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Hi Greg

Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether or not this would add SEO value to your site.

If we look at the source code, the link on the page goes to: http://goafrica.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=goafrica&cdn=travel&tm=61&f=00&su=p531.60.342.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&st=12&zu=http%3A//www.driveafrica.co.za/buy-back/general-overview.html

It is effectively opening your website in an about.com frame, we can see this in opening the source code on the above URL. Google have severe difficulty in reading frames (which may have to do with that URL not being indexed on Google).

Honestly, I'm not sure whether or not a backlink to your site would be detected by the Googlebot. If it's detected by OSE there's a chance it might, but because it goes to a framed version of your website I am not certain whether Google would be able to count it.

Would love to hear from Mozzers with experience on this.

Howdy

You'll need to block the SEOMoz crawler in your robots.txt file.  Edit the file and insert this bit of code:

User-Agent: rogerbot Allow: /
Disallow: /forum/

If that doesn't work, you might want to add a Wildcard too, making it:

Disallow: *****/forum/

If you're not too sure about editing the robots.txt file, then it might be an idea to check the SEOMoz guide: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt - if you're really unsure, it's best to get someone else to do it for you, as you don't want to block all of your site to all of the crawlers

Hope this helps

My advice would be not to use any directories at all.

Directories offer very little user value (no real web user uses directories any more - at a push they use very local ones) and consequently they offer very little SEO value.  What I have seen consistently since the turn of the year are links coming from directories being completely devalued.  It has been a common theme in the Moz forums that people experience ranking drops for homepage keywords, with no apparent penalty.  A look at their link profile shows that the majority of their links are coming from directories, pointing to the homepage.  They're low quality links and Google has been quite proactive in devaluing directory links on the fly every month or so.

There are infinitely better ways to earn high quality links to your website.  Don't bother wasting your time and money with directories and focus your efforts elsewhere.  Start creating content that is going to accrue high quality links over a sustained period of time.

You've effectively got 2 versions of your homepage live and ranking.

Using web-sniffer, you can see that both finalduties.co.uk and www.finalduties.co.uk are both giving 200 responses.  Google is effectively seeing both versions as two separate pages.

This can obviously be a problem because it might lead to duplicate content.  What you would want to do is 301 redirect one URL to the other.

Looking at your site architecture and linking, it looks as though you will want to 301 redirect http://finalduties.co.uk to http://www.finalduties.co.uk.  For more info on 301 redirecting, follow this guide.

Who's the SEO consultant here? You or the client? If they won't listen to your recommendations and want to rely on crap tactics, let them get on with it themselves.

If you must use directories, I would do as your colleague says and only use industry specific ones, or location specific ones.  General directories are not only link-farms but they will not be able to pass on strength to your website due to indexing issues.

Check out the SEOMoz Directories list for some of the 'better' ones out there.

In a word: no.

There's a rough sort of hierarchy for where links come from.  Up near the top, you've got mainstream news websites, reputable blogs and so on.  Somewhere near the bottom, along with the likes of free, spammy directories, SEO press release sites and article directories are forum links.

They've been devalued substantially.  Even on pages that show a decent PA/DA (just the way the Moz algo works), forum links carry very little strength.  If you're using them to build an SEO benefit, then you're wasting your time.

Now, forums that are close to your market/niche and have an active community can be a great way to build potential leads - providing that you become part of the community yourself and are not there to just drop your link and go.  I'd certainly look at the possibility of that, should you have relevant forums in your industry.

Hi Oliver

I've used the tool for a number of websites and I think it's a terrific supplement to backlink research.

It's very simple to use and will list the links to your site by order of how safe they are - safe links, suspicious links and toxic links.  The database size is roughly the same as that of Linkscape, SEOMoz's tool.

The toxic link notifications are great - these are links to the site that come from deindexed domains and URLs.  That's usually a very obvious sign that the site it is coming from has been devalued.

The suspicious links are ranked by varying degrees of "CemperTrust" - the algorithm the tool uses.  Each suspicion ranking comes with a helpful description of the category, for example SUSP5 warnings are links coming from sites where the domain’s Theme is listed as suspicious (Hacking, Suspicious or Pornography).

You need to use your own discretion when deciding if the links are truly poor quality or not, and I would use SEOMoz's PA/DA and Mozrank metrics, as well as MajesticSEO's citation and trust ranks to help achieve this.

But as a starting point, I think it's a terrific tool and you can tweet for a discount, which makes it even more attractive.

Hope this helps

First, can I ask if you received any message from Google in Webmaster tools?  I'm wondering whether you got an unnatural links warning.

At first glance, I think you may have received a Penguin/Over-optimisation penalty. Looking at the anchor text diversity in your link profile (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.tilers-dublin.com) and (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.painterdublin.com) the vast majority of your links come from anchor text heavy terms, like "painting dublin" and "tilers dublin".

Furthermore, it looks as though the majority of these links are coming from the footer from your group of websites and are site-wide.  After the Penguin update, this quickly became a big red flag.

My recommendations would be first to check what message you've received from Google.  After that, I would remove all of the footer links on your sites. I think you would be OK replacing these with a single link, on the homepage, to your websites - provided that you mark it as "nofollow".

Once that is done, I would file a reconsideration request.  I haven't checked many of your other backlinks, so it might be the case that you would need to remove any other spammy links you can find there.

Hi there

That's a good start, but there are a number of other factors you should check as well.  On-page elements for each link should be reviewed, such as whether or not the link is contextual or not, if it appears in a blogroll or footer and what the other outbound links on the page are pointing.  If they're going to a whole mix of irrelevant sites, chances are your link is on a link-farm.

The SEOMoz metrics of Page Authority and Domain Authority are really helpful in determining if a link is low quality or not.  There's no magic number here and every case is different, but you may want to start with something like: Anything below 15 for domain authority might be a low quality link.

I'm also a big fan of MajesticSEO's trust score and citation score.  The higher these scores the better, so again any link under 10 for either score could be considered as low quality.

You can check all of these metrics, along with PR if that's your thing (though I wouldn't pay too much attention to it), with the NetPeak checker.  It's free and lets you check URLs on bulk for a wide range of metrics.  I'd definitely check that out.

You might also find this SEOMoz blog post helpful.

Hope this helps get you going.

Hi Ruud

As you've said, I'd go ahead and add a robots.txt file.  One thing to remember is that each subdomain requires its own robots.txt file.

In addition, I would add "noindex, follow" to the header of the pages you don't want crawl.

You can find out the best way to implement these changes with the Moz Robotstxt guide.

You won't regret it.

Jon has a brilliant link building mind and if you've seen the content that he has on his site already, you can get some idea of how useful the course might be.

I'd highly recommend it and it really is applicable for beginners and experts alike.  You also have the 30 day money back guarantee option, so if it's not for you, there's no risk.

There's actionable advice you can use from day 1, so I'd jump in.

Hey Petros

From the SEOMoz guide to domain authority:

"We calculate this metric by combining all of our other link metrics (linking root domains, number of total links, mozRank, mozTrust, etc.) into a one single score."

What you should also consider is that each Mozscape update varies in size.  If we look at the last update, 70 billion URLs were crawled. The previous crawl looked at 68 billion and the one before that looked at 78 billion (that's a lotta links!)

With each different crawl being slightly different in size, there may be little fluctuations to your page authority and domain authority, even if your website and link profile hadn't changed a single bit between crawls.  Of course, if you have earned a number of high authority links to your domain, you can expect to see your domain authority go up.

Hope this helps, have a great weekend!

SEOMoz's own OpenSiteExplorer is very useful.  The metrics it uses to rank pages are widely considered to be very accurate, while the new 'just discovered' feature is a great way to check on links as they are indexed.

I use it in conjunction with MajesticSEO - which has a larger link database and also some very accurate metrics in the form of Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

Many people I know also recommend Ahrefs.

Hope this helps.

I'd buy both. I'd use the long one as the main domain and then use L21F.com as a 301 redirect to the main domain.

Reason being, I can see the shorter domain being useful if you're ever running any advertising, including print.

Hey there

Let's run through the two options and look at the pros and cons of each:

Moving content from old blog to new blog - if you do this, the first thing you'll want to do is remove the old content from the old blog, as you mentioned.  This is to remove any chance of a duplicate content penalty.

Now, the links to your site from your old blog (plus any links to those blog posts) will be lost.  You will know better than anyone if those links are high value or if they are nice authoritative links.  You'd be losing those links in this method, but even if they were high quality I would be tempted to use this method anyway.

By having the blog content directly on your root domain, there's nothing stopping from high authority websites linking to those posts in the future, particularly if the content is timeless.  That means you'd be getting the benefit of those links directly to your site.

As a contingency, if you find any links pointing to your old blog and would like to keep them, reaching out to the webmaster who owns the site is a good idea.  I'm sure they'd be keen on not sending their own users to a 404 page as it makes them look bad.  Tell them you've updated the URL and you can keep the link.

As for the other option - keeping the old blog and starting fresh with the new one.  This will make your new blog appear sparse at first, which isn't that bad of a thing and certainly not from an SEO perspective.  You'd be keeping the links from the old blog to your site in this sense, but the only problem is that if people want to link to your old blog posts, you're not getting the direct benefit of that to your new domain.  The strength of that link will be diluted somewhat.

On a personal note, I always prefer keeping your content on your main site for contingency reasons anyway.  I want my site, or whichever site I'm working on, to be the number 1 stop for users looking for information, resources, tools, advice etc.  For that reason, I'd go with option one and take the necessary steps outlined above.

Hope this helps.

It wouldn't make that much of a difference, similarly being hosted in somewhere like the US wouldn't be the end of the world.

If the TLD is .ie, I feel that would have a bigger influence on Google.  Similarly, you can tell Google where your Geographic target is in webmaster tools.  In the configuration drop-down menu, click settings and ensure that your Geographic target is set up for Ireland.

I mean, the absolute best practice would be to have a .ie domain, targeted in WMT for Ireland with Irish hosting - but I just don't know how feasible or cost effective this would be for you.  In this case, 2 out of 3 certainly is not bad.  If I was asked whether the hosting, in this case, is likely to have any visible difference, then I'd say no.

Myself and Bill Slawski were having a conversation about this on Twitter just yesterday.

It strikes me as laziness - they don't want to navigate through the link profile to identify a good link or a bad link and have just gone "sod it - ask everyone to remove and then we'll disavow if they don't".

Yeah, will probably remove the penalty, but it would also put you so far behind SEO wise.  Just laziness if you ask me.

I also don't see why they don't start on a fresh domain if they're doing this, unless they're really attached to their current domain and/or brand.

Hey Daniel

You might be interested in reading this article and this thread on Inbound.org that brought this up a couple of weeks ago.

Too early to say what the potential ramifications might be, but I would say it's a safe assumption to make that Google is focusing more on more on promoting trustworthy brands.  Bringing the brand name to the front often helps the user navigate through the SERPs, as opposed to the SEO optimised titles that we see out there.

Think we'll have to wait and see on this one, but hopefully those 2 links can help for the time being.

It's by no means essential.

I've worked on a number of international sites and you quickly realise that while a website is setup with a geographical TLD and is fully served for that language's audience, the server is located in the US - where so much hosting is.  Regardless, this has not stopped the site's ability to rank.

Similarly, evidence of links from a different country working can unfortunately be found in places like SAPE - the russian link network.  I've seen countless of websites rank #1, #2 with links from these websites in Russia, Uzbekistan and so on - Google wouldn't be targeting these links if they didn't work.

However, my mindset has always been to acquire links from places that are going to send the most targeted and relevant traffic to your site.  In the scenario you've given, this would most likely mean trying to earn as many Japanese backlinks as possible.  Links from other places may increase organic visibility, but more often than not referring traffic from links you've earned can be far more qualified and convert more often - so I would aim to get them via links from the country.

Just my £0.02

If you're just changing the title tags, then no, you do not need to setup a 301 redirect. You can leave that URL as it is.

As for hops, I would say that anything more than 3 hops and the search engine is not likely to follow it any further.  Here's an article on the topic, complete with a Matt Cutts video on redirects, as well as specifically addressing the hop issue (it's at the bottom of the article).