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I'm getting a sense that you may be suffering from a duplicate-content issue. But first, let me explain. Duplicate content is not exactly a "penalty" (most of the time). Here's what usually happens: Google sees that two pages of your website are essentially the same, and the search engine does not want to have redundant search results. So, it will usually make a decision to include one of the two in search results (and not the other). I have to ask: Why do you essentially have two home pages? Is it only to attempt to have the home page rank for two different sets of keywords? If so, then I'm guessing that your two home pages are essentially the same except for some minor keyword variations. It's likely that Google changed its mind (for whatever reason) on which to include and which to ignore. I'd keep the example.com page as the main home page and 301 (permanent) redirect example.com/index/ to that page. The next time that Google indexes your website, it should see the change and then the SERP should reflect the change shortly thereafter.

I'd echo this comment. Your H1 tag should be unique and identify the most important information. H2 tags should be for subcategories. See example below: About us Meet the team Our history Our clients

I did some digging on Moz and found some resources that might help! A recent extensive case study on recovering from a penalty Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal 6 Ways to Recover From Bad Links How to Check Which Links Can Harm Your Site's Rankings Secrets of Google's Disavow Tool Link Audit Guide for Link Removal Hopefully this will help!

You have a inside the but not thethat it is closing. That is just to start. The rest of that code needs cleanup and is mostly unnecessary--you wouldn't need two spans; the letter-spacing has no value, etc. What is best is to properly define the h1 in the CSS and then use Your Page Title . If you need to modify the h1 (maybe it is defined for a group of pages and on this particular page you want something a little different), do it as simply as possible. (The span attributes in your example probably would not do anything, assuming a white background, though that depends on how the class google-mixed, is defined...)

Hi Kevin, If you have face-to-face transactions with your customers, you are allowed to have 1 Google+ Local page per each physical location out of which you operate. These are Google's rules (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en). It is also considered a best practice to have a unique landing page on your website for each physical location you operate. These should be high quality pages that help customers (not thin or duplicative pages) and linking your Google+ Local listings to these pages (rather than to the domain) may also reduce the risk of Google accidentally merging your listings in their system, because you are doing your utmost to differentiate the various locations. You can read more about the practice of creating local landing pages here: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this helps!

Open Site Explorer can show you if your site has sitewide backlinks, but I would not rely only on OSE for a link analysis of that kind, because the total amount of URLs its crawls in not the biggest one around. As Ray-pp you can use also other tools like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO (or Cognitive SEO, which is particularly effective when it comes to link analysis), but I would always start from the "incoming links" page of Google Webmaster Tools. To answer to your first question (how to detect sitewide links): sitewide links are very easy to detect. If you see that a domain is linking to yours with hundreds or even thousands backlinks, that is because they are sitewide links, or - classifying them - a single link published in a website element that repeated as it in every page of a site (i.e.: footer, sidebar, header). In the specific case of your sites, the interlinking due to the "flag" menu is a classic. Normally they should not represent a problem, because Google recognizes they are systemic to certain kind of web design for multi-country or multilingual websites. On the other hand, though, Matt Cutts once suggested that a better solution would be creating a country selector page reachable via internal linking from the header or the footer, so to avoid the creation of an always increasing number of sitewide sitelinks.

For more competitive keywords it's quite hard to rank with forum posts. I am running some quite successful forums and all the traffic I get is from long tail keyword searches. Basically, you have to do the same optimizing as for other websites. Are you talking about a specific forum post or forum posts in general?

A) Generally yes, but hard to say for certain. There are correlations suggesting that maybe some of them do pass influence in some way. B) Probably, but again, likely based on engagement, i.e. if a social link gets very little engagement, it probably won't do much to influence search rankings, but if it gets a lot, it often seems to have at least some positive impact.

Hi Kevin, I'm reviewing the questions assigned to me as Associate, and I was wondering if you consider this yours as answered. If it is so, I kindly ask you to set it up as answered. Thank you.

As long as you submit the URL to your sitemap there it will pick up any changes.

They're called mini-sitelinks, and Google decides when to display them. Here's a post from when they first debuted: http://readwrite.com/2009/04/16/google_gets_sitelink_one-liners

I don't like trying to solve problems without specific domains and example KWs so I can do a real diagnosis but let me suggest a few hypotheses (I would not suggest all of these if I could see the URLs.) You don't know what they've disavowed - they could have, for whatever reason, disavowed their own cross-domain links. Disavow says "ignore these links" which is (if you're not an SEO) basically the same as nofollow "don't pass juice to these links."  So they may have made a (poor) choice to disavow their own links but it may be working for them. Competitor 2 has at least 1 redirect.  Could be a site with 20 million links for all we know.  Could be nothing. Can't tell the site speed, titles, content or any other on-page issues with any of the sites.  You could be over-branding (Panda issues) or smashing the site with keywords. Sometimes Google doesn't make sense. Ahrefs only picks up around 10-20% of all links from what we've seen. Hard to make estimates on what Majestic, OSE, & Google see without the domain info. You're assuming this is a link issue - but honestly we just can't tell yet.  Not enough info to fully diagnose.

I can confirm as well. I've run a lot of tests hoping this would help but it never moves the needle it's all about building high quality citations or cleaning up your already existing citations.

I agree with Hutch42 and RangeMarketing. In most cases, the best practice for SEO is to create a self-hosted blog under the same domain as your main business website, if applicable. There's no reason to create more than one website (or blog) to achieve the same purpose. It dilutes your link equity (juice). Creating a separate blog for the purpose of creating a bunch of links back to your website could be seen as spammy and cause more harm than good. There are much more effective ways to get links to your website with good quality content and digital PR.

It does seem like you may be setting up some obvious patterns of backlinking for SEO gains, which Google Penguin can penalize. It especially depends on what anchor text you are using. Remember that Google prefers linking to be "natural." This means that you produce great content, and then in turn, others will want to share that content by linking to it. A backlink to your website should be seen as an "editorial vote" from one website to another, as opposed to you going out and creating all of your backlinks yourself. Here is a video from a bald Matt Cutts on techniques for building links. If your primary SEO strategy is to go about linking to yourself on various forums and blogs, and especially if you are using money anchor text like "seo company new york" then you may be setting yourself up for an over-optimization penalty of some kind. In regards to the discussion forum you participate in, I would check to see if those links you are creating are marked with a rel="nofollow" attribute. If they are, then I would not worry so much about them harming you, but also know that they can't really directly boost your ranking either.

A link is like an editorial vote from one website to another. If you can vouch for the quality of the site you are linking to, don't hesitate to place the link, provided it is relevant and useful to your visitors (and not just there for some kind of reciprocal link agreement for SEO = Bad). On the flip side, blogs and forums that encourage user contributions often add the "nofollow" attribute to links by default, because you, the webmaster, may not be able to vouch for the quality of the sites your readers are linking to in a comments section, and the links are possibly being placed as part of a link scheme for SEO. So, in short, If you are placing a link on a web page or article because you think the site provides useful information that enhances your content = Good, go for it! If you or a visitor places a link for the sole purpose of ranking improvement for a particular keyword = Proceed with caution.

Hi Kevin Looks like you have some great answers here. I'll just add my 2 cents as well: Not doing it wrong at all. Google will consider it the same site for sure if it's all under sub-folders and not sub-domains. They will even consider sub-domains "one site" so long as you have consistent design, navigation, UX etc. This would count as an internal link.

Hi There, Thanks for writing us and I hope this message finds you well. Unfortunately, our link opportunities section is dependent upon Mozscape which updates about every four weeks. Depending on when the changes were made they may not be reflected until the update following this one but fingers crossed it will be included soon. The next update is on 1/8/2015 so with a little bit of New Years magic hopefully you will see the changes reflected there. Sorry I could not bring better tidings, but I am optimistic we may yet see a brighter tomorrow. If you have any other questions or just some general conundrums please let me know. Have a spectacular day!

Hi Kevin, This is Michael on the Moz Help Team! Sorry to hear about the trouble you're having adding a campaign. I had a look at your account and I was able to add a "Moz Test" campaign without any issue - you can delete it once you confirm that it exists in your account. It's hard to say exactly what is going on here but it COULD be browser related. Our tools are optimized for Firefox and Google Chrome so you'll want to be sure that you're using one of those 2 browsers. In addition, certain add-ons and browser extensions can cause performance issues in Firefox & Chrome, so disabling them while you try to add another campaign might be necessary. Go ahead and give it another shot and let me know if this helped by responding in this Q&A thread or by writing in to the Moz help team at https://moz.com/help/contact - I hope this helps! Michael

Then the answer is no, do not worry about keyword/content optimizing pages that you do not want ranking.