writing for high quality blogs, such as SEJ, SearchEnginePeople, etc, just by contacting them with my articles ready to publish. You can later establish a relationship that could led to faster publishing, or even skipping the review process.

Hope that helps!

Apparently, Google is indexing your main domain http://sportiqe.com with over 7,000 pages already indexed (https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sportiqe.com). Perhaps you are also seeing the previous version as you set the custom domain recently?

Looking at your site, everything looks ok, canonicals are well set, etc.

Well, it depends on how you "embed" it.

YouTube does it with an iframe and a special player designed to go on other sites, linking to the original video in YouTube, etc.

This can easily be achieved by creating an HTML page, that you can later offer as a code to embed the post in their pages while adding some design and styling. In that HTML, you can still add the Analytics code for tracking and as it is actually a page in your site they are loading, you are still getting the hit. Beware of the extra server load you may receive, potentially hundreds of hits from outside sources.

And try to style the iframe so you can actually add a link to the full source or limit the amount of words displayed in the iframe so you can bring the user back t your page to continue reading.

An example of this is the slideshare

Hope that helps.

Yes. Links from PRWeb are considered unnatural if not no-followed. You must nofollow all the links in your releases, and in case other sites pickup your PRs, just make sure those links are no followed.

PRWeb claimed they made several changes to comply with Google guidelines, but given the amount of people that use their services only for the SEO effect, it would be hard to believe that they actually force the nofollow to all their releases and the sites that syndicates them.

From PRWeb:

"As far as changes in links and backlinking these changes come from google and apply to all press release distribution. We have been proactive in these changes and marking all outgoing syndication as ‘no-follow’ in accordance with Googles new rules."

Nope, that post is completely wrong my friend. Besides being from 2011 or even earlier, the writer probably misunderstood to how Google handles external/internal links in WMT.

What is confirmed is that www.domain.com and other.domain.com ARE different domains and a penalty to other.domain.com DOES NOT affect www.domain.com. Otherwise, all blogspot, wordpress.com and others should be penalized by now.

Just published an article on SEJ about Schema.org markup and its role in future google updates: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/schema-org-eight-tips-incorporate-rich-snippets-conform-google-hummingbird/75435/

As peter pointed out, it will depend on the CMS you are using, nowadays there are plugins for almost everything.

They should be no-follow even on those sites that may pick the news up. Like the question says, the response from Google to the reconsideration request mentions links that were on syndicating sites, not on the actual PRWeb site.

And the statement I mentioned was a quote from PRWeb, and it says and I quote "all outgoing syndication" meaning that even those outside PRWeb site are being no-followed.

Most likely using the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag, where X is not only the language but also the location. You should have something like this:

1st line tells the default page.

2nd line tells that visitors with french browsers in France should get that page.

3rd line tells that users with french browsers should get that other page.

Think the best way to apply that and you need to do it for each page that has different versions. Those lines are just for the homepage.

PS: That won't guarantee that Google will show the specific page you want, nothing can, but it will help Google understand the structure and serve the best page to the user.

Hope that helps!

Yes, google crawls and understands almost every language, so you shouldn't have any problem.

Make sure you add the appropriate  (changing "es" for whatever language you will use).

Hi,

Yahoo directory is a paid link service, although "curated", still paid. I am sure you are not going to be penalized from a link there, however, don't expect any benefit from them other than the organic traffic they may generate. But, who uses directories nowadays?

Hey Jason,

Did you notice that ALL the pages in your site are lacking descriptions?

Your description tag is empty. You can also see the result of that in Google doing a site search. Almost all results have the same description.

Another thing I would consider is fixing the text. Why is it all in caps? It's not only annoying to see in the site, but also in Google's search results. Just put the caps where they should be.

Other things I checked were fine.

Did you verify that subdomain in WMT?

You can rest assure that the scraper blog WILL NOT rank above Moz's results.

As Eric said, Google's Matt Cutts pointed out that Google has several techniques to recognize the original source of an article/content.

In this case, the content isn't helping the blog, and it can even be penalized for duplicate content and/or rank far below as it isn't adding any value.

On the DMCA side, while they point to the source, why will the source bother? They get backlinks, Google knows who's the original writer, etc., nothing to worry about.

IF there was no link to the source, then I would advise taking action, otherwise, they are probably doing you a favor

Hey,

Those creating the links will need to pay for them, or spend a lot of time creating those links to actually hurt you. Negative SEO, although very well known, is not that common, you can't know for sure that the site is going to be hurt, the negative SEO can actually do you a favor.

Just keep an eye on your link profile, see patterns, and if you start seeing new links (either using Moz Just-Discovered or Google's Latest Links), if you notice they are spam, just disavow the domains. Most likely, if a Website doesn't protect itself from spam you probably don't want a link from them even if it was naturally earned.

Hope that helped!