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Hi Rich,

I think just this one act of hiding text will not get you in trouble however if you combine this with other black hat techniques or your site exhibits spammy behavior then you're definitely in trouble. If one is able to access all the content in a text only browser then you should be ok. I would still try and educate the client on having a small block of introductory text above the product and category pages that would also help with conversions.

Her's the official link on hidden text by Google.

Jill Whalen's forum addresses this question here 

Here's another  link on this topic

1. Base it on user experience. Will it benefit the visitor if you have an external link on your page. If it does then add the external link. This will not only provide a good visitor experience and showcase your site as a trusted source for info , it will also help in your rankings if you're competing against a site that links to nothing or just poor quality internal links . This has been covered in another post here

2. Internal linking should again be done if its benefits the visitor experience and you have links to good quality related internal content. Keyword rich anchor text internal links are often used for getting high ranks for particular keywords. Just dont overdo it by using the keyword so much on a particular page that you suffer the consequences of the over optimization  penalty

3. i would say that an inbound link from the home page is more valuable than an inner page. You can benefit in 2 ways, more traffic referred to you assuming that the home page of that site gets the highest traffic out of all it's pages and the 2nd benefit is that the home page of that site has a higher trust factor as compared to it's inner pages with Google. I would recommend a text link over a button. Text links enjoy a higher CTR as compared to buttons/banners.

it also depends on what domain you have already done link building for. Choose the one that has more backlinks pointing to it.

Most of these sites have a "no follow" on their comments. Commenting on these industry leading sites should be more to increase knowledge and interact with industry folks.

Hi Alex, i would suggest you to consider the following:

• Relevancy of the links as opposed to their page rank related to your subject matter
• The # of outbound links on the page where you are getting these links from. The lesser the # of outbound links on that page , the better that link is
• Competition for the keywords. What is the link profile for the sites that are ranking high for the keyword you are trying to optimize your site for
• Google has reduced the frequency of updating the true page rank of sites so using that as a factor to choose your backlinks would not be a good idea.

Google pulls sitelinks in an automated manner based on what they feel is important for your site and would help the user access your site better. According to Google:

"There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Another good post below:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-sitelinks-2

Hi Paul,

Do you have year over year data in analytics so you can compare Nov performance this year to last year. It might be seasonal or perhaps an over optimization penalty for the keyword "uncontested divorce". I  see it used on the page 7-8 times. Wait till next month and if the drop in traffic continues then you may have suffered the penalty. Try redoing the on site elements and reduce the keyword density. Hopefully that works.

It's all about the quality and not the quantity of links that you build. You might find the below discussions helpful:

DigitalPoint Forums Discussion

V7N Forum Discussion

• the tool seems to work , did some tests and it is returning accurate responses
• Not used screaming frog, previewed the demo, it looks like good tool and the features mention the redirect check
• this might take a bit of time but eventually yes, the url that was 301 redirected should not appear in the search results
• wait for a while before you run crawl reports as it might take some time for Google to register the 301 that you have setup.

Hi Christian,

You highlighted excellent sources for reference. You can apply the 301 redirect to move the domain. Ideally 301 the specific pages to domain 2 that relate to the same product info as domain 1. This way when someone clicks on a product page for domain 1 that is still ranking , they see a similar page on domain 2 when they are redirected.

Andreas, start with doing some backlink research for the top 10 sites that are ranking for that keyword. Find the backlinks that you can also get your site. Analyze the on site activity that those top 10 sites have engaged in for that keyword and try to emulate some of the best practices that you observe. Keep doing this regularly and track the rankings weekly, monthly. You should see progress.

Using the canonical element can help you fix this. More info in this article 

yep, here is a reference source for the change of address.

Your keyword selection should depend on the conversion probability related to the keyword combined with the search volume. You dont want to put too much SEO effort on a keyword with very little search volume however as you mentioned correctly, Google's keyword tool info is not always accurate.

Low volume search terms might be very valuable for some industries as even one sale resulting from those keywords can mean a lot of revenue for the client.

this part refers to the same content being on the site but being translated in different languages, then you dont need to worry about the content being marked as duplicate. Hope this helps.

Hi Joel,

Changing a hosting provider should not impact your rankings or traffic. We have changed hosting for a lot of websites without any adverse impact in rankings.Just make sure that all the site files are transferred correctly on the new hosting account.

If the new and the existing hosting providers are located in the different countries , that can impact the results.

We recommend Rackspace to our clients for their hosting needs.

For our insurance clients we always recommend geo targeted approach unless they have very deep pockets. We also recommend a short and a long term strategy. The short term strategy being PPC advertising, identifying the core search terms that are converting and getting traction for the client using the "search terms report" in adwords. Once we identify the best keywords, we utilize them in our keyword selection strategy for the SEO campaign and go after optimizing those keywords using SEO best practices.

I would only use the no follow tag when i want to protect some information posted on the site from getting accessed by everyone. This includes any confidential internal info posted on the site or info that's behind a login. If you do not utilize the no follow attribute properly you can end up doing more harm than good. No harm in getting some additional pages indexed by Google as long as they don't compromise any data.

Hi,

If your on site optimization is done properly then your focus going forward should be on the 2 activities listed below:

• Link Building

• Social Media Optimization

Some posts below that you might find useful in your SEO planning:

Building a Monthly SEO Action Plan

Noob Guide to Online Marketing

Noob Guide to Link Building

6 Month Link Building Plan

Hi Hal,

Try reducing the keyword density of this keyword on your page. You are also using the keyword in your internal links with that keyword as the anchor text. Your site could have suffered from Google's over optimization penalty. Also check your links and report any bad links using the disavow tool.