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Hi Mike

I'm looking at your link profile now and there are quite a few links in there that could be perceived to be unnatural (what betting site doesn't have these though, right?  Used to work for a big brand in-house myself), however, I'm with you in being concerned about these Russian links and anchors.

It looks like your forum has been getting spammed massively.  I can see russian anchors with anchor text like "useful links" and "useful products" - I can even see some Minecraft anchor text in there.  It almost looks as though someone is using your forum to build forum links to rank their spam site.

Have you had trouble recently with spam hitting your forums?  I worry that some people have been ploughing your forum with spam - and thus your site with spammy links - and it may have had a negative effect.

Hi there

I see what you're getting at here, but there's no great cause for concern.

So, all of those hash links (#) are internal anchors. Link juice (specifically Page Rank) does not pass and is not lost with an internal anchor.  It only passes on full links - like the text links you have to other pages on the homepage.  It won't try to pass (and then fail) on any internal anchors - so link juice won't be "killed" by them, so to speak.

One thing you'll need to keep in mind is how people link to you externally.  To ensure all of the "link juice" from an external site is passed to yours, make sure that they link to you without any internal anchors (basically, your URL without any of the #'s).

However, even then, my recent tests have shown that the majority of the strength (if not all) will pass anyway.  Seems to me that Google at least treats these internal anchors very well and will recognise where to pass the "link juice" even if one is present in a URL.

So, from a strictly SEO and internal structure point of view, I don't think there's too much to be concerned about here.  If it works for you user experience wise etc. I'd say keep it for sure.

Hi George

Sounds like you'll be using the 2.0s for the right reasons, which is great.

Here's a list of 25 2.0's sorted by PR:

wordpress.com - pr9
tumblr.com - pr8
typepad.com - pr8
weebly.com - pr8
blogger.com - pr8
tripod.com - pr8
posterous.com - pr7
jimdo.com - pr7
yola.com - pr7
squidoo.com - pr7
multiply.com - pr7
angelfire.com - pr7
officelive.com - pr7
rediff.com - pr7
wikidot.com - pr7
webs.com - pr7
webnode.com - pr7
salon.com - pr7
edublogs.org - pr6
webspawner.com - pr6
soup.io - pr6
ucoz.com - pr6
travelblog.org - pr6
gather.com - pr6
springnote.com - pr6

I really can't vouch for how easy they are to use or which have the best features etc. as I rarely ever use 2.0s.  But hopefully you should find some useful ones here.

So long as you create the content with the purpose of educating and/or entertaining a genuine audience, I think you'll do great - although don't rule out writing some of those posts for guest blogs or perhaps even your own blog.

To clarify a couple of those points for you:

If you have earned over 500 points on your account over any time period, you are eligible for full access to Q&A to respond and ask questions. Accounts are reviewed for this access on an account-by-account basis.

You keep your ID/username no matter what level of account you have (free, pro etc.)

As all accounts are subject to a review, if you have concerns or questions about this it is well worth getting in touch with someone at the Moz team, they're incredibly helpful and will be able to let you know what your options are.

Hey there

I like to look at these issues in the eyes of the Googlebot.  There is a tool called SEO Browser that lets you see what your webpage looks like to the search engine crawlers.

Here is your first link in that tool

Here is the second one.

As you can see, the vast majority of the web pages are identical to each other, causing this duplication issue.  Yes, they are different products, but what Google sees are two pages with very similar text, coding etc.

To counter this, a lot of people recommend adding unique elements to your product pages.  Try to include 200+ words of content that is unique and talks about the products.  It could be a product review, a background on the product, instructions on how it use it if applicable and so on.  For your example, you might want to write a little bit about the history of Korn the band for your first page.

Essentially, you need to add more unique content that Google/Bing can see on your page in order to avoid any duplication issues.

I hope this helps.

Without knowing the competitor, it's impossible to say how it was done.  Could be a number of things - some legitimate, some not.

All I can do is refer to the Moz document on Domain Authority so you can run through your competitors backlinks and see how that score was increased.  Could just be quality content marketing to the homepage and a number of internal pages, could be something more sinister like .edu blog spamming.

Hi Alex

Reciprocal links can be useful for SEO, user and branding purposes - provided that it is done in moderation and, as you say, done for the user.

There's nothing wrong for companies to link to each other or recommend one another (Moz and Distilled do it quite frequently) and this can help for the SEO side of things.  The main thing, however, is that Moz and Distilled do so for the user benefit, never solely for the SEO.

Your example is pretty much the same principle, but in order to replicate the "best practice" as it were, make sure the links are in relative content.  I'm not a fan of "recommended links" pages that just link out to companies.  But blog posts and other user friendly, informative and helpful content that contain links should be absolutely fine.  Just make sure you don't overdo and don't use targeted/commercial anchor text - keep it for the user and their benefit and the other benefits will follow.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

The question is two-fold, so let's look at it in bits.

First - Google+ may pass SEO value to your site, just as any other website would.  This is because Google+ pages can accrue PageRank and also pass it on - the links in the "about" section of a business page, for example, are dofollow, which passes PageRank or SEO equity.

Second of all, Google+ already has a big influence in organic search in a few other ways - and this is likely to get bigger over time.  We have seen people being able to link to their website with the rel=author tag - which links the website with a Google+ profile.  This creates a rich snippet in the organic search results, a small picture of the contributor's profile, which has been tested to show an increase in click-through rate in the SERPs.  So that's one way.

The second is personalised search.  People logged into their Google accounts will be served personalised search engine results.  This could be based on their previous browsing history, pages that they have "+1'", friends that have "+1"'d pages and probably more factors in the future.  This can have a massive shift in how organic search appears and therefore makes Google accounts and Google+ a significant influencer.

I would start engaging more and more with your Google+ account.  Get involved with Google+ community pages to start getting more followers to your own account and start being active and promoting your business pages too.  Engage with your audience, take part of the Hangouts feature and start adding +1s and followers to your page.  Link up your personal profile to your blog posts with the "rel=author" schema tag to improve click through rate on these posts.  The stronger your profile and business page are, then it's most likely the stronger the influence they will have in organic search.

Hope this answers your questions!

Hi Cole

That kind of duplication will almost certainly negatively impact your ability to rank.

It's the kind of dupe content that Google hates - the kind that's deliberately manipulative and used by sites just trying to rank for as many different KWs or locations as possible, without trying to give people a unique user experience.

Not to say that you couldn't possibly rank like this (I've seen it happen and will probably see it again in the future), but you're leaving yourself wide open to a Panda penalty and, as such, I'd highly recommend that you cater each site and each landing page to your particular audience.  Even by doing that, not only will you be making it unique but you would dramatically improve your chances of ranking by mentioning local things for a local page.

Give each page unique copy and really tailor it to your local audience.

Hope this helps.

Don't be surprised by Google's inability to penalise obvious breaches to its TOS. So many sites slip under the radar.

Case in point, after looking through the top backlinks in OSE and MajesticSEO after you sent me the URL (thank you very much by the way), I think it's clear how they've done it.

There is an absolute ton of links coming from high PA/DA .jp and other Japanese domains pointing to the site.

Furthermore, it looks as though the site may have been hacked at some point, because there's a load of high PA/DA viagra links as well - most of which look deleted now.

Both of these sort of links, while without question unnatural, would pass page and domain authority to the site.  As for why it hasn't been penalised yet? Well, you may be able to see that the linking anchor text to the site is 95% raw URLs (as in: http://www.example.com/).  This means that they would not have triggered any Penguine threshold for over optimised anchor text, leaving it to the algorithm to work out the spam another way, and perhaps it will only be penalised when reviewed manually.

It's an absolute ton of raw URL links coming from high PA/DA, but completely suspicious and irrelevant, websites that has caused the site's authority to sky rocket.

Hope this helps clarify a few things.

Probably not the answer you're hoping for Keith, but this really will vary from industry to industry.  I've seen it work great for promotional stuff (again in the financial verticals), while it's just not worth the effort for other industries.

The only way to really get a definitive answer is to test and gather some quantitative data.  As the sub is coming up for renewal, PRWeb are going to want to keep your business.  This gives you a bit of bargaining power.  Try to negotiate a short, 4-6 week contract with them where you can test response (Vocus, the people who own/run PRWeb, are pretty reasonable and will want to satisfy a long-term subscriber, so you've got a good chance with this).

Now, when sending out your PRs for this period, try and capture the people in your conversion funnel that come from PRWeb.  Either send them to a particular landing page, give a specific cookie for a PRWeb referrer, or even have a trigger CTA in your press release (eg: search for "blue widgets" online) - anything that allows you to say "this visitor/converter came from PRWeb".

After that period and with a bit more data, you should be able to see if it is a cost effective strategy.

It has to be said that this is a response marketing outlook - we're looking at people who've visited and/or converted on your site via these PRs.  Some may argue that this negates or overlooks the branding effect that press releases have.  In my opinion, there are far better ways, both in cost and reach, to establish brand, tone of voice and share of voice than press releases.  PRs just don't cut it for me when we're talking about establishing brand and so on.  Social media can be much more effective, as you allude to, as can display advertisement buys, whether through an exchange network or direct buys with websites.  Not only that, but those purchases are often a lot more tangible in their data - you'll get impression rates, click rates and so on a lot easier with display ads.

That's how I'd approach it.  Call me a sceptic, but I think the online press release game's days are numbered.

Hi Gavin

I hope Zoopla is big enough for you!

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml

And here is a downloadable version:

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz - found from within their robots.txt file. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/robots.txt

Hope this helps!

Taking an educated guess at this, I imagine that those links are coming from a site-wide anchor that is in the blogroll of footer of the website, and not so much contextual links linked from within relevant content. (I could be wrong, but over 30k makes me think it's on every page of the site).

Regardless of the anchor text, this is a very unnatural link profile. If the links are passing PageRank (that is to say, they are follow links and not marked with "nofollow"), then it is giving Google every reason to assume that the links are only there to pass PageRank and manipulate your site's search visibility.

If this is the case, I'd get in touch with the other site and ask the link to be removed or made "nofollow" ASAP. Should you get no response, you should do a site-wide disavow.

As you may have deduced, if the links are "nofollow", which you can check by viewing the source code or with the Mozbar extension for Chrome or Firefox, then they shouldn't be a problem.  Similarly, if they contextual links that point to relevant pages on your website and are designed to help the user, again there shouldn't be much of a problem, unless the anchor text is very targeted.

If they're all passing PageRank, however, it could be seen as a very unnatural signal by Google and they may well penalise you for it.

Hope this helps.

It certainly can.

The argument here (whether you agree with it or not) is that you would be trying to make the link blend in with the rest of the text.  You are, in essence, blending the link in and concealing the fact that it might be a link.  Google wants all the links to be visible and obvious.

I've had one example where links were deemed to be hidden because the CSS file of the website made the links appear in the same way as the normal text, same colour, decoration etc. I was pretty miffed by it, as it involved CSS changes which I'm never happy about, but it happened.

Hope this helps.

With the greatest respect, I don't think you should be taking SEO advice from an article directory that has been deindexed from Google.

By all means, you shouldn't stuff your content with a lot of links, but there is no golden rule that says "1 link per X words".  I can think of a ton of examples where having a lot of links together in a short space of time is natural and nigh on a necessity.

I'd worry less about what you can and cannot link and think about what kind of content you're producing and where you're publishing it instead.  Article directories have passed very little to no value for a long time now, since the big Google updates.  In fact, having links from a deindexed site can be very harmful to your own site.  If you have links on ArticleSlash I would actually remove your articles ASAP.

Look to publish your content on your own blog or reputable blogs that are related to your industry.  MyBlogGuest is a great place to find some of these blogs, you can visit it here: http://myblogguest.com

Focus less on building links when you're blogging and more about writing for your target audience.  If you manage this and offer quality content, then the links will come as a result.

Hi there

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

Good grief no. No, no, a thousand times no.

Linking on low quality link farms such as that is a one-way ticket to getting penalised by the search engines.

Hi David

There's obviously a few things just to check on - such as checking the right localised version of Google is being tracked and also the fact that the rankings update each Friday and not daily.

Having said that, seeing such dramatic fluctuations is a bit much.  It's probably a good idea to flag this to the customer support team and see if there are any issues.

In the mean time, if you're looking for a free keyword tracker that is accurate the majority of the time, you might want to try Rank Checker Ace for a web-based platform, or Rankerizer for a program that you can install on your PC.

Hope this helps.

Hi Ted

Myself and a few others here are of the mind set that you should only use the disavow tool when prompted by Google.  This is when Google sends you an unnatural links warning to your website and asks you to remove these links.

Colour me sceptical, but I feel that if you can avoid opening up to Google on the issue, then you should.  Not that you should have anything to hide, but I think there's nothing to be gained by doing so unless you have been requested by Google themselves, and you could potentially be putting yourself on their radar.

If you're traffic and rankings have not severely decreased and there's no visible penalty on your site, then I would leave the links alone. I'd certainly keep a note of them and mention that you cannot contact them because there is no email or contact form (incidentally, have you tried looking at the registrar's data on who.is?). Should anything happen in the future (touch wood it won't) you're ready to rock straight away.  There's also a chance that Google has already devalued these links - we've seen evidence that Google is moving towards monthly refreshes in its algorithm to devalue links on the fly (which is a much better solution then a dramatic fall because of a penalty).

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has had success in being proactive with the disavow tool (disavowing bad links before a penalty has come, rankings improve), but so far I don't think I've met anyone on the forums that has done so. Would love to be proven wrong, but until then my advice would be to make a note on the domains, but don't disavow.  Concentrate instead with the good inbound marketing strategies you've been using so far - I think this is a much better use of your time.

Hi Paul

Let's take PA and DA out of the equation here, for the time being.

My first question would be: Is your current website ranking for anything?

If it is and it is ranking well, I would question any site migration.  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" springs to mind.

With that aside - let's consider the user experience element:

"Will you have more trust to UK customers with a .co.uk vs a .com?"

As a UK business myself, I don't think that buyers have any preferential trust to one TLD or another - so long that it is clear on the website that you are UK based (UK numbers, locations, £ signs etc).

"Would a .com domain be more suitable for international clients?"

If you have aspirations to grow the company and target international regions, I would say that having a .com would be more suitable than a .co.uk - given that it is the global TLD.  If this is a serious business consideration, that would make me lean more to the side of choosing .com.

"Will you rank better in Google.co.uk if you use a .co.uk domain?"

In short, no.  In long, no - not really.  Google uses many factors when deciding to rank a site well in a region or location - the TLD used is somewhere near the bottom of that pile.  The other elements I talked about - UK address, numbers, spelling, server location, local citations etc - they will have a much, much greater impact to ranking.  You'll see yourself that probably millions of .com sites are ranking well in Google UK.

I would look at all of those factors before I'd begin to think about PA/DA or the links a domain has.  I'll be honest, it sounds a pretty poor suggestion from your last SEO company - particularly if they did nothing to justify their reasoning.  Having a .co.uk domain is by no means a pre-requisite to rank well in Google UK.  I'd ask yourself all of the above questions before reaching a decision on whether to switch or not.

Hope this helps.