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LOL.

The editor of that category, looks like a very very senior edtor.

http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=nocturnal

Also notice the last update date on this page. When did you submit ?

Last update: Thursday, May 31, 2012 9:18:28 PM EDT

Claudio

You are not doing anything wrong with the fact that you are submitting.

Anita's point is, are you submitting the right Title and Description ?

Sometime, that's the key. Editors don't want to spend 5-10 minutes reviewing a listing as well as having to write/edit the Title and Description.

As I said above, I would suggest submitting the listing and forgetting about it. You may get listed tomorrow or you may never get listed. You just never know. That's the nature of DMOZ, the DMOZ of today.

SEOMoz might be telling you about Internal Links. And this might be a warning. Again, I understand the value of these links to potential clients. What you can do is nofollow these links so if there are any clients you are linking to which may have bad links to themselves, and get penalized, you don't want to be another one of those links linking to that site.

Nofollow'ing all those 125 links should do the trick. Also, SEOMoz Crawl Report for the number of outgoing links is more of a warning. I hope this helps.

Ayite, think of Link Building as Brand Building. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. You will have to come up with things that people would want to link to. Think of a combination of Link Bait, Infographics, Press Releases, Some Guest Posts and other misc links. Just a little bit of everything in your niche. Not too much of anything.

I would also start with analyzing your competition backlinks and see how and where they got/get their links from. Try to get some of those kinds of links.

It's a slow and steady, painful, expensive process. But it works.

Spun content has no value for the user. I would therefore suggest investing time and effort in building value to the user. If you are able to do that, you will gain loyalty amongst your users. Depending upon the niche and nature of your website, your user's may share your website on their blogs and social media. They may also come back to your website and so on. That does what Google is looking for in real sites...sites that should rank.

DMOZ over the last couple years has been Submit It and Forget it. There's not much you can do. I have been a DMOZ Editor in the past and it is what it is.

Also, in the days of today, I do not value a DMOZ listing as much as I used to 5-7 years ago. I would suggest to keep working on your alternate link strategies.

When you do country level sites, you might only be doing a handful. But when you get to US States, you are probably eventually going to do all the 50 states. That said, that's too many websites. I totally do a sub-folder. No questions. On country level sites, I'd do CC TLDs if that makes sense for your business.

I hope this helps and clarifies.

Great answers here already. All I'd like to add is: If the Search Engines did not exist / SEO did not exist ? Would you still link to them ? Are you going to be leading traffic to them ? Do you want to do that ?

I totally understand why the affiliate wants it. The question is, would you want to do it ?

Let's say for a second that you are able to manipulate this one ranking signal. Keep in mind there are well over 200 ranking signals. What would one do for the other factors ? There's too many items to manipulate. And if you have naturally been able to achieve 140 of those signals, would you really want to risk all your good and hard work and try to manipulate it ? I wouldn't.

I hope this helps.

Andrew, let's site abc.com is the site linking to your from their homepage. If you really want to check, just see cache:abc.com in Google and see if the page in Google's cache contains your link. Google may or may not show all of your backlinks.

Considering your site is new, and the fact that you are doing Guest Posts (which in my opinion are the Directory Submissions of 2011-2012-2013 years), I would look at diversifying your link building tactics to be more natural. Really natural. Specially if you want this site to rank for a long period.

I hope this helps.

Jason

You have some great detailed answers from Marie and Marcus. I guess the question I'd like to ask is, Why are you looking into this ? Did you get to a point where your site is not ranking as well before ? Or is it that you got an actual un-natural links warning ?

That could help justify what the next steps should be.

I agree with EGOL and Takeshi. If you want your blog to work and you have a content strategy in place where you will be adding a lot of useful content and you would want that content to rank by itself, I would try to put it on the domain.com/blog. Now you know that already, that's why you asked the question.

**One solution you might have is to find out if bigcommerce can do Reverse Proxy. That way a domain could be hosted at anywhere.whateverdomain.com but to the search engines and everything else it will appear as yourdomain.com/blog. **

The reason a lot of these hosted platforms do not allow wordpress is because of security issues. They then have another piece of software / files / plugins in the same environment which is sometimes a threat.

Honestly, I would stay away from buying links unless you are ina really really black hat, super competitive niche like Online Casino, Gambling, Rx, Adult etc etc.

Those guys are clearly selling links with PR. Huge Red Flag. Stay away.

I would suggest building content with that budget, content that helps your user find what they are looking for. Content that they would link to and so on instead of spending your money on junk links.

You can download the entire crawl and see if there's actually that many pages. Or post the URL here.

You can also test using a crawling software tool like Xenu or Screaming Frog to test it.

You can also post/private message the link here and I can take a look.

If I were you, I'd consider merging them. The intent of the page is to sell and I'd rather present them what they are looking for right there or a clear call to action.

I am guessing you have multiple sets of pages like these. What's I'd do is find 1-2 examples of lower risk pages and merge them. Make sure you use the better ranking page and optimize it better (if you can) and then 301 redirect the other page to this page.

Based on the results of this test, you should have a solid plan of action. I hope this helps.

James, that is definitely a good thought. Consider adding EXIF data to your images or add more accurate data including GPS data if you can, depending upon nature of data. I am sure, it will start getting used more and more in times to come.

I agree with Andrea's comments. I'd also like to highlight the answer from within the question.

"My main competitor has a lot more pages".

Great content, strengthens your entire website. Attracts more social media activity, more shares, more time spent on site etc etc. So If I were you, I'd see what I can do to provide useful content. Find the gaps. Look at your analytics, see what keywords people are using to come to your website. Do you update your content ? Is there an opportunity there ? If you can, see what people are looking for in your site-search.

I hope this helps.

I'd also recommend to look at your blog not just for SEO reasons as a link that helps towards SEO, but as your customer acquisition and brand awareness tool. The SEO Benefit is a freebie (maybe an essential freebie) that you get out of it. So if you think of this blog with this attitude, you'll end up building a great blog with tons of content, great readership and so on.

And to directly answer your question, honestly since it's just 1 domain name, I would not worry about it too much. As donford set, you'll technically get a little bit more value if this blog was hosted on a different Class C IP. Other then that, I wouldn't worry much about changing registrars etc. Not a big deal, however if it bothers you and you'd like to shift the domain to a different registrar, that's okay as well. Again, I would not stress much on this small issue.

I hope this helps.

I agree with Matt. Build great content and Authority on one domain name and focus your strength and efforts there. Don't divide them too much. That way all the efforts you do within this site, helps and complements each and every page on the website. Works better long term.

I have an interesting situation.

Current URLs Example1:

www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1-1.html

Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html

New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html

Current URLs Example2:

www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1-1.html

Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html

New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html

Current URLs Example3:

www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1-1.html

Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html

New URL:
www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html

I want to make sure all variations of the above URL redirect to the new URLs.  However, as you see in Example 3, we are dealing with variables that are passed on. (+5 in this case).

Question 1: What wildcard 301 redirect / regular expression can I use to tackle these ?

Question 2: If we redirect www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html to www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html and www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html contains the canonical tag www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html, any concerns or red flags here ?