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Hi there, Echoing William about not wanting to step on another's business, but on-page content creation is virtually indistinguishable from the process of creating internal links, in my opinion as an SEO and as someone with a background in writing / publishing. They're generally worked into copy naturally, then site structure (which should have been covered in the site audit) would cover issues like navigational linking. I worked in the sales section of my former agency for the last year I was there (former SEO consultant for them, now back to freelancing) and we certainly never broke anything down like this. What I did find, however, was that larger clients (think corporate giants) want break-downs of everything cost-wise when proposing work. They want to know what the individual cost of writing pages, removing links, even the cost of a consultant's time to monitor tools on a monthly basis. However, adding invoices for things after the fact was clearly a big no-no. The retainer or full cost was stated up front (e.g. $10,000 per month) and then a breakdown was shown, rather than work beginning and then me saying, "Oh, so it's going to be another $2k for X, Y and Z." I can see something like the cost of rewiring internal links being included in a breakdown like this, but if I were writing a quote for re-working the on-page elements of a website, it would certainly not come with an extra invoice for internal links. $20,000 for an initial phase of work before link dev is understandable if you were on a monthly retainer of $10,000 and a massive amount of initial work was put into the campaign - this is the sort of fee I used to be working with when at an agency. But with that fee came a culture of all-inclusiveness. Everything from site audits to link audits and take-downs, social media audit, 12 - 24 month strategy, staff training, tool access, etc. came included. Short version: I'd not be a fan of including these costs after work has started, rather than the company saying: "This is going to cost you $40,000 over six months" and showing the breakdown of where that money is spent. I also personally find the cost of placing internal links to be a natural part of both the site audit and copywriting, so am confused about why that's separate.

OSE looks at Facebook likes for your page/domain, NOT for your Facebook page on the Facebook domain. If you look at it that way, does it explain the numbers? For example, OSE shows moz.com has having a couple of thousand likes, compared to our FB page on Facebook.com that has 151,000 likes.

If the links are toxic, your firm is correct in that it's important to start the removal process. That said, I don't see any reason not to start optimizing pages for your terms. These aren't dependent tasks in any way. If the links were built by you and are toxic and your pages are not currently well optimized, you should definitely be working on both of those things. If it's time that's the issue, think about what you can do on your own. There's no need to have a paid firm gathering contact info from the linking sites when you could easily be doing that yourself. Make sure you're communicating with one another so that they're helping with things you need help with

Footer links don't provide much SEO benefit anymore. It can even hurt your SEO if you overdo it. If the links are not useful for the user than i would suggest dropping them altogether. I do like the suggesting  provided by Eric Rubin though. A Javascript based toggle for the footer links would keep the UI pretty and clean while it still gives your users the ability to open the menu and visit any links there. It all depends on the links though. If they are only there because of SEO reasons and not for helping users find good content then i would recommend just dropping them altogether.

Hi Alan, Can you give us an update on how things are going? Do you have any more questions? Have you seen any changes recently?

Another thing to keep in mind is how the DA of your competitors has been behaving over the same period.  The number doesn't matter so much as how it moves in relation to your competition.

There used to be a platform for this called Sponge, but their site is down so I assume it's gone now. Q&A can be very useful, but you will need to focus attention less on length and more on the capability to search the questions. More importantly if your market wants this and if it's not available elsewhere. If this is something that has been identified as necessary and useful, go for it. Don't worry too much about the headings and length. Just don't make this a factory of questions and 300 word answers. Allow the people writing the answers to answer well, no matter how long. Hope that helps!

Quality content properly promoted is the ultimate link building strategy. Consider how many artificial link building strategies from the past have eventually caused site owners problems. I'd post to your site first and when I was sure it was indexed, re-purpose it for social media. Best of luck!

5-10 linking domains per month sounds reasonable if they are relevant editorial links. Building links can involve spending a lot of time to research opportunities to find websites that would want to link to you or should be linking to you. For example, a relevant link opportunity would be a local real estate association that lists local brokerages. Another example might be a local website that already lists your competitors. Other times, links are result of building a relationship over time like a connection you have with a friend or complimentary business. If the SEO firm is manufacturing links that you don't really deserve, then that can hurt you in the long run. Ultimately, a link building campaign is like any investment in marketing and carries some risk of failure.

It's difficult to say whether these links are helping or hindering at the moment  - by the sounds of it the report the SEO agency ran was a Link Detox report and the results are purely automated, while I have a lot of faith in the tools from LRT I wouldn't be 100% confident with the results as some of the links may be giving a false positive... however you will most likely be talking about a small change ratios. Ultimately there is a potential problem if you haven't received a warning yet, so I would look to remove as many of these links as possible - as soon as possible.

What she said.

Hi Jen: That is very helpful, thanks!! The one point I did not understand is the last one one regarding checking to see if the c-blocks are varied. Could you please elaborate. Also, do you think it would be risky for me as an amateur to do this on my own, that link removal would be better left in the hands of a professional? I am working with a reputable SEO firm, but they are requesting almost $3,800 to identify and remove approximately 225 domains that have toxic links to my site. If I use a professional SEO firm I would probably want to conserve my resources for link building ($2,500/month). But I don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish. So do you think I could disavow bad links on my own? Also, would you suggest any software of tools for doing so? Thanks so much. Alan

Hey Alan Possibly. As you have likely noticed, there are so many potential factors here it always requires some experimentation. To answer a few of your points: 1. I don't see why you can't have two businesses at one address as long as that is totally legit and they have different names and phone numbers. 2. Look at how your neighbour has his address configured and make sure yours matches that format (if that is working) and that matches how that is laid out in Google maps etc. Then, do a citation audit and make sure you look at any historic variations in your name, address and phone number and update those lisitings. The link in my original post above outlines a structured way to approach this. 3. Will Google take time to show the address - yep, for sure. They may even show it, then not show it again, and then show it again. It's choppy waters in the local ecosystem but if you are sure you have everything correct and have audited external listings then just wait it out a while (2 weeks) and it should be okay. Hope that helps! Marcus

A lot of the time carousels can tack on lots of added bandwidth, both in the slider functionality as well as the images within the slider.  Site speed is a large factor within SEO and has been known to make a site respond accordingly. You mentioned you switched CMS's as well:  did you pay attention to your permalink structure during the change?  Were any 404's created.  Did you 3xx old posts to the new ones? Sitemap? All things worth looking ito.

Hi there, could you be more specific about which G+ button the question is about? There are several different types. Better yet, are you able to share a link to your site?

Since DA is a Moz metric, we're not looking at a case where all of a sudden a whole bunch of domains linking to you have been devalued, nor are we looking at a penalty. The only conclusion I can come to is that Roger is no longer seeing a bunch of links it used to see.  If that's the case, then that probably means that a set of domains that used to link to you are now offline.  And if that's true, then Google is also going to see the drop, and your rankings will slide accordingly. That's my best guess.

Hi Chris: Thanks for your response. 301 redirects were implemented properly. The redirects were to pages that contained the same content as the original ones. Previously out of 50 target phrases maybe 15 were in Google's top ten ranking. Now maybe 3 are. You are probably right, no going back need to focus on improving the Wordpress site. Thanks, Alan

Could you give the main/featured image a custom alt attribute, and let the rest share a format like you show above? So like this: alt="Blue Cotton Tee by Billabong" alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 002" alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 003" alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 004" alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 005" I would not leave the rest without an alt attribute.

The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects. Two comments. If the 301s were done correctly and this site does not have a lot of links then it might take weeks for google to find the 450 new pages, get them indexed and forget the 450 old URLs. Maintaining the rankings requires more than redirects.  If the onpage optimization elements (title, h1, etc.) were not maintained or if they were changed then rankings could tank.  I have seen lots of cases where developer puts the same title tag on every page and rankings tank, or developer puts site in frames, or uses javascript links because he thinks they are cool. One of my competitors had a redesign done and developer noindexed all the the pages.  It took them a couple weeks to figure it out after the site disappeared - but rankings came back immediately after the fix.  So, technical glitch can cause problems too.