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Mornin'

Anyone have any guests blogging resources to find guest bloggers and blogs to guest post on?

I've been using My Guest Blog but it runs dry after a while.

Thanks

I've received a Webmasters notification about an 'increase in soft 404 errors'.

When we had the new site launched three months ago we did away with some old pages, which we either 301 to new equivalents, or, we return a 'Oops, that page seems to be missing' 404 page which has some links to important parts on the site that might be of use to the visitor.

Any ideas why Webmasters is issuing the warning? Any suggestions as to what to do?

Thanks

I'm looking for decent hosting services in France? Any recommendations?

Thanks

thanks mate, that's certainly useful.

We're about to re-launch our site but to think of everything before going live in a week is pretty tough going.

Any suggestions or reminders as to what to remember and take care of before going live?

What have you found or forgotten in your experience with re-launches?

Thanks,

Dave

Thank you, Irving

From my initial look at things,  there is one particular term that links to one particular old URL across numerous directories that all seem to be connected, which I never sanctioned at all.

I'm starting to suspect part of this problem is related to someone purposefully trying to hinder our rankings, and I'm having the 404 for the affected page (old URL) implemented.

Is having the 404 something legitimate to include in the reconsideration request?

Hi all,

A client has been penalised, having received the message in Google Webmasters last week, along with two more yesterday.

It seems the penalty is for something specific: “As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole“.

This is the first time I've had to deal with this so I'll be a bit layman about it

The penalty, firstly, seems to be for the old domain, from which there is a re-direct to the current one. This redirect has been in place since Feb 2012 (no link building has been done for the old domain since then). In Webmasters, I have the old and new domains set up separately and the messages are only coming for the old (but affecting the new, obviously).  I need to determine if it’s the old or new URL I’m being hit for, or would that even matter?

Some questionable links I can see in WM:

There is an affiliate for whom WM is showing 154,000 links (all followed) from their individual products listings to the client’s site (as a related product) but they’re linking to the new domain if that matters. Could this affiliate be an issue?

There is also Updowner, which has added 2000+ links unbeknownst to me but apparently they are discounted by Google.

I see a ton of recent directory submissions - right up until last week - that I am not responsible for. Could that be intentional spam targeting?

I did also use a 3^rd party link building company for Feb, March and April who ‘manually’ submitted the new domain to directories and social bookmarking sites. Could this be issue?

For what kind of time-scale are penalties usually imposed - how far back (or how recently) are they penalising for?  Ranking were going really well until this happened last Thursday.

Will directories with non-followed links effect us negatively - one such one has over 2000 links.

What is the most conclusive way to determine which are the poor, penalty-incurring links pointing to us?

I know I now have to contact all the dodgy directories the site is now listed on to get links removed, but any and all advice on how to rectify this, along with determining what had gone wrong, will be most appreciated.

Cheers,

David

Hi all,

We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content.

We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together.

Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content?

Cheers,

Dave

After a steady drop in rankings (which I suspect to have been because of the link building company I used for 3 months - Feb/Mar/Apr - then sacked them off) I poked around for bloggers that are semi-related to my industry. In the last month, I've been using about 5/6 different ones, probably getting 10-15 links in the process. PR for these are 1-3 (but hey, who believes in PR, right?), and the domains are in 3/4 different countries I think so I'm getting spread around too.

Perhaps it's a mix of ceasing the use of the crappy link building company and then using these new blogs, it's impossible to tell. Pretty sure that the directories, article submission and 'social bookmarking' (*laughs) were bad for me because it's when that stuff starting going up that I had that horrible feeling when checking my poor rankings on Monday mornings.

And yeah, I'm still targeting the same keywords - in fact, highly-competitive ones, and seeing some encouraging results for which.

I feel your pain, Neil.

My niche is quite a hard field to work with in terms of getting backlinks - our competitors have bigger budgets and have dominated almost every site out there we could possibly work with. When I do approach sites we can't compete in terms of offering the same incentives to feature our blog fodder as our competitors can.

In a bid to help with rankings, I hired a third party company to help with 'manuel' link building with the intention of using them for a few months. They got us on some terrible directories, distributed terrible press releases to equally terrible PR/Article/Whatever sites, and after a month or two I'm pretty sure their crappy methods dented our decent rankings.

Then I started offering one-off content to better blogs and things seem to be on the up.

A huge frustration is looking at one of my competitors, who rank pretty well, and seeing that they have links from the worst 'blogs'. Clearly, some dude has bought an expired domain that has a bit of historical weight and now publishes half-arsed nonsense posts (including rubbish for my competitors) and now the competition  is winning off this highly-questionable technique that Google isn't picking up on. What can I do? Slightly heart-breaking, but then again, another competitor has been doing this kind of thing - they're pretty big in the industry - and they've been nailed so, so hard. I'd hate to have been their SEO for the last few months.

Yup, I feel your pain, brother.

My advice, find some better blogs related to your field, get some rapport going with the blog owner, and get regular blogs off of that iff possible. It's seems to be working for me a bit - I supply them with the content, they publish it with a link or two, everyone wins. Steer clear of shitty directories, social bookmarking (whatever that is), and horrible Article sites.

Relevancy seems to be core - so find bloggers who're related to you and make some new friends.

Other than that, start saving and open a burger joint.

Dave

Ye, working on better backlinks is a definite for the client - they have none for that particular page/album - but if I compare backlinks for the client's page and the filesharing page using OSE, the filesharing page has 1 backlink over no backlinks for the client page.

I don't think it's simply a case of backlinks. I suspect it's more related to who has more traffic - more people want to download music illegally than buy the CD, right?  The client has decent on-page optimisation. What else could it be?

Of course linking is important (as we're so often told) but...

Hi all,

A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd"

If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right?  How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking?

How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do?

Thanks,

So you have a decent blog on the other side of the world ready and willing to work with you. Their content relates to your industry, and you're going to be allocated a lovely page of content, once a week, with a link or two back to your site.

Do you think anchor text is still as important in May 2012 as everyone said it was three years ago?

How do you determine what anchor text to have based on your answer to the question above?

Ye, I've made the plea but when resources are limited there's only so much you can you I suppose. I'm also going to see what the useless PPC man is up to - perhaps throw more of my 2¢ into the fray.

Being selective as at which industry I go into next has become more and more apparent. Probably good advice for any SEO with enough experience who can afford to be selective.

So, you've recently begun as a SEO manager for a new company who's just launched a lovely, gleaming corporate site to boot. The onsite stuff is taken care of and your attention turns to link building.

Now you've been in the game for a few years. You've seen things change in that time. Directories are out. Link networks are done. You're not going to embark on reciprocal linking either because it's bad and looks horribly tacky. Black Hat, White Hat - you know the score.

You're lucky that the company produces a page or two of news a day - it's original, informative, is great for keeping your clients informed and you punt this on Twitter and FB. A bit of link bait, eh?

But there's a rub: your competitors, with their bigger budgets, and industry clout, have been around for a some time longer than your company has been. They've snapped up all the good (industry-related) sites to get links from. You've approached all potential targets with the offer of good, relevant content and affiliate partnerships but they aren't having any of it. You're simply out-sized by the big boys next door - you can't compete. They're rich kids.

There just seems nowhere to get links from. Do you just go the route of press releases and articles? Do you use paid blogging services? Grovel at doorsteps. The industry you're in is incredibly commercial - no meek altruist is going to take pity and give you  a couple backlinks out of kindness.

What do you do? What indeed...?

So it's for the affiliate to implement the canonical as we're the originating source?

When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice?

Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)?

Thanks