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Yeah, Google isn't perfect, it doesn't always detect all the spam sites. And spam can rank well for YEARS before Google catches onto it, that's what it was like before Panda & Penguin rolled out. But if it's a keyword that gets a lot of searches, Google will eventually figure it out.

One strategy that can work is to use grey hat tactics to get good rankings in Google, and then leverage that ranking position & traffic to get higher quality links.  This can help cement your rankings so that once the low value links get devalued, you still rank well because of all the quality links you acquired afterwards.

Another tactic is to build an intermediary layer between the spam links and your main site. This way, even if the sites you link to get penalized, you have a buffer site insulating your main one. You can also create multiple layers of buffers to reduce your risk of being penalized.

Anyway, these are all things I would never do with a client site, but you should give it a try if you want to learn more about greyhat/blackhat tactics

Sounds like a big and risky endeavor, although there could be potential benefits.

Why are you considering merging the sites if they are already ranking well for their keywords?  Are they not ranking high enough?  If it ain't broke...

A better strategy might be to just build more links and add more content to the sites you have.  Another area you could focus your efforts on is conversion rate optimization.  You're already getting all this traffic for desirable keywords, so you can boost your client's ROI by figuring out how to turn more of that traffic into leads.

I don't think it's that big of a problem, but if you really want anchor text, you could try this:  Use a javascript onclick event for the image instead of an anchor tag. Then turn the promotion title into a link:

• 

  onclick="javascript:location.href='link.html';">

  Jessica Simspon

  Extra 20% Off

Or if you don't want to use javascript, you could have 2 links:

• Jessica Simspon

  Extra 20% Off

  [

  style="float:left; margin-top:-XXpx;

  position:relative; z-index:-2">](link)

   

Hope that helps!

The rel=publisher should only go within the section of your homepage.

I'm not sure if there are any plugins that will do this for you automatically, but if you add the following code to header.php (Appearance -> Editor -> Header) you should be good:

My opinion:

Don't stress too much about the exact structure, as long as you have the keywords in there.  Also, since adding more words to the URL dilutes the value of each keyword (and makes it harder to type) you want to strike a balance between usability and stuffing all your keywords in.

I think the examples you gave look fine.  Just take out the "find-professionals" from the first URL since it's superflous and makes the URL unnecessarily long.  Just do "domain.com/profession/state-abbv-zip", with the individual businesses falling under that.

Just point them to all the business owners posting horror stories about Penguin, how their rankings have dropped and their businesses are dying, how they are now paying money to remove links that they originally paid to build, the long wait for reconsideration requests while their profits are shrinking...

It's a long term vs short term strategy. If your clients want black hat links, make sure they understand the risks, and get it in writing in case the sh*t hits the fan

Those links definitely look like they could be in blackhat territory.  It looks like either paid links or possibly some kind of blog network.  The links are also all exact match anchor text. Do you know when your traffic took a hit?  You may have been hit by the Penguin algorithm.

Seeing if the page where your link will be placed is indexed by Google is a good thing to check, as well as the PageRank of that page.  It's probably not worth paying for a listing if you're going to end up on some deep listing with no PageRank.

Probably the best directories out there are DMOZ, Yahoo, and BOTW.  Those as well as any niche specific directories and business directories. Beyond that it's probably not worth spending money or time on.

Google will still personalize your results based on geography, browser history, and other factors, even if you are browsing in private mode and signed out of your Google account.

Add canonical tags to your headers:

This helps tell Google which version of your content is the original.  You can also tell Google to ignore those query parameters in Google Webmaster Tools:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

That's definitely true, and then there all those people who got their livelihoods destroyed by Panda & Penguin because of the shady techniques that were working for "years". It's up to each individual to make whatever choice they want, so long as they understand the risks.

If you haven't been hit by a penalty and haven't received any warnings in GWT, then I wouldn't take any rash actions.  It's good to remain vigilant and have contingency plans in place, but going out and making a big change to your link profile could have an adverse effect on your current rankings.

What keyword are you currently using for your calendar function?  If it's just your brandname, you're probably safe.  If it's an exact anchor text match keyword, that could be more risky.  Are you currently ranking well for the keyword you're using, because changing it to a url could result in lower rankings.

http://moz.com/perks

Well, if you look at it from Google's perspective, their goal is to present the most relevant results for the user. If Google only returns results on a query by query basis, they have only a limited set of data (your location + the words you typed in) to figure out what would be most relevant to you. But if they look at your search history, they might be able to better determine the intent of your search.

In this case, it looks like Goolge saw that you searched for "presonus studiolive", then on your next search for "communion supplies" it returned a result for a merchant that sells both communion supplies and presonus products, thinking it might be more relevant to you.

Google almost never indexes hashtags, since they generally point to content on the same page. Typically, Google will just strip out the hashtag when evaluating the link.

However, I have seen with Wikipedia that Google will sometimes show hashtags as sitelinks. Wikipedia is the only site that I know of that they do this for.

Long story short, it should be fine to leave in the hashtags and Google should just ignore them.

Authority Labs (http://authoritylabs.com/) is the best service I've used, and they have a decent pricing model. They even have a 30-day free trial where you can check rankings for up to 1500 keywords.

As long as you are using your real name while commenting and not using spammy anchor text, I don't see how you could get penalized for commenting.

It looks like there is a giant javascript form (

<form <="" span="">name="Form") on the page that is likely generating all those nonsense URLs. You're not actually linking to them with HTML anchors, but Google and other crawlers can still detect them.</form>

On the sites I manage, I've done about 100-150 words per category page, with ~50 word snippets for each of the items in the category, and they've ranked well. If you really can't afford the resources for unique content, templatized content is better than nothing: "Welcome to the [blank] category where you can find products such as [blank] [blank] [blank] from merchants such as [blank]"

What do you mean by getting your video indexed? If you mean showing up as a rich snippet, generally YouTube & Vimeo videos will not show up as rich snippets for your site, you need to host them on your own server. Occasionally, Google will display a video snippet even if the video is from YouTube, but this works with iframed videos as well.