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Darcy,

For whatever reason, Google really doesn't want to give us the keyword search data that they have. However, Microsoft is actually taking a different approach, where they give us the ACTUAL search numbers, and even will predict it in the future. If you have access to MSN AdCenter, you can get that data. I prefer to use the Bing Advertising Intelligence to pull the data into MS Excel and then crunch the numbers from there. You can start with a keyword list from Google AdWords, put the data into MS Excel, and then get the real numbers of queries right there in Excel. Then, you can calculate possible Google search queries by multiplying by their current market share percentage.

Audra,

One of the big differences between Bing and Google is how they deal with links. Google analyzes links to your site a lot more than Bing does, and is "pickier" when it comes to the types of links and how they're obtained. I would review all of the links to your website and make sure that they're all "high quality" links. A quick analysis of the links to your site shows some undesirable links pointing to the site that violate Google's webmaster guidelines.

Christopher,

When you check the IP address of a domain, you may want to also to see the other websites that are hosted on that same server. MajesticSEO has a tool called the "neighborhood checker" that allows you to do that: https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/neighbourhood-checker

Federico is right, it's not necessarily how often you post, but what you post. Keep in mind, though, that typically just posting is not enough: make sure that you do some extra promotion of each post, like adding it to your Twitter account, Facebook account, Google Plus account, etc. so that there are links and social media mentions going to each post.

Armin,

Before you tell your SEO company, I recommend that you thoroughly review any contracts that you signed in order to make sure you understand everything. I would make sure that you make backups of any content that has been produced, and make sure you change the appropriate passwords on the site and on any tools that the SEO firm may have access to: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc.

Your conversation should be focused around leaving your SEO firm in good standing if possible, because there could be issues later on that arise (if they're mad at you, they could start some negative SEO or cause other hassles).

Dave, it's entirely possible for sites to start ranking again really quickly, within days or weeks. The problem is not that it's taking Google a long time to process the disavow file. The problem lies with the actual links in that disavow file to be recrawled by Google. Since those are low quality links it will take some time (usually) for them to recrawl them. From what I understand, Google has to crawl a URL first and see the link: then they look at the disavow file in order to 'process' that link (to disavow that link).

It's the crawling that it taking time: not the processing of the disavow file.

So, to speed up recovery, you'll need to get those disavowed links crawled again. Or force Google to recrawl them.

Tyler, just so we're clear: it's the first TIME the link is mentioned on a page that counts, not just the first link on the page.

So, if you have several links on the same page to page1.html then only the first time counts--the other mentions (if they have different anchor text) don't count.

If you have a link that's useful (like a link to site's home page) then having the logo on your page link to your home page at the top is useful. Then, having a link on the sidebar to the home page might be useful for users, as well. Then there is the link to the home page in the footer. Those are all useful.

Ryan,

I'm sorry you're having trouble. You're not the only one who is having issues like this. My first thought is that you're probably not seeing all of the links to the site. You haven't mentioned which tools you've used to gather the links to the site, but nowadays you need to use several tools and combine the data. Then, it's really a fine art, in a way, to figure out which links to remove and which ones to keep. You mentioned that there are a few hundred that you contacted. We typically try to remove thousands or hundreds of links, not just 100 or so.

The other issue here is that you may have targeted the correct links to remove. But it takes time for Google to recrawl those links and then give you credit for disavowing them. You can speed up that process by forcing Google to recrawl those links.

Lara, this has been an issue that has been debated recently, and it's kind of a grey area. If you're going to build the app or widget in a way to take advantage of its SEO value, then that's really not a good plan. It's logical that you include a link back to your site since you're developer of the widget or app, so that's fine. But if you really just want to include a keyword rich anchor text link to your site then I would take a different approach.

Your best bet is to consider the traffic that the widget or app will bring your site, and the notoriety your company will get by providing a widget or app. If you include a link, then it should be a branded link and not a keyword rich anchor text link.

Since index.html is most likely your home page (it's the default home page on your web server), then you really don't need to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect in this situation. The only thing you need to do is make sure that on your website you don't have any links pointing to www.yourdomain.com/index.html. Rather, all of those links should be pointing to www.yourdomain.com as the home page.

If you set up a redirect from index.html to your site's home page www.domain.com then you'll probably create a "loop" that won't work. If you find all the links to /index.html and fix those then that will be enough to take care of this.

Mike, the only way that you can be certain that it's not affecting SEO in any way is to not use it. That said, you have to look at the potential drawbacks from using it. Is the article being shared enough via addthis to get natural links without those extra characters in the URL? Probably not.

I also looked at the URL and see that Google isn't indexing that URL. Therefore, I don't recommend using addthis just for that reason. You should be building links and social shares to the main URL, not another URL. If that other URL (the one you posted above) actually redirected to the main URL, that would be one thing: but it doesn't. You're just feeding and creating duplicate content (not a good thing).

Google uses a lot of different factors to determine why one site ranks above another site. However, when it comes to duplicate content (other sites using your site's RSS feed to generate content on their site), Google determines who posted the content first--and then the others are considered to be duplicates.

In your case, most likely the other sites are getting crawled quicker--therefore you are not the one who is originating the content, according to Google. You need Google to crawl your site quicker, and that typically is determined by how often you post content and the links to your content. Get more quality links to your site, and make sure you post on your social profiles (twitter, google plus, facebook, linkedin) whenever you post on your site.

Based on the last several Google Penguin updates, if your site was going to be harmed or your rankings were going to go down, they probably would have gone down already. That said, that doesn't mean that you could still be penalized.

If there are sitewide badge links, they need to look natural. I wouldn't use any specific keyword anchor text, I would use your website name or brand or URL as the anchor text in the link. Don't make it look like you're trying to "game" Google by having too much exact match anchor text.

If these links are only a small percentage of the overall links that you have pointing to your site, then there won't be a problem. But if you have only 5 percent like you're saying then it should be fine.

You have a few options here. You could take a look at the popular bloggers in your industry and contact them directly. They already write content and are familiar with your industry, so they may be willing to work with your site directly to create content and manage it as a "ghost writer" or "ghost editor". You can usually end up having a good mutual long term relationship with someone specific that you may even to meet with in person every once in a while.

An alternative would be a company, but you may end up with writers and editors that are not located in your country or you might have to deal with a higher turnover rate with employees.

There are firms such as our firm that manage content and have an internal staff that can handle your needs; it's important to make sure that the writers are familiar with SEO best practices and can also help promote your content properly, as well.

Generally speaking, if that's the only H1 tag that is going to be on the page, then it should be just fine. I would style the text so that it looks appropriate for the page and looks like the rest of the breadcrumb text on the page. An alternative would be to select another location, such as the sidebar somewhere towards the top of the page, and include a heading as an H1.

George,

There aren't any specific SEO migration tools out there, but there are several tools out there that will do the job. If you're an advanced SEO and know what you're doing, you can use tools like Screaming Frog's SEO spider to crawl the list of URLs and even Scrutiny (on the mac) to crawl the URLs and grab the data you need.

2 to 3 months can be a short amount of time, but that really depends on many factors. In fact, it can be done and has been done in many cases. Let's look at the very public case of Rap Genius. They had a penalty and within 10 days Rap Genius was back in the search index. This is an extreme example, but their penalty was lifted within 10 days.

There are several factors that might come into play here, though. For example, the number of reconsideration requests that have been sent to Google already... if Google has received several of them already, then you'll need to wait a period of time (about a month) until Google will even reconsider the site again.

And then it might not be physically possible to clean up the links within 2 months' time. For example, you might be dealing with millions of links. We've had success in the past cleaning up very large link profiles in the past. It's possible, but I don't know of any reputable companies that will do the work based on a contingency. Reputable SEO firms have people who we must pay to the do the actual work. That said, we'd be happy to investigate this further, it's difficult to give you any more specifics without knowing the URL of the site and the number of links you're dealing with.

Eric,

When Google shows the Google Authorship and photo snippet in the search results, it depends on the search query, but there are site links shown. I am not seeing the "indented" larger list of site links in the results, but for most sites who 'deserve' to have site links, I'm seeing three or four site links show up under the search listing.

Look at a search for our company name, "Globe Runner", I'm seeing site links. But for your company name, I am not seeing them.

Just about every CMS out there has a way to set up 301 redirects from your old content to the new URLs. I did a quick Google search for "squarespace 301 redirect" and found several sites with tutorials on how to do that. I believe it's related to shortcuts, although I haven't used Squarespace before.

I would try your best to redirect as much of the old content to the new content. You might even take a look at your site's backlinks and see if there are any links to internal pages on your site (rather than to your home page). Those links are the ones you're going to want to redirect.

I would also take a look at Google Webmaster Tools and see the errors there. They'll point out the most important ones to get corrected, and I would go ahead and set up redirects for those pages that are listed.

A redirect for all the content, including what you're calling a "global redirect" is okay, but it's more like a last resort than what I recommend. If you can redirect an old URL to the new location that is preferred.

BobGW, you're not the only one experience this. In the past year or so, Google has updated their internal algorithms on how they deal with links to sites. If your site has a low quality or even toxic (bad) links pointing to your website from other sites, your site's rankings will go down. And in many cases, you're not going to get any sort of warning messages or messages from Google in Google Webmaster Tools.

If you do have unnatural links that violate their guidelines, then they may send you a message, and in that case they'll ask you to file a reconsideration request after you've cleaned up the links and made good attempts to get those links removed.

The good thing is that it doesn't sound like you've received any sort of penalties--the rankings have gone down algorithmically. That doesn't mean that you don't need to evaluate all of the links to your site and get the low quality links removed.

I would look at all your links (you can use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, or Majestic SEO or a combination of those to find the links) and review them with a fine tooth comb. Not all of the bad links will be shown in Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need to look at other tools to gather the link data.

Get rid of the ones that are low quality and get new fresh quality links and your site's rankings should come back.