Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sadly, Fresh Web Mentions came up with a ton of crazy results for our site- sites that make absolutely no sense and also that don't contain mentions.

Hi Casey,

My feeling is that whenever a vendor is unwilling to be transparent, provide reports or discuss specific strategies they may be someone worth steering clear of. Saying he has never had problems in the past is waffling and not responding to or addressing your actual request. You are entitled to the information and if it's not willingly given that is a red flag. Additionally, this tasks he is performing do beg some qualifiers since they verge on outdated and/or less than completely safe practices. I would investigate further and/or locate an alternative.

Hope this is helpful.

Thanks, Andy.

I can't say 100%, but I am as sure as possible that the URL was created as a redirect. I checked on archive.org and wayback machine doesn't have URL archived. So, then, I also understand you to be saying that the links this company has obtained through blog commenting with CommentLuv aren't worth much and may be considered to have been manipulated.

And I think you're also saying that chances are, it's not worth my while in terms of search engines to pursue commenting on blogs with CommentLuv, but it may help me get more traffic to my blog. And that would make me happy.

I appreciate the advice to not just look at one type of link. I am not. I just tripped on this thing and got curious enough to pursue more info. Finding ways to get more traffic on my blog is something I have been investigating - links aside. Seems to be a don't put the cart before the horse kind of thing.

Question 1: What is the general consensus on gaining links through blog comments on blogs with CommentLuv enabled?

Backstory: I was studying our competitor's links and tripped upon something I haven't seen before. There were a number of blog comments created in 2011 by an individual who was probably an SEO hired at least partially for the purpose of making blog comments to gain inbound links for the competitor. I haven't dug deeply enough to find if there are any more recent than 2011.

The interesting part was the name/link of the company for this individual which was not the company's actual name but a URL crafted from a main keyword. It  obviously has a redirect to the actual competitor's website which is where the link took me AND a link to this individual's "most recent blog post". This blog post on the company site was written by someone else entirely.

Question 2: Clearly some manipulation to build links- would these links be considered unnatural?

Question 3: Would it be smart for me to find blogs with CommentLuv to gain links to my blog?

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the tip. I checked and our .xml sitemap has 55 pages and Google is indexing 53. not sure what the 2 missing pages are or how to find out, but I imagine the difference may have to do with blog archives or something along those lines. At any rate, I'm reassured by this. Thanks again.

Gina

Thanks, Sung Moon.

You're right. I need to check my competitors links. Many of them have a ton more links than I do and I know for a fact that at least one of them has been paying a service to get them links for years. I do not want to follow in those footsteps for all the obvious reasons.

Thanks, Nakul,

As I mentioned, I have the social thing going and am doing all the things you suggest with the exception of the action text. I am looking for suggestions and ideas for other strategies in addition to my reach in social accounts.

My blog is still very young - and I feel like a total newbie, but I'm working at it consistently. I've got  21 posts that I've put up since the beginning of January (except for 2 from October) and another in the pipeline and of course, plans to continue on this way.

I've been building up my confidence and feel like it's just about time to branch out farther than my Google+, FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts (which I've been doing regularly).

My hope is to gain more visitors by publicizing the posts in some other environments. I would so appreciate some suggestions on how I might do that.  And also, is it too soon? I don't want to jump the gun before there's an respectable/acceptable amount of content.

I'm jumping in here with an offshoot question for Mike. (or anyone else with an idea)

You suggest "If you Google site:logobids.com you can see which of your pages Google has indexed."

I just tried that and only 10 out of 40+ pages on our site are coming up. We have both an html site map and an xml site map on our site. There isn't any noindex code on the site other than for blog comments.

Any idea why Google isn't showing them all?

Thanks!!

Thanks, Everyone!

I am basing the Domain Authority on the seoMoz number on my reports. It went from mid/high 40's to 39. Page Authority for Home is 49. MozRank is 4.32, MozTrust 4.60.

While not innovative or groundbreaking, our content is original and not duplicated, thin or syndicated at all. I have not checked bounce back rates on the blog pages.

The links to the Home page from the blog were not part of the navigation structure, but internal links from the content. I have now deleted the links I was concerned about. I think they were too keyword stuffy. I have never employed spam tactics but I do sometimes get a little carried away with on-page optimization for keywords.

We have never had a ton of traffic as we offer a primarily local service that doesn't bring a lot of frequent traffic. And then we lost traffic a few months ago due to losing position in the SERPS for our 2 main keywords, so we have very little traffic.

I have two questions regarding Domain Authority:

1. Is it possible that a drop in Domain Authority may have been caused by adding a blog and blog posts? In other words, would adding pages/posts dilute the site's authority? And will it catch back up with itself or will that require inbound links to those new pages? (oops! that was 3 questions in one)

2. Would it be detrimental to have internal links coming from blog posts without authority to my Home page and could that have contributed to a drop in Domain Authority?

Thanks!

Thanks Colin. Your response clarifies "manual" warnings. I have wondered about the difference between "manual" penalties and receiving an email warning in GWT. I understand you to be saying those are one and the same. Yes?

I am still hoping to learn more about the methods by which a couple of specific keywords might be penalized if no warning was received.

I know this specific keyword issue is not related to inbound links in this case.

I just read the following comment in a response to someone else's question. The Responer is an SEOMoz Authority whose opinion I respect and have learned from (not sure if it's cool to mention names in a question) and it spurred my curiosity:

"...Generally you will receive a warning from Google before your site is penalized, unless you are talking about just specific keywords."

This is something I have been wondering about in relation to my own sudden  ranking drop for 2 specific keywords as I did not receive any warnings or notices. I have been proceeding as if I had over used these keywords on my Home page due to an initial lesser drop, but identifying the cause for the huge drop still seems useful for a number of reasons. Can anyone explain this further?

From what I understand, if it's a new site or there have recently been a lot of changes to the site, it's not unusual for there to be a lot of fluctuations before it settles into the position where it will stick.

Thank you, Mike and James. This makes a lot of sense since this is the only blog page that has a comment. (embarrassing to say that publicly ;o) And I haven't gotten this notice for any other blog pages.

On my most recent campaign report, I have 2 Notices that we can't find any cause for:

Meta-Robots nofollow-
http://www.fateyes.com/the-effect-of-social-media-on-the-serps-social-signals-seo/?replytocom=92
"noindex nofollow" for the page:

http://www.fateyes.com/the-effect-of-social-media-on-the-serps-social-signals-seo/

Blocked by Meta-Robots -Meta-Robots nofollow-
http://www.fateyes.com/the-effect-of-social-media-on-the-serps-social-signals-seo/?replytocom=92
"noindex nofollow" for the page:

http://www.fateyes.com/the-effect-of-social-media-on-the-serps-social-signals-seo/

We are unable to locate any code whatsoever that may explain this. Any ideas anyone?

So sorry! One more question, please, Takeshi. My husband just reminded me that we purchased a second domain name in October and set up a redirect or forwarding to our site domain. He kept the page authority for the main URL. Our site is www.fateyes.com and the additional URL is www.fateyeswebdesign.com and that points to fateyes.com.

Mike, this is very helpful information for me as well.

I'm curious - I also discovered I have links with 0 PR and have been wondering if I should put some time in to get them removed. Not with the disavow tool, but by writing to the webmaster or  seeing if there is sanything on those sites that allows me to request that my link be removed. I also have not received any messages or warnings in GWT about penalties.. I did have a major drop in The SERPs for a couple of my keywords -still healthy for others and my business name URL. Do you feel it could do harm if I were to try to get the links removed?

oh yeah, duh. It's not personalization. Thanks.

Wow- thanks again! Much appreciated.

We did make some changes in September and early October and I was pushing with  on-page SEO on the Home page between Oct. and Dec. after the first hint of slippage, but have since pulled it back and tried to revert as much as I could remember. In late September and early October, our overseas programming company made some suggestions for page descriptions and meta keywords that I adopted, but that shouldn't matter.

The big thing they did was some link building and one article submission which I may have overstepped duplicate content with an article, now blog post, on our site to a certain extent, not understanding that issue at the time. There were 24 links listed and 268 submitted. None of the anchor text is a match for the keywords in question. Believe me, I will NEVER do that again. I don't think these guys would do anything shady, but now that I've learned more, I don't like what they did much anyway.

But with no messages from Google, it's so hard to know if it's the links. I was studying their report this morning, and there are some sites with 0 PR. I'm thinking about trying to get those removed. Do you think I should?

What do you mean by personalization? And no, the site's been up since 1998.

Thanks again!