Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As much as I'd like to go, unfortunately I'm switching jobs and now won't be able to attend.

The good news for you is I'm selling my early bird ticket for what I paid for it - $799. That's $200 less than the cheapest one you can buy right now.

Want it? Email me asap at patrick.garmoe@travelex.com.

Hi Tom, I read your blog post on this. Very helpful. Just wondering though, why use Majestic to download a massive list of links?

Wouldn't Moz do the same thing?

And Moz even allows you to filter out those that do not pass value?

Wouldn't that be a way to have Moz sift out a much smaller list that in theory would include all the affiliate links? As they should not be passing value because they are paid links?

If you have an affiliate program, you might want to look at Sale Cycle. They do cart abandonment and some other stuff, but only get paid as an affiliate in your program. I've only been using it for a few weeks, but so far I really like how well things are going. They're really good to work with as well.

Please disregard this question. Someone in my company will be going. I'd prefer to delete this question, but cannot.

I managed to snag an early, early bird ticket to MozCon for $799. Now it appears I won't be going. I'd like to exchange it with another Mozer who does want to go, but would like to save $200 off the current price.

If interested, please email me at patrick.garmoe@travelex.com.

Then you have nothing to worry about as far as being delisted.

I doubt the server issue would matter, but do make sure your website loads as fast as possible. That is one factor that influences search results. But suffice to say the traffic sways up and down based on lots of factors from Google along with things like the day of the week, seasons of the year, holidays, etc. In my opinion you have nothing to worry about outside of simply steadily building your website traffic.

I agree with everything BlueprintMarketing said.

I would add that you should back up your blog posts, just in case something goes berserk. If you're on a paid theme or going to another paid theme, normally their support might have some advice for you.

I second Genesis/Studio Press framework from Copyblogger Media. I have one, and never had any issues when I switched from a free theme to a paid one. Never used Woo Themes, but I've heard good things.

Brian,

I agree with what Lumina wrote.

Sometimes when I run into this problem I look at the competition for the term, and then figure out how many backlinks my competitors who are ranking in the top 10 for that keyword are showing/their DAs, etc. the top 10 have, and compare it to my own.

It won't give you a super firm answer, but sometimes it's enough to explain why the top 10 is beating you.

Depends what your ultimate plan is. If it's a big blog and it's the ideal audience to get in front of for your product, it's definitely worth the traffic. If they click through and join your list or look around and purchase etc., then that's worth it.

But if you just want the link for the ranking value, then no it probably is not.

Think of it as though you are an opening band. Sure, getting paid is nice, but access to the audience who then becomes fans of your band for years to come is a lot better than just getting paid to perform.

If I'm reading the screen shot right, I wouldn't be worried. Seems like normal to me.

If you're not doing anything black or grey hat that you're worried Google might not like, I'm not sure why you'd be worried about getting delisted or penalized in any way.

Hello soralsokal,

I don't have a bunch of products like you, but generally I prefer to use the rel=canocial tag to push the link juice to the one category page I'm trying to get ranked well. So I still build out the various pages I want, but don't expect the duplicate content to be ranked.

I suppose you could also put them in your Robots.txt file to block them from search engines. I've done that with a blog that packed the blog posts in all sort of different categories, thus creating duplicate content.

Hello Gebby,

You can put it in the title tags. If I ran a local business, I'd use it on a few title tags, but not my entire site.

I'd encourage you to think of how many different ways  you can really highlight on your website that you are a local company, both for your visitor and therefore Google. It's not really about how many times you add it to a title tag.

If you're going after local traffic, you should make sure your address ideally is part of every page, (like in the footer) or somewhere. That can also include things like a directions to our store page. Use local reference information in your copy as well. Be sure to fill out local directories as well, especially Google+ Local store page (I can't recall the new name for this). Ideally if you partner with other businesses in town, have a page of recommended partners, and get your partners to do the same for you. You want to send Google as many signals that you are part of that local community. Collectively those efforts will help you show up well in local search results.

An SEO that specializes in local results will hopefully chime in with more specifics.

Never used the siteexplorer tool, but it probably provides very similar data. The Moz toolbar has worked fine for me.

I took a look at the links you posted. I'm not sure of what your business is, so I can't comment on relevance.

Some of these links hopefully popped up naturally, though if you had a previous SEO firm doing work, some of them might have come via that channel.

http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Night_Shark_Fishing_Florida/ is definitely a directory.

I used the Moz bar to show me it has a Page Authority of 1, and a domain authority of 25, so I would email the webmaster and ask them to "nofollow" the link or remove it, if not relevant to your business. Because of the low ranking, if it were my website, I wouldn't worry about it hurting my rankings by having it removed/nofollow.

On http://drama.academia.edu/LelaRanson I would leave this one. It has high DA value of 85 and at least on the surface looks like good content.

http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/post/93825362281/the-canaveral-circus

I personally wouldn't worry about stuff on Tumblr, as many social networks automatically nofollow all tags. Here you can see some of the links on the page are nofollow.

The post <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://ift.tt/1v4ezED">The Canaveral Circus appeared first on <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://ift.tt/1oFpDCf">Florida Fishing Stories.

Since you don't have a penalty, I honestly wouldn't spend lots of time getting rid of bad links as long as you believe no one on your end sought them out to begin with, like a former SEO. Focus more on continuing to build relevant links and content locally people want to link to. Easier said than done I know. But theoretically if Google hasn't taken a manual action of any sort out on your website, your issue lies with competitors simply optimizing more effectively, not "bad links."

Sam,

Here are a few thoughts.

"We've submitted the site to all the relevant local directories and listings sites" - If you haven't already, I'd use Moz Local or White Spark, just to make sure you really have hit them all. I used to have a list of the ones I considered important, but was blown away by all the other listings available, after visiting those tools.

Also, make absolutely certain you have the exact same name, address and phone number in all your listings. I've seen slight variations lead to long-term issues for small businesses.

That said, you're not the first person who has voiced frustration over not being near enough to the centroid, being the issue.

Is your address prominent on your website as well, ideally listed on every page in some form if it's a highly localized page? I've heard (not sure it's true) that Google is looking more and more at your own website property to impact how well Google+ does in search rankings.

You might also want to look at Moz's latest local search engine ranking factors report. I'm sure that might spur some other ideas.

I would agree with everyone here that duplicate content isn't really an issue here. And it's really not the concern it once was. I personally would take a screen shot though, just to show where the original is for your audience. I also heard somewhere that you can't republish Yelp testimonials elsewhere, or maybe it was Google+, and have them still featured on the original source. So you may want to double check the rules around testimonials for those two sites.

Hello CalicoKitty,

I've been dealing with something somewhat similar for my website (slight drop in rankings, but in my case it includes a targeted penalty, not sitewide thank goodness!) If I were you I'd definitely look at your backlinks. I've disavowed and asked for a bunch of mine removed.

Since you don't have a penalty but are losing some rankings, here are some references that have helped me decide which links are worth keeping (along with everything else that goes along with trying to get rid of a penalty).

The quick and dirty rule of thumb I use (in addition to using the Moz Bar to also gauge the value of a link) is do I think this website is genuinely built for real people who might find what I'm talking about or selling useful. If it's on the fence, I generally leave it (especially since you don't have a current penalty) but if you know in your gut it doesn't seem helpful at all, and is built more for the search engines and looks like a junk page, then you're probably looking at a bad link.Identifying Link Penalties, 2012: http://moz.com/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012He does a nice job of comparing a good link profile with one that has a lot of bad links. (Essentially the same anchor text.)You can find a lot of good articles on the subject by Mozer Marie Hayne. She also wrote an excellent book on the topic available here. http://www.unnaturallinksrecovery.com. It walks you through every kind of link you might run across. The ebook is about $100 though, so I personally wouldn't buy it if I don't have a penalty on my website. That said, I bought it and I'm not sure how I would have ever worked through my penalty without her step-by-step assistance in the book.http://moz.com/community/users/308135In depth look at quality guidelines.http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelinesMy answered question on which links to remove, which Marie weighed in on:http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-when-requesting-links-be-removed-how-important-to-google-is-the-address-you-re-sending-the-requests-from#reply_256531How to conduct a link audit:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2207168/How-to-Conduct-a-Link-Audithttp://searchenginewatch.com/article/2330944/7-Things-You-May-Not-Know-About-Googles-Disavow-Tool - Mariehttp://moz.com/community/q/is-this-negative-seo-should-i-disavow-these-links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7WK3s693oI&list=UU3jmlL2rHbipq_2tDd5zDRA

Thanks Alex,

It I assume could also be the "nofollow" issue Mike mentioned.

Happy Thanksgiving Mozers,

In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow".

I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google.

Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow.

Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.

Thanks for the input. I've never seen something like this before, nor can I really tell why it would benefit content.onlineagency.com, but I figured perhaps this was a normal black hat tactic I had not heard of.

Perhaps if it is a tactic to get travelexinsurance.com more inbound links, it's somehow designed to copy relevant content from someone else that is already pointed at travelexinsurance.com, and then simply create another backlink, piggybacking on the content.