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How To Protect Your Site from Negative SEO

We recommend Rackspace. Have had a great experience with them for many of our clients. Their customer service is fantastic. Their cloud hosting solution also has the ability to handle huge spikes in traffic.

Hi Dana,

In our opinion that would technically be treated like a paid link and is in violation of Google guidelines. Link below:

Link Schemes (especially the part that says "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites")

Better to be safe than sorry:). Our suggestion in this case would be to set up call with the blogger (a more personal discussion) as opposed to an email and then get your views across to him. I'm sure he will appreciate your proactive approach in doing this before you get into any issues with Google. Also the fact that you do have a reputation to protect with your clients and in the industry, so why put that in jeopardy.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Thanks Jane, very insightful. Much appreciated.

Thanks Matijn. Agree with the spammy footer.

This site was moved to a new host by the client a month back and is still not indexed in Google UK if you search for the site directly.

www.loftconversionswestsussex.com

Webmaster tools shows that 55 pages have been crawled and no errors have been detected. The client also tried the "Fetch as Google Bot" tactic in GWT as well as running a PPC campaign and the site is still not appearing in Google. Any thoughts please?

Cheers,

SEO5..

Hopefully the content is good enough that the initial push using this network will expose it to a larger audience and result in more shares. That's the premise behind using this tactic.

1. Where is that keyword ranking ; Top 5 or top 10. If it is ranking 9 or 10 then that partly explains why your impressions count is high yet the clicks are low and in that case changing the keyword phrase to a more call to action oriented one would not do much for improve the CTR. (although it may help a bit) . If the keyword is ranking high and is quite lucrative , i would not do a lot of testing on it. I would suggest creating another page on the site with the longer title that you want to test, optimize that page and see how it performs with the CTR.

2. I would recommend checking the optimization elements of the page using the Moz On Page Grader.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Hi Bob,

Link analysis for a competitor's site is a very solid tactic for finding linking opportunities in our opinion. You can find a lot of relevant links by utilizing this strategy and use it for your site's benefit. Although DA is important, analyze lower DA links and question their relevance for your site. If the relevancy is high, then i would suggest going ahead and adding your site to it as well.

Couple of resources below to assist you with your query:

Link Analysis Page - Moz

31 Link Building Tactics Discovered from Competitive Analysis

Cheers,

SEO5..

I would agree with Michael's assessment. Better to be safe than sorry. Reduce the keyword stuffing proactively and think more about the visitor than the search engine and provide them with useful content.

Couple of links addressing this topic below:

Adwords and Analytics not matching up

Adwords and Analytics tracking

We're testing this network Outbrain to promote quality content. Will do a case study on how it works out once we have tested the network.

Hi Byran,

If the site does not have any local presence, that would be a huge disadvantage against better optimized sites that do have a local presence. The level of competition in that industry would also make a difference. I'd like to point out a post by Rand below as reference to this discussion. The post is a bit old (2010) however a lot of the concepts addressed still seem to be revelant today.

Ranking in Multiple Geographies

Cheers,

SEO5

Thanks Brady, the backlink profile looks clean.

Thanks Travis,

It does seem like the .ca is playing a big part in their rankings. I agree, would be very surprised if the site keeps ranking in the long haul.

Thanks Takeshi, appreciate your input.

In light of all the Google updates in 2013, have you updated/changed your title tag best practices?

Is the format of (Keyword | Brand)  still working well for your optimization efforts or have you started incorporating an approach similar to this format . (Keyword in a Sentence | Brand)

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

Hello Mozzers,

Thought we'd get the group's opinion on this: This site (power lead generation) is ranking for the keyword "lead generation" on Google.ca at the 5th position organically . It's performing even better than some of the better optimized sites with more content related to this keyword. Any input would be appreciated.

Cheers,

SEO5..

To add to Oleg's response, i would suggest you to do a backlink analysis for your competitors (each keyword) and compile a list of common directories that you see you competition being a part of.

you might find the below link useful

26 Inspiring ideas for evergreen travel blog content