Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
If an author contributes on more than one site, then on G+ you should link to each author page on each site (within the same G+ profile). Each site should have the author page linking to his/her g+ profile. The authorship verification needs a "reciprocal" link to verify "ownership".
Oh well, as you mentioned "rebrand" I guessed you were able to also merge the two, by using one site to cover all, like most manufacturers do (apple, samsung, sony, etc).
Anyway, in this case, I would suggest you build different content for both sites. In the manufacturer site, you can have technical specifications, let's say it builds computers, then in the manufacturer page you list technical aspects of the chips, motherboards, manufacturing process, etc. While in the sales front you "SELL" the end product, show how it works, you can probably add videos of the product in action, etc.
By following that process you will end up with "similar" pages, but sites that actually read totally different; and you won't need to nofollow or noindex anything...
Site looks like a scraping engine full of crap, you probably don't want them to link to you (links are dofollow).
You can still disavow the entire domain even if not showing in WMT. Just add the full domain in the domain format: Domain:handmadearea.com to your disavow file and you are done.
Are you using the hreflang correctly? it contains both the language and location. If, for example, you french version is being served with the hreflang="fr" that means that users with a French browser should see that page, but not that users in France should see that page.
If you are running an German browser, searching in France, you will probably get the German version first, as the hreflang="de" it's doing it's job. If you'd like to have the french version even for German browsers, you will probably need to add an hreflang="de-FR" and point to the french version.
Even adding all the hreflang tags you may need, Google will ultimately serve what they think is better to the user. There's no way to "force" them, hreflang is just a "guidance" 
There are lots of blog directories, but those won't get you any significant traffic at all. In fact, I would recommend you focus on social media to become viral.
First, make sure you have created a FB page, Twitter profile and G+ page, verify everything needed and start posting on the 3 networks on a regular basis. Not only post your blog posts, but try to build a community. This could take a while (and you can push it with a few ads from facebook and twitter). Remember to use hashtags to get new followers that read about certain topics.
Then you can also use sites like viralcontentbuzz, which allows others to share your pages in exchange of sharing theirs. There's also a paid version that gives you more exposure and a few of free credits, although the idea is to share in exchange, not to "buy shares".
To add up, you can always offer yourself to guest post on other related blogs, even if the outbound links are nofollow (no juice to the site), you still get your article and your name out there.
There are millions of other ways to promote your blog that I;m sure you'll discover on the way
Hope that helps!
I suffered a similar issue. Although I do recognize I bought links back in 2007 - 2010, we were still getting about 10 new links every day, probably from some negative SEO campaign.
Got a penalty as a "partial match" affecting "some incoming links". We worked over a year to clean the backlink profile and still every reconsideration request failed as Google returned some links that were actually discovered after we downloaded all the links from all the possible sources.
What we did to solve this: downloaded the domains from both GWT and OSE, and instead of going link by link and spending at least 2 month contacting AGAIN, we added domain:[domain-to-disavow] and did it for almost 90% of the profile. Even domains that were linking to us honestly, but could possibly be seen as spam (like a link for my own profile in a dev forum).
After sending the disavow file with about 1500 domains, we didn't wait and sent the reconsideration request, with all the previous reconsiderations and their outcome and the decision we made to give it a "last shot". 2 weeks later we received their response, Penalty Revoked.
We started seeing ranking increases from the next day.
Hey Alberto,
If those 44 posts are set to "private" how is Moz finding them? Somewhere in your blog you are linking to them. Find those links and take them down.
Then you should consider 2 things:
Hope that helps!
There's no such thing as a maximum or minimum. All that matters is WHAT you publish. It is best to publish an excellent post once a week than 10 posts of useless content a day.
Both will actually have the same effect as long as you nofollow your affiliate links directly or the PHP script that does the redirection is disallowed via the robots.txt + makes a 302 redirect.
The downside of using nofollow is that you can't track the hits on those links from your end, but with PHP you can save that into a DB or any file.
Hope that helps!
Did you verify your site with GWT?
If yes, go to "Search Traffic" > "Manual Actions" and see if there's something there.
Penalties could occur for several reasons, manipulative backlinks, stuffing, full spam, etc. Check there and see if you have any.
If not, then it could be Hummingbird or Panda affecting your site.
Does your client have that much content to regularly update a tumblr and a custom on-site blog? I would actually go with the on-site blog.
What's your customer's reasoning behind the change?
Basically yes. Any form of payment received in return of a back link is considered a paid link and will be penalized.
Catherine,
If you have a blog you should be using structured data. But in any case that couldn't be the reason of the drop.
I am guessing competitors using some shady techniques to outrank you and others or perhaps lack of content. I do see only 18 pages were indexed. Having a blog and posting regularly can help you. For example posting experiences from your customers? or any extra info you can provide on the locations you offer skiing (I don't know). Do a little research and see what's missing in other pages and get your hands on it.
In any case, if the site outranking you are spammy, you can always report them to Google, they don't pay too much attention, however, you could then throw a thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums (if you didn't do any backhat link building, which apparently you didn't.
Once you start creating good content, over time you will earn links which ultimately and combined will give you an edge over your competitors. That just needs time, time and more time.
Hope that helps!
No. It only counts the +1s on the Google+ Page and on Google+ widgets installed on a site that are using their Google+ Page as the SRC.
Check here: https://developers.google.com/+/web/+1button/
You can put that code in any page and it will +1 the page that it is on. However, if in the "Advance Options" you input Moz's Google+ Page, then even installed in your site and clicked will be "+1ing" Moz's Google+ Page.
Hi Papp,
What you are asking is the million dollar question... there's no right answer. To get traffic you need basically 2 things:
A great Website. And excellent content (whatever the niche is, it could also be the "best products" if you were selling something, or the "best service").
The real question here is: do your websites have what they need to rank in the SERPs? I'm quite sure, that 10 - 30 "seo'ed" articles are not even near enough unless those articles that you published are something really extraordinary that you can't find anywhere else, say a medical research for example.
My advice? Take one of the sites first, and try to do something amazing. If you are able to monetize that first one with AdSense, then you would have learned what is needed to do it with the other sites.
I believe you can't.
That said Moz crawler shouldn't take down your site, and if it does then you should really consider improving your hosting or checking out why is the site crashing, could be tons of reasons, such as:
I will surely do it. It's not all about SEO, but building relationships. You may not get a link from them directly, but you could indirectly!
There's when guest blogging becomes a spam technique, when you only do it for the link. Change your mind, watch it from another perspective!
Example: I once wrote for a small SEO blog, it had almost no value, then when I applied for a much bigger site, and showed them my work, it was a "Can you please write for us?".
You are doing guest blogging for the links? Then just 1 will do it to get you penalized. Forget about guest blogging for links, instead, create great content and promote it trying to get a natural link.
If you are doing guest blogging, don't do it for the links. If in one article you write it happens you have an excellent article to link to in one of your properties then link to it. But do NOT write so you can insert a link.
Hey G,
I took a quick look at your Website and link profile.
There's no much I can suggest other than continue working on your site. The on page grader is just another metric, but you can't take that and expect higher rankings.
Google say they consider over 200 metrics to rank Websites, not only links, but also content, navigation, user interface, etc.
If I was required to suggest you changes these a few a would start:
As for the 301, it is perfectly implemented. Your robots file has nothing in it and does not need to. You can probably add (and remove everything else in the file):
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
But it wouldn't help much or even anything.
It will require a much more in-depth research, you may want to hire a professional SEO to look at your site and competitors'. I based my quick review only on your site, I don't know who your competitors are or what keywords you are targeting.
Hope that helps, a bit at least
Having a link in the image linking to it's own file does not help your image to get indexed faster or added to a sitemap, at least not that I know of.
In my blog, I don't have the images linking to their file and they are indexed just fine, plus added to the image sitemap that is being generated by "xml-sitemaps" automated script.
Having the image file redirecting to the page having the post is actually serving users with different content that what Google may see, hence the penalty of the image mismatch. If Google offers a link the the image, it should load the image. That's why they also offer link to the page or clicking the image links to the page where the image is. You can read more on the "Image Mismatch" penalty here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137