Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey, your links look a bit ropey, lots and lots of spammy comments with too much anchor text. Get some better links and dump some of the bad ones for starters.

Hey, some more info would help us put a solution together that best suits your requirements but... in a nutshell - remove all the things you did wrong.

• Built lots of bad, bad, links? - remove them
• got loads of duplicate or weak content - improve it

Anything you have done that earnt the penalty needs to be fixed and you will be okay (eventually, hopefully).

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate

Hope it helps.
Marcus

Hey, I used copyscape to locate all the content and have suggested copyscape sentry going forward. The problem is for this site the scale of the copying, it seems to go back several years and is pretty widespread.

Cheers!

Marcus

Hey Nick

It is worded pretty much perfectly on the Google blog post where they state their preference for responsive design even over same URLs with slightly different content.

"Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration"

So, you use the same HTML, nothing changes apart from the layout and you use CSS media queries to handle formating the CSS for each device.

Alternatively, you can serve different HTML content on the same URLs and technically do this however you see fit but this is not the preferred way of doing things but... if your site does this at the moment, I would not worry not about it too much for now. The idea behind this approach is that the content is equivalent - much like wptouch does and it shows the article but removes any supplemental widgets so the page retains it's essence, but drops any flab. Personally I would script this so those additional elements are not output at all rather than hide them with CSS though but that's just my take.

Short answer, go responsive if you can, it's what they want and creates the most consistent approach across devices but remember, that means not hiding anything and just moving it about.

Personally, I question if responsive is always the best option and if the mobile data connection is weak then a stripped down version works better but... hey, who am I to question big G's reasoning here!

As it goes, I wrote a piece about this yesterday that may help:

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/responsive-web-design/

half way down there is a diagram showing how your responsive layout could work for various devices.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey Brian, if the only reason you are doing this is for an SEO benefit you would be better concentrating on the content, adding some social sharing buttons (like, tweet, +1, recommend) and then directing your efforts in other directions.

This is a good read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-improved-social-signals-cause-improved-rankings

Hey, visit those blogs that show up in opensiteexplorer and either set the anchor text to your URL or brand name or delete the comments. Then, work on quality guest posts and wait for the penguin refresh and see if it makes a difference.

**Be thorough with those bad links! **

Hey

I don't think it would make a great deal of difference as you are going to need to wait for a full crawl of your site anyhow before you see any benefits.

Out of interest, how are  you identifying the low quality pages? One way to have a go at this is to use your analytics and identify all pages with a 100% bounce rate and noindex all of them. If there are lots (sounds like there are) you can do them in chunks and see what happens.

Don't get rid of pages that are doing good search traffic or have a low bounce rate UNLESS you know they are really poor pages as sooner or later, they will be picked up.

Ultimately, it sounds like a big site so you are going to have to be patient here and make incremental changes based on analytical and crawl data until you get the results you are looking for.

I have pulled a site back from the depths, a rather unfairly punished site in my opinion that just got it's content copied by several other sites but the same rules applied. We updated pages, removed blocks of template content to their own pages and just kept on watching and like magic, it came back stronger than before a week or so after we made all the changes.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Hey, there are a bunch of ways to identify guest blog opportunities, and some sites / services etc, but I tend to think a lot of that is played out to some extent and if they are accepting content from any Tom, Dick and Harry then how much value will your post have from a pure SEO / exposure / link perspective AND for how long?

I tend to think, rather than looking for Blogs that accept guest posts, look for the best Blogs in your target niche and try to spark up a relationship with the owners. Then, try to find a gap or someway you can contribute always focusing on the 'what is in it for them' angle AND be focused on doing it for the exposure you can generate.

Sure, you want a link or two but make sure it is super valuable, super relevant to their core audience and then that post may pick up more links, shares etc from the current audience and subsequently, the links to your site and more importantly the exposure will have more value.

Forget about volume, think about quality and focus on getting links that your competitors can't just pull up in OSE and copy.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

From a pure SEO perspective, then ditch them, they are probably not worth the effort. That said, if you have multiple people working on a site and the keywords meta tag just shows the keywords you have optimised the page for then it won't hurt anything.

So, okay from a management perspective but if this is a time sink, then drop it like a bad habit!

I think this is exactly the point - no matter now boring you perceive it, now matter how niche the problem your business solves, then there is someone out there who needs that information.

Now, whether they will share it or not is another matter but if you answer those questions, they will certainly find you and then you can look at other ways of converting a percentage of those visitors in leads or prospects down the road.

Hey Michelle

Just to clarify, are you saying that you have some sites with like a million pages and that these sites have a footer or template link to another site?

If so, this might be an interesting read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

I am not 100% clear here so as ever, examples would be useful but I really can't see that one domain putting a 1,000,000 inbound links to a single page on another domain as being anything but a bad, bad thing. Combine that with some dodgy anchor text and you are on the road to ruin.

It's a shot in the dark without an example but I would suggest an nofollow given what we know.

Exactly (the everything is important bit, not agreeing with me).

I think a good little memory hook here is hard answers make for easy links -

or, in more content marketing times - hard answers make for well ranking content.

--

What I mean here is that if you look around, find a question that is being asked but there is no good or really, truly authoritative answer then you have a solid starting point.

This still requires you to do all the donkey work but that is the name of the game to some extent!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Cesar

I have grabbed the URL from your profile and will give you some answers and suggestions as to ways to tackle this.

Firstly, can you just feed back on your goals here? What are you trying to achieve? Is it just to remove these errors in the SEOMoz tool? Or are you looking to improve the ranking of these category pages? I will assume it's a bit of both and give you some suggestions.

1. Removing the links is probably not the best approach as your are going to orphan all those children pages so they may fall out the index and like you say, it kind of works for users. That said, having so many links on the page is not great either. If this was me I would probably break things down a little further and stop having single pages doing so much work.

So, as an example:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/words-with-z/

Here we have several categories and a ton of links under each category so why not put each category on it's own page? So, a page for 6 letter words with z, 5 letter words with z, 4 letter words with z etc. You could still show a sample of the words for each category but you would take the number of links right down and also possibly create some more specific and targeted landing pages for search traffic.

You already have the links to each section but they use anchors on this page rather than separate pages so that is a simple way to keep it user friendly, bag some new landing pages and take the number of keywords per page down.

Things get a bit more unwieldy when we look at the words-with-a page as opposed to the words with z as there are just so many more words (links). So, the suggestion above is still valid, but I would likely introduce some pagination as well with all the standard SEO rules of pagination applied. You have two options here with as either rel=prev and rel=next to indicate they are part of a series or rel=canonical to the first page. You would have to give this some thought as I don't know how your users arrive but I would tend to swing towards rel=next & rel=prev in this instance to show this is a series and sometimes people may want to land at page 2, 3 etc if they are looking for a specific word.

It may even be that you have the main page as a view all page and then still have pagination but the specifics depend upon what is best for your users and search.

Some good reading:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

http://www.seomoz.org/q/pagination-ajax-rel-next-and-previous-rel-canonical-and-meta-noindex

2. Removing the links

Yeah, it will likely hurt as you are saying these pages are not important enough to have any links to them. I think the above pretty much answers this one but that is not a good idea. Just be smarter in how you link to these pages and you will be okay.

---

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Nope, shares will remain, they are pulled from the networks themselves and are not relevant to the plugin or buttons.

To test and put your mind at ease either install another plugin and publish to another widget or grab some code for a button and drop it somewhere else on a specific page with likes / tweets etc.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons

A nice easy one for Friday.

Hope that helps! 
Marcus

Is it a link or is it a canonical? If it is a link to the canonical then I would not imagine it is going to help anyway but personally, I would try to have high quality links and not these mass link bombs, it's just asking for trouble and you won't get 100,000 links worth of benefit anyway.

As ever, hard to be precise without seeing the site in question but... I would edge towards no follow here.

Powermapper is very cool: http://www.powermapper.com/download/mapper/index.htm

It will give you a visual representation of the site and has a free trial so you have a go. I have not used for a site with over 1000 pages but it is certainly good for sites with hundreds of pages.

It allows you to output to HTML, PDF etc so really can help give you an idea of site structure.

Hope it helps.

Marcus

Hey Shelly, this may be worth a read:

http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-panda-update-link-evaluation-local-search-rankings-113078

Hey

Right, I kind of understand where you are coming from here but you have to realise that SEOMoz provides a suit of tools and reports but will not actually SEO the site for you.

The full crawl and report is useful in that it will check the optimisation of your pages against your targeted search terms (so long as you entered them) and it will diagnose a raft of potential problems, errors and warnings so you can tackle these in a structured way.

You ideally want to get to a point where you have no issues or errors reported in the tool (or none that are a problem) and that side of things will just tick over and alert you to any potential problems as you run and manage your site as time goes on.

So, problem management aside you then have a bunch of other tools to help you research keywords, competition and link targets but again, these require some input for you to get the best from them.

What you need is a plan.

You need to start at the bottom, decide how you are going to attack this. Do your keyword research, optimise your pages, figure out your long term strategy to drive traffic, do you have a content marketing plan? What are you going to write, when is it going to go on the site, how will it be shared and promoted. How will you build links?

Once you have a plan and some structure, you can start to track some variables and this is where the SEOMoz tool becomes really valuable. You can see what the competition is doing, see how your efforts are working (or not) and keep a high level eye on some low level stuff without endless analysis.

Have you got a more general plan to  move forward? What are your goals?

Here we have a one word answer - wait.

It may take a while before the comment (review?) becomes visible on your Google+ business page. If it does not appear after time you could drop a question (or study the existing ones) in the Google business support forum here:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/business/technical-issue

Google+ Local / Places is riddled with bugs and whilst there are some legitimate reasons that reviews may not show or may trigger a manual review / spam filter there are seemingly lots of innocent folks that are missing reviews. Reviews appear, disappear and return so best advise is to not sweat it to much and wait it out.

I am assuming you are not breaking any obvious review criteria? You are encouraging reviews from customers when they are at home but not soliciting them on your own premises etc?

The following links are worth a read:

• https://support.google.com/places/answer/2622994?hl=en&rd=1
• https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2519605

Hope that helps!

Marcus