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Would be not very interesting for Google to see people stop ads because of an organic penalty :). This is his core business.

Most of time, the opposite question is asked : "does Participating In Google AdWords Help My Organic Rankings?"

No, of course : http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-organic-results-15910.html

Is it really www.SubconsciousMind.com ? PR 0 and listed at domainnamesales ?

Nice links.

Personal experience: I had a manual penalty on a "MFA" domain for unnatural links. I did not renew it on time and he has been offline for few days. When he came back online, there was no manual penalty in GWT anymore.

So, if only few days offline can waive a penalty, I would be very confident for a domain offline several years.

Brian Dean wrote: "Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google."

In another article, he explained that he generally links to 4 authority sites in his articles.

His friend is probably thinking to "Amazon's Mechanical Turk". You pay people few cents to type what you need in Google.

Does it work? Yes. Is it ethical? I don't think so :). Especially when you pay for "you competitor + scam".

A French manager has been caught for "negative suggest" against a blogger.

Update: found the article about this story http://www.slate.fr/life/82581/sophie-gourion-malhonnete-e-reputation; use Google translate ~~.

Hi,

I agree with Dennis, try to optimize your website first.

Links = 40% of rankings.

I have a client ranking 3rd page with same page/domain authority than his 1st page competitors.

I started to optimize homepage (title, headings, ALT attribute...) ; then found a freelancer to follow Google PageSpeed advices. I also asked for a W3C/HTML5 validation.

For internal pages, you can also optimize URL.

Most important : I took time to study the first page texts.

My client = 400 words on homepage.

1st page results: from 600 to 2000+ words.

Of course, it is always better to write for users and not for search engines. But a longer text is most of time a better answer to user query...

The website went from 30 > 22 > 11 in one month.

Now, I will probably try to get some relevant links; but it was not my first step :).

Erwan.

Forum helps you to collect mails, can be very valuable.

If you want people to register easily, try a Facebook login system + allow a dofollow link on profile. Maybe that the forum just launched by Quicksprout can inspire you.

http://www.quicksprout.com/forum/

Would you have enough time to run a blog + a forum ? If you are usually busy, step away from forum and focus on blog.

LEAVE AS : the blog website can link to other websites of your network and improve their domain autority.

LEAVE AS : you will lose blog comments / social shares.

We should not "believe" anything, we should always test :).

Same feeling than Ron. I would care more about title and page stuffing. Checking the top 10 results and what they are doing can help you to decide.

Use 301 redirection old page->new page for every page; see the Google "moving your site page" https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en

SVN = 86% difficulty / 18185 global Bing search volume.

Subversion = 83% difficulty / 3164 global Bsv.

• Both keywords have the same difficulty; SVN is more searched than subversion.

One of your popular page is https://help.cloudforge.com/entries/22483742-Setting-up-svn-externals

Most people search "svn externals", not "subversion externals". For each important page, you should check what is the most important keyword, SVN or subversion; it looks that SVN is far more popular.

Good news: it will be easier to stay under 70 characters :).

Did you notice a loss of ranks/traffic? Did you get a warning message in Google Webmaster Tools for "unnatural links"? As an "authority site", the answer is probably "no". No need to use the disavow tool in my opinion.

You need to build trust. I would add an "about us" page with address, phone, contact form/mail, privacy policy, picture of the team, bio of writers etc; everything that helps you to look more human and real :).

Both answers are true:

• A good keyword density can help to rank; most of your competitors used the word "lifestyle" from 4 to 6 times on their homepage (with the SEOquake bar, you can check density of a page).

• If you go over a normal limit and repeat "lifestyle" 20 times, it will look spammy for the reader and for Google. You repeat it already 14 times; maybe it's too much but there is no definitive answer; the best way in my opinion is to look how competitors rank.

Once you have an optimized website, the difference will be made by links; but like in the top 10 US, the top 10 UK = a lot of exact match/partial match domain. You will need better links than them.

Of course, don't focus only on one keyword; your SEO strategy should include 100's or 1000's of keywords to bring traffic.

I checked the top in Google US for Lifestyle Magazine. They ALL have lifestyle or magazine in their domain name or in their URL.

http://www.lifestyle.org/

http://www.lifeandstylemag.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_magazine

http://www.nashvillelifestyles.com/

http://www.lifestylesmagazine.com/

Etc.

Without an EMD/PMD, it will be harder for you to rank. if I look page authority/domain authority, the 5th/6th rank is possible with a good net-linking work.

As far as i'm concerned, I would not repeat Magazine twice in your title :

"Lifestyle Magazine No Magazine Subscription Required"

Once + website title would be better not only for SEO but for CTR.

A French e-commerce had the same issue:

• they picked a new domain.

• they used a java-script redirection from the old homepage (no 301), which is not supposed to pass penalty (to be verified) - it helps to redirect people who bookmarked the website/the direct visitors.

• they tried to understand the reason of the penalty and changed their way to build links (no more links on farm websites, diversified anchor etc, more nofollow, no over optimized titles etc).

• they updated the top old links.

• they used SEA and bought ads the first 6 months to keep the same traffic.

One year later, they got an even better traffic than before the penalty.

I did a test last month on google.fr with the keyword "cuisine quimper" (kitchen + town name); with one dofollow link, I got the 11th rank.

Then I added 3 good nofollow links... and got rank 2. Nofollow links value is probably very low but not equal to 0.

All details and screenshots : http://internetbusiness.fr/liens-nofollow-utiles-pour-gagner-des-positions-dans-google

Do you own test :). Anyway, good nofollow links can bring you direct traffic and help your linking profile to be more natural.

linking-nofollow-cuisine-quimper.jpg Historique-liens-cuisine-quimper.jpg Autorit%C3%A9-cuisine-quimper.jpg

Hi,

I saw the same result for a webmaster that accepted paid links from a casino/poker room on his homepage. I don't know the other possible reasons. Hope community can help :).

I have question : did you lose ranks on your keywords ater the PR loss ?

Erwan.

Thank you for your answer people. It looks like index,nofollow would be indeed better.

By looking more on the net, I also found a yoast article about this issue: http://yoast.com/wordpress-threaded-comments-and-seo/

"WordPress automatically adds a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag to each URL that has ?replytocom in it."

This is why all my comments URL look like http://www.example.com/example-post/?replytocom=1

Yoast plugin update offers an option to remove ?replytocom variable. I think that I will have to drop All in one SEO on this website...