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Regardless of whether you choose blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog you should definitely keep your blog on your personal domain. This is where you will have the best opportunity to create new and engaging content on a regular basis.

Ideally, your blog content will be popular on occasion and other people in similar industries will tweet and/or share your link in one way or another. This will gain you backlinks and bring traffic to your domain. Better they point to and land on your domain than wordpress.com.

Yeah I love it. So much better than the giant cover photo, that was driving me bonkers to be honest.

These guys are all right, but John is assuming you're on an Apache server. You very well might be, but you will need to determine if it's LINUX or WINDOWS based that your site is hosted on.

Also, in addition to redirects I would go ahead and remove whatever internal links point to "www.yoursite.com/index.html" and change them to "www.yoursite.com" instead. The redirect will solve the problem ultimately, but fixing these links will help ever-so-slightly and especially in the meantime while you wait to fix your server level redirect.

Good luck!

If it makes sense to put their link on your site, then go for it. If it fits naturally and isn't out of place, then yes. Otherwise, no.

Basically just use your common sense. If it looks spammy on your site, don't use it.

Also, avoid having a page full of links. That's a huge red flag and could end up hurting you. And if they are putting your link on a similar page, you are better off without it.

ABSOLUTELY!

I'm so glad I'm not the only one. Lately I've re-launched a few penguined pages with new URLs so the 404 would rid the black-hat action. The keywords have slowly regenerated whereas in the past you'd see them have a big jump quickly and then start to fade back down (if your SEM campaign didn't keep up of course.)

Anyway I definitely have been seeing this lately. Good topic. Makes me feel better.

Ugh. I'm sorry to hear this.

I'm disheartened by the amount of people on these forums being attacked by competitors with bad backlinks and fraudulent PPC charges. Is this really the direction businesses are going in the online marketing world?

Sad...

Sorry I have no suggestions. Except maybe to have faith in karma?

If the keyword "doesn't sound good to the user" then why would they type said keyword into Google?

That's my first question. To answer your question H1 tags are definitely important and carry a lot of weight for on-page optimization. Do you realize you can format your H1 tag using CSS or HTML to look however you want? You could, by all rights, drop an H1 tag into the middle of a sentence and the user would be none the wiser... just a hint.

There isn't really any significance to that as far as I'm concerned. You can go here **http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663691 **and request it's removal, but I wouldn't bother. Who looks at that? Certainly nobody I know. I could be mistaken here... I'll be interested to see what somebody else says. Personally I'd leave it alone and move on.

Yes the descriptions all need some work. Write them as a tagline to get the potential client to click on your page. Forget about keywords as Google doesn't factor these in. This is your chance to set your link apart from the others: write something enticing for each page to get the user to click your link instead of the other one.

Unsure what works? Google something and without thinking about it, click the one that appeals to you. Go back to the SERPs and read the description.. try to decide what it was about the listing that made you click it.

Good luck!

Potentially. Depends on the directories. Directories in general carry little-to-no value and most end up hurting more than helping. Especially blog directories. Google doesn't like these sites and generally it's my least favorite method of grabbing links for SEO. Local listings is important, however, and there are some directory sites that are decent enough to warrant grabbing links from but I'd say there aren't many  more than 5 in all of the internet galaxy.

To dumb it down, if your question is simply "will building 20 links in one day get us a penalty?" the answer is most likely "no." However if the links are poison and this pattern continues, expect a penalty to be imposed eventually.

Hope this helps.

What you are asking here is essentially "What is SEO and how do I do it?"

Well it's kind of an incredibly long answer and explanation and basically in order to truly master what you are after it will require you to spend some time learning the trade. These forums are a great place to do that, but probably not the best place to start. Moz does have some great resources to get you started, however. I would head this direction and read through every last page they offer if I were you: http://moz.com/learn/seo

Well put Thomas. I very much agree with your ideas here, especially the part on Google's perception of this practice. He seems very certain that Google won't ever penalize this. We all know that Google is entirely unpredictable. Wait til they roll out their cat-penalties and start targeting the 'i can haz cheezburger' sites.

Mike is right on. You just need to get back to work building links and content. (or the other way around)

You can 301 if you want. Won't be much of a point because yes, it will pass the "bad rankings.." although I'm not sure that's what's going on here. 301 passes link juice, meaning good and bad. It's simply informing the world that "hey, this page lives over here now so carry on." If you want to truly start over, you must do just that.

Yes, reach out to the natural links and inform them. You can do so in a way that is enticing to a webmaster. Don't forget, you're asking them to do work for you. Make it seem worth their while. Be polite and phrase it in a way like "hey just so you know that link is now broken. In order to improve functionality and user experience you may want to change the link to ______."

That way there's a motivator for them.

Hope we've been helpful.

I would personally focus on your main site's blog. This way, if you build awesome content that people want to feature and/or share then you are building backlinks organically and link juice is passing to your blog.

That said, it's okay to have a blog on the side as well. Especially if you want to target certain niches with it. Problem is your CTR is going to be diminished and you won't get as much traffic to your primary domain which I'm assuming is where you want to build presence/traffic/SERPs.

Having another blog though separate from your main site also opens up the possibility for guest blog sharing which can be quite beneficial. Problem is it may not be worth developing as you will need an established blog to be able to trade with the types of bloggers you'd like to trade with.

Go to Open Site Explorer and directly under the URL input box is a button that says "+ Compare up to 5 sites."

That's your ticket, right there.

These people are all correct.

I'd just like to add that while it is important to use your keyword early in the title it is also important to make your page title readable. Remember, the page title is the first thing people will see and it is what they will click on to go to your site. In your case, the page title mentioned looks spammy and unreal to me. I simply would not click it no matter where it was ranked in Google.

Think from an average user's perspective -

You type in what you're searching for

A list of websites come up on your screen

Now you have to choose which one to click. Do you choose the top one just because it's first? Not necessarily. You will most likely quickly scan the area to see which one sounds reputable or the most relevant to what you want.

If I was looking for a sci fi book and saw a title the said

"SCI FI FANTASY FICTION BOOK NOVEL | CLICK FOR SCI FI"

above one that said

"Sci fi novels and fantasy fiction books: the Ultimate Resource"

There's no question I'd click the second one. So keep that in mind too. Go search for something you want and click on the website you think looks best without thinking about it. Then go back and re-read the page title and determine what it was about that title that got your click. Voila.

Are you sure it says you "don't" have the canonicals? What section is it under? IE Warnings, Notices, etc.. ??

Because often times SEOmoz will tell you in Notices that you DO have canonical tags in place. This might be causing your confusion? It's not a report of a problem at all, just to make you aware.

My thoughts would be to try and contact the webmaster or blog owner first and ask for them to remove the link. Document this communication and throw a screenshot in a folder, then go ahead and disavow (assuming you decide you don't want these links.)

That way, if you do ever end up penalized you have something to show that you were attempting to right a wrong.

Well... I'd use the Moz Rank Tracker but that may be too obvious seeing as how we're on the Moz forums and all. But just in case: http://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker

I personally prefer spacing them out in somewhat of a recognizable pattern in an effort to develop readership.

Whatever you do though, don't just pump out a new article because you have only done one so far this month and you think you need two. Make sure the quality of the content is top-notch first and foremost. Think to yourself, "if I were my target reader/viewer, would I find this interesting? Would I want to share it with my friends?" If the answer is ever no then trash it and move on!

Hope this helps..

Each article's view pages are unique? Or are they all one page with uniquely propagated iframes? If it's one page, then add it to your robots.txt file as a disallowed page.

Otherwise yes you can no-index

OR you can add a rel="nofollow" to the links which might be a good idea anyway. Of course if the page is linked from anywhere else it could be indexed.

Or you could send them all to a unique directory and have that particular directory removed in the robots file. This would pertain if each article was given a unique page. Just have them go to url.com/article/view/thisarticle.html and disallow the view/ directory.

Hope this helps.