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When you get big changes it is often worth checking again this page here on seomoz: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

That shows a calendar of big updates at Google, although no need to check it for that date: You've probably been hit by the penguin update.

You'll find LOADS written about penguin around the web. However the 2 minute version is that it is an update that looks at poor quality link profiles.  Most sites hit badly had a substantial proportion of unnatural looking links: largely those from poor quality sites and/or over optimised anchor text.

Most sites didn't get notifications in webmaster tools for this.

I hope that this helps.  There conflicting suggestions as to the best approach to recover. However the general principal is to ensure that a higher proportion of the links pointing to your site are/appear to be quality, natural references.

If you aren't going to have any HTML output, you are won't really have any SEO to speak of to be honest.

There is no issue with using a single API to power multiple front ends. However you should be aiming for indexable HTML output in all cases.  The phrase "cloud-based rather than through actual HTML" doesn't really make sense.  If that came from the developers then you should be hearing alarm bells.

If organic search is part of your strategy going forward, then you really need to clarify some things before going any further.  Most importantly you need to be confident that the output will be readable, indexable and crawlable by search engines.

You also need to be confident that your developers understand these issues and the importance of on site SEO. (if they don't it may well be cheaper to find new ones that try to "fix it in post").

What you have said above worries me to be honest.

In addition to my previous comment, this popped in to my RSS reader this morning and I thought of your question:

http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/01/24/the-ultimate-list-of-rank-checkers/

(by Dan Shure, who you might know from around these parts).  Nice round up there to check back to.

Regarding Google places (and in fact other universal results), I cannot believe that no-one is (publicly) offering this.  It's a huge need (Take note seomoz brigade!)

I think it is pretty dependent on the content. It sounds like an overly simplistic answer, but I'd consider using the date when it is time-relevant content and not when it isn't.  That way you are only showing relevant, useful content to the users - which has to be good for all. If it helps with CTR from the SERPs then all the better!

Google knows (at least roughly) when the content went up whether you date it or not, so it really is about what you are showing the user both on page and in the snippet. So why bother them with it if it isn't relevant?

I think that there is a slightly bigger question here. Rather than "How can I stop Moz flagging these up as duplicate?" you might want to ask "Are these duplicate pages harming me".

Thin pages, particularly those ranking on desirable terms, are something I try hard to avoid.  They send pretty poor quality signals to Google and create poor user experience signals as well.  If there is a term that I want to rank for I would ensure that pages are strong enough to deserve ranking before letting them get indexed.

It can be painful to deindex a page that ranks. However if those pages are giving off bad signals that could be your best chance of long term ranking success.

A compromise might be to fill them out in the mean time.  How effective this might be will really depend on your niche and your website.  Lots of stores do this by just adding a load of low value text to the page, but a better approach is to try to put something useful there until the products arrive.  Do this right and you could even be building links into those pages before the products arrive.

One example of this that I have done in the past is to build out a great coming soon page that featured a competition to win the item when it launched,  As well as ensuring that there was a page worthy of ranking (particularly against the competition who were using stub pages!), it brought some other key advantages:

• The competition was used to build links from related sites
• User experience was great. People hung about, watched the video and filled in the entry form
• It got shared (bonus prize draw entries for sharing!)
• When the product hit the shelves we already had a mailing list of interested customers

That's fairly involved, so won't work for everything, but the principals are sound.  If you were Google which would you want to rank? That or an empty page?

By Linking C Blocks they are talking about the number of different c blocks linking to the domain (not the number that are somehow linked together). So, definitely a good thing.

Hi SpadaMan,

Submitting articles usually means finding sites that only existing to host other people's articles, giving them a link in exchange for the article content.  That approach has always been flawed and Google has been cracking down on it as deliberate manipulation of the results.  Definitely steer clear.

If your articles are original and useful then your best bet is likely to be to use them on your own website.  Start adding them on a regular basis, and push them out through social media at the same time.  You could contact sites in your niche and see if they would take a and credit you as the author (with a link) as well.

If they aren't original and interesting/useful then your options are going to be limited.  However I'd rather opt for "do nothing" than submitting them to article directories.

I think you have loads of opportunity to do affiliate stuff on that site.  Grooming, fashion, experience days, media, gifts - near endless. It's all going to be dependent on getting the audience and having the trust of that audience.

However affiliate marketing goes beyond having content and putting some affiliate links alongside it. For example, I'm currently looking at your "how to pull at a wedding" article. Not my thing, but I'd imagine it has an audience. you have some e-book links in the side bar and an amazon banner. I can't imagine that the click through would be amazing on these.

Imagine instead that you added a final paragraph "Headed to a wedding" that suggested some useful links for a lad heading to a wedding.  Maybe a couple of suit shops, a grooming store and the like.  More useful - and more likely to get a click/sale.

However your challenge is going to be traffic - the rest will come.  I'd definitely be pushing the "stay in contact" type message. Get them on mailing lists, following your facebook page, on twitter etc so that you can keep bringing them back to the site.

How long does it take? That largely depends on how hard you are willing to work and a bit of luck.

It looks like you may have been hit by the penguin update.

According to OSE 1546 linking root domains out of 1634 link to you using the anchor text "reputation management". Looking at a few of those links they look a lot like quite a few of them have come from blog link networks as well.

So you potentially have either 2 or 3 issues that are causing you an immediate problem:

1. Over-optimised anchor text
2. Links that were previously helping you now having no value
3. (possibly) also a penalty for unnatural linking

#3 is the most scary, so we'll deal with that first. If the site is set up on webmaster tools log in and check for any messages. If it isn't then get it set up. If you do have a penalty you should have a message. If not then breathe a sigh of relief... for now.

How you deal with 1&2 is up to you. Have a good read around "penguin" and "poor quality links". There is LOADS written elsewhere about this.

Not pushed it to be honest. We tend to now favour direct outreach.  However look for a group called "the blog zone" - they have a guest blogging sub group.  Quality level there is pretty good, but I wouldn't steam in with a "content for links" angle.

You can track any type of link you like.  Google is good at detecting affiliate links built in common formats or run through big networks. However there are plenty of links around that are part of an affiliate program and totally undetectable by algorithmic means.

One example: I've previously written scripts to track referred sales from the referring domain. No tracking URL was used.

If I was building an affiliate program with the SEO benefit of the links in mind I'd probably use (or at least offer) a method like that.  There is also another trick that I've seen used in the travel sector quite heavily using malformed URLs which I think it slightly more theoretically traceable, but seems to work just fine.

Even simpler I would suggest that most forms that don't go through a known network and don't use an obvious form like &aff_id=xxx or &affiliate=xxx will probably count.

I'd imagine that doing such is pretty much a textbook example of a paid link.  You'd need to consider that and be sure you were happy with such risk. Either way I would strongly disagree with the other comments that affiliate links don't count.  I'd also question the suggestion that affiliates will always nofollow as well.

More pressing I would consider whether you are possibly causing a duplicate content issue with your URL structure.

If abcweb.com/affiliate1/nameqaz and abcweb.com/affiliate2/nameqaz both point to the same page and there is no 301 or canonical in place then you could end up with multiple versions of the same page indexed.  I'd opt for a 301 if you are stuck with that structure which would also help direct the link equity if that is your concern.

Better still I'd pass one (or more) get vars and have these ignored through webmaster tools.  If you were using abcweb.com/nameqaz?rand=111 & abcweb.com/nameqaz?rand=222 and had ?rand ignored in webmaster tools that would solve a couple of issues.

I'm not endorsing everything above as a great tactic for every project. However it is all correct.

It looks like these are given to those who speak as part of the Barclays Entrepeneur Speakers campaign.  See here: http://www.barclaysandme.com/Seminars/Entrepreneurspeakers/P1242587029441

Very interesting Seems a little... err, uhmm... Naa.. they wouldn't

Good niche directories are still useful to both site owners and the public.  There is nothing wrong with the format of a directory, it is the use of that format that has been causing problems.

I'm not a big fan of much off the shelf software for this sort of thing (I'd either build from scratch or build using drupal).  People I know who use them mostly complain about limitations of the software.  However phplinks directory seems to be a very common choice . However if you were building with that I would suggest spending extra time to make sure that it stands out as a quality directory and doesn't look like another spammy one.

Not a dumb question at all. There was a "fashion" for this for a while. Unfortunately it was really obvious manipulation, so things were changed to make it ineffective.  Now the pagerank that would have passed down those no-follow links just dissipates.

That means that "sculpting" is now more about removing unwanted links and ensuring good structure.

It's not what I would call a link wheel. However it certainly does demonstrate the intention of building a network of sorts. Sadly quite a few SEO firms (including some quite large ones) do this. What is really bad is that they don't tell the clients that they are effectively abusing their websites for them either. Really underhand tactic if you ask me. I don't think that the "white hat / black hat" thing is particularly useful. It's over simplistic and makes our industry sound childish. However these are not links that have editorial merit, so you would think/hope that they don't pass authority. It is also a clear case of trying to manipulate pagerank, which is against google quality guidelines. As such it would seem to be putting the host sites at risk. Oh... it's really damn easy to spot as well.

Nice site, great product.  You need to sell them on a blog though - it'll be one of the best marketing investments they make.

Something like a camp always has a story to tell, because there are always new people involved  and things happening. Photos, updates, achievements - that all good stuff and use that for facebook as well, which will probably pick up engagement from those involved.  That's the background chatter sorted.

Big content I'd be thinking about in depth guides for young people getting in to the sport. The team page suggests that they have the expertise on hand, so you need to start tapping in to that.  Hmm.... "Actor by training, teacher by vocation, Nacho does it all: DJ, storyteller, avid Facebooker, videographer, karaoke king, and daydreamer… If Nacho’s around, fun is never far away."  - Get that guy on video once a month answering a question,. Transcribe that, add in some diagrams and you have the start of some good content. If he won't do that get one of them in a google hangout and do it.

I think SEO is becomming more and more about how we interact with clients and get them on board. It's certainly out biggest challenge with ongoing clients at the moment, but that is the only way to it really to work.  You could easily get some content outsourced for that topic, but if these guys are such experts then that is what needs to come across on the site. That way you'll not only be building great content to SEO benefit, but selling the product at the same time.

I like the tracker in seoMoz, but I monitor too many sites for it to be viable as my primary tool.

For me it is RavenTools.  The cost of the tracker is effectively free for me, as I wouldn't live without Raven because of other features it offers anyway.  However even if it was a standalone tracker I would probably go with Raven simply because:

1. It works
2. The packages work out very cost effective for me

Price

$99/month gives you unlimed websites and tracking on up to 1000 keyword rankings.  As a tracker that isn't bad, but I suspect it isn't the best deal if you are not using their other toosl as well. If you factor in the social monitoring and link manager that becomes far easier to justify.

Capabilities

Check the site. It's a long list and seems to be growing.

In terms of the SERP tracker it'll check weekly, graph past performance, allow tracking of multiple engines (and geographic variants), allows tagging etc.

Time Savings

For me, immesurable. It would simply not be possible for us to do what we do without Raven or something similar.

UI

Raven does look dated compared to some and, despite daily use, I still struggle with their UI at times.  There isn't a great deal wrong with it (and they are REALLY responsive if you do point out shortcomings), but it just doesn't sing.

Other Thoughts

Raven is an all rounder.  If I only have access to one tool it would be Raven (sorry Moz!). Some of the tools they have seem to be "labs" style bolt ons, but the core tools are very good.

Hope that is some help.

I'd avoid having two sets of pages targeting town names if you can.  The exception would be if you are targeting very different terms for each page type.

If the old pages don't bring organic traffic and it would be hard to merge them you could considering de-indexing those.  Otherwise the preference would probably be to combine the pages and 301 the old ones to the new URLs.  If you take that approach remember to also update internal and external links that point to those pages.

I guess as you mention .htaccess you are running apache - try this example: http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

If you are using cpanel I would add it as a parked domain - then follow the instructions in that link to do the redirect through .htaccess .

Parked domains on cpanel/whm don't redirect, so you will have a duplicate content problem if you miss out the .htaccess step.  Remember to update as many incoming links as you can as well. Although the 301 will pass the rank on, it does keep a little to itself, so update your biggest incoming links to point to the new domain.

I love the keyword stuffed forum name in that email BH to the core!

Happy birthday.