Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Moosa for the kissmetrics post - it looks very helpful for our pricing project. We'll see if any other Moz members finds the original post.

About a year ago there was a MOZ blog showing a 3 tiered product offering (similar to a gold, silver, bronze type offer), with option 1, 2 and 3 next to each other in a single row. As I recall, option one was an ebook (lowest price), option 2 was a printed book at a middle price, and option three was the printed plus ebook for the SAME price as the printed book. The article discussed why this offer compelled more customers to choose the most expensive option by pricing it the same as the middle item in a three part offer.

After much searching in the blog, we were unable to find this article again. Does anyone remember this article, and if so, do you have a link?

Thanks,

Les and Michelle

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply.

Any idea on "why" people do this? It's an obviously spammy URL that they would go to over and over.

And for Robots.txt file for these spammy links, are you referring to using the "disallow" function for this file name?

Thanks Chris,
Michelle

Good morning,

I've been using the redirection plugin on my wordpress site and noticed i have multiple IP addresses going to the same folder on my site - like "mydomain.com/folder-name/". The "folder-name" is obviously not anything remotely like any folder or file name I have on my domain - so it's obviously spammy in nature.

And, there are multiple IP addresses going to this same URL address every 3 hours on the dot, so it's appears automated.

Is this something to be concerned about? Should I "do" anything?

Thanks in advance for reading and replying!

PS - I just realized that OSE says the 50,000 netnewspublisher .com links are NOFOLLOW - If that's the case, should I not bother with these (can no follow links cause you a problem)?
Thanks

Hi Sha,

Yes - there is one post comment with our URL in it on one page from this site. The pages that are showing in OSE are not identical copies of each other, but unique URL pages with different content - but these pages do not have a link to my site that I can see.

As best I can tell, all the links coming from so many pages is because each page has a "recent comments" section on it. I'm "guessing" when the comment containing the backlink to my site was on each of these pages in the "comment section", it was discovered as a backlink when the page was crawled - could that happen?

I'd be happy to share a URL if I could do so privately with you?

And per what luwhosjack says, my home page that was linked to so I can't really change the URL.

And, I have seen significant drops in my traffic on some pages since May 22 when Penguin hit, but I have no manual penalties. Upon investigating my backlink profile, I have many malicious sites linked to me from Poland (Google says not to open their site) -I'm hoping I can just disavow these since Google agrees they are not good sites.

Plus, I'm seeing at least one competitor and MANY other sites linking to me, but when I go to their page,  my url is in their source code, but the webpage is different than all the text that's in the source code (like the source code is a bunch of text on the subject - but the visible webpage is salescopy or optin forms). I don't know what to make of this???  I would presume this is something Google would not approve of and I shouldn't be associated with it - do you agree?

Thank you

Hi Dana,
Thanks for your response. Well, it's not paid. I had 8000 backlinks in WMT before, now I have 58,000. This is the biggest spike I've had before for sure (that I'm aware of) - so it is a big jump for us.
This apparently has been going for for a few weeks to a month - the post that was added to their site has linked (perhaps a blogroll is the best term) through all of their pages, creating all these links.
Still think that's "ok"?
What would I look for in OSE to see if we are "dropping over time"? Not sure what you are referring to?
Thanks!

Hi All,

I'm new to evaluating backlinks, but I just saw I got over 50,000 links from a backlink that was added on ONE page at this site here: http://www.netnewspublisherDOTcom.

I presume this is not a good thing, and if I contact them to remove the one link on the one page, it won't solve the other 49,999 links that Google is seeing pointing to us, so what do I do??.

Should I contact them and ask to remove it and see if they don't and then disavow?  Or would you just tell Google to disavow the whole site?

Thanks!

Hi Chris,
Thanks - BTW - I don't have 200 links in my footer - I have 200 pages on my site, with about 20 navigational links in the footer.

Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response.

So for #3, you wouldn't mess with malicious sites - just go straight to a disavow?

For #5  - I'm glad it's not "that easy" then for people to tank one another.  Can you clarify when you said "It's the links that cross a certain threshold of strength AND fit the mold of inorganic that trip the filter."  I don't quite follow what you mean.  Is this an example of if you haven't been doing any link cleaning for 5 years (like we have) we may have exceeded a certain number and now it will "bite us"?

For #6 -  you say "Don't worry about anchor text within your own site, as long as it's not crazy ridiculous".  Right now, we have 200+ pages on our site - which makes 200+ footer anchor text links - I can't imagine this could be an issue as we don't have a big site - do you agree? We did use a KWP in our footer really because it's descriptive of what our page was about and helping people understand - but i have since changed it to be safe.

Our biggest traffic drop was right on Sept 27/28 - we moved to 1/2 of the traffic we had prior to that - and I understand that was a Panda update. We do have some definite quality issues. I thought if you lined up your traffic drop to a Panda update that's how you could tell?

Thanks

Hi,
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page.

We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust.  We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH!

I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below...  I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory).

We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains),  - this makes up 80% of our links.

As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this.

We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if  possible, hence my questions.

We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them.

1. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow?

2. For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too?  Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing?

3. For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do?

4. For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed).

5. How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you?  We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure).  When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do.

6. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress  (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this).

7. What would you do if this was you?  Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)?  Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect?

Thanks for your input and advice.  We appreciate it.

Hi Peter,
Thanks for the update. Though I haven't got an email from you...
Michelle

Thanks - I was hoping it would be something that simple.

I logged in today and my rankings are normally crawled on Thurs, and of my 66 keywords only 6 of them are showing any data - the rest are all blank. It's been going for weeks so it's not like it doesn't have it's initial data yet.

I presume this is some issue or artifact that the results haven't been input yet.

Can someone help answer this?
Thanks,
Michelle

thank you!

Thanks again George. So, I guess "en" or "en-us" is ok.  Most of our customers are in the US by far, but we also have a smaller percent in Australia, Canada and the UK. But they all speak English.

That being said, maybe "en" is best?

Michelle

Hi George,
Thanks for your prompt reply - and I agree - I'm sure this isn't a big factor, but when finding reports saying things are "wrong" - I'm trying to fix them for overall improvement.

I noticed w3c says: Always add a lang attribute to the html tag to set the default language of your page. If this is XHTML 1.x you should also use the xml:lang attribute (with the same value).

So, is it best practice to add it (xml:lang) to this tag you suggested (is applicable to my document)?
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">

And is "en" preferred over "ll-cc"?

Thanks again,
Michelle

I've had my site dinged by Google and feel it's likely several quality issues and I'm hunting down these issues.

One of Bing's Webmaster SEO tools said my xhtml pages (which were built in 2007) are missing Meta Language and suggested adding tag in the   or on the html tag.

Wanting to "not mess anything up" and validate correctly, I read in **W3C's site and it said: ** "Always add a lang attribute to the html tag to set the default language of your page. If this is XHTML 1.x you should also use the xml:lang attribute (with the same value).  Do not use the meta element with http-equiv set to Content-Language."

My current html leads like:

QUESTION:
I'm confused on how to add the Meta Language to my website given my current coding as I"m not a coder.

Can you suggest if I should add this content-language info, and if so, what is the best way to do so, considering valid w3c markup for my document type?

Thank you!!!
Michelle