Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You're welcome.  I hope that the numbers are large!

The section should be there anyway - even before you link (just without data).   It is now called "publisher" and can be found under behaviour.

Hi again!

Despite how much people say SEO is changing, I'm not sure I would change my answer much from the one I gave just under 3 years ago. Let me update one statement at a time:

I don't think that there are many categories where the traffic sent warrants $299/year any more. In fact I would say that in most cases the referral traffic from a Yahoo directory listing is close to zero.

The above is still true, but even more so now.  Do you get any traffic from it?

As you say though, it has a lot of authority. It is also well established, tightly curated and is certainly known by those building engines. Therefore inclusion could at least been seen as a check that the site is not utter tripe. However, logically at least, a link in their directory shouldn't lend much more weight than that.

Any value on this front has probably diminished even further.  If it was seen as a special case that highlighted quality sites, I don't think that would be the case any more.  The overall quality has diminished, great sites don't bother listing any more and Google has had another 3 years to work that out.

I have not seen a measurable result from either adding or removing a site from the directory in recent years. It may well bring benefit as part of a bigger picture, who other than Google can really say?

No change there.  I probably haven't added a site to Yahoo directory since then though.

However I wouldn't expect to see an increase from adding your site - even factoring in the additional links from directories who use it as a seed.

People aren't really creating directories like that any more, and if they did then links from them would likely be more damaging than helpful.  I can't imagine that anyone would use the Yahoo directory as a seed for a quality site any more anyway.

It's worth mentioning that it is technically a different directory now, but I still don't think it is worth it.  Wouldn't you have rather spent that last $900 on something more tangible?

Hi Ruborg,

I would argue that those tools don't do the same as Moz.  They cover the same areas, but do different things.  Also, Moz is much more limited in the number of sites you can direct it at.  With the domain limit in Moz I'd say I am paying considerably less and getting more of the functionality that I am after.

That isn't any criticism of Moz. It's horses for courses and Moz just isn't the right horse for the course I run on!

Majestic's crawl picks up a lot more than ahrefs for me.  Deep links on a high quality BIG sites seem to be a particular issue with any tool where the crawl is more limited.

I do get myassignmenthelp scam as a suggestion I am afraid.  There are quite a few similar suggestions coming up as well.  You can check them at ubersuggest.org

"Is this work of a hacker..."

Impossible to say for sure based on how much I've looked at it, but if those domains are legit then I would say that it probably is. It looks like a hacked wordpress plugin or something allowing them to create additional pages.  It's quite clever really. If there is a referring URL it  doesn't redirect. So, if you follow the link from a search result (or anywhere else) it redirects, but you can view the page if you do directly - or if you are a web crawler.

"Most Imp how do I counter this without  starting a spam-war???"

Tricky.  I'd start by setting up alerts to find any new occurrences.  I'd be looking to try and contact the owners of every website this vulnerability is being used on.  I don't think that Google has a means of reporting redirects, only malware.

This isn't really my area, but let me try to help get the conversation started.

I don't think that the spamming of the term (without link) is going to directly impact rankings.  I'm thinking that this is a technique that might be aimed at trying to influence google suggestions instead.  The strategy there would be to have Google think that the word "fake" is the most common word to partner with your brand term and suggest it so that this deters people from using you.    I'm not sure of how to best counter that without getting into a game of "who can spam the most" (probably not a good idea).

You said "Also all spam is  created by site - paperhelp.org"

You might have other reasons to think that, but I would be careful if you are making that judgement just based on the fact that the pages link to that site.  Sites employing negative methods will often make it look like a third party is doing the dirty work. That not only covers their tracks, but also means that any revenge is directed at another competitor.

You have been picking up a lot of new referring domains over the last two years and these seem to be at the low end of the quality spectrum. Whether that is down to the strategies that you have been employing or a a sustained negative attack you are probably the best placed to know.  Based on the very quick look I just did I'd be looking at those in terms of what might cause a drop in ranking.

Links are essential to ranking in competitive areas, yes.

If people do not want to link to your current content and you need links then you need to be thinking about what content you can add to your site that relevant sites will want to link to.  A salary survey of Cisco engineers, maps of world-wide demand and the like could be really interesting and valuable.

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?

I think this is different:

offering customers discounts for adding links to their site to Overstock.com.

That is straight forward link buying.  "I'll give you X if you link to me" isn't the same as "I see you have a page about X. We do that!".   It's a good example of what to be cautious of though.

Offering student discounts is a great thing to do. From experience I can say that many of them come with nice links attached  .

This is definitely one of those "open to interpretation" areas.  A few years ago I would have said that Google wouldn't expect links on a discounts page to be no-followed. It's harder to tell these days though.  On the flip side I don't that they would be too impressed by student discounts being used as a way to game links.  Student discounts bring referrals, raise profile and bring business.  Do it for those reasons and enjoy any nice authoritative followed links that come with it.  (no harm in targeting those with the best links first though!)

If you have set them up for removal and no longer want them in the index then go for it. That is what the tool is for.

There was some suggestion from John Mueller some time ago that lots of removals could be seen as an issue, but it seems that is an exception.

Very good question. A timely one too as I am toying with jumping ship to Ahrefs.

Majestic's data has a number of advantages over anyone else's.  I find their TrustRank and CitationFlow to be more useful than similar metrics from other providers.  That is icing on the cake though. For me the cake is crawl size.  Majestic have a huge crawl which means that you get visibility on more links.  The argument of smaller crawls is that only important links are included, but I don't buy that.  Providers with smaller crawls miss more top quality links on large sites and those are important.   Links from the BBC are a holy grail for some sites that I work from - right up there as the best they are likely to get. All of the big backlink data providers miss these frequently. I find Majestic misses less of them.

I used to always pull backlink data into internal tools or work with it in excel. However SEO is a much smaller part of my roll these days and I now use data differently.  These days I am more likely to be doing quick checks on sites than in depth analysis.  This is tempting me to move to Ahrefs which has a much better UI than Majestic.  I'm still weighing up the benefits of convenience over accuracy though.

I'd turn the question about - what functionality are you looking for?  I love a tool, but no longer enjoy handing over large 4-figure sums every month to support my marketing tool habit (I've tried most publicly available toolsets at some point plus a few others).  I now prefer to trial lots of tools in order to understand what they offer but only buy/subscribe to those that fit my strategic needs.

IMHO Moz's strength is that it provides a solid foundation - giving a broad range of tools that are easy to understand and use.  Getting deeper into things often reveals areas where you need something more specialised.  I recommend Moz to a lot of people but no longer subscribe to the pro tools myself as it just wasn't a great fit for me.  I am now most reliant on Raven + SEMrush + Majestic + Screaming Frog + SEO Tools for excel +hootsuite +buzz sumo plus a few home built extras and free tools to tie it all together.  That mostly works for me, although I still miss Advanced web ranking.   On paper that whole collection only really still does what Moz does (but costs lots more!) and Moz still has a few extras that I don't have covered - particularly for US based projects.

More focused "specialist" tools will often go deeper into one area.   SEMrush is particularly strong on keyword research and PPC monitoring for example.  If you find that you need more capability to get a job done then that is the time to go tool shopping.  Paying for SEO tools without a clear idea of why you need them gets expensive quickly.

If SERP tracking is an area that you think you might need to tool up on then Advanced web ranking is well worth a look.  I'm not convinced that monitoring swathes of rankings is as useful as it once was, but if I return to it then that is the tool I'd use. SEMrush is great, but I don't see that as their best area.

You might find that either the domain or the IP got blacklisted.  Many mail providers use realtime blacklists and automatically mark as spam anything from matching senders.  This can cause delivery rates to plummet.

MX Toolbox provide a simple checker for this here: http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx . You can set up monitoring for it as well.

If you find that the client is on a blacklist you need to visit that particular lists site to find out the rules for removal. Some expire automatically, some you have to contact when issues are resolved.  Be careful though - some charge for removal.  If you are on such a list read up about it first - not all are as above board as they seem.

Good luck with it.

I think that John Mueller confirmed that they are not using social signals as a factor as well.

I believe personally believe that to be strictly true. That doesn't mean that at good social presence can't help you rank though.  A successful social presence will create other positive signals.  For instance if Google considered repeat visits to be a positive signal then this is a signal that comes as a by-product of a strong social presence.

That all said, it probably isn't a brilliant use of resources to "do social" just for rankings.  Social media can bring targeted traffic and conversions, build brand loyalty, increase your reach etc. These are all good reasons to use social media.  If you are using it for those reasons then any benefit to rankings is a free extra.

If you are doing this as one-off tasks rather than as regular monitoring then the scrape similar Google extension is pretty handy too.

It took me a while to come back, but I made it.

Link building is all about leveraging your assets.  You have a great blog with great images, so this opens up a number of strategies that you can follow to maximise the links that come back your way.  The ones that interest me in your case do involve giving a little something away, and that can be uncomfortable at first as it can feel like devaluing your work. However quality links have value, so there is a return to be had.

I'd be tempted to start by thinking about what you might be prepared to give away for the right credit.  For instance would you be happy for people to use smaller versions of your images on their website if they linked back to you?  How about if that only applied to some images?  Would you let "the right website" use a full sized image in exchange for a credit?

Consider what you are comfortable with and then communicate that.  Having a link to "use this image on your website" that explained the rules would encourage more to do it. You could even upload specific images to Flickr as creative commons with the required attribution being a credit link.

On a smaller scale you could target high quality sites that have poor imagery and just offer them the use of a relevant image in exchange for a credit.  That can be a very effective way of getting some very high quality links.  My photos are rubbish, but I've done this successfully for even related things in the past.

If you are not doing so already I'd also look at something like imageraider.  Imageraider will monitor the web for places where your images are used and alert you.  This can be equally useful for protecting your IP as it is for link building.

No time to answer properly now (mostly because I just got really sucked into your blog!).  Great site and amazing photos though.  Acquiring links shouldn't be too hard to a site like that.

I'm sure you'll get some great answers, but I'll check back later and post some thoughts if you haven't.  I just wanted to pass on the appreciation of a great site first.

1.  This should be fine.  As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles.

2. Again, as long as other parts of the page change this should be fine.  It's quite a common thing and google is pretty good at understanding the difference.