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Thanks for the response Jimmy!!

Site explorer is showing zero likes, when there are about 800. The MOZ program show about the correct number.

I am concerned that this will affect domain authority and other metrics.

When I enter competing domains in Site Explorer Facebook likes are shown, so I don't understand why they are not getting picked up for my site. Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks,
Alan

For some reason MOZ is not registering the number of Facebook likes my corporate Facebook page has. Over 700 likes have accumulated, yet MOZ is showing zero. It is strange because MOZ has picked up three Facebook "shares".

Does anyone have an idea how this issue can be corrected?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Brett:

The domain is about 9 years old and that has value. Organic search volume dropped from 6800/month to about 3100/month after the April 2012 Penguin update. It has climbed back in the last five months to about 4500/month. So the penalty has atleast been partially lifted.

I never received a notice of penalty from Google. However my SEO firm believes that so many of the links are toxic (per "LinkDetox") that that some sort of penalty exists on the site. Google Pagerank has decline to 2 from 4 and Cemper Trust has also declined significantly. Strangely enough search volume has increased significantly in the last 4 months despite the drop in PR and Cemper Trust. Being that the site still performs, I really hope it is not necessary to move to a new domain and start from scratch!!!

Are you saying that submitting a disavow will trigger a manual review of my site? If so, this may be very good, as the content on the site is useful and unique.

In the scenario above, where the site still ranks for keywords, search volume has increased but Cemper Trust and PR have declined, do you believe recovery and improvement is possible? Note, I have never received any penalty notice.

Thanks,
Alan

Hi George, thanks for your response.

Actually, the content is high quality, unique content that is useful to the visitor. I have noticed that as new content is added search traffic increases.

Prior to the April 2012 Penguin update organic traffic was as high as 6800 visit per month, dropping to as low as 2800 per month. Search traffic is now about 4000/per month.

In 2010 and 2011 submissions were made to a few hundred low quality directories. As a result there are many toxic links pointing to the site, which I believe should be removed.

Content is useful, question is should that content be optimized with Yoast before we remove links?

Thanks,
Alan

Greetings MOZ Community:

According to site audit by a reputable SEO firm last November, my commercial real estate web site has a toxic link profile which is very weak (about 58% of links qualified as toxic).

The SEO firm suggests than we immediately start pruning the link profile, requesting removal of the toxic links and eventually filing a link disavow file with Google for links that web masters will not agree to remove.

While removing toxic links, the SEO firm proposes to simultaneously solicit very high quality links, to try to obtain 7-12 high quality links per month.

My question is the following: is it putting the cart before the horse to work on link building without optimizing pages (with Yoast) for specific keywords?

I would think that Google considers how each page is optimized for specific terms; which terms are used within the link structure, as well as terms within the meta tags. My site is partially optimized, but optimization has never been done thoroughly.

Should the pages of the site be optimized for the top 25-30 terms before link building begins. Or can that be done at a later stage. Note that my link profile is pretty atrocious. My site at the moment is receiving about 1,000 unique visitors a week from organic search. However 70% of the traffic is from terms that are not relevant. The firm that did my audit claims that removal of the toxic links while building some new links is imperative and that optimization for keywords can wait somewhat.

Any thoughts?/

Thanks for your assistance.

Alan

Dear MOZ Community:

In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure.

The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding

My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors.

Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages.

Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic.

Thanks for your input!!!
Alan

Hi Nick:

Thanks for your perspective.

Our website traffic (my company is a commercial real estate brokerage firm in New York City) dropped 60% after the first Penguin update in April of 2012.  It recovered somewhat last October after the latest Penguin update after we eliminated repetitive, spammy footer links. The site was also redesigned last Summer.

The quality of the links was only reviewed last November by a SEO firm and a formal audit. The links were analyzed by Link Detox. About 55% are toxic. 40% suspicious and 5% OK. I have no stomach to risk my business with this terrible link profile. But I am trying to take a middle of the road approach. First step being to remove links from 113 domains deemed toxic by Link Detox. These domains all originate on the same IP address so they are mostly a link farm. The owner of the directories has agreed to remove them.

That will still leave me with some toxic links, suspicious link and a few good ones. So I am immediately going to hire an SEO firm for six months to build high quality links (monitoring their deliverables each month).  Only in a few months after we have obtained some high quality links will I start working on removing the other toxic and suspicious links. The objective will be to try to radically improve the link profile within a year.

I am also going to be adding blog content on a weekly basis and increase activity on social media to counter what I am realizing is an absolutely awful link profile.

In the last two years I spent more than $35,000 on web marketing and coding and ignored the link profile. BIG MISTAKE!!!

Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address.

Examples of these directories are:

-www.keydirectory.net         -www.linkwind.com              -www.sitepassage.com

-www.ubdaily.com                -www.linkyard.org

A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links.

My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality.

I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS.

Thanks everyone!!!

Alan

Dear Moz Community:

Domain Authority for my site has dropped to 26. It was about 35 a year ago and has dropped to 26 a few days ago from 29 as recently as last month. In the meantime Google Page rank has dropped from 4 to 2.

Page authority for my home page remains pretty stable at about 37.

Strangely site traffic increased about 25% in early October after the most recent Penguin update, going form about 130 to 170 visits per day.

I ordered a web site audit from a MOZ recommended SEO firm last October. Since November we have focused on implementing suggestions in their audit.We have removed duplicate content from about 30 pages (our site is 500 pages), slightly modified the architecture of the site to allow better indexing of property listings (I run a real estate site), had a mirror site hosted by former developer de-indexed, added structured mark-up language and made some other minor changes.

The audit concluded that about 45% of the domains linking to my site were toxic, 45% suspicious and the remaining 10%. I have yet to take action to remove the bad domains and work on building quality links. But these bad links have existed for the last several years.

I would like to know if anyone has any ideas as to why the drop in my Domain Authority appears to be accelerating? Is this tied with my implementation of the audit suggestions or could it be something else?

I should mention that I have not engages in any social media for about two three months. From January to August I would tweet, Google+, Facebook regularly adding links to my site. Also I have been adding an average of 2-3 blog posts a month, with the exception of November where none were added.

How serious is this drop? Can I recover domain authority through link building? Would removing the toxic links result in a partial recovery?

My PR agency has suggested a question answer format be incorporated in my blog. They suggest a microblog with a single sentence question and an answer of about 300 words.

My blog currently has about 35 posts. I would like to ramp up blog entries to about one or two per week of these "mini blog" posts.

The format of the new blog begins as a question with the responses being paragraphs that do not use headings. My concerns are as follows:

1. No headings in an answer of 300 words will fail to provide Google with context regarding the content's meaning. Everything I have read about SEO suggests text be broken up in short sections and that it be divided by headings (preferably H2s).

I very much like my agency's concept for a question answer format blog. It provides very practical info for visitors. How can I use it in a manner that supports SEO best practices?

2. According to a reputable SEO firm that has been assisting me, Google does not consider a blog post of less than 600 words to be superior quality. They told me that  blog posts of 300 words, from an SEO purpose will not be a great helpful, that the content will not be rich enough to generate incoming links.

Is this really the case? What if this abbreviated content is very well written and engaging? If so, is 300 words sufficient? From the visitor's perspective I am not sure they would have the patience to read 600 words when 300 words is more than than enough to answer these basic questions. From a PR perspective I think the shorter content in a question answer format is superior at least for my line of business (commercial real estate brokerage).

3. If 500-600 words is the minimum word count, and headings are necessary, what is the best way to execute a question and answer blog format?

The purpose of this blog is to provide very useful info to my visitors while generating incoming links to that will boast my rankings.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!!!

Alan

No that is an interesting!!!

So assuming I can create content that is unique interesting and engaging, where should I post it? My website blog, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn an off site blog?

So  if I can create the content, how do I address the issue of optimizing and submitting to the appropriate places. Would an SEO firm add value in this area assuming they are pros and only engage in white hat?

Obviously I would prefer to allocate my budget to creating high value content and more of it. Which not hiring an SEO firm would allow me to do. But I don't wan to be penny wise and pound foolish.

Hi Keri:

Thanks for your response!!

Well i am writing the content and have a PR agency making it more engaging, incorporating a strong call to action organizing in order to create a piece which is very informative while at the same time being entertaining.

So would something that is written more skillfully create more quality links than an article created by an SEO firm, maybe being better optimized but not as engaging? DO I spend my budget on superb content or on good content by an SEO expert who may have a better idea of where to get links?

Thanks,

Alan

Greeting MOZ Community:

My site has 400 domains linking to it of which about 180 are toxic and 180 are suspicious according to a site audit from a reputable SEO firm. The SEO firm is offering link removal and link building services to remedy the situation.

My question is this: if I can create and post high quality blog articles on a very regular basis, will this in and of itself create high quality links to my site? If the articles are of exceptional quality can I post them elsewhere to earn quality links?

Does it make more sense to use my budget on paying a PR agency to create high quality articles and posting them on my blog or elsewhere rather than spending on an SEO link building campaign? Should I do both?

I plan on having the SEO firm remove toxic links and optimize content using Yoast. But I want to be careful about not wasting my budget if the links will develop naturally if I post the content online myself. I am more inclined to have an SEO pro work on creating links but why pay if I can do it myself.

Any thoughts?
Alan

Hi Thomas:

Thanks so much for your very informative response!!!

In fact the website is for my real estate brokerage business and the organic traffic is essential for new leads. Without that traffic my business is in trouble.

The SEO firm has assured me that removal the toxic and suspicious links will not cause a decline in traffic. They intend to request removal from each web master over about two months. Finally we will send a disavow request to Google for the remaining bad links. The process should be done in about 90 days. Simultaneously a new link building campaign will begin. First month to be mostly research but in the 2nd and 3rd month 5-10 quality links will be added per month. The SEO firm believes that this approach has little risk in reducing organic traffic. We will look at the link reports carefully before requesting removal so no good links are accidentally removed.

Only concern I have is how Google will evaluate the removal of bad links from 380 bad domains (out of 400 domains) and the simultaneous addition of 10-20 high quality domains over three months. So at the end of the process I will have maybe 35 quality domains linking to my site versus about 20 good domains now 380 bad domains (suspicious and toxic). The SEO firm has insisted that the site it self is very well implemented with lots of good content and that the bad domains are really holding it back. I hope they are correct.

Also, before link building they will spend the first month of link building on research. So nothing much will happen until the second month. I did pay for an extremely detailed (and well done) site audit which included a link analysis. So I hope I am not in a sense paying for this twice.

Also, I am being charged a considerable fee for the toxic and suspicious fee removal. A flat price plus a per domain fee for the removal. I feel since the audit identified the bad links a fair amount of the work towards getting this done is already complete.  I really wonder what is fair and customary under the circumstance. I do understand link removal is time consuming. I at times consider trying to to it myself, but for a task of this complexity using a pro is probably better.

Also, you had asked about the penalty. Apparently it is a Penguin penalty. At no point did Google ever send us a penalty notification via Webmaster Tools. And the penalty was partially lifted in October after the latest Penguin update. Traffic increased to 4,300 in October versus 2,800 in September. The SEO firm thinks this may be because a spammy footer was removed.

After these new details I would be very curious to hear if you think the SEO firms approach sounds reasonable and that I am going in the right direction.

Thanks so much.
Alan

Dear Moz Community:

I am considering hiring the SEO firm that conducted a web site audit for my company. The audit was very serious and thorough. Out of 400 domains linking to my site, the audit identified 40% as toxic, 45% as suspicious and only 5% as good quality.

The SEO firm believes the poor link profile is very much holding back organic ranking and traffic. I am considering signing a six month contract to have them remove the toxic and suspicious links and also, build new quality links.

Basically I have the following questions:

-The SEO firm hopes to build 5-10 very high quality incoming links to my site per month. Is this a reasonable number? They claim that quantity is much more important than quality.

-In the six month campaign, I will be paying for one month of research by the SEO provider before the link building kicks in earnest. In fact I will only get five months of link building despite paying for six months of service. Is this fair?

-Is the removal of toxic links and the development of 25-50 new quality links and enough to improve ranking and traffic over six months? The site currently receives 4,000 visitors from organic search results per month.
Note that at the moment the site has only about 20 "quality" links. I would hate to exhaust my budget after six months with no tangible improvement!

I would very much like to hear of anyone's experience or input regarding reasonable expectations regarding hiring an SEO firm for link building campaigns.

Thanks!!!
Alan

Hi Marie:

Thanks for your very thorough response.

My site dropped in rankings in April 2011 and never completely recovered. I had a site audit and they really stressed the urgency of removing toxic links to my site.

For the first time I looked at links using Majestic SEO and noticed that most are from low quality directories and many have the same IP address. Also I have seen Domain Authority on MOZ drop from 38 to 27 in the last year. Page authority at the moment is 38.

The audit (from a reputable MOZ approved SEO vendor) found the site to be pretty good technically (unique content, fast download, no Google or MOZ errors, etcetera). I think they checked the links with software, not manually.

Regarding the Google penalty, I never received any sort of written notice on Google Webmaster Tools.

The SEO firm is confident they can remove around 60% of the toxic links. They in no way promise to remove all. So from what you are saying, even if a few remain I may be in trouble. Furthermore they are not at this point addressing the "suspicious" links.

I'd like to point out that there are only 445 domains linking to my site. Would it be possible to overcome the penalty by building thousands of high quality links over time? I am also concerned that removing these links before adding new ones will really cause my traffic to drop (I receive about 4,000 unique visitors via search each month).

Is there any kind of action that I can ask the SEO provider to take to ensure they will be removing the bad links? I would hate to spend $3,000 and find the site still penalized by Google for bad links.

One last thing, I am particularly concerned by your last paragraph. Are you saying that it is very unlikely that Google will lift this penalty no matter how many new links are built of how many bad links get removed; that the domain my domain is in a sense "blacklisted"? That since the links were never very good, Google will never remove the penalty? If that is so, there is no sense in investing in link clean up.

THANKS,
Alan

Well, OK looks like I need to bite the bullet....

Is there an objective way that I can identify toxic links, that I can detemine if in fact they need to be removed? The SEO firm has identified  45% of incoming links as "Toxic", 50% as suspicious and 5% as healthy. There are a total of 1,500 links coming from 450 domains.

About 130 have a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero and a citation flow of zero.  So they don't look great.

While I don't want to be too skeptical I am concerned that the SEO firm may want to generate revenue when perhaps it is not necessary to remove these links.

Alan

I get it,  however there are varying levels of complexity and there is software such a link detox that can simplify the process.

Is this out of the league of someone who is not an SEO pro but is tech savvy?

Link building, development of content strategy, local SEO, link removal, duplicate content removal can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars or more. Need to do what I can myself so I can invest in services that add the highest value.

Thanks,
Alan

Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains.

Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones?

My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place.

For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Jen:

Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. They are of the opinion that it is imperative to remove the toxic domains.

The fee for toxic link removal is about $3,000.I would prefer to save the $3,000 but would prefer not to take the risk of screwing up my ranking if this is a complex procedure best left to SEO professionals. My assumption is that link removal will involve  identifying the toxic domains, requesting removal and eventually submitting a Google disavow request.

Can I do this myself or is there a big risk of screwing it up? Assuming it is safe for me to remove toxic links, would anyone suggest  software of tools for doing so?

Thanks so much.
Alan