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Does anybody have or know of any examples of a site that maybe a bit boring to the masses but has figured out a way to develop interesting content in order to boost their inbound traffic from said masses?
I guess what I'm saying is that it is easy to recommend "build interesting content" but if, for example, I am marketing a store that sells pillows and blankets how am I going to get people to share that URL on Facebook?
DISCLAIMER: I do not work for a pillow manufacturer.
I need some sort of awesome marketing related book.
It could be SEO/SEM related, it'd be nice if it focused on content creation, or it could just be broad and business-y.
Wil Reynolds got me thinking I'm not reading enough, and I wasn't lucky enough to grab one of his books off him at MozCon.
So now I need some suggestions. It's just too overwhelming searching through these broad keywords for the right book. So if anyone knows of any that might fit, let me know!
Thanks Moz Community. You guys rock.
Okay so what's wrong with altering the directory where you store your image files?
Assuming a cease and desist letter isn't working, what other options are there?
hate to say it as i am new here and loving OSE, but ahrefs.com is great for what you're asking. it shows daily additions and subtractions and provides an incredibly extensive backlink profile.
the free version allows something like 5-10 requests if you register. i suggest trying it out. i have yet to pay for ahrefs and am able to get the info i need from it still. great tool to use in conjunction with OSE.
NO Kidding?! That's amazing. Learn something new everyday. There ya go, there's your other option Tony. Good luck!
Rachel,
This is pretty much exactly what happened to me and I've been dealing with it for about 6 months now. FIRST, I want to refer you to a Q&A I posted regarding this: http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-unnatural-link-penalties
Next I'd like to say this - Find the service which was used to purchase these spammy links and contact them. For my company it was a site called "Submit Edge" and I was luckily able to login and download lists of articles published for us with usernames and passwords. Using these excel sheets I removed a good 300 links. That still wasn't enough and I wasn't able to remove the social media and directory links for the most part, but I knew where they were.
Use this list and attempt to contact webmasters and keep track of emails. Simply using the disavow tool will not be enough if you find you have been penalized manually. Google will want to see that you've worked hard to undo all of this.
It sounds like you haven't received a manual penalty message yet (make sure you check your GWMT daily to be sure) but there's still a chance it could come. I discovered and began trying to remove the spam links for my company's sites in late December and wasn't notified of penalty until mid-March. Luckily I had been tracking most of my efforts and am still putting together a re-inclusion request. (strangely, we have yet to see results of penalties so i'm admittedly dragging my feet a bit.)
There's also talk of a new Penguin update coming which could hurt your site when done. So the earlier you start and better you track your efforts the farther ahead you will get, I'd say.
Takeshi's advice is good. Just make sure you can show Google that you've tried really hard to identify this and fix it. That will prove to them that you know what your company did wrong and that it won't happen any more.
Good luck, keep us posted! These types of things are very interesting to me as it's what I'm dealing with daily.
That would be a good way to do it. The other way would be to block it in the robots.txt file on the root directory. Although be careful you aren't blocking both since it's a subdomain.
You could also add a noindex, nofollow tag to each dev page but then you have to remember to remove those when you push them live to your real domain.
I'd probably go with the Robots.txt option since using the redirect will not allow you to view the site live which I'm assuming would take away from the whole point of having this "staging" sub-domain.
Cody is much more helpful and tolerant than me this morning. My apologies, I just couldn't resist.
Oof. Well without more information it's hard to say; it could be any number of things. On-page optimization would be my first guess:
Not sure what to say, honestly.
directory submission is a four letter word, far as i'm concerned.
Well as for the 404s, I would run the site through Screaming Frog and see what I get. If you find 404s there, then redirects and edits will be needed to fix them. Otherwise forget about the GWT report.
I think the most important thing for you to do (besides an overall marketing campaign) is fix those duplicate page titles and descriptions. This is a huge factor, undoubtedly.
A PPC campaign (executed properly) can always help, but you shouldn't lean on it as your fix to your marketing campaign. It is only another spoke in the wheel of your overall efforts.
Hope this helps.
you're in a good spot! I find myself in a similar position. Our competitors to this day participate in a ton of black hat seo tactics. For whatever stupid reason, Penguin hasn't hit them. YET. I believe with all of my heart that they will be affected in the near future, possibly the next big update, and all of my efforts will be rewarded.
I think you are in the same boat. Continue your proper SEO tactics, building content, social media, guest blogging on relevant sites, etc and I would be willing to bet you will be rewarded in the long run. The tricky thing about this industry is not gaining instant gratification in a world like the internet where instant gratification is the norm.
So good luck balancing that and I'm rootin' for ya!
If your site has been penalized, haven't you already lost rankings and traffic?
I'm assuming they're asking you not to build links to ensure they don't remove links you are adding... bah. I don't know why you outsourced this I would just do it myself. All they are doing is contacting webmasters and then disavowing. Hell they might even just be disavowing for all I know... They don't have magic tools to remove links with.
I'd fire them, attempt to remove, document, spreadsheets, screenshots of emails and requests, lists, etc and then disavow, resubmit all the while building new organic and relevant links. That's my thoughts. Sorry... I know this is tough. I have experience with this problem as well. It stinks.
G'luck
Correct to assume but incorrect to think that's enough to get ranked. "Link juice" decays rather rapidly as it spreads out across your site. So yes, your rankings will fall.
What you need to do is get a marketing campaign going. Build content, gain organic links, and continue to grow engagement. You've got the technical aspect sorted (it seems) so now it's time to get people coming to your site. Social/blog/etc to build your community.
Good luck!
Assuming the content is high quality and relevant, it's perfectly fine. If you are writing an article about financial bookkeeping on a hip hop blog... maybe a bad idea. But if it seems relevant and you actually think readership of the blog in question will find value in the article, then absolutely! Go for it!
Oleg is correct, you need a 301 to solve this ASAP.
However, this method only works for Apache servers. You need to determine what type of server the domain in question is being hosted on. It will either be a Linux based Apache server or a Windows IIS environment.
If it is the latter your method of redirecting will be entirely difficult. Google "how to 301 in IIS" for instructions, but really your hosting provider should be able to do this for you.