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Yes this happened to me just moments ago. I cleared my cookies and it's back to working now.

Right well you didn't really address my question at all either. I will reiterate - if you provide your domain we can better assist you and discover any problems you speak of.

Your question is not clear here, which is why I was unable to answer it and probably why nobody else has responded to your thread. (clear questions are answered quickly in this forum 99% of the time.)

So I'd suggest simplifying the question and re-phrasing it as it is unclear what exactly you're asking here. And as always, your link would help this community to answer any questions.

I will say this - if your question is "how do I rank for my targeted keywords" then the answer is to build quality content and develop real organic links. But I think you already know that. I'd worry less about anchor text, honestly. I think people focus too much on what their anchor text is these days and in reality Google is looking for a natural link profile so the best way to achieve this is let it come naturally. If your anchor text is heavily weighted already, then yes it would be good to remove those links or edit them if they're good links. Depends how weighted.

Also, if you don't have a message in GWMT about unnatural links then you probably weren't penalized for such... (*keyword: "probably.")

Hey this is pretty awesome, Kyle. Thanks for sharing it. I'm literally in the middle of ordering a ton of company branded swag for our sales and promotions team to take with them to trade shows and industry conferences this Summer.

If I may do a slight hijack of this thread (now that you've gotten the desired result from the lovely Keri), I'd like to get people's opinions on what works the best for this type of loot.

So far I've ordered:

• stress reliever balls (my guys like to juggle and toss balls at people wandering trade shows to lure them into the booths so this was a must.)

• mouse pads (there's some debate over whether anybody even uses mouse pads anymore..? our office is split darn near 50/50.. you?)

• LED flashlight keychains

...That's it for now. What do you all think is the best and most cost effective promotional item to give away.. what would you go out of your way at a tradeshow to snag, etc..?

It's that time of year so I feel like this is an interesting topic relevant to marketing, which most of us seem to be working in.

Last but not least, I am officially signed up and registered for Mozcon this year and am incredibly thankful that my employer found it worthwhile to sponsor my attendance and send me up there. (it helps that I live in the Seattle area of course..) Can't wait to get some moz swag myself and learn/meet/greet!

No problem.. I'm sure you can get a ton of help around here this community is awesome. I'm going to write a rushed response because I'm hurrying to wrap up for a 4 day weekend (woot woot!) so ---

Start by getting a list of all referring domains. Use multiple tools. Open Site Explorer, ahrefs.com, Google Webmaster Tools. Check all you can and get this list. Maybe into Excel. (there are some great articles on parsing this data and how to setup excel sheets to help determine Domain Authority and Page Rank value, but I'm not able to grab links at the moment check around these forums and seomoz blogs..)

What you'll be looking for is low DA and irrelevant domains. If you have a bunch of links coming from autism-savior.com/forums/ it probably is spam. Some of them will jump right out at you. If these links don't look like they would help somebody to learn more then they are poison... etc.

I'm assuming somebody along the way used a link building service. Something like $75 for 1,000 links, etc... If so maybe you can contact the company that did this and ask for a full report with logins/passwords. I did this with some success. Removed about 1/5th of paid links once... Wasn't great but at least got me closer.

These are just a few ideas. Hope they helped. Keep asking questions, maybe start another thread (since this one is marked answered it might get less clicks.)

Well I certainly don't consider hype a four-letter word, first off. Hype is just a clever form of marketing and something that we should all love and embrace. ESPECIALLY in the digital/social marketing world.

As per my expectations... Well I hadn't really thought of it. What I think it is and what I wish existed are definitely two different things, as you've mentioned here.

WISHES:

What I wish is for a more complete backlink profiler a la ahrefs.com. If their backlink discovery tool was paired with the Moz Pro toolset my brain would burst with bubbly joy.

If I were designing Moz Tools I'd consider adding in some sort of functionality that tracks my link building efforts for me. i.e. who I'm contacting, who I'd like to contact, what websites I found interesting and relevant to my campaigns, etc. For example, a pinterest type button embedded in my browser that would allow me to pin a site/blog/whatever to my campaign for my later perusal. Then I could go back and grab one of my form requests, edit it to meet the needs of the specific webmaster or blog owner, and fire it off. I have burnt through far too many journals with notes scattered across my desk and there HAS to be a better way!

...I feel like I'm giving too much away. I have more ideas! I'll save them for the interview one day. As a friend of Joanna Lord's and a Seattle area resident I often have had dreams of joining the Moz crew. Of course I'm happy where I am currently, but perhaps one day I will come a-knockin' ...

WHAT I THINK IT IS:

I honestly don't know. Maybe a robust campaign tracking tool with new graphs and purdy methods of displaying search data. Better integration with GA and GWMT perhaps? Tracking penalties, identifying which algo update may have caused a site's traffic to decrease... Suggestions.. hmm I don't know.

This is fun though I'm excited for tomorrow now.

Yes I have seen a lot of this too. I'm in competition with a bunch of companies using blackhat link building techniques and they are outranking me (sometimes) using these. Literally they are just doing article/link submission blasts with keyword targeted anchor text and it's working. Part of me thinks perhaps it's because EVERY site fighting for that phrase is using blackhat techniques and part of me thinks Penguin just isn't working well.

Either way I'm frustrated and each Monday I come in thinking.. "maybe today I'll start some blackhat link building."

The clock is ticking!

Ugh. Glad you cleared it up. Your demeanor comes off a bit cross, however. "please dont say obvious stuff." --? What does that even mean? I was asking what you meant in my original post. I'm still unsure as to where I am right now.

In any case, the answer to your question is: No, it's pointless. Delete it and move on.

I doubt it hurts (maybe could be considered cloaking but most likely not, right?) but it certainly doesn't help so why have it?

Stick to your title tag and get on with it. There's a reason web developers and SEO minds alike are forgetting this meta tag even exists.

In the future, if we don't know what tag you are talking about we will probably just ask for clarity like I did here this time. The best way to avoid that is to make it clear. A lot of people mistakenly refer to the Title tag as the META TITLE so it can get confusing. Thanks and good luck!

Okay so this morning I logged into webmaster tools and saw this notice of manual penalty for "unnatural links" affecting "some incoming links." (see attached photo) This is a different notification than I've seen before.

Keep in mind this website had been building unnatural links up until I took over in December of 2012. I have since cleaned up a TON of them and thought I was making progress... Until this morning that is.

So the next thing I did was head over to the incoming links in GWT. What I saw here shocked me. Whereas the last time I checked (maybe 2 days ago) we had approx 6,000 links we now had 195,565 !!! WTF?!?! Okay so somebody is screwing with us, right?

But here's the real confusion: I can't find any of these links anywhere else other than GWT. As you can see on the other attachment I have included, Google is reporting some 39,000 links from a domain called "itbriefing.net" however when I search this domain I find absolutely zero of these links. There are a few mentions of our brand but not one single link.

Also, looking through ahrefs.com and OSE I don't see any of the data that GWT is reporting here; everything looks normal to me.

Now isn't GWT the last to report all of these changes? What could possibly be happening here? Am I losing my mind?

We are still being indexed although I've been frustrated trying to get one of our main keywords to re-rank. This was one that had the most poison links built over the years so recently I gave up and changed the URL of the page completely sans redirect. This worked, and GWT reported a ton of lost links (99% of which were poison and the other 1% of which I regained with the new URL).

But now this.

Is this a GWT fluke? Am I under attack? What is going on.. Please weigh in on this one as I'm baffled.

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growing trend? according to who/what?

Donna is right. This will not work unless you have a pre-established brand and traffic incoming.

If you want to optimize for multiple keywords on one page, you're out of luck. I mean... the basics of SEO will tell you that.

Good luck changing the industry, though! I myself would immediately run away from a long scrolling one-page site. I'm not sure why you'd even want to do that, seeing as how people still navigate from the top header... what's the difference?

I'll tell you the difference - limited SEO options and keyword targets.

Yes.

You should be worried. This is blackhat SEO by its very definition and it is exactly the kind of stuff the Google Webspam team is going after. It's kind of like saying "Hey we just fired a bunch of chemical weapons even though we were told not to. Should we be worried?" Yeah, expect some cruise missiles headed your way.

Okay maybe it's not that drastic but I'm trying to be topical here

I would fire that SEO company and shame them in the process for giving us digital marketers a bad reputation. The Penguin (not Phantom) will come for you. It's only a matter of time.

Whoa dude how'd you get that article from the future like that?

("AUSTIN, TEXAS— Oct. 31, 2013 — 21CT, Inc.")

Okay so beyond my Bill & Ted reference calling out an error in your article, I just want to say that there is nothing wrong with what you call "pull quotes" and they definitely will not negatively affect your SEO.

Repeating a sentence does not qualify as duplicate content. Duplicate content would be a problem if you had this exact same article on another page of your website. In other words, the duplication problems arise between pages, not within pages. Does this make sense?

Pull quotes work fine, it's all about user experience.

Use spreadsheets and other tools like OSE and Majestic and dig in. Roll up your sleeves and get after it. I wouldn't start with Webmaster tools, it's not the best, but whatever you do export your reports to excel and start narrowing 'em down.

Remove domains you know are good or search for domains you know are bad, etc.

Filter search in OSE to remove nofollows and internal links.. There are things you can do to narrow this down but it will be a daunting task, no question.

Uh.. I don't know where to begin.

A web page is a blog post. A blog post sits on a web page.. What's the difference? ... I like Clever's short answer let's leave it at that.

Publishing press releases is essentially expensive black hat in this day and age. That's not going to help you. Probably won't destroy you, but might knock you over the edge if you were on the verge before.

Sounds to me like you were penalized but I'd have no way of knowing without:

a.) your domain

b.) your targeted keywords

c.) your link-building history (what do you do to build links?)

What I can tell you is that's a hefty drop and the algorithm is updated all the time.

No different than building your desktop really, as far as technical on-site SEO tactics are concerned.

You say "responsive" but then imply that you are building a separate mobile site. I always recommend building one responsive site but do understand that there are occasionally instances where it doesn't make sense to do so.

Point being, if you're truly building a responsive site then the on-site SEO considerations will be the same as you are building for all devices.

This is an incredibly easy topic to address because you've already laid out exactly what needs to happen.

In other words, yes! That strategy is exactly the way you should go.

Good job and good luck!

Without going through your site (for obvious reasons) I can tell you that there shouldn't be any Penguin-imposed penalties present. Unless your site was tagged for phishing or some other un-trustworthy violation I can't think of what would cause this other than you are just after some very competitive keywords.

Judging from the site's content I would guess the latter to be the case.
Looking at your backlink profile quickly it's obvious that this site was recently created. A lot of times Google rankings for a new site will start high and drop quickly. I suggest hitting the SEO trail hard to regain your rankings.

If Google hasn't manually imposed penalties, that's a green light. Get to SEO'ing the crap outta that thing my friend.

Nice answer, Rob +1

No you're fine. You're correct that it will recognize them as duplicate content, but you won't have any longstanding effects if you put that redirect into place.

Just go ahead with the 301 and forget all about it. Next time, drop those redirects day one. No harm done.

Adwords. Create an account and use the Keyword tool, then just start typing in every possible keyword combination you can think of and looking at monthly search volumes for each. It will also suggest some ideas based on what you're feeding it to help you think of more.

Good luck!