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Here is my trick for helping you get the balance right of "should I go for that link"? 1. Go to Google image search and search "Matt Cutts". Find a resulting image and print it out 2. Do an image search for "Rand Fishkin", print one of those out too 3. Pin both image up on the wall behind you - one looking over each shoulder 4. Continue to build links knowing they are watching you Deep down we all know what is a good link and a bad one. Beyond that we are balancing risk v reward. Your new over the shoulder friends will help you stay on the safer/cleaner side of the road if that is your intention.

It's all about targeting the right keywords.  Sadly it is an area that lots of people get wrong and then are left wondering why they don't have traffic.

However you are promoting a niche product, so you don't have to compete on the really big terms.  You've done well on the villa terms - maybe start down another seem next: maybe luxury accommodation.

Hi Bilal,

The best known site for selling other websites is probably Flippa.com . They certainly get the inventory there, but it'd probably be wise to hang about a while and get a feel for the place as the quality of what is on offer does vary a lot.  There seems to be a lot of sites there using scraped content and low quality links as a quick means to build something with the sole purpose of "flipping" it.

Another approach might be to find likely blogs. Maybe search for topical blogs that haven't been updated in a while and approach the owners directly. It would be more time consuming, but you would probably end up with with a higher quality result.

In short, no. You only need to include the instruction in one or the other.  Most people find that the robots.txt file is the preferred solution because it will only take a few lines to specify which parts of a well structured site should and should not be crawled.

If NO pages at all have been indexed then the first thing to check is that you are not blocking google. the easiest way to check all the most likely issues there is to get your site registered on google webmaster tools and then look for any crawl errors.

However if you want to check manually start with the robots.txt file - make sure that there are not any disallows in there.  If there are then make sure that they are not blocking the mail content (if you are not sure then post the contents back here - happy to look).  Also look in the source code of the page for any "no index" instructions.

If neither of those flag up problems then you need to ask does Google know about the site?  Has it been linked to from external places, or submitted? How long since it went live.

If you post (or message me) the URL I'd be happy to take a quick look for you.

What do you mean "not being counted as links".  Do you mean that seomoz isn't picking it up in opensite explorer or that it isn't appearing in webmaster tools?

If you just mean open site explorer then don't worry. OSE only crawls a small portion of the web and it's purpose is to give you some analysis rather than a defininitive link.

If Google isn't picking it up and it has been there a while you just need to get some links pointing back to it.  Drop your twitter handle if you are guestposting / using author boxes or maybe as your link on some blog comments and it'll soon get picked up.

Overall though, if you are worrying about a single link getting indexed then you probably are not using your time in the best way.  Focus on what to do to get more links, rather than worrying about the ones you get.  The payoff is far bigger.

if you do a search you will see that the results end with this:

powered by  Custom Search

So, yes - they do

Hi András ,

I think that you are getting confused to what rel=author actually does.  It can help as part of the picture that shows google who the originator of content is, but it doesn't assert it in the way you seem to be suggesting. I'll come back to that, but let me address another point first:

as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own.

This is plainly wrong.  I would agree that whatever you see on the internet can just be stolen. However that is not the same as owning it, something that international law backs up.

If you have valuable content that is likely to get stolen then you need to do 2 things:

1. Ensure that search engines find your copy first and see you as the originator

2. Police it

#1 You seem to be doing. Manual submission via webmaster tools sounds painful to me, but will do that.  Tweet it, link it, ping it etc. Do what you can to establish "this was here" early and to get Google to index it.

Part of that same picture is to be seen as trustworthy. Get those high authority citations, ensure you content is always unique etc.

However, #2 is about you taking responsibility for your content. It's yours, you own it, there are no internet police so it is up to you.  Try a service like copyscape, or just use google alerts to let you know when people steal stuff.  When they do hit them with a take down notice, send the same to their hosts, domain registrar etc - then follow it up with a DMCA request.

This will stop a lot of it.  It will also make it a  pain in the bum for some of the others (if it is more hassle to steal from you than someone else then they will steal from someone else!).  It also starts undermining the trust in their sites.  If google have frequent DMCA requests about particular domains it helps build that picture.  If you see them stealing other people content let the other victims know as well and encourage them to do the same.

I think people panic about cloaking/dynamic content too much to be honest.

It would be easy to go overboard and start alarm bells ringing, but if you have a dynamic area on a well structured and balanced page I can't see it being an issue.

Caveat: I can't think of a clear comparison to something I have worked on in terms of serving it geographically.  However I've done similar based on countless other criteria and not felt it has harmed anything.

There is no point in having search results if your site puts people off. In navigation in particular  put the user first.

Hi Cesar - I've actually used your site in the past! That's cool.

That date sounds suspiciously like you were hit with by the Panda. Panda is a Google update that mostly targeted 'thin' content - it was updated on the 23rd.  If you ever get a sudden drop in rankings like that it is always good to check http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change which lists when updates happen.  That is fast becoming the page I link to most frequently in Q&A answers!

So - why might they think you have thin content? I'll look quickly at 2 pages: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/ - ranking for scrabble dictionary & http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/scrabble-cheat/ - presumably the one that has dropped for scrabble cheat.

OK, the two pages have a few paragraphs of unique content, but it is really what I would call "fluff" - it doesn't really serve any purpose other than to tell the search engines that you wish to rank for that page. That is not an accusation - I've written plenty of fluff myself. Just telling it how it is. This text is also quite a way down the page which indicates that it isn't the most important.

The "meat" of the page is the form. This is identical on both pages. So really we really have 2 pages that are only really different in terms of the fluff. That is textbook for the sort of thing that Panda hit.

How to fix it then?

I'd consider actually providing information that is more relevant to the search "scrabble cheat". List common cheat methods (and how to spot them) plus a big call to action pointing back to the main search tool. At first glance I can't see any need to replicate that form on every page.

Your scrabble helper page is actually following roughly this process - although I would make the link back to the main tool much more obvious. However the on page optimisation isn't great on that one - tweak that up and get some people to link to it and I'd imagine that could help quite a bit.

Good luck with it.

There is a chrome extension called "scrape similar" that is useful for doing small batches of stuff like this. However it does have a couple of limitations in that you have to view each page & google will not show you all pages of a large domain. However it is quite easy and effective for sites with under 1000 pages.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd

The process can be sped up using other tools.  I use tool that is designed for black hat forum/comment spamming to do SERP scrapes like that.  Even if I did such spamming (I don't), I don't actually think this is a very good tool to do it with. However it is rather good at scraping results from google. However, again you are limited to how many results Google/Bing choose to show you.

If you need a bigger list then log files might be the way to do.  You can get a list of all crawled URLs for any particular agent (including the likes of googlebot) from your server logs.  Some hosts limit the size of these, so it might be worth checking before you start.  However the data does get collected.  The downside here of course is that you need access to the logs.

Of course crawled is not the same as indexed. Once you have that list you might need a further step to see which is indexed. Possibly cross-referencing it against google analytics landing pages or querying the google cache for that page (SEOtools for Excel from Biels Bosma is good for this).

Similarly, if you have a definitive list of the URLs on site you could start with that list and query which are cached.

Harder than it seems isn't it? Hopefully one of those methods will put you on the right track.

I like campaign monitor.  As your list gets larger it works out better value too. Hard to argue with that free level on mailchimp though.

I'd start thinking about more keywords to target to be honest.  It's really risky to be that narrowly focused and you'll bring in more business by broadening your focus anyway.  As a bonus, work that you do to introduce new target phrases should also strengthen your hold on your primary terms by attracting more authorative links.

Whether you were talking about the anchor text or titles it is the same principal. If you are worried about over-doing titles don't use them on all the links.  I'm actually not a heavy user of them at all myself - only using them when they are needed rather than when there might be some seo benefit.

Can't help you with the schema question I am afraid.  I'm lucky enough to have someone who deals with that for me. I'd put it up as a separate question.

Not everyone will agree, however I'd say leave them for now - unless you are seeing anything particularly worrying.

Bad links could case a ranking drop for two reasons: On one hand you could be getting a penalty - even without a warning in webmaster tools. On the other it could just be that you are not getting the benefit from those links that you were.

The second is the most common. The remedy to that is "build more, better, links". That same remedy solves a lot of other problems too.

If a link is poor quality you may as well get it removed rather than changing the anchor. However I'd still rather put resources in to new links rather than removing old ones unless you are particularly concerned.

Looking at that site I would say that you are doing pretty well if you are getting 700-1000 visitors per day.  I would have expected that number to be lower.

You have some real basics missing. Quite a lot of them as well.  Rather than rattle off a load of stuff out of context I would say that you need to really understand what SEO entails.  One good way of doing that is to work through the whole beginners guide to SEO here on seomoz

• http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

That will give you a much better understanding of how search engines can send you more traffic and how you can ensure that your website makes the most of that.

At the end of it I would bet that you would be looking at:

• Starting again with your keyword research
• Restructuring your site to make the most of your keyword research
• Changes to your on page structure
• Ways to get more links

Sorry to just give you a link, but I think that is the best place for you to go next.

Really hard to say without knowing the site.  However my first place to look would be at technical issues. Are they crawl-able and indexable?

• Check robots text, metatags etc - are you allowing googlebot to crawl?
• Log in to webmaster tools and see if any URLs are being blocked/unreachable
• Point a crawler, such as Xenu or screaming frog at the home page. WIth all settings set to mimic Google, does it find the posts?

If it passes all of those it should be technically indexable.  If that doesn't turn up anything I would start looking at when Google is crawling the site (webmaster tools) and see if that is the problem.

Hi Feilim,

As with many things in SEO, no-one outside of Google truly knows the answer.  It is so difficult to isolate the effects of any one ranking factor that accurate measurement of it's impact is often impossible.

However - we get clues. These come from Google themselves, people doing experiments and analysis of other information (the work of Bill Slawski analysing search engine patents comes to mind )

Most people agree that domain age is a factor. A lot of low quality sites are created on a "churn and burn" type principal, so it makes sense that a site that has been active for a longer time is more likely to be more trustworthy than a newer one.

Whether that effect comes from the actual age of the domain, how long the site has been in googles index or the backlink history (or all 3 in different proportions) is harder to tell. However older sites do appear to have an advantage of some sort.

However, don't get age and standing confused. A newer site that is better cited can easily outrank an older site that have few good backlinks.

I hope that answer is helpful. I know it isn't that clear cut, but few things in search are!

A couple of related resources that you might find interesting:

• Search engine ranking factors : Results of an annual survey of "top SEOs" looking at the question of what makes a site rank.
• SEO by the Sea : Bill Slawski's blog (mentioned above) Essential reading if you are serious

Actually, I would say that uniqueness probably is an issue.  keep in mind that I don't speak Hungarian,but it looks like everything on that page is a snippet from the sub pages. ie none of the text on that page is unique to that page. Is that correct?

Adding unique content at category level, even just a few lines of natural text that include the main keywords can make quite a difference. I've found it much harder to rank category pages that do not have that.

That would probably be my first job. Even if you just did it on a sample set of pages and monitored those for any improvement.  Making them useful (and therefore attracting links) might be harder.