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That could work too. Something along the lines of "View more jobs at www.site.com" (basically, don't use money/keyword anchor text)

Here's another idea - when you post a new job on your site, post it to your company's google plus business page as well (and/or personal). G+ links are almost instantly crawled so you can post to the other job site right afterwards.

Search engines can't tell the difference so all good.

Hmm, not that I'm aware of. If anything, Google used to scrape Yelp reviews. Where are you seeing that this is the case?

Not sure what you are looking to hear. There are sooooo many more factors than just # of links to look at.

• Number of linking domains
• Authority of links/domains
• Penalization status of the linking domains
• Anchor text distribution
• Nofollow distribution

You need to consider all of these variables when performing competitor analysis, not just the number of links.

Cheers,
Oleg

Here is Google's official recommendations for website testing. According to them, no amount of cloaking is okay. Try using one of the other methods suggested.

You need to set up rel="alternative" hreflang="x" tags to let google know that you have two sites, with very similar content, that target different countries.

Nope, that's exactly what you should do.

There have been a bazillion posts written about this topic.

• http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-7-step-no-fail-formula-for-finding-and-placing-guest-posts/
• http://moz.com/blog/five-steps-to-finding-the-right-guest-blogging-opportunities
• http://www.dailyblogtips.com/3-less-known-ways-to-find-guest-posting-opportunities/

Top two are my faves

_Could a specific url of my site be banned by google? _Yes. And like you said, its likely offpage (backlinks with overoptimized anchor text maybe?)

1. Is this a Google penalty? If you were ranking well and it dropped, something must have changed. Either algorithm or page on/offsite seo
2. Do you think it could be a SEO offpage, onpage or both issue? Could be either or both
3. Could it be that someone is sabotaging our project? If so, what is the best tool to find out (if it exists) check GSC for backlinks to your page
4. Any other good tool to evaluate on onpage? make sure the page isn't overoptimized for any terms (i.e. don't keyword stuff). Also make sure robots can reach your page (not blocked via robots.txt or meta robots)
5. Even if I do not get a notification on the Google Search Console, Can we ask to Google for a reconsideration? No. Reconsideration is ONLY if you received a manual penalty.. for which you would receive a message in GSC.

You gave a lot of info but this seems like a really specific problem and there are many variables at play. Hard to judge without knowing the specific pages.

I like your suggestion with the overlay when a visitor is using IE8. Couple that with an additional stylesheet with fixes to make the site usable (if not responsive) to reduce visitor drop off (because you can bet that many people won't download a new browser and just leave the site)

Here is my experience...

Client runs a large ecommerce site and also creates a feed that is used for the Amazon listings.

When title on ecommerce site = title on amazon, only the amazon listing ranks (images and product descriptions are the same)

When title on ecommerce site is slightly different than title on amazon (e.g. "brand model t-shirt" vs "brand men's model t-shirt"), both of the pages rank in search.

So titles MUST be different in all channels, images/descriptions should be different, but not nearly as important. If you have a handful of products, I'd invest the time in creating several variations of the descriptions/images. If you have thousands, you are better off spending your resources elsewhere.

So ideally you would do page to page redirects which would be on the .htaccess level. Meaning sitea.com/topicx redirects to siteb.com/similartopicx

If you don't have that ability/don't want to do that, use the DNS 301 and point it all to siteb.com. I would also first verify both websites in GWT and tell Google the website is moving locations.

I'd be wary of that - many will just employ old school link building tactics that may hurt your rankings more than help. I'd ask them to share exactly how they plan to build links and to provide some samples.

I'm going to assume that you are in a low-competition area (otherwise you'll have a tough time competing on that budget) in which case you can just do on-page optimization + use a service like getlisted.org. Many times, just having complete and consistent information across all of the major local directories is enough to get you ranking locally.

Long as the site loads fine in all browsers (and loads fine for googlebot - check GWT fetch & render) then it shouldn't really affect SEO.

Its just good practice to use divs and stylesheets over tables. Tables have their uses but for an entire site layout, there are better solutions.

I would create the blog on your own domain and have them link to that page. That would help you rank all of the other pages on your website as well. Having it on another website won't help your rankings as much as direct links to your site.

With your thousands of guests, I would also try to streamline some way for them to leave reviews on your website as well as travel review websites. That would 1) help you rank locally 2) get you to the top of other lists/directories and attract more links to your website

So....

1. If the dev site has not been indexed yet, you can block crawlers via robots.txt
2. If the dev site is already indexed and you want it removed, add meta NOINDEX tag to all pages allow the site to be crawled via robots.txt (reason: you want google to crawl and noticed the noindex tag on the pages so that they remove it from search results. if the site is indexed and you block crawler via robots.txt, google will keep the pages indexed but won't crawl them again). Once deindexed, you can block via robots.txt again

As long as its blocked (and you build that into your process), having the dev site on the same domain shouldn't be an issue. We have our own dev domain + server that autoblocks all pages from being indexed.

I don't think the SEO plugin will assist with that but there are a number of plugins that will help. I recommend https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Well, you aren't the only one. Shared this post with our PPC guy...

yup, they've been doing that to our clients for a few months now.. very annoying. they even did it for CLIENT who wasn't spending that much. for another client, they called with same thing. for many others, when I login to their accounts, i've noticed the alert at the top right saying "you have been selected for agency support, please click here to schedule a call". I mentioned it to our rep and they said the google agency support team that might contact clients isn't to replace us blah blah blah. shitty practice from google.

I highly doubt you can remove them - best case disavow them.

At this point, if you are willing to roll the dice, see what kind of effect the links will have on your rankings. Understand that those links are textbook spammy and should be treated negatively (they are irrelevant to your website, have lots of spammy outgoing links) but Google makes mistakes.

It is probably a matter of time before those links will be considered negative/poor and likely to hurt you down the line. However, it could be months/years before that happens.

If you are already ranking well some some terms and are scared of losing rankings, i'd disavow them now.

They are not taken into SEO consideration so you will never benefit from having them.

The negatives to having them is that competitors have easy access to all your keyword research, saving them work and letting them compete with you more easily.

So I agree with the SEO page tool - do remove meta keywords from your pages.