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Marie is correct - this is unlikely to work unless you are VERY careful to not let Google know that the websites are connected, as they're partial to transferring penalties from one site to another if you try to get rid of a penalty by starting a new, identical website. Simply redirecting a penalised site is a trick that used to work back in 2009, 2010 (you don't mention redirection, but it's worth noting that this used to work, so if you see it mentioned online it's probably old information).

Even if you do not redirect the old site, Google may still recognise that the content is identical to a website it previously penalised, especially if all the new site's registration information, hosting, template, etc. is the same as the old site.

That's not for sure - you may get away with doing this if there are no ties between the old, penalised site and the new site, but using identical content is a big give-away.

Assuming that your penalty was links-related, the safest way to do this is to remove the old site's content, wait until Google cache the old site with the content gone (so the content is completely out of the index), take the site down and re-publish on the new domain. That said, Google's ability to remember what it has seen before could result in the scenario Marie describes.

Unless there is a specific reason to keep the areas separate (e.g. you don't want people to be confused about the brand, or one activity is very inappropriate when paired with the other), it's usually best to keep the content on the same domain. brand.com/activity also usually looks more professional than exact-match-keyword.com. Furthermore, you often gain more trust when people see that the site's offering is well-rounded and includes a variety of activities.

You can also benefit from accumulating good reviews from happy customers to just one website, rather than accumulating surfing holiday reviews for one of your travel sites, wedding holiday reviews for another and so on.

Again, if you feel that the subjects clash badly and will create a weird user experience, you might look at developing different websites, but if you have a range of different activities / holidays that involve one location, I'd be 99% confident that these should all site on the same domain.

Feel absolutely free to link out as often as you like to as many sources, as long as those sources are high-quality. I personally do not recommend nofollowing links "just in case" they are spammy in the future; the vast majority of the links you create will be to sites that will never suffer a spam problem (and if you are ever worried, perform a check on your site's outbound links once or twice a year).

As Anirban says, a site that links out to trustworthy sites makes itself look more trustworthy in return. A very simplistic way of looking at this is that spam websites link to spam websites and to trustworthy websites. Trustworthy websites _only _link out to other trustworthy websites. So while you're not giving the sort of positive signal that likely results in improved rankings, you are failing to give a negative signal.

If the links are user-generated, place a nofollow tag on them, but if they are editorial and added by you because you appreciate the resource, you can do this as often as you like (within reason, still don't create massive pages with thousands of outbound links!).

The instruction in the audit template is probably given to give you a 100% true view of what Google sees when it comes to the website, unobstructed by things meant for humans like cookies, javascript, etc. As Stephen says, Google traditionally does not accept cookies or execute javascript, or do a lot of things that are meant for usability (but may take some of this into account if it's being used for malicious purposes).

This is not about whether cookies are "harmful" and you are not being instructed to turn off cookies on the website itself. You are being instructed to disable your browser from accepting cookies so you get an idea of what Google's experience on the website is like.

Edited to add - posts like this are being shared, literally today, so keep an eye on the Google-accepting-cookies issue, but for the purpose of the site audit, it's just wanting to let you see what Google traditionally sees.

Unfortunately, there is no 100% safe way to do this without the risk of losing either some rankings or traffic, but this was what the hreflang tag was created to help mitigate.

Would it recognize it's the same it knew, just in another language when using the hreflang and would just display the german language now in the german results without mainly affecting the rank?

This is certainly what should happen. Say you move the English version to /en/ and keep the German version on the original URLs (which Google currently sees as being in English), you'd use the hreflang tag on the German content, with the tag pointing to the /en/ subfolder to say "the English language stuff you're used to seeing is over here now." Are you comfortable targeting the English language to one particular country or would you prefer to keep it as non-specific English content?

If you do it the other way around, moving the German content to /de/, you'd still place the hreflang tag on the default URLs (which in this case, would be in English), and Google should rank the new URLs in Germany because it is being told that those URLs are for German audiences.

None of this is a certainty though - the hreflang tag seems to work really well on newly developed content and I am sure Google can make it work in this case, but I don't have any case studies or anecdotes that involve a similar scenario.

Some brilliant tips in here for finding toxic links that tools often don't bring up. it's worth noting that many backlink tools like Moz only crawl the parts of the internet that they feel are "important". When I worked at an agency that crawled its own backlinks (i.e. we had a tool that was similar to OSE and Ahrefs but was in-house), we did the same thing for our regular crawls. We'd do "deep crawls" that went far further only when necessary, usually due to inheriting a client with terrible spam links and needing to see the extent of the damage.

The model and method taken by commercial tools has benefits and detriments. Moz, Ahrefs etc. do a great job, but they do not update as regularly as Google because they don't have the same processing power or storage as Google does. Moz's OSE updates somewhere around once a month with the team working to make this as quick as possible. If OSE were to include every forum page on every subdomain on the entire internet, this would be slower. Going off of what we would do for our every-day tool that was similar in many ways to OSE and its friends, we took a very comprehensive snap-shot that included the entirety of what appears to "matter" on the web and a selection of the deeper parts of the public internet. We did not index or show every .blogspot.com page online.

For 99% of backlink analysis, this is fine and always will be. It's when you're faced with really bad spam that you need a more comprehensive view of what's out there. Majestic has a reputation of including more of this stuff in its reports, although you say you've already used it. The criticism of Majestic is that they often include stuff that was taken down a long time ago, or where pages have been offline for a long time.

For the times when you ned a deeper view, Marie's suggestions are fantastic if you don't have access to a tool that can crawl deeper.

As the others have said, redirecting domains with no backlinks (and even domains with just a few backlinks) will likely not be useful at all in terms of making the destination website rank better.

I dealt with a client a few years ago who literally had thousands of parked domains, all with names somewhat related to their industry (for example, if they were in the sports betting industry, they owned thousands of domains like expertfootballbets.net). We completed a backlink crawl for each of these domains and threw out those with no links or too few links, first checking that there were none with particularly catchy names in the list.

Then, we filtered through to find those that actually had good or passable links and decent names. The remaining list was pretty short. We sought (with budget) to build actual sites on those domains. They were basically affiliate sites for want of a better description: they were not "microsites" in that they didn't take away from the business of the main domain and the content wouldn't have been better off on the main site. From the many thousands we started with, I think our build list was about 30 sites, which was appropriate for the content and industry.

I would imagine that most parked domain lists would end up with far fewer than 30 workable websites.

Obvious misspellings or old company names should be redirected, but for usability purposes.

It's much more work, but actually using the domains is much more useful in the long run, if that's possible, than just redirecting. As altecdesign says above, you're better off reinvesting the hosting / registration elsewhere for domains that have no other noticeable value.

Definitely use the rel="alternative" tag, also referred to as the hreflang tag, if you plan on direct translations and pages that are basically the same thing in either language.

Two good resources: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en and http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool.

I too would go for the subfolder option over subdomains for similar reasons to those Kevin mentions.

Are you translating the content by hand?

If you have been hit with one of the most recent updates, there may be no sign in your Webmaster Tools account like there would be if you had been handed a manual penalty for spam. Has anything stabilised for the site over the weekend? Check your Webmaster Tools account for any mention of a penalty, just in case more is explained in there. However, many sites' rankings changed significantly over the past week due to Panda and Google's "payday loans" changes.

There is no magic number of frequency of links that will secure you good, long-term high rankings. Richard is right, you shouldn't consider link building as a painting-by-numbers game where you decide on a number of links from one type of source and fill these numbers into a chart as the links are built.

Check out the link building category on the Moz blog. It contains years worth of high-quality content about creative, sustainable link development ideas.

Please keep in mind that "social bookmarking" is a very outdated technique. Depending on what you actually plan on doing, a lot of these links may be nofollowed as well, making their usefulness for SEO purposes negligible.

A DIY approach that uses a custom tool is http://www.rmoov.com/index.php, which many people have used with success.

Regular Moz contribute Sha Menz writes about this tool (she works for the company that makes Rmoov) here, and also shows what Remove'em (another tool) does.

I agree with Oleg in that thread that there is often little difference in they way different services handle link removal, besides price and initial approach, but I'd go further to say that a standard, tested follow-up protocol (how long until you you send follow-ups? What language is used?) is also important if you are going with an agency.

Many if not most SEO agencies will provide this service, but may not be particularly economical depending on the agencies' business models. Many hope to provide on-going services to clients, or at least services that extend beyond one link removal campaign.

Hi Corey,

Do you know anything about the history of the domain beyond your involvement with it? Any chance the domain might have had issues in the past that you're not aware of that could cause it to struggle with rankings?

I would not say that "moving text up" alone is necessary, but rather the manner in which you use text should done in a way that makes it look less like the text has been included for SEO purposes and more like that text is a natural part of the page. Unfortunately, grey-ish text on a white background in small font towards the bottom of the page gives off that impression.

This was years ago (before my agency built its own crawler to do this), but I used changedetection.com on a client site where they could not be trusted not to arbitrarily change title tags without asking us first. It was a competitive niche and we had more than one failsafe in action to detect changes quickly, including (of course) manual checking.

I like the idea of using a tool like this to monitor title tags or pages where the competitor's new content might be listed. Having not used the tool for this purpose I am not sure how effective it will be, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. The trick would be finding pages on their site where this new content is acknowledged, whether that be a sitemap or index page, table of contents, etc. If anyone has other tools that might do the same thing in a more direct manner, that would be great!

There's no direct evidence that over-doing your internal commercial linking (i.e. linking with your primary keyword internally in a site) causes problems, but it certainly doesn't look professional to continually link to your car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". There has been some speculation that internal linking like this can cause issues, but I haven't seen it tested or proven yet in the way that having too many inbound links like this has been tested / confirmed.

I would certainly not overdo this sort of linking despite there being no solid evidence that I am aware of, partially because of the unprofessional vibe it gives a page (related to everything David has mentioned above) and partially because I am sure it sends sub-optimal signals to Google regardless of whether it is considered a ranking factor.

The guys here are all correct - you can handle these in WMT with parameter handling, but as every piece of text about parameter handling states, handle with care. You can end up messing things up big-time if you block areas of the site you do want crawled.

You'll also have to wait days / longer for Google to acknowledge the changes and reflect these in its index and in WMT.

If it's an option, look at using the canonical tag to self-reference: this means that if the CMS creates multiple pages with the same file on different URLs, they'll all point back to the original URL.

Hi Kyle,

I would probably only include the URLs that have been translated in the hreflang sitemap, unless the English content that hasn't been translated can be assigned to one territory / language, e.g. en_us or en_gb, etc.

If the pages that haven't been translated are otherwise linked-to throughout the site and are present in a regular sitemap, they will be found. I am not 100% sure that leaving them out of the hreflang sitemap is the way to go, so I will leave this question open for other people to reply as well. However, I'd say that if you wanted English language content to serve internationally because it has not been translated, it would be a mistake to target it to one English-language speaking area via hreflang.

What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA?

Well, if I were going the directory route I'd first look at the relevancy of each directory to what I'm selling, meaning that I'd look specifically for sites in my niche. From those, I'd use PR and DA to determine strength and possible penalties (i.e. if the DA is insanely high and the PR is non-existent, perhaps steer clear). PR isn't a great metric, as it's updated infrequently and may well be sometimes obfuscated to avoid it being used as a link-selling metric but comparing it to other things like number of links and Moz figures can be useful still.

I'd then progress to more generic directories that had categories relevant to me and do the same thing - order them in terms of perceived strength and likelihood that their intended user-base was interested in what I sold.

From the directories I chose, I'd look very carefully through their links - you're judged on who you're linked to alongside, so get rid of any that link to what you'd call low-quality sites, parked domains, etc.

I would be willing to bet that sites with good rankings who have gone in for directory SEO are ranking largely because of other factors, as directories are not something Google likes to put a lot of weight into anymore, and has become better at picking out. And as "holistic" as it sounds, I'd choose directories based off of whether I'd want to be listed there if SEO didn't exist. It's just a case of this tactic having been used so many times for spammy purposes that search engines end up devaluing it or being quite suspicious of it.

What is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link?

Not very much in that a Google rep would likely tell you that sponsors / donors' links should be nofollowed because money changed hands in establishing the relationship. But this will likely be just one page on a website, and for many businesses the number of links won't be astronomically high. If the outbound link numbers are very high, they might attract webspam team attention. As an SEO, I've done FAR more to encourage sponsor linking than go around trying to nofollow these links, however, as have most people. We haven't got to the stage yet where Google has put out memos about this being not-white-hat, but that's what a webspam team member would likely say. I'd still not link out from a site to my sponsors using their commercial anchor text ("car insurance", "mobile phones") - I'd link with their names.

Hi Ryan,

I guess the first point here is that Google doesn't treat this sort of filtering as "penalisation"; it's just filtering two or more versions of the same content because it believes (sometimes mistakenly) that users don't need to see two versions of the same thing. This gets REALLY tricky in fields like real estate when all the aggregators in the same town have access to pretty much the same feeds or properties.

If Google were perfect, you'd put up the two pieces of identical content for all 55 millions products, and Google would serve the right one given the appropriate query, like the example above ("fridge sale san antonio" brings up the local page; "refrigerator" has your main site rank). And this might happen, because Google is getting better at these sort of query-appropriate results. We still recommend not providing dupe content solely because we can't be sure that Google will get it right.

As an aside, it would be so great if they worked on a tool for localisation in the same way that they have given us the href lang tag for internationalisation. rel="city" or similar would be awesome, especially for big countries.

Your idea about serving the content from a shared source will certainly work (iframe, text hosted on separate URL, JS etc.). The pages serving this text clearly won't be credited with that text's content, which removes its SEO value of course.

Linking internally with optimised anchor text should be fine, but be careful not to overdo this in the same manner that you would not overdo inbound links with optimised anchors.

In the last day, I've read a couple of theories about over-done internal anchor text being a common factor in sites that have recently lost rankings, but do NOT take that as gospel or even particularly important yet, as this was acknowledged by the person who said it as a very preliminary theory that they had not run proper analysis on yet. Just something to keep an eye on - I am sure the person will publish this theory if they establish that it has more merit!

The image re-usage should be fine, although it's best to use entirely unique content in both text and imagery.

Hi there,

Just adding to what has already been said here: for the longterm health of the website, I'm in favour of removing all bad links where possible rather than relying solely on disavowal, even though disavowal can and does work in the short term. My reason for this is that relying on disavowal puts the power in Google's hands to at some point say: "Well we don't really care about the content of your disavow file anymore; those links still exist so here's your penalty back again."

Likely, no. But if the links are completely gone, they can never hurt the site again.

Regarding losing the links worsening your rankings, it's possible if those links (as bad as they may have been) were not actually contributing to your penalty (yet) and were passing PageRank / helping you rank. Hopefully the SEO company were correct in marking them as bad... and even if they weren't hurting yet but were otherwise spammy, you're best rid of them in the long term.

The success rate of link removal can vary a lot. At my old agency, we had a set process of "outreach" for link removal that carefully left a certain number of days between emails to webmasters if we received no response from out initial email. We also used carefully-worded templates that we had tested enough to be confident that they worked well. We made at least three attempts to contact a webmaster for link removal.

Not much anyone - you or the SEO company - can do about being held to random for link removal. Sadly that's a popular part of the link take-down process now, as people are aware they prey on site owners' desperation to clean up their profiles.

If there are good reasons why the rest of the 100 of the domains can't be reached, this is certainly where we're lucky disavowal now exists. You are not under a manual penalty so won't be submitted reconsideration requests, but if you ever do, it's there that you'd cite your attempts to contact the X sites you've not managed to remove links from.