Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'll advice to use the hreflang tag on each page to be sure that google know ehich language are you targetin for especially for english and spanish having those languages different variations from one country to another.

maybe you'll see a swap for local search engines for your base language which I suppose is english and gain some additional trafic from other languages. You'll start ranking in languages you disn't have before so extra traffic is highly possible.

first of all don't panic, wait for google to notify you.

Meanwhile you may want to see where are you losing that organic traffic. If the loss is at page level you may want to check if the pages which are losing traffic (and so rankings) are also heavy linked. If that so you may want to disavow those links and try to recover your rankings.

If the site was hit as a whole you should have received a notification by google or will receive that shortly. In that case just go on with a full disavow and start the reconsideration request telling them in details what you did, what you're doing to recover in details, and apologize for all your bad guy actions taken

I don't agree with that. It depends on how much you rely on ppc. If the 90% of your traffic relies on ppc, the entrance of a new player will raise your costs but if you have organic traffic driving money to you you can reinvest it to adwords, this will increase your sales and even if you don't earn more money your achieving additional market share and difficulting the life of your competitors, in the long term alex ben or sara will be able to raise their budget and make the market more difficult for other players to enter. That's how you build sales and brand.

Ebay got other issues based on out of stock products, since they don't own their products they can't be sure that the keywords were they're bidding always get a product to sell. If you have a solid stock you can always bid on that terms. Also bidding in adwords doesn't mean to push only on high volume keywords but on on long tail too which helps you getting the user to the right page in the right moment. Consider that seo is losing visibility due to the new 7 results pack and local listings so any slot available in the serps is an additional business opportunity you can't miss. Adwords may be a waste of money if you're targeting broad keywords but can be highly efficient if you make manual and highly focused actions.

First of all congrats on taking a linkfrom dmoz, even with its contras it still remains a good source where to have your link placed.

Second don't worry about it. Google knows how many sites are taking DMOZ data even Google directory is based on it

Hi Vac, send me a private message and in m y free time I'll be glad to help you, if I can condense the redirects in just one or two rules I'll definitely do that. However I think you don't have to redirect all your 404s. (further reading here)

It's natural for a site to have 404s you need to redirect only pages which are actually going elsewhere (as the redirect term indicates), for expired content or not available pages, you'll better create a customized 404 page to help UX on your site.

Hey Daniel, I'm glad you're achieveing good results with your strategy. However since you can read and write in proper english I recommend you to try to tweak your site not only to what is working now but focusing on what will work tomorrow.

focus on long term strategy, try to not spam a good technique because it may return back to you as a negative impact. Try to dilute your links and build high quality ones, I'll really focus more on brazilian sites than building links in foreigners sites.

You still want to reach your audience and you're audience is not so much in english websites. Try to stay focused and build value where you need. PR is not the most important thing try to focus on themed sites, related to your business and with an high autorithy,(normally old and frequently updated sites)

Good luck!

I'm unsure if I get your request. are you asking for which are the advantages of setting your site to a given region in Search Console or to apply GEO targeting like HREFlang?

Hi James, first of all you're not bothering here that's the purpose of any community I think,share experience and thoughts!

about profiles I think that the way to make users interact with them is to enhance integration with social media is highly helpful. Link to their g+ and facebook profiles will help them to easily access them with their facebook login so to not haveing to register from zero with you and ease the way they'll adding content  to them.

Hi Mike, Sorry for my lastest answer it seems I've overlooked an article from last february which states that the value lost in a redirect is the same you lose in a link (here), so about the value both B and A will give you the same seo value (more or less).

The choice will depend on which page will return the best UX. If you think that the user may find valuable the video they're seeing I'll leave that video there and link to product or service related. If you think that the video is really outdated and you'll better get rid of it, so 301 it to the service/product page.

Hope this helps!

Hi Spry, as you already mentioned, not all links has the same weight, there are navigationla links like in the footer, in the menu; also google may give some different weight among them, moreover some value may be reduced, and also there are some other factors that google uses to weight each link in a page that we don't know, but we may assume they have.

So given that we can calculate an aproximate value of juice passed from a link to another I won't rely so much in PR, the time you're spending in this caluclations may be given to other tasks. In general you may assume that the best pages to obtain links are pages which are nearest to the homepage of a site and which has the least number of outgoing (both internal and external) links.

Don't rely so much on PR, I've seen so many low page rank pages ranking well and high pr pages with no rankings that I think that you need to consider other parameters which are more important when it comes to linkbuilding: age of the domain, authority, topic related, etc etc.

If your calculations are made for onsite optimization just try to have your main pages higher in your site structure and linked directly from the homepage or from m ain categories.

Technical onsite is pretty important for a successful SEO but you still have several opportunities out there:

• onsite content creation: you can create new content to implement on the site and target your core keywords with LSI data

• title and meta optimization: I don't consider this technical but it's pretty key to get better rank and most importantly better CTR

• sitemaps: create sitemaps to better diagnose the site. I imagine the dev team may have other priorities but bugs should be handled anyway, especially important ones

• find 404 with traffic/links and redirect them

• lnikbuilding. This one is always tricky depending on resources.

• If you can create new pages do some broken linkbuilding and some ego baits (mention other in order to get them to link back to that content)

• influencers marketing in social media. Build up your community and get ready to share stuff, they will return the favor when you need it

• guest posting. There are a lot of sites that accept free guest posts, depending on the niche.

• cocitation. Get links where your competitors did (exception made for PR stuff)

• skyscraper technique. Find the best content in your niche and make it better, then get the links that content had.

Hi Nevil, first of all Google WAS ignoring the low value links pointing to your site. In the past having a link was always worthwhile. The least value they may pass was 0. Actually links may pass negative value to your site and the general consensus is if the ratio of those links pointing to your site is superior to a certain threshold (about 70% although portent says it would be 50% in the future) your entire site will be considered low value and "penalized".

Also there may be the case you were buying links. Google doesn't like people trying to game their algo so you want to get away from leaving patterns which may lead google to think you may have done this. If so you'll be probably negatively flagged.

About the reconsideration request it only have effect if your site received a manual penalty from google which normally confirm that with a message in your webmaster tools of unnatural links pointing to your website. In this case you want to send google a proof that you're really trying to change the way you build your links and tried to clean every sign of bad behaviour using all the tools you have, both contacting those sites to remove low value links and if not possible to disavow them.

This is to simplify a lot a widely more complicated scenario where many factors can act. Also you may be affected by Panda (as you said a number of low value pages are dragging your site down in rankings) in this case you want to get rid or improve those pages, but when this comes to links is a Penguin matter. People tries to get rid of bad links just becasue if Penguin hits you you'll need to wait until the next release (and they update very few times by now) until your site will see the light again.

Hope this helps clarify your doubts.

Sitemap and robots are not required but recommended. However you may find sites which doesn't need them jsut because they're really tiny or which doesn't want to show they blocked pages to competitors.

Sitemap may be the same, you don't want to show to your competitors your site structure or your site is so small that is useless. Also a sitemap may be useful for you to be sure that google is aware of all you urls and that those urls are crawled constantly.

For a classified ads site I'll recommend to use map for categories. You want google to rank those pages because there are the ones rankings for broader keywords and attracting users which may convert. Create one or more sitemap (with an index), based on how many urls you have, (limits for each sitemap are 50k urls per sitemap).

I'll also recommend  you to canonicalize you paginated series to the main page and submit only the first page. In that way google will focus on the first page and consolidating all the value there.

It's always good to have seo friendly urls, both for the bots and the users so they can easily understand what the page is about even in serps!

So you have to be cautious:

• be sure to implement well your 301s. Don't leave any page out if so you may lose real rankings
• prepare a new sitemap to submit as soon as you'll be swapping urls.

Even with that google will take a little to fully digest your new urls. SO you'll see some lower rankings at the beginning but maybe you'll recover in a couple of weeks.

Why not make a test with a bunch of lower priorities pages? So you'll be sure about the time to recover and maybe the impact will be less since it will be spreaded in a longer period.

• Hey Gianluca, thanks for responding to my answer.

  I agree that LSI is not a pure metric, and in the past when I used TF-IDF content, it didn't prove to work all the times in all markets. Despite that I think that both LSI and TF-IDF are recognized method to gather information about related keywords and provide to content writers additional insights.

  It's not the same when you request an article to a content writer about "Blue ribbons" than providing them information about related keywords, keywords suggested by Google and Questions related using askthepublic. The connection of the three is what I call LSI data, not 100% what google intends with pure LSI (based on the huge amount of data they have) but pretty accurate IMO.

I still remember the old videos from Matt Cutts about widgets marketing. The issue is that many people have overused that strategy to squeeze over optimized anchor texts behind the widget, so many people ended up having a link pointing to a site without any editorial willingness to do this.

Matt Cutts wasn't against widgets per se but against the lack of a clear user intent to link to a site. Widgets and badges can still be used if used right. Have a look at TRIP which is still very highly widgets oriented.

If you create the article and offer a badge to embed on the food bloggers websites with a link back to the article I think it will be fine, as the badge should say something like

TOP 2017 food blogger as mentioned on  domain.com, check it out!

and the link will point to the article where you're featuring them. I think it's natural and useful as it clearly states what's the purpose of the badge. A different thing would be if you try to squeeze multiple links or if you try to send users to another page of your website to try to boost it's rankings.

Do things correctly and no issues will arise.

I think that you may consider tweaking a little your site however it depends on how bad are you ranking for the new term and how much traffic you think that new term will give you.

If you're ranking in first position of page 2 for the new term, maybe just modifying a little the h1 of your page you'll still maintain the old rankings but achieve an important increaase for the other term. But if you need to make many changes to the page to achieve better ranking which wil give you maybe 5 more visits a day, is really worth risking your old rankings?

Moreover, how optimized are your competitors? If your competitors are nto so heavily focused on Ofallon lawn care, maybe you may lose some strength on that exact term to achieve bettere results for the other.

It really depends on any particular case, if your competitors are strong and a slight cahnge may let you lose 3 position from top rankings, I won't risk at all. But it's up to you on how you consider you may improve your total traffic and exposure.

It depends on which articles are you creating. If you're writing a guide about an event you may find useful marking up localization,  and dates of the event they will be showing in the serps too.

Also if you have user rating your content with reviews you'll find that interesting, the extrastars are always a ctr booster.

Yes madame. It's called re-messaging ask to your rep in bing for that and they'll help you for sure.

Look at the checklist google made here.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844

Have you put a link to your g+ page? Because I couldn't find any link to it.