Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great, comprehensive answer from Ryan as ever.

Nothing more to see here folks.

Move along now.

Move along.

Hey Diane

I think you need to do a couple of things.

1. Clean up some of the very worst links to ensure you don't end up with a penalty or problems from some of the link building that has been done. Check out linkdetox.com to help with this and then do a manual audit.

2. Look at the biggest and best sites in your industry OR sites where you feel there is a big cross over audience - that is readers of that site would enjoy reading your site and then see if you can pitch them a guest blog post. The idea is to go for exposure here and if you win a link in the bargain then all the better!

With regards to getting links you need to have great content and to really network with other bloggers. Once you get established and people start to talk about what you are doing then people will want to link to it.

There is more to this, obviously, but it starts with great content. I wrote something about this here if it helps:

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/earning-links-work-talk-hustle/

Really, as I see with most of the people I work with, you lack strategy. Nothing is terribly wrong with what you are doing, you just need some guidance with regards to the content creation winning links and to help you from straying to the dark side.

Cheers!
Marcus

Hey Diane

From a quick look at things I would say the rankings for 'lifestyle magazine' were predominately based on the link building done for the site as we have some heavy usage of 'lifestyle magazine' as the main anchor.

Links on pages like these:

http://brownsvillebankruptcyattorney.com/resources.php?cid=8&page=7

http://brownsvilleaccidentlawyer.com/resources.php?cid=8&page=8

None of which are currently indexed are doing you any good and looking at the general ratio and type of linking sites, it is lucky you have not fell foul of this before now.

On a plus note, you don't seem to have a penalty for these terms (from the briefest of looks) and it seems that you are really just seeing the result of the devaluation of lots of your linking pages / sites.

Ultimately, you can't rely on a single keyword as your traffic strategy for your site and you would be far better focusing on a wide range of lifestyle related keywords with your blog content. It seems you are a magazine with lots of content so I would make this your focus and try to bring traffic in via a wide range of pages.

Ultimately, you need to flip your strategy on it's head.

• focus on content and building a readership
• build traffic via a wide array of content items
• bring people back to the site by generating social sign ups and seeding your content
• Be careful with regards to quality and who you let guest post on the site
• do a small amount of triple A guest posts on big sites with the intention of generating exposure with a bonus link (rather than a link with bonus exposure).

Really, you just need to focus on making your site great, forget about  these very general and vague keywords and set some real business related goals and track those rather than rankings and you should be good to go. A well ran content strategy will outperform a well optimised single keyword tenfold with enough time and effort behind it.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Mark

There are a couple of well established WordPress ecommerce plugins but if you are looking for e-commerce with a theme integrated then it's hard to beat the WooCommerce plugin with a woothemes theme.

http://www.woothemes.com/

Supports a wide range of payment gateways although there is nothing wrong with using paypal and the site does not need to redirect to a paypal URL - it can all be done behind the scenes.

Woothemes also provide a range of affilliated wooworkers so you can pretty much make this a one stop shop and know that the person you use to edit the theme will have previous experience.

http://www.woothemes.com/affiliated-woo-workers/

Note - I don't in any way work with or for woothemes, but seemingly re reading this, am a bit of a fanboy. That said, they are very cool, give it a look.

Hope this helps

Marcus

Hey Holger

I don't use all in one SEO Pack so it may do this but certainly, the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will allow you to sort out a lot of these issues.

You can likely noindex your author and tag indexes as they are essentially just duplicates and the WordPress SEO plugin will allow you to fix your page titles.

Follow the advice in this article and you can't go far wrong:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Marcus

Marcus here!

Well, the site looks okay but it is behaving as if it has a search penalty. There is something I have been discussing with a few folks working on penalised sites and generally, if you search for a block of text from a penalised page with double quotes it returns the page, without the quotes, nowhere to be found.

"You will only pay for the private treatment you need and want" - returns the page

You will only pay for the private treatment you need and want - nowhere to be found

Now, this is hardly science but it is something that I have seen replicated across many penalised sites and it also seems specific to a given page that has an algorithmic penalty meaning that if we try the same thing on a non penalised page then it returns as a result as we would expect.

There are two big obvious algorithmic penalties broadly relating to on page and off page problems and it seems you may have a dose of both of them.

Penguin - Check your backlinks, they are very anchor text heavy and highly unlikely to be natural, editorial votes.

Panda - Your content seems to be duplicated across several other sites.

I would imagine several things have happened.

1. Site was built by a company that makes dentist sites and it uses generic content across all sites
2. Link building was done to improve on the poor ranks and that has just made things worse

In a nutshell you need to do the below:

1. review all the content and make it unique and informative (feed it through copyscape when this is done)
2. clean up the nasty link profile (look at rmoov, link detox and removeem)
3. ideally generate a small amount of high quality links

This is algorithmic, so it is better than a manual penalty so you just need to ensure you get the site all fully compliant with the google guidelines.

Some recommended reading:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Ha, okay, got it!

Go after some long tail content and start adding some value to the site and you should have a broader scope and some pages that will rank on their own merit. Gives you something constructive to do and some possible link targets!

Hey Chris (peter? sorry)

Yeah, will be interesting, every case is unique I figure but certainly, if you get rid of the problems you can at least concentrate on moving forwards.

Keep me posted.

Hey Peter, that's great news, keep us posted on how that works out from a traffic perspective and would love a poke around in your analytics once the dust has settled.

Cheers,

Marcus

Hey Paul

Hmmm, that might work, but really, that is far from the ideal approach here and it might make sense to try and understand what is causing that page to rank over the homepage.

Have you checked

1. keywords targeted on each page
2. optimisation of pages for keyword
3. internal anchor text (navigation + pages)
4. External links

Planning and consistency is just so important that I would recommend trying to get a handle on why one page over another is ranking rather than just trying to put a hack in place to try and redirect folks to the right page.

Canonical is really for clearing up any uncertainty regarding different URLs for a single page. So, if you have.

www.yoursite.co.uk/blog
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/index.html

You could set the canonical to the one your prefer and then any links or search results would be allocated to the correct varation. It is not really for saying one page is really a copy of another but it can be used like that if there are near duplicates but really noindex may be a better solution for non search based landing pages that are very close in content to another page.

As ever, there are lots of moving parts and without an example it's hard to say but in principle, I would try to figure out what is going on here and adjust the pages + set up canonical as they should be used.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Some useful references
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps 

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

This is a solid explanation and really, we just have to exercise common sense.

If you are exchanging links to the site as it provides value to visitors of both sites visitor then great, if you are exchanging links to somehow manipulate the search results, well, not so great.

Ultimately, if you are doing this for search engines, that is definately not going to help and it could certainly hurt now or down the road if Google gets even more antsy regarding link based SERP manipulation.

Hey Jozef

You know, I have not come across this issue with PDF's causing problems as duplicates but ultimately, a duplicate is a duplicate and if you want to republish this content then it would be worth examining the reasons for doing so.

Is this purely, as you say, to give access to a special offer and is something purely to benefit your users and not in any way for driving more search traffic? If so, I would just create a folder for these pdfs and block that in robots.txt.

If your folder was simply called pdfs/ we would need something along the lines of:

User-agent: * Disallow: /pdfs/

This way you can use these PDFs and make them available without ever having to worry about them causing any kind of duplication issue.

Additionally, PDFs do sometimes get indexed and can make pretty poor landing pages, especially if they have the branding of another company and no navigation to get into your site so again, this is a good thing.

If you are looking to use these to generate more exposure then create a unique landing page, add the link to the PDF but ensure the PDF is blocked in robots.txt.

You can also issue meta no index (REP tags) via your webserver in the HTTP header to block out specific files or file types but I would imagine the simple robots.txt and a directory solution is a perfectly suitable and easier to implement solution in this case.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey

As Tom mentioned, if it was the 22nd then it is likely a Panda issue. Without a link we can only speculate but the obvious starting point would be to review his site content to assess how unique it is. If he has a site full of manufacturers product descriptions then he needs to audit his site and identify any internal and external duplication.

My advice would be to sign up with copyscape.com and do a full site audit to determine what content is duplicated, weak etc.

Also, it would make sense to understand what is going on with the robots.txt problems. This may be intentional but it is certainly something to cross of the list.

On a positive note, this is the easiest of the penalties to work with as you simply have to remove all the duplication and improve the site to earn it's place in the results. Try to use this as an exercise to focus on creating a solid and informative site and adding real value through the content.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey

If you consider what a low quality page actually is

• tiny amount of content
• no content
• spammy
• near duplicate
• external duplicate
• internal duplication created by CMS
• etc

Then, really, a forum post should not really be low content as it should be relatively unique due to the various inputs from different folks.

That said, I don't see forums doing so well as they may once have done and you do need tight moderation for it to be effective.

Really, I would try to think of this outside of the SEO mindset and if it adds value for your visitors AND you can handle the inevitable management then it should be a good idea. If you are adding it purely for search and landing pages, then some smart blogging may be a better option.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Chris

Often, it would seem they want to see a continued effort on your part to clean up and the link profile still looks pretty stinky in OSE. That said, I appreciate, it's almost impossible to get many links removed so you can only do so much.

It may be that you just have to keep trying, keep cleaning up, keep emailing, send letters, make phonecalls etc and just show even more willing before they will let you out of penalty jail.

Have you had a professional audit done with regards to the problems on the site? Have you looked at duplication etc?

Can you detail what you have done in your reconsideration requests?

Marcus

No problem, let us know how you get on.

Hey Brian

Where did you see that? Historically, before Panda updates we see some fluctuations a little earlier and this is fairly typical with that. I would be interested to see any analysis on this though if you have a link?

A problem here is that most sites with spammy content, also have spammy links so we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions on the back of internet rumours. Correlation is not causation remember!

Really, in this kind of situation - a site needs a full SEO audit to understand any problems and irrespective of whether it is panda / penguin or anything else then any quality problems need to be identified and rectified else if this one didn't get you, the next one will!

Marcus

Lots of folks saw results suffer on or around the 17th and this could be in relation to the Panda update announced on the 24th of Jan going on previous form and pre announcement shock waves.

It's probably safe to say that you have been affected by Panda or a similar issue and need to review your site in more depth. Assuming Panda is the culprit look for duplicate content and running your site through copyscape.com would likely be a good place to start.

Also, dig into your analytics, look at the two weeks before and after the 17th and then look at landing pages, see which pages have been most affected and use that information and anything from copyscape to help understand what may be the issue.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Are you a US company or a UK company?

It won't really make any difference where the domain is purchased, and very little where it is hosted really but it makes sense to host for a UK audience in the UK (less distance for requests to travel) but you could overcome this with geo targeting in webmaster tools.

You can register a US domain (.com etc) with a UK company though - no need to do it via a US registrar.

This is one of those tiny, weeney issues - if you are targeting UK folks, do it all in the UK and be done with it. Certainly don't agonise over it for any time!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Matti

Glad it helped buddy. Check out those tools, they won't do the job for you but they will certainly help out with some of the manual labour aspects.

Marcus