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Activitysuper,

I see you're using the rel=canonical on the non www version, but really you need to use a 301 re-direct on the domain with the non www to direct it to the www version (if that's which one you want to use), you can then set the www one as your preference in webmaster tools and remove the non www version from your account. You can do this quite easily in IIS on your server, by setting up a separate site for the non www version and simply using the re-direct feature to 301 it to your www site.

The site has the potential (to a googlebot) to look slightly spammy in the fact that it's a single page with no external links coming into it. I would try and get some quality links going to your domain to give it some link juice and trust.

It's also an easy site to copy from a content perspective. Someone can just come along, rip your content and setup their own page on a more established domain, so make sure this isn't happening. Google could give credit to the other site in this instance.

I've seen some other South African sites like this that have ranked really well. In fact our brand name is a big term is South Africa, hence the reason I noticed the odd .za site appearing in the rankings. I'm not sure if the algorithm is different for the area and that's why it works??

To be completely honest with you, what you competitor has done may not be sustainable in the long term, but you can see he's got some easy links from 'high ranking pages'. I won't endorse it and sooner or later he may get a penalty, but he does seem to have found some easy wins for the moment at least!!

It looks like when archive.org tried to crawl that site the crawl bot met a 302 error, which is a temporary re-direct which was either enforced just on the crawl bot or on the site on whole at that time.

It's strange, the site seems to just be carrying the same Page Rank as the site it was re-directing to which is http://www.withcauses.org/. So my guess is either that it's a coincidence and what Ryan says carries for this site as well or some method of re-directing the crawl-bot was instigated which meant the page rank was retained by the 4causes.org page or something else fishy is going on.

Browsing the site posing as a googlebot doesn't make much difference, but i'm intrigued so I've asked the Mozbot to crawl it to see what results are returned.

Whether the PR is valid or not, who knows. As Ryan correctly says, the PR indicator can't be fully trusted and although PR is calculated on pretty much a daily basis, it's only updated to the toolbar cache every 4-6 months (and this isn't always accurate).

You should read this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139066#301

Google seem to prefer 301 re-directs where possible, but in your case it may be much more straight forward to use the canonical tag. It was created pretty much for times where you have variations on a product (such as different colour shoes but otherwise identical, each with a separate page)

There are two quick methods I use to check if a site's ranking has been devalued or penalised;

1. Compare the Page rank of the site in question with MozRank. If MozRank is 1.5+ points different, then the site may have been penalised by google and lost some of it's PR.

2. Pick a sentence from the site of 5-6 words and search for this sentence in google enclosed in quotes. If you find the the site is ranking on the first page, then it probably hasn't been penalised or devalued heavily.

I also use gut instinct for a lot of links and usually that's good measure - If a site look spammy, then it probably will to google. As for nolo.com, it looks like a pretty decent site to me, so I would be surprised if it's links have been devalued.

Just got the crawl report back and strangely that site is 302ing the Mozbot on some sections of the site to elsewhere, but when you navigate by browser, no redirection at all.

I smell something fishy afoot

Your site is relatively new and so a spammy looking link profile is something that will not work in your favour. Take a look at this video by rand from a few years ago; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/belated-whiteboard-friday-can-bad-links-hurt-me

You definately need to work on some high quality content and then try and create good links to the high quality content you are creating. Google will then recognise your content and see that it's being linked to externally which is a positive sign.

Yes, massive changes today. Lots of keywords have dropped like a stone, although brand terms remain strong... Seems to have hit the UK hard today.

I've seen reasonably strong sites that have never fallen before disappeared completely.

Following on from what happened to SEER Interactive a few days ago in the US SERP, I'm hoping some rankings might return over the next few days, but I doubt it very much!

I'm surprised that people ask you for a link and then can't be bothered to write the content. That's like catching a fish, but then throwing it back in because you couldn't be bothered to pull it all the way up.

I like your logic on setting this up, but I would definitely be a little wary. You don't want your links being devalued.

Aside from that, do you fancy an article on how a loan can help with garden improvements or is that too far off niche for you?

It doesn't really make much difference. Relative is useful for navigating when your web site is off line in the design stage, but it makes little difference.

If you were to put links in content, it's probably best to use absolute links, incase anyone scrapes your articles to replicate on their own site. Then at least you might gain an extra link back to your own site.

Please be aware that if you use several different types of links to navigate to your home page such as;

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

http://www.mysite.com/

Google and other search engines would count this as 2 different links and cause some duplication issues. So in that respect, I wouldn't refer to your home page's actual page my name. Just use the / either in an absolute or a relative sense.

Yes that's definitely the way to go and if that's what you've always done, you'll probably be ok. I think problems are starting to crop up where tactics used in the past are catching up with people. That's what I'm witnessing.

It seems strange that Google are penalising sites for having shady links/tactics in the past whilst ignoring good recent content, credible links and white hat methods that should imo outweigh any older bad signals.

Wil Reynolds has put up a good post about his recent SERP experience http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/7-lessons-i-learned-while-being-banned-in-google-for-12-hours

Definitely worth a read, as is his first comment.

Felicity, I wouldn't necessarily bunk it in the black-hat category, but it's certainly grey.

Clearly you're not just offering a paid link, you're also creating some content, which is good.. But your site is making it clear that the user is paying for a link within a blog article.

Your site clearly isn't spammy and it's got a good general feel to it. As to whether google would penalise your outbound links (if they happened to come across your site), not sure. It's not like your putting links up for who-ever wants them, as you're also seeking a degree of relevancy. Tough one to call

Nice keyword drop there

Are you looking to completely re launch the site or will there be a lot of similarities between the two? If the new one has a lot of existing content, then google will probably notice that you have just updated your site.

Yeah any custom of the AIO custom fields you've configured will probably need to be re-entered into Yoast's custom fields. You can just copy and paste these out to a spreadsheet or something and then paste them back into the Yoast custom fields.

So yes, the functionality is retained to have separate search engine titles/descriptions and blog page titles/descriptions

Regardless of what google may say, having a nofollow link to your site does pass credibility to you. So having a link from a national newspaper is a big win.

I wouldn't worry too much that it's a no-follow. In my experience, if it's from a great source, it makes little difference. You should still get value from it

Rather than creating the same report layout for each of your campaigns in Moz Analytics?

Anyone know?

Why wouldn't you want to include a link to your help desk? If it's a resource that visitors will use then you should include it.

As for a nofollow link, this is just going to stop link juice being passed to your hepdesk page, but other links on your page will pass less link juice as a consequence, so without more information, it doesn't seem to make sense to do this.

If there's a reason why you don't want visitors to access the help desk then don't include the link at all.

Generally, I correct the error and then wait until the next crawl if I'm confident that I've fixed the problem.

If I'm unsure then I may run a manual crawl using the crawling tool, however for me the format just isn't as easy to read as the weekly crawl diagnostics.

Gregory - Check out this new blog post, might contain just what you're looking for;

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity

Atul,

Try reading this, especially the website content section;

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

There's some great stuff in there that every SEO can learn from