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I am wondering, with all the recent changes in the algorithm, is this a good time to start a niche  site?

I know this can be fairly subjective, depending on the niche. But, anyone think this is a good opportunity?

Unfortunately, a lot of those links you may have a very hard time removing. They were probably part of a network that was used to sell links, and the webmaster does little or no upkeep. I also know that some webmasters or companies will ask you for money to remove the links.

Another problem is, you have to do A LOT of research to determine which links are hurting you to the best of your ability, Otherwise, if you go about it with carpet bombing approach, you might remove some links that are actually helping you. This will cause more harm.

Given your difficult situation, this is what I would do:

• Article directories : remove all duplicate copies of articles and leave ONE copy on the best site, i.e Ezinearticles. You may even want to remove them all and put them on your own site if it is a real quality article.

• Try to remove as many forum comments, spammy profile links.

• Other links (i.e blog posts, etc) - for each keywords/page affected, find the the backlinks to that page. Use OSE AND Webmaster tools. WEBMASTER TOOLS IS YOUR FRIEND HERE. Google is telling you which links are being pointed to your site. If you know if  a spammy link, and Google is not showing in the links to your site, you better focus your energy elsewhere.

Make a list of these sites, and examine the site: spammy jibberish content;  excessive links pointing out; their backlinks (they may 100s of backlinks with spammy keywords like "viagra" or "payday loans," this is a red flag that the site is likely hurting you); links to pills, gambling, and porn.

Approach the sites via contact, email, and whois contact. Document ALL correspondence and attempts to clean up.

Once you feel you have done all you can, send Google another reconsideration request with all the documenting as you can (be thorough). Specifically, tell them which links you have made good faith attempts to remove and have been unsuccessful.

Hopefully, they will lift the penalty or let it expire.

What you seem to be talking about is the reconsideration request. If he has not gotten a message from Google warning about unnatural links it is probably a bad idea to file a reconsideration request.

Read this: http://searchengineland.com/penguin-update-recovery-tips-advice-119650

You don't have a lot of backlinks, and the ones you do have don't seem spammy- no overuse of keywords or spammy sites. I didn't go through the all the top sites, but the very first result (used to be ONLY 2 spots above you) is much better optimized. They have a much higher domain authority + plus they have more than 10 times as many links (again I didn't spend much time on the links, but the anchor text didn't seem spammy).

It seems that there were just some fluctuations in ranking factors, and your site doesn't deserve the ranking it once had in Google's opinion. You likely did not set off any sort of spam filter.

At this point, invest in some good content and try to make the site more useful.

BTW, when I searched for "boston wedding photographer" I didn't see any sponsored results. You might be able to drive some traffic without breaking the bank via PPC.

That might solve part of your problem. Unless you know that excessive use of targeted anchor text is your ONLY problem, then this might not be a good idea. It is likely that if you have a "spammy profile," then you have links from spammy sites. Going out there and spamming some more doesn't sound like a good long term solution.

Even if anchor text was your only problem, you might cause other problems by aggressively getting "easy links."

Find the keywords that were hit hardest and actually delivered traffic. If you can identify the worst links for that page/keyword (i.e spammy sites linking to porn, pills, or gambling), then remove them to the best of your ability. Then try to add some useful content to the page itself. Then promote that content to related sites. It will take time, but it is the right answer.

Good luck!

If it is relevant to Sofas, you might be able to put it directly on that page. But yeah, having relevant content for each category makes sense for the user.

You can move the content over and the do 301 page-to-page redirects to the main site.

i.e

Sofas.com to furniture.com/sofas

contemporary sofas to furniture.com/contemporary-sofas

Good luck!

BTW, have you thought about doing a 301 redirect to a relevant subfolder of the main site?

For example, the main site is furniture.com, microsite is sofas.com, you redirect sofas.com to furniture.com/sofas.html.

By content, are you talking about category and product descriptions? or articles, guides, etc.? Both?

Marie,

I think link building as a whole is in limbo right now. If Google really means any link building intended to affect organic results is a link scheme, then any "active" link-building violates Google's WG.

If you are an ecommerce site, these are hard times because avenues of link-building are being cutoff + Google is showing more bias to HUGE sites (i.e Amazon, Lowes, etc.).

That was what I initially thought, but SEOmoz has usage data and social signals as separate factors.

According to SEOmoz, the main ranking factor to become more important is Google's "analysis of [a] pages perceived value to users"

What does this mean? Is this Google's analysis of the on-page content (i.e reading level, readability, etc.)?

If you don't mind me asking, which company did you speak to that seemed like a great company? and what is your budget (ballpark)?

I just want to see if it is a company I have already contacted or if I am in the same boat as far as budget.

Thanks for the reply.

I manage an e-commerce site. I wanted to know if anyone has worked with an SEO company for link-building that they would recommend.

I DO NOT want articled directories, bookmarks, etc.. I want real link-building from credible/related sites.

If you would give me an idea of the results or the general process they use I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you in advance.

I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text.

So here is the question;

If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html

Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain?

If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.

BTW, the crawls stats show Google crawling about 3-10K pages a day. The daily errors are numbering over 100K. Is this even possible? How can if find so many errors if the spiders are not even crawling that many pages?

Thanks again!

I have been seeing a large number of access denied and not found crawl errors. I have since fixed the issued causing these errors; however, I am still seeing the in webmaster tools.

At first I thought the data was outdated, but the data is tracked on a daily basis!

Does anyone have experience with this? Does GWT really re-crawl all those pages/links everyday to see if the errors still exist?

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

No. I don't know how often the OSE index is updated. Knowing my own backlinks, I know only a part of my links appear.

Google seems to be more thorough with the links, and it is coming from the search engine that is ranking your keywords.

How often does Google update the "links to your site" data. It seems that it has been static for about a month now even though we have made a lot of changes

Does anyone have any idea?

If you have made changes to your links (i.e removed links, updated anchor text, etc.), do you have to wait for this information to be updated to measure the impact? Or is that whenever Google crawls those pages/sites and sees changes there is a adjustment.

Thanks

If a domain with higher authority publishes the article, they will likely outrank you for your own content.

To be safe, you have to ask yourself this questions:

If you a re putting the same piece of information on multiple sites, what value does it add to the end user?

The goal of the last update according to Google is to have people create content for the sake of the end user, and not search engines. From that perspective, if you are doing this for the sake of rankings, it might not be a good idea. If it doesn't hurt you now, it might hurt you later.

The best way to do it would be to choose at most 2-3 very reputable press release sites and publish there with a link back to your press release page.