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Yeah isn't there tools to put the link through for that?

Just a guess from me here, but I don't think hiding redirects from a search engine would be a good idea at all. I mean, we know they really don't like us trying to hide stuff from them whether it's keywords or anything else. Not sure how that would work out, or what the chances of anything bad happening from it would be, but I would assume that if Google thought people were doing it, it would soon be in their webmaster guidelines as "Don't". But again, complete guess, I don't know enough about it to say anything for sure.

It's Adsense, so the plan is always to show "relevant" ads for your site right?

Look at your ads, they're for hotels in Romania, Talk Talk, and other stuff that's not really that relevant.

You are on page one for the term in the UK though... the links you're getting, how many of them are from other Romanian sites?

The too many on-page links... they're ads aren't they?

Is the site still massively ad heavy?

Three weeks is not a very long time in search results changes... it can take much, much longer than that to see the impact of your work.

So you went through and got an "A" for your on-page SEO yes? And the crawl error report is nice and clear?

Just one, Raven... but you've already said you're using it lol.

Sorry

Have you added it into the campaign tool here on SEOmoz?

Just me, but I slap everything through Google URL Builder Tool, then add it as a campaign in Google Analytics.

Okay yeah I see what you mean. I guess it really comes down to how much of your objectives are based on the local advertising then. If it's a huge portion of your revenue then maybe the separate sites. Although I still wouldn't. I would have assumed the benefits of one site would outweigh the advertising issue, as I would have thought it wouldn't make that much difference, but then I don't know enough about the market and what advertisers might want.

The same is happening to a couple of our clients in their crawl errors. I think it must just be a bit of a bug... only happening with clients that use CMS though, not plain old HTML sites.

For me, one large .com everytime... hands down!

The benefits of the combined link juice, and authority, etc,... gained will far outweigh geo tld benefits.

Plus more usage data

Sorry, reading it back it looks like I was a bit blunt when stating the issues. One thing I will say, judging by the number of other links on the blog they must have some pretty convincing sales people lol. But yeah honestly there's a tonne of other places out there that will get you some great links. I don't know how much it works out that you're paying them monthly, but there's some great SEO companies you could probably hire for a similar amount (maybe less?) who would do a good job with your link building. Half of the people on these boards probably run them lol. Check out the SEOmoz market place and get a few quotes... and don't forget, Distilled have just opened up a branch in the USA, and they're endorsed by SEOmoz so you can't go wrong there!

Thank you Ryan

Okay, based on that blog... before I say this, please get the opinions of others too as I'm aware I'm starting to sound too negative here... you're being taken for a bit of a ride.

That blog is spammy, irrelevant, full of links to random sites, contains dire content (probably dupe but haven't checked), looks like a domain purchased for it's old page rank as it doesn't fit the content, etc... etc...

That is far, far from a quality link and isn't worth 5 cents let alone $50.

Run a mile!! If that's what they've been doing, you could have achieved the same results for $50 one-off.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news

Hmm, iffy. I think you're probably doing the right thing looking elsewhere (in my opinion). If you have low traffic (not saying you have) then a 50% increase isn't a lot, plus, how much of an increase in conversions are you getting would be the more important question.

All I mean is, if you're in a field that's not competitive, you started off low with no rankings, and they got you a few low value links which bumped you up to having a couple of okay ranks, which are driving some "not-so qualified" traffic, then that's not worth $50 per link. You could have done that yourself pretty easily, or employed someone at $10 per link.

But...

If you've got some good rankings out of it which are driving good, targeted traffic due to those links then great

Edit Also, how many other links are there on these blogs going to other sites, are the blogs spammy? Care to share one?

Sorry, that's what I mean. Captcha programs are ineffective much of the time against Xrumer. For other software there's services such as decaptcha, beatcaptcha, etc.. some services read the screen and take their best guess, some use actual people in what I can only imagine are sweatshops to enter captchas manually for you, but Xrumer doesn't need that stuff. It's smart, it learns... and many who use it combine it's knowledge with files so that it learns even more.

That's what I mean, the only way to stay ahead of it is your own personalized captchas (ones that alternate).

I would place my money on Xrumer and other such software... we get it loads too.

Some might even be hack attempts with SQL injection but probably not too often.

Xrumer is pretty good at beating captcha's (I've heard lol ;p), so you'll need to define your own actual questions if you want to stop it... i.e. "What colour the sky?" is one, but it's learnt that and others like it, so you need more personalized ones. The best are "What is the first word on the homepage of this site?" as of course it can't guess that, and it can't follow the instructions to go find out

I hope they're good links then. $50 is cheap for a great link, expensive for a worthless one... do they not provide anything so you can see the value of the links?

I'd check it with some other software too... i.e. Raven Tools free trial or something, that will tell you if there's canonicalization problems... of course I'm not advocating Raven Tools over SEOmoz tools (I'm a member here and not there for good reasons), I just think best to try a few different tests before deciding if it's a problem. There might just be an issue with the SEOmoz campaign tool for the moment, which I'm sure they'll fix as soon as they realise.

Hey, aren't you the tutor I had in my SEC usability course?

I can't explain the reason for the drop, but if you want to get it back up you need to get some more links for the individual pages. You've got some great links into the domain, plenty of domain trust and authority, but the pages themselves such as /teach don't fair so well. This means they'll get passed link juice internally but they certainly do do with more external links coming in, and with keyworded anchor text at that (though don't over-do it and make it look unnatural):

Currently, for that page you have: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ciee.org%252Fteach%252F/a!anchors

It would be well worth you changing the anchor text on internal links too. i.e. at the moment, it's just "learn more" from the main link on the homepage.

I'd use the campaign tool on here and run a crawl test too, whilst the site looks great... it seems problematic in many ways (gut feel from a brief look), I wouldn't be surprised if you got a lot of crawl errors back in the report.

Maybe take a look at Rand's stuff on keyword cannibalization too, your page titles have many similar keywords in. i.e. "Teaching English Overseas" on pretty much every title for each country. Whilst there are different keywords in the titles too, I don't think this would help... maybe "Teaching English in <country>" would be a better option.</country>