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Hello Everyone,

My question is in regards to Schema and whether the it replaces the need for the conventional structured data NAP configuration. Because you have the ability to specifically call out variables (such as Name, URL, Address, Phone number ect.) is it still necessary to keep the NAP form-factor that has historically been required for local SEO?

Logically it makes sense that schema would allow someone to reverse this order and still achieve the same result, however I have yet to find any conclusive evidence of this being the case.

Thanks, and I look forward to what the community has to say on this matter.

Hello Mozzers!

I have been tasked with recovering a site from partial link penalty that was previous brought to my attention for this website www.active8canada.com. Upon reviewing the site backlinks and reporting info in Google webmaster tools, I found there was no penalty showing, could it have expired? We spent the last few months doing link cleanup as we recognize that there was some bad links that needed to be addressed.

We requested removal of all the bad links after spending time categorizing all of them. Targeting commercial anchor text and bringing those numbers back to acceptable levels. Following this we did a disavow of the bad links which could not be removed through requests.

We are actively building out additional content for the website as we recognize that some pages have thin content. We have earned some links as well to show some positive signals during the cleanup but have seen no change for better or worse.

My question is, does anyone else see anything else we could be missing here? Should I revisit links again? Some of the links we disavowed are still showing in our backlink reports, but I cross referenced our disavows with the existing backlink profile to try and get an accurate sense of the remaining links. We never saw a decline in ranks further after the disavow, so I'm lead to believe that the links we removed had little, if any impact.

I am a little hesitant to begin earning new links through content and partnership outreach as I still feel something is off that I can't quite put my finger on. It was previously confirmed that there was a penalty, but without that showing now in Google webmaster tools I'm grasping at any possible angle I may have missed.

If anyone had a couple minutes to spare to shed some light on this situation, it would be greatly appreciated!

I would suggest utilizing larger content marketing campaigns geared at the industry / vertical authorities.

At the same time, be careful to place too much weight on DA as a metric of concern. DA is a result of high level link and content strategies.

It is great for comparative purposes, and serves as a fantastic benchmark, but search revenue, CRO, acquisition and retention for your your audience is probably more important.

Considering the metrics that probably matter most to your business:

search revenue
leads
unique traffic
engagement
stickiness

Everything else is something you will checkout in the line of your favorite coffee shop, and probably nothing you need to spend a lot (read: more than the time it takes to get coffee) on.

Hope this helps!
Todd

Good questions, it's great to see that you have taken the time to carefully consider each step.

Ranking on a national level in organic SERPs is a much different cat than local.

Local SEO

The factors required to impact authority and visibility on a local SEO level involve, to name a few, proximity to centroid, correct (consistent) NAP citations for the business, positive reviews for the business, adoption of localized Title tags and copy, as well as many others.

However, those elements are guidelines, and the level of work and commitment needed to rank in each vertical at a local level is entirely dependent on the level of competition within that vertical X the the competitive level of the city.

National SEO

In order to rank nationally for targeted terms, you will need to build much higher overall authority, which loosely translates to higher quality (and potentially volume) of links. You rank well on a National level when Google believes that you are one of the best choices for the consumer Nationally. This means your audience is National, and therefore your link strategy, content strategy, social media strategy and mind map should all be geared at looking locally and sprinkling at various major cities - starting with your core city.

I wouldn't suggest removing or altering your G+ account or any of your local settings. You are simply telling Google that on a local stage you wish to be known for servicing businesses in a radius, or the consumers visit your business.

This account gives you stability and authority, acting as an anchor and proof / verification of a physical business. This is an important step in ALL SEO nowadays.

Focus on increasing the scope of your strategy, including your National targets, re-target your Title tags to reflect National cities / shorter tail, and work hard, and you should be able to impact that market.

Hope this helps,
Todd

AFAIK Google is not using rel="publisher" often as a signal in the SERPs, and doesn't seem to use that (yet) to display in SERPs. You should use your G+ profile for this with rel="author", if you wish to benefit from that increased CTR in the SERPs, and switch to publisher at a later time when Google shows clear signals of using this in the SERPs.

Hope this helps,
Todd

I would recommend doing just what you suggested - utilize the first 152.

Hi Michael, best of luck. I am sure that you can get the site back to where it needs to be with some clever thinking and a reinclusion that speaks about how much time and effort you have put into the website in order to make it 110% compliant (even though we know it already largely is

Let us know how it goes!

-T

Hi Michael,

I can sense your frustration but business and marketing are unforgiving. And while I do agree with your sentiments the best thing you can do is be absolutely 100% thorough in your approach to the problem.

I would recommend running the Screaming Frog and Xenu and re-evaluating.

Here is a handy checklist that you can do through to ensure you are covering bases, if you have not already.

1. Run Xenu Screaming Frog and examine in detail. Look for any pages which have outlinks and scrutinize those outlinks and ensure they are nofollowed. Be sure to include all subdomains, even subdomains you believe are noindex at the robots.txt level.

2. Check page code on 20 random pages in each subdomain to ensure that there are not hidden bits of code you might be missing that contain an external link. Check CSS and javascript while you are at it just to be certain

3. Check GWT to ensure that there are no warnings or alerts as to any hacking or suspicious page activity.

4. Thoroughly audit any and all widgets to ensure they do not contain outlinks, and if they do, assess as necessary based on authority of destination website and relevance / commercial natural of link.

5. Ensure any business listings on the website are nofollow

6. Nofollow any links (for now) from any areas where you published articles (I noticed here that you do allow for this option)

7. Nofollow signature links in the forums, if they are not already. Nofollow profile page links in the forum, if they are not already.

When you run these reports and checks, make extensive notes of what you are doing. Google is looking to see that you have put exhaustive effort into the process. Since you have control over link on your own domain, the level of scrutiny is higher.

On a side note, some of your important business pages seem to be hanging up on an internal redirect. The about us and privacy policy in particular appear to have a closed loop redirect.

Wishing you the best of luck!

Best,
Todd

Hi Michael,

I would suggest running Screaming Frog and re-running Xenu again on the entire domain and all sub directories. Ensure that outbound links that are not editorial in nature (freely given and relevant to the user) have nofollow applied (even on sections where robots.txt are set to limit / prevent indexing). Every outbound link needs to be scrutinized. Nofollow first, ask questions later.

Take 20 pages in different sections and also hand check page code. Look for iframe injections or other unusual patterns or outbound links. Nofollow any outbound widget links, or if not possible, then remove those widgets.

Once done, develop the reinclusion.

Before reincluding be sure to be extremely thorough in your explanation to Google. Explain how the outbound links you had, you felt were editorial. Document and explain in detail how you have remedied the entire situation and comply with guidelines and understand those fully.

You might consider referencing this URL in the reinclusion request, which shows more proof that you are trying to clean up any possible areas.

Panda could still be influencing the website, but taking care of the manual penalty is definitely the right place to start.

Hope this helps,
Todd

Hi Michael, to start let's look at a few areas so that we have some supporting information

1. Can you confirm the message is "Unnatural links from your site"? What date did you receive this message?

2. Which directory has been deindexed by Google (url please)

3. When did you remove the links to your personal websites, and where were those links located in the website, and what were the topics that those websites represented?

4. Which penalty do you feel has been lingering for a long time?

Any other supporting information as to the history of the website (suspected penalties, ranking drops + those corresponding dates) would be helpful.

Good value, solid DA / PA and nice co-citation links with other authorities. I would recommend it.

Hi Imedia, thanks for explaining your situation. Hopefully I can be of help:

Inbound link profile

1. In terms of inbound links, my concern would be the quality type of links that can be 'pulled and re-plugged'. Generally, it is difficult to do this with links that are earned or naturally given, as they usually only relate to one client and assets and resources that client has (great web design, awesome guides, white papers, blog posts).

I would focus on first ensuring that the back link profile is natural and correct. Here is a great guide in my opinion to removing poor links and disavowing them. Remember to always first contact webmasters and request irrelevant and low quality links removed first. Google wants to see that you have acted on links.

2. If you want to rank in Google Local: Build local citations. Darren Shaw from Whitespark has plenty of fantastic knowledge published on the Internet and on his blog. Mike Blumenthal is also highly qualified in local.

3. I would recommend staying away from anchor text in press releases altogether. My take on press releases is that the value of the link is really directly proportional to the quality / newsworthiness of the story itself. Great stories are shared and linked to, improving the social signals and engagement signals and inbound links to that piece. Using exact match anchor texts in press releases is probably not necessary and might be working against you because it makes it more difficult to assess over-optimization issues if they happen.

Try and ensure any exact match links are in natural, editorial content, so that you can try to rule out which particular pieces might be counting for and against you when diagnosing over optimization and position drops.

4. Also linking internally with Exact Match can do double damage to rankings if particular thresholds are reached. Because Google updates its complex algorithm a lot, it is difficult to understand what those thresholds are. You might consider utilizing a different internal anchor text in this situation and testing it over a long period. You might also consider changing the press release link if possible. However, it is important to understand that changing links can also send signals to Google that can cause ranking flux (commercialize anchor, effect in SERPs, change in anchor = another net change)

A safe bet for internal links is to rarely use exact match internal anchor text, and opt for natural text, mixed brand and mixed commercialized text, and anchor to text that isn't commercial at all (click here, buy it here, learn more here) Focus on building internal links that are driven from content within the website that is well linked to.

In my opinion this also should apply to inbound link anchor text profiles as well, but you will want to study the top 10-20 competitors in this niche (with a close eye on 1-2-3) in order to better understand both individual and aggregate anchor text usage.

Hope this helps!
-Todd

If you can, implement a "snippet" mentality where you write unique content in at the top of those categories, and then provide the links and a short excerpt under each link below (in the case of blog posts)

This often helps eliminate problematic duplicate content issues. I would recommend at least 100 words of pure unique content for those category pages above the blog posts to start.

If the new pages are fantastic content, this will only help.

They will likely attract more inbound links if done well.

I would focus on ensuring that the link real estate (taxonomy, navigation) doesn't change in this case if you want to retain the rankings you have.

If the new pages are sub categories / children of the current pages, then link down to them from those pages, and back up to the current pages in breadcrumb (which will further reinforce those rankings)

Hope this helps!

If the product will be coming back, I would direct those platforms to simply notify the user on the product page - while keeping the product page indexed.

If the product is not set to return, redirect to a similar product.

Hope this helps.

Nothing can physically remove them but the webmasters that own those websites, so:

1. You need to craft a well organized pitch email that doesn't offend the webmaster, and asks them politely to remove the link. Bank on this taking at least 3 total emails, and in many cases, you might get no response.

PM me and I can send you a script or two that has been effective for us.

2. No too can remove those links for you externally.

Hope this helps!

One possibility is that the level of competition in the us insofar as domain authority and inbound links for competitors is much greater than in the UK.

Another possibility is that you picked up a good UK based link, which drove up those rankings.

Has the site always been targeted in GWT to US?

Agree 100% with David and Fredrico. Noindex, follow your tag pages.

Strengthening the home page with inbound branded links, and mixed commercialized / brand links from editorial / high quality sources builds authority, which as Perfect007 mentioned, distributes 'weight' throughout the website.

This improved domain authority tends to move relevant associated topics within the website up in rankings more than non-related areas. For example, the more tightly knit the homepage is to the categories that comprise it, the more inbound link building to the homepage impacts those pages.

At the same time, link building to strategic inner pages moves the needle as well, and reinforces authority to associated related sub categories and 'sister' categories in the website.

As a basic rule of thumb, competition being equal - the further apart your inner categories are insofar as relations, the more authority you need to build at the base level (root, homepage) in order to move inner categories forward.

Hope this helps.