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Hi Jarno I was going through the metrics for this site in OSE and Majestic, and it appears that this site is actually quite relevant for camping / recreation / outdoor backlinks in Majestic. It's seems it's doing a great job of associating itself with those themes. It also has a quite high Page Authority. I am assuming this is why this subdomain is ranking rather high. That being said, Moz is reporting some pretty spammy backlinks pointed at them. That being said, how long have they been out ranking you? Have you done a competitive analysis on them? Keep in mind, this could be a fluctuation in the SERPs as there was an update on May 3rd. I would wait it out and see what happens. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Thank you both for your responses and my apologies that I haven't been able to respond sooner. I will start by looking into it a bit more before making any significant changes however maybe 2015 is a nice year for a complete site redesign. Thank you for you thoughts. Regards Jarno

I remember tests being done in the past and title tag in a link does not pass relevance to the linked page, but it could possible add relevance to the linking page to make that clear, image page A has this link dogs Then page B may rank for dogs even if the page has no mention of dogs because the link text has passed relevance, but I will not do the same for cats. But if page B was about cats, then it may be possible that search engines see this link coming from a relevant page because of the title attribute. Probably not, but posible

I came to the same conclusion!

My Moz points seem to increase immediately by a couple of points when I post a question.   I know that Moz awards a point for the question so I assume the "extra" 2 or 3 points come from some sort of caching issue which updates when Moz awards "automatic" points for something.  Just an observation if that helps your techs who are looking into this issue.

I tend to agree with EGOL - it's a rule of thumb. See my post from last year: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many If this was a sitewide issue, like your navigation, and your site had relatively low authority, then it would be worth worrying about. If you're just talking about a couple of pages, and one of them is your HTML sitemap, then I'd probably just ignore it. Some pages naturally require a lot of links. You could split that sitemap up if you think it would have value for users, but from a purely SEO perspective, I don't think it's an issue.

I'm not saying that a keyword matched domain should receive a penalty, I'm saying that it should be a more neutral ground when it comes to ranking factors. If your site happens to have a keyword matched domain but has great content and value for a visitor then it should rightly rank higher for relevant queries - and if they changed the weighting on the matched domains then it should(in theory) weed out the thinner value sites. Matt Cutts did mention in that interview the phrase 'level playing field' - not that I personally believe this could ever be achieved with an algorithm

Hi Jarno The Linkscape Index is not updated daily, a schedule of planned (& previous) updates can be found at  https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule The last update was on January 17th, so your link that you obtained last week won't be showing up just yet. It likely will be after the next update on February 29th (or the next time your site is crawled after that date). Regards Simon

Keyword density is a myth. http://www.miislita.com/fractals/keyword-density-optimization.html dont keyword stuff tags like the title with keywords, place the keyword as many times as you want in the document, as long as it is natural.

Hello Jarno, Since all the links that are coming to your site are related to the website's niche it should not cause much issue with Google.The links are not being repeated in the content so you have your quality content in tact and a link at the end does not show your webpage like a page full of links. And I agree with Alan that the "at the worse the links will negate each other". Just be careful that your website does not look like a directory for camping sites because then your meaning will change entirely.

Hi Jamo, Thanks for the detailed explanation of what is happening on your site. Let's start at the beginning. You say your rankings recently dropped. There could be several obvious explanations. 1. Changed title tags. Title tags are one of the most important on-page ranking factors. If you changed your title tags too much, you might have lost some rankings there. Generally, the first few words of a title tag are the most important - the closer a word is to the beginning the more weight it carries. So if you changed a lot of words at the beginning of you titles, you may have gotten yourself in trouble. On the other hand, if you mostly changed words at the end of the title tags, this probably did little harm. 2. An algorithm change. It's possible Google Panda or the Page Layout update threw an algorithmic penalty at you. As others have mentioned, if this is the case, the only solution is to fix your layout, wait several weeks and hope for the best.  Oh, and read this:  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/donna-on-big-adsense-earners 3. Something else? Unfortunately, any change you made on-site, changes in your backlink profile and changes in the algorithm, or a combination of these factors could have caused your site to drop. We've seen a lot of turbulence in the SERPs the past year and Google is really shaking things up. Sometimes you can't figure it out, no matter what you do. In this case, it's best to move forward and continue to build a site worth visiting. Sometimes you can't fix what went wrong, but you can always build something better.

I am still struggling with this. I am using Numbers on my Mac, and I have tried to change the file extension to txt, but I'm still seeing everything in one column.