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Thanks Casey, that's handy to know... was still considering them despite the costs as I 'assumed' at such high rates the service would be excellent but I guess it's not always a case of you get what you pay for. Cheers for the heads up

Might be sticking with your one... Gigya is serious $$$ and I work for a charity so not got the budget. So yeah I think that plugin will have to do it.

Will let you know once it's done for sure

Thanks Marcus, that's about what I was looking for... in case it's of interest I've also had this suggested to me which appears worth looking into: http://www.gigya.com/gamification/

I wouldn't just go ahead an do it without looking into it further, maybe waiting for more comments on here to weigh it up. It sounds counter-intuitive to me.

Hi guys,

Does anyone know of something similar to what Moz uses for it's community engagement awards system?

We're launching a new blog and are looking to give points (which might be transferable into credits to spend in our online shop) for guest posting, commenting, likes, etc...

I've found various "ranking" systems of course but none quite do the trick.

Thanks,

Steve

Sorry Johannes I think I confused matters... I didn't mean there is spammy content now, I mean the spammy content that you removed. I'll be cursed for saying it but it's quite possible some of that spammy stuff was working if there were exact matches in there then which aren't now. Google isn't perfect yet so unfortunately some spam does still work (for now) though it will likely hold risks too. My suggestion with that was to look at the spam that was removed and figure out how to incorporate some of it back into the site in a non-spammy way.

With regards to the link numbers, yes if it was me I think I'd remove at least some of those footer links too.

My mistake with the rel canonical, I didn't spot it but just noticed it was a bit lower down.

The duplication could well be the issue, but if that's the case and the dupe is no longer there then it should sort itself out pretty quickly.

You must still have bad links that you weren't able to get rid of it, try this: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/link-networks/ tis awesome

If one were better than the other (and I'm not sure of any research comparing the two), then I would guess at .cn, since that's as top level as you can get with it (I know their both top level but that was the original).

Did you always have as many links going out of each page? There's quite a few... plus that spammy content, whilst I hate to say it, might have provided the longtail exact matches you were ranking for. Maybe get those keywords back in to their pages in a non-spammy way?

There's no rel="canonical" tags which would help if it is down to dupe issues.

Also, you're cannibalising a lot with the keywords... not just content and links but for a quick demo look at your page titles, the same keywords cropping up in a few of them.

Hiya, no it's fine to keep the global nav on all pages... you should do anyway. What I mean is, trim the number of links in that global nav down by placing some of them only within their category areas instead, in a secondary menu maybe. But... you can still use flyouts in the main menu so that the menu items are listed and then a hover-over of a category brings out more items, and again for a sub-category, etc... in which you could use a technology which isn't crawl-able/followed. That way users can still access all menu items from the main nav but Google will only see the top level links, with further links not followed (without using NoFollow) and bypassed. Not sure the best way to do it though since JS and Ajax are by all accounts a lot more crawl-able now.

My recommendation would be to do whatever you can to get as much experience as possible by submersing yourself in with anybody there who deals with the SEO, and get the theory by reading, spending time on here, and doing an SEO course such as MarketMotive, SearchEngineCollege, or Quirk... they're three of the decent ones, and it's kind of like having interactive books with deadlines, coursework and tests to ensure you're doing things right. They're kept nicely up to date too

Try these:

http://www.marketmotive.com/internet-marketing-training-and-certification-signup?top=how&topic=SEO

http://www.searchenginecollege.com/certified-search-engine-optimizer/

http://www.quirk.biz/courses/course/seo?utm_expid=47245799-5&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.quirk.biz%2Fcourses%2Fhome

And get these:

http://www.artofseobook.com/

http://www.dannydover.com/lp/seo-secrets.html

My mistake, I wrongly assumed demoting all that currently show would effectively turn them off.

According to this, there's no way to do it: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/removing-content/GrV8Axa81Ec

It's still on there under "Configuration"... there's instructions on how to turn them off at https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

NoFollowing internal links won't save you any link juice... Rand did a WBF on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak

You're far better off going broad to narrow with your menu and trying to incorporate the pages those hundreds of links go to into categories and sub-categories, so try to combine what those pages are about in the main nav and then give options to go into more detail once users are within the category area (not of the main nav).

Yeah I'd like to know if this progressed any further as a concept actually... any more news Cyrus?

I remember saying this before... I think that maybe when somebody clicks thumbs down there should at least be something that says, something along the lines of "Hey, thanks for letting us know that you disagree with this comment... you don't have to but we'd really appreciate if you told us why, we love constructive criticism!" <-- Or better written by somebody that got more sleep last night

That stuff is the fundamentals which still hold true in my opinion... the report card never encouraged over-optimization and the stuff within it is still relevant today in my opinion. An A Grade is certainly not over-optimized... really the whole over-optimization thing has been around for a long time it's just there's a lot of buzz about it at the moment, but when it comes down to it, it's still just the same stuff but maybe a little stricter... so as long as your not keyword stuffing, etc... or breaking any of the other old rules from back then, then you're still not breaking them now

If it's algorithmic then they just need to fix it fast, if it's manual... they still need to fix it fast and then do a reconsideration request.

I would guess that as long as you don't have other bad signals it won't really affect your site, but maybe remove the links temporarily just to be on the safe side.

SEL just did this, which may be of interest: http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463

Note that part where it states "In particular, pointing bad links at a good site with many other good signals seems to be like trying to infect it with a disease that it has antibodies to. The good stuff outweighs the bad."

Christoph put a really decent video out on how to identify spammy links, that should help

http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/link-networks/

I would say to look at it from a business perspective... how much revenue is generated from your existing site and will does it justify fixing it for just a short period of time, or would you be better off using that time planning and researching to ensure the new site is as good as it can be?