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I get a few requests from people I never met/don't know. It's not too terrible right now, as I'm relatively unknown. As far as connections/circles, I tend to keep it small.

Recently I seemingly instantly connected with a few industry vets, but I don't recall ever sending a request. Nor do I recall receiving one. I'm not complaining though.

The groups bother me, it's difficult to find a good group that isn't spammed/will be spammed. Some of the obscure unrelated industry groups help in random instances, but I really do wonder why I pay.

My mistake. I must have been up too late and started seeing double. I can't find any equity with what I saw then and what I see now.

Thank you. Please be sure to read the information at the second link I posted. It looks like it's written using kana.

You would use this code in the head . This should be done for each page. Such as:

I'm not sure if you plan on redirecting people based upon location. There's a lot more about this subject here.

The difference between the number of links you see across various sources is because of the resources themselves. Some backlink services only crawl so much. Google can only crawl so much of the internet.

Your best bet is to use multiple sources. I would go with GWT, Majestic SEO and aHrefs, then filter duplicates. You'll have a much better understanding of where the site stands. Once you have that, you can use Cemper Link Detox to upload the data.

Be very careful, Link Detox still throws some false positives. Though I expect it to get better every day. There's a machine learning element to it that's based on human feedback.

Finally, I would be very careful of fully automating anything like a disavow/removal process. Do you really want something so delicate taken out of your hands? It's still very necessary to manually check each link so you know that you're getting rid of the bad and keeping the good.

Link Detox is the closest thing there is, that I'm aware of, that will help 'automate' the process in a safe-ish way. The subject of link removal/disavow is something so sensitive I wouldn't outsource it. Then again, I hate the idea of outsourcing overflow blog writing work to competent people. Call me a control freak.

Deinitely make sure to use the hreflang element. And it was a wise choice to have your pages professionally translated.

More information on multiple languages and SEO here.

The hreflang element is actually meant to help you avoid duplicate content issues when it comes to content in different languages.

No problem, but one thing you also need to know is that keyword density is a myth. It's true that longer articles tend to be shared more often, but there's isn't any set word limit either.

If you write about the topic in a way that sounds natural to you, you'll probably be alright.

After you get your blog/site fleshed out, it's time to start thinking about letting people you know you're there. Of course, it is advised to do so in a non-desperate/non-annoying way. (Don't worry, you're not annoying. Just don't say; "OMG OMG PULLEEEZE LINK TO MEH LOL!!!!1) Participate in discussions with people.

I mean, there's a ton of ways you can go with this. There's mommy bloggers, crafty people/sites - rustic stuff, home decor. Someone out there has at least a moderate interest in your theme and what it entails. Engage people and offer value, don't always sell.

If you haven't yet, there's a metric ton of good information here.

No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301.

If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming.

Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting.

They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life.

It would have been a great recovery story.

The second to last paragraph in my response should get you through that. Best of luck - don't over think things. You don't sound like a spammer.

GWT definitely doesn't show you the whole picture. Majestic SEO won't show you the whole picture. Ahrefs or OSE can't show you the whole picture either.

Google has a pretty good idea of your link inventory. They share very little. In my understanding, the spreadsheet you download is just what they've shown you until it's no longer there.

No one set of link data is ever 100%. It's a big internet, but the one source that appears to generally share the least amount of data is Google. That's why you should use multiple sets of link data and do some spreadsheet wizardry to sort out the duplicates.

The general consensus regarding how long it takes to get a link penalty lifted is; "It takes as long as it takes." Some have taken up to a year and a few turned around fairly fast. Four months isn't exactly irregular.

Majestic is showing a lot of deleted links, so there's definitely some progress there. It's just hard to see the wheat from the chaff at a glance. Yeah, the backlink profile was hit hard.

Regarding the 404s... letting them 404 is just wasting crawl budget. It may be a good idea to 410 those and let the bots know those pages aren't there. In regard to what pages were dropped, you might have lost some pretty good links. I haven't done a page level audit, but losing good links with a ton of bad can delay the process as well.

Someone is going to chime in about the 'foundation' of links, and they would be correct. It's a whole other screed - so I'll leave it to them. Seriously, this one looks pretty nasty. Best of luck.

It's good that you're thinking about this, but you may be worrying a little too much. I find it hard to have a site about soap or homemade soap without saying soap, at least a couple of times. It's generally a good thing to have the keyword target in the meta description, Title, slug and a possible variant for the h1. So long as the content actually pertains to soap - you should be okay.

What I would avoid is writing:

"So I heard you like soap. Soap is my favorite thing. I'm so glad you like soap too. Let's have a soap party. Soap is amazeballs! You likely need soap in Poughkeepsie. Soapy soap soap."

A site has a theme. It sounds like you're going to keep that theme. You're writing will likely be Top 10 Decorative Soap Ideas for 2014, or An Amazing Tour of 'Soap Factory Here' in Paris.

My overall recommendation is don't be too pious. Your site has a theme, stick with the theme.

Yes, All in One can help you change your titles. If you're worried about repeating a keyword in your blog title, go to the general settings in your WP Admin panel and remove the site Title and the Tagline. Go to the general settings in All in One and scroll to title settings. From there, remove | %blog_title% from both Page Title and Post Title format then save your updates.

Enter what you would like in your title tags on both pages and posts. I personally see nothing wrong with 'branding' at the end of your Title tags, but you can now add your branding wherever you want - rather than having it added by default. But it's your thing - your site - this should enable you to do what you feel is right.

When it comes to alt tags, I always err on the side of descriptive. The alt is used when the image link is broken, or if a plain text browser/screen reader is in use. I tend to think about it as a usability/accessibility issue.

I would go with something like "brand-color-dresses". Say "gap-pink-dresses". If you're not doing a dictionary attack on the alt tags, you should be okay.

You should be able to establish authorship for a single author relatively easily. The hack appears to be setting up a Google Apps account for the domain. But yes, a subdomain should work as well. It works on site.wordpress.com.

The Matt Cutts stated that href-lang is important because it will help Google bot know that the page is intended for a different language, rather than a poorly translated page 'written' just to 'rank'. If it seems like everything is okay, then err on the side of caution and use href-lang. You may just see an improvement.

However, the critical piece is making sure the pages are well written/translated for their intended target. Perhaps search engines have gotten better at weeding out/penalizing poor translations, but I would use href-lang just so I could sleep at night. At least you'll know you did that much.

If you really want to go for the gold, get someone fluent in the target languages and see what they think. You may end up with some edits. There are a ton of Spanish dialects and what reads well in Mexico might not read so well in Spain.

Majestic SEO is still crawling thousands of 'new' bad links. I can't really say what Google bot is doing. I also don't know what domains you've disavowed.

The good news is, Majestic shows that it appears to be at least ebbing. I would revisit GWT backlinks and look for anything new. Know that you're barely getting 10% of the picture, if that.

I would hate to give up on a domain that's ten years old, but it looks like there's a little more history to understand. Plug it into SEM rush and slide the scale back to 'all time'.

Yes, I got it from Majestic SEO. View page source then ctrl+f and type in 'daisy'. A lot of the domains with a lot of exact match anchors - hidden behind giant images.

The registrant of the site probably has no idea this all happened.

You should probably have them noindex nofollow the login link. My crawler picked up tons of them.

I just see a white background when I check cache on google.co.uk.

Keyword density is a myth, don't worry about it.

The 'behind the scenes' text is the source code. It could likely be done better, but there's isn't any getting around not having source code. (I won't touch a .Net site, so I'm not trying to sell you anything.)

Also, there appears to be some duplicate content concerns.(e.g.: Page.aspx page.aspx)

There's definitely more to this, but I should probably get a couple hours of sleep before the day job.

Your site appears to have received a little less than 70K links from sexualproblems.net in the last 90 days. The anchor text is "daisy fondant cutters". It looks like the result of a post on sexualproblems.com. I could go on, but it looks like the guest posting strategy isn't working out.

First, you're totally right about the possible duplicate content issue. No matter what, don't make a duplicate. If the only interest is crowding SERPs, you're destined for a bad time.

If your manpower is fixed in the short run, you're better off focusing on one property. If the systems administration on one property alone is hard, two will be killer. Now imagine all the necessities aside from that. You'll end up hating your life.

Clients have come to me with dozens of keyword+geo sites. The results are usually the same. That's when the culling of chaff begins. It ends in a single property that performs better than the dozen combined.

Instead, consider another strategy with your existing property. Is your product something that lends itself to the experiential side of things? Is there potential for frequent buying from one client, can they upgrade? Consider what you can do for the buyers you have.

If you can increase LTV, you might be able to increase staff in the long run. And that means more hands for more complex/interesting things. I would think about the situation like that.

That's what I get for speed reading. I don't think it would interfere. The only other markup I see is WPSideBar (crrrrrazy camel case). I would imagine a bot would look at the page and say; "This seems to be a site that has a sidebar. This also seems to be a local business in Jackson Hole."

I haven't looked into screen readers in a while. Maybe there's a screen reader that interprets Schema markup. If that's the case, you're likely improving accessibility, which is generally a good thing.