Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Quick question, do you have control over the iframed content?

My two all time favorite tools (free to a certain degree) are Ubersuggest and SpyFu.

Ubersuggest gives you a lot of keyword variations and suggestions while SpyFU can be used to look at how your site compares to your competitors. I also would suggest letting Google SERPs give you an idea, try using long tail keywords related to your site and see what others are targeting.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Good call rick, i will check out the stats and let you know what i find.

So i have been working with a company running their SEO for close to two years now. Since i started to engage with them they have always used a very simple pop up for the first time an end user visits their website (via javascript and cookies). The pop up simply ask them if they would like to download a solutions brochure  from their website. So as far as pop ups go, it is at least relevant. The client loves this pop up, i do not.

For a while we have always held spots #1-3 for a lot of our keywords but we have started to drop to lower on the first page. So i have been researching to see if some of the new algorithm changes are targeting sites with this type of functionality. If i have some data i could definitely get them to remove it. So the question is, do pop-ups hurt your organic ranking?

Thanks for the input!

• Kyle

A 302 status code is a temporary redirect which, depending on the circumstances, can cause issues with search engine ranks. Here is a great infographic from Dr Pete on status codes and how it effects each user in relation to SEO:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

If you would want end users to redirect to that page and NOT search engines, then the current setup is fine. However, if you would want to send search engines, end users AND link equity then you would want to recreate that as a 301. This process normally requires access to your hosting environment as well as some technical knowledge.

Hope this helps - Kyle

Hey Cameron - i would suggest using a free service like http://checkmyheaders.com/ and spot check some of your previous URLs to ensure they are 301ing to the correct place. If you get a 301 and never get a 302 or a 4xx/5xx then you are all set!

Also, just a personal suggestion i would start straying away from Alexa, it really gives you no valuable insight to success or authority online. I would definitely suggest using domain authority or even pagerank still for competitive metrics.

Hope this helps - Kyle

Kerri - this is awesome! My wife and her students are going to be so excited! I will send something via email shortly. Thank you again!

Last year i attended Mozcon out in Seattle and it was an awesome experience plus they gave us tons of awesome giveaways with Roger on it. One of the items was a mug with Roger waving.

For the last few weeks my wife, who is a special education teacher in Cleveland Ohio, has been using it everyday. Then one day her students noticed the robot on the mug and were totally obsessed with him to the point that i gathered up all the other roger stuff i had from the conference (key chain, magnets  etc) and gave them to her to use as prizes.

The kids loved it, they had tons of questions like what the robot did, which at that point my wife attempted to explain how roger works with search engines like Google. None-the-less it showed how awesome a brand can be if it can transcend from it's target market to even children - so cool!

So i guess my question would be, do you guys have any more Roger swag i can get for these kids?

Thanks! - Kyle

Tom is spot on with tools for a link profile analysis.

If you know that you are being penalized by Google (via a warning message) i would also suggest checking out www.linkdetox.com to give you a quick run down on what are good, bad, and suspicious links for removal.

Good luck!

• Kyle

Since you didn't receive any penalties this may be tied to an algorithm change, however that is something pretty tough to prove. If you can check their analytics and see if the drop was inline with any updates listed here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change. Above and beyond that here are some more specific answers to some of your questions:

What would be my best recourse to fix the Spam link problem? I would first define what parts of your link profile is related to spam. A great tool to use for this is called LinkDetox and it is only $40 per site that is totally worth it. From there i would suggest disavowing any sites that are flagged as toxic.

**Also in today's Google,  what is considered a spam link? **
Some red flags would be any website that is not indexed in Google, has a domain moztrust below 2, and if the content is not focused/randomly generated.

Should I just link to his business name, or to a Keyword like Edmonton Real Estate Agent?
Make it as natural as possible. If you are linking back to a portion of the website about home loan questions, use that as anchor text. Or if it is the contact page perhaps use "contact edmonton real estate". Now-a-days you want to keep the end user in mind almost more so than the search engines.

Is there anything I can do about the expired link pages?
Actually this is a good thing - if it was a spam link and it has expired all the hard work has been done for you in the removal

Hope this helps - Kyle

Hi Traian - i would have to disagree.

With the advice mentioned above from both Cyrus and Marie i was able to get the penalty lifted and whether it was normal or not my rankings and traffic have bounced back to exactly where they were if not higher than before the penalty.

It looks like the site is still indexed in Google if you do a site search with their URL. However their anchor text looks bloated in the way that resembles unnatural links. They had 400 different occurrances of a banner ad link with the image alt text of "wally buy sell edmonton real estate". Many of those backlinks looked to either be spammy or have expired.

Did he have Google Webmasters tools hooked up to his site? If so check for any warnings in regards to penalties.

In order to help track down some options are you comfortable with sharing your website's domain?

Thanks - Kyle

The first place i would look for finding the inbound links is OSE following these few steps:

1. Put your full domain into the input box and hit search
2. Choose the inbound links tab and filter to show "all" links from "only external" pages to "pages on the root domain" and "show links ungrouped". The click filter.
3. Once it filters click the "download CSV" button.
4. Open the CSV, in the very last column to the right there will be a list of all the destination pages coming from inbound links.

From there you can map across the rows to see which websites are using those queries in their links. As for the question on the canonical - yes i believe this is the correct approach to help direct all authority to the correct, non query pages. Just make sure you implement it correctly so you do not canonical ALL the pages of your website to your homepage.

Regards - Kyle

Try and do you best to stick to quality websites for links but most importantly make sure the link is tied to relevant content. Beyond that i always look at 3 factors when choosing places to reach out to:

1. Do they have a domain Moztrust above 2
2. Are they currently indexed in Google
3. Is the content focused, relevant and to the point

Also if you ever want a sanity check on your link profile, http://www.linkdetox.com/, does an awesome job of automating the process of telling you good, suspicious and toxic links in your profile. Plus it is only $40 for the tool which is totally worth it!

Good luck!

• Kyle

There is no benefit or negative aspect to either - pick one and stick with for your own internal linking structure, external linking structure, Google Webmaster Tools setup and outreach. I also suggest doing a redirect from the one that you do not choose to the one that you choose. For instance if you want to go with www.domain.com, make sure you 301 redirect any traffic from domain.com.

Assaf - are all of the different queries bringing up the same exact page for end users? If so then a canonical link would definitely do the trick.

I would also look into where these URLs are coming from to help prevent them in the future. Some things to think about could be:

• Does your websites content management system generate them?
• Are other sites linking back to you with those URLs?

Hope this helped!

• Kyle

The rule of thumb is to try and keep below 100 links per page as well as trying to limit the amount of site wide links.

Check out the crawl section in the pro campaign - they have a warning if you have to many on-page links. That would be a great starting place to check.

Great share, not sure how i didn't stumble over this in my research

There were a lot of questions and data on this a few years back and nothing terribly recent so i wanted to get the discussion going again and see if any new data has been published.

Is hosting your website on a shared host like Godaddy or Network Solutions going to hurt your rankings because their holds a chance that you could be on the same IP as spammy websites?

My gut feeling is no primarily because almost 90% of the worldwide web is on shared hosting but i do not have a lot of data to back it up. Id love to hear some feedback.

Cheers - Kyle