Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Vasil,

I don't think having exact match anchor text is a negative signal in itself, as there are some sites and brands built on the back of an exact match domain name. It's more about the %'s involved, if you've focused on exact match anchor text too much over more branded terms, and more natural looking anchor text (eg. www.brandname.com, brandname.com, click here, brand name product, product name, etc.) then you may have suffered with the latest updates.

Here's some links for SEOMoz blog posts that might be of interest to you on this topic;

May 2nd, 2012 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
Jan 5th, 2012 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday
Sep 8th, 2011 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps.
Greg

Hi Gareth,

The redirection plugin should cover this for you - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

http://davidwalsh.name/wordpress-category-slug

Just to add, I've just had an error page on trying to reply to another question, hopefully Roger is on the case!!

Hi Joshua,

As far as I know there's no way you can control links pointing to your site (part of the argument with negative SEO) so all you can do is try and contact the sites to have the links removed. If they are that low quality it hopefully wouldn't be too long before the links are dis-counted, or the sites in question are deindexed.

I think every site will have a % of low quality links just because of the nature of content crawling sites and such, so I would focus your time on building good quality links and outweighing them in % terms.

Hope that helps!
Greg

Hi Gareth,

It can take a couple of weeks, depending on how often Google visits your site to check for changes/updates. Try a quick cache search to see when they last visited:

Search 'cache:htttp://www.yourdomain.com/'

You could also check Webmaster Tools to see how often the spiders are crawling your site.

Hope that helps,
Greg

Hi Gareth,

Will the content within the category be moved to another category, or is it being taken down altogether?

Hi Kollin,

I've tried a number of the big outsourcing sites for copywriters, and the best I've found have come from People Per Hour, by quite a distance. Be realistic with your budget, check for samples/portfolio & you should have no troubles finding some good quality reliable writers.

Hope that helps!
Greg

I wouldn't risk it.

Even if the benefits from the 301 are passed on, I don't think it would be too long before they were removed, or worse, a similar penalty was applied to the new domain. In the UK there was one particular niche were I've seen this happen with a number of sites, and they only lasted 2-3 months before dropping down & another 301 coming into place for a new domain. It's only a matter of time before Google gets smart to this pattern and gets quicker at applying more severe penalties in my opinion.

If all 100 are like your example, eg. different /folder/ structure and different page name then unfortunately there's probably not an easy/automated way to generate the list of 301s. Having said that, if there's any patterns for the URLs you could try a rule geneator tool like this one: http://seo-website-designer.com/HtAccess-301-Redirect-Generator

Hi Donnie, sorry misread the question a bit!
Sounds like it's down to the way the tool connects with Googles various servers then(?)

Hi Emma,

How do you post your news articles to your site currently?
Are the articles unique content, or are you sourcing your content from elsewhere?

Hi,

Have you looked at using an SEO add-on such as CDSEO Pro? From a quick search it looks like it should give you a bit of extra control over the on-page SEO issues such as the H1 tags - http://www.websitecm.com/x-cart-mods/cdseo-pro-x-cart-seo.html

If you're experienced with editing template files you could look at adding them yourself manually:
http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?p=278293#post278293

Hope that helps.
Thanks, Greg

Hi Donnie,

Have you considered that being signed into Gmail/Google apps could be affecting your SERPs? I've also seen a similar issue with using Chrome whilst not signed in. I usually goto Private Browsing to check SERPs manually, as this seems to be the best way to get the (nearest to) accurate results.

But, as EGOL says, there does seem to be a lot of fluctation & change around at the moment.

Hope that helps.
Thanks, Greg

Hi Pete,

I would suggest having a separate US version of the site (ideally on a .com domain matching your .co.uk) rather than trying to target both from the .co.uk domain name. I think (as you've already experienced to an extent) it would be very difficult to target both and could have long-term negative effects on your work in the UK rankings.

Hope that helps.
Thanks, Greg

Hi Andy,

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a deep footer with useful links to pages within your site, as long as they are there for the benefit of your visitors. With your example, I would personally look to move those links in to your main content area on the homepage, perhaps with a CSS/Javascript map of Italy that shows all the town locations as clickable links? That way you're still including those links from your homepage but in a more useful manner for the user.

Then if you wanted to keep the links on your inner content pages too, you could simply have a location dropdown box in your sidebar with the listings and a 'Go' button or similar.

My personal preference would probably be to just keep them to the map setup on the homepage, then perhaps introduce regional content pages with enlarged sections of the main map, so South Italy, North Italy, etc, etc.

Hope that helps in some way.
Greg

Hi Chris,

How many URLs does Google have indexed for your site?
(a quick 'site:http://yoururl' search should tell you)

What's the current URL format for the dynamic URLs?
Can you post an example or two?

Thanks,
Greg

Hold on & wait.

It sounds like the pages you're waiting on recache for are deeper pages within the site (product pages) so it's likely that they are visited less regularly by Google. You can always check the cache date with a 'cache:http://pageurl' search to check when Google last visited & cached the page.

Hope that helps.
Thanks, Greg