Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We have someone with a shady link profile ranking above us too. Don't worry; as was already said, it's only a matter of time before they're gone. Just keep working on your long-term #RCS strategies, and they will pay off in the long run--probably sooner rather than later.

Have you seen Jon Cooper's Complete List of Link Building Strategies?

You're bound to find something there; it's very inclusive.

I want to go in-depth about different customizations for custom caps, which is one of the products we offer. I just don't know whether it would be better--from an SEO perspective--to expand the caps sales page we already have or to write a blog post to give the site another valuable indexed page. From a user standpoint, I don't think it's as important, because if I do it the blog way, I can't just put a link on the page saying, Want more customizations? Visit our blog post.

Any opinions?

If I correctly understand what you are saying, this seems like a bad idea all the way around. You shouldn't have two different domains linking back and forth looking like the same site. If you wanted to maintain good rankings, you'd have to be doing SEO work for two separate sites. And whatever SEO benefit you think you'll be getting by having a shorter domain will be lost with all the back and forth you'll have going on there. And if your main objective is to make the domain shorter for the customers' benefit, it seems like this would also cause confusion as they're navigating your site and see two separate domains in the address bar.

I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?

I am currently in the research stage of finding more sites that I will be able to do things such as submit infographics, guest post, or get easy backlinks that are legit. I feel out of options, as I have already built links with a lot of sites but feel like I need more. Has anyone ever seen someone actually sharing all of their hard work by providing a list of all the sites that worked for them? Or does there come a point when really your only option left is to guest post or be a HARO source? I have been doing those things all along--I'm not just looking for easy, lazy links!  Is there anyone who's gotten a site up to a high PR score who's felt out of options, like they've already done all they know how to do? I'd like your opinions. I know it seems like an outrageous question to ask, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I'd be willing to share sources too; I'm not just trying to mooch off people!

Oh, I just saw what you added. Yes, that's the page in question. Maybe I should do both--expand that page and write a blog post--with DIFFERENT content.

Many months ago, a fellow marketer at my company introduced me to Pintrest, claiming that it would be good for our business. Pintrest was very much unknown by many just a few short months ago. Since then, I have seen it take off like wildfire, with excessive media coverage, registrations, and people putting the button on their sites. It must have thousands more backlinks now than it did six months ago--high quality ones too, as it's had coverage in virtually every major new media outlet.

I want your opinion as to why it has remained a PR6 site this entire time. It was a PR6 site then and it still is now. I know the increase in PR is algorithmic, but come on! Can people share their experiences they've had link building for those higher PR sites? How much harder does it get?

A few weeks ago, Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday about negative SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday

There was recently a blog post on SEOmoz that actually shows the value out outbound linking in blog posts.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-reasons-you-should-link-out-to-others-from-your-website

But contrary to what some may say, it is a good thing. Especially if you are linking to high-quality sites such as Wikipedia, it shows Google that your blog posts are informative and helpful.

I can answer the first part of your question at least. It is definitely best to have site.com/blog because blog.site.com and site.com are two different sites, and you'd have to do SEO for both. With site.com/blog, you can have pagerank flow right from your homepage to your blog. I don't know how to switch it in Blogger, though, sorry. Once you figure that out, if you do a 301 redirect, your past posts will keep their inbound links, but your social counters will be reset.

It's the sheer volume of them that is the main problem. Is there a way (that makes sense) to not have them all listed on the same page?

I'd suggest a combination of B and C. If you have to compromise, don't compromise B for the sake of C. C could be compromised for the sake of B a little bit, but better to find the perfect balance of the two, of course.

As far as tags go, two basic things to remember is to only give something a certain tag if your post is about that tag/word or mentions it in great detail. If it only mentions it once in passing, maybe don't give it that tag.

Another practice that a lot of people use with tags is to keep them at one word each unless they're proper names or brands. For example, if you post is about truck brakes, add the tags "truck" and "brakes" rather than "truck breaks." Most people say don't go over 10 tags per post. I don't know how much that actually matters, but I usually abide by that and it works for me.

Side point: I'd strongly recommend installing a plugin like Yoast and noindexing all tag pages.

Post-Penguin it's supposed to be a bit of a concern. On the other hand, we have 12,900 links from a single site, yet we have moved to the #1 position as a result of Penguin and a lot of white hat SEO, of course. I know 12,900 is nowhere near 3.1 million, but the site that links to ours is nowhere near a DA of 93 so I guess you could say it balances out?

Yes, it matters. It could mean that Google is detecting it that way too, and may view them as two different sites with duplicate content. This could be hurting your rankings. Do you have access to your .htaccess file? You should add this code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domainhere.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domainhere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect the non-www version to the www version and tell the crawlers this is how you'd prefer your site to display.

Yes, it's fine and a good thing to do that.

1. This is the best way to do it to preserve your rankings. There's never a guarantee, but doing it this way is your best bet.

2. Once you've combined them into one, take the old page out of your sitemap.

My favorite is modified broad match and my least favorite is regular broad match. Modified broad allows for the most variety in searches without returning results that are irrelevant the way regular board match does.

Our main keyword is "embroidered patches" so here is an example

[embroidered patches] - returns only "embroidered patches"
"embroidered patches" - could return "embroidered patches for uniforms"
+embroidered +patches - could return "patches embroidered onto hats"
embroidered patches - could return nicotine patches (useless)

The bottom line is that broad match will get you the most traffic, but a large amount will be irrelevant.
Exact match won't get you as much traffic, but most of it will be high quality.
I personally think modified broad and phrase are the best balance.

My belief is that they are not the same at all. With /blog, Domain Authority and Page Rank are being passed on. With blog. you're starting from scratch.

I'm not sure by looking at it if it's wrong since I'm not really an Apache coder. But I'm just guessing it's probably wrong since the bots are still detecting both versions of your site. I have it the way I showed you in my .htaccess file and I don't have any problems with bots detecting multiple versions. Maybe try it this way. You can always make a backup of your current file and switch back if it doesn't make a difference.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I'm thinking from the standpoint of how you can make the most money rather than how you can increase your traffic and rankings of your current site. But make the recently acquired site a division of your current site and do business as both. Rather than ingratiating the business into yours, have two phone lines, two sets of letterhead, ect. I realize there's A LOT to doing this and you'd probably have to hire a couple more people, and it may be a bit of investment, but the long term payoff could be astronomical. I've seen clients do this right before my eyes and I have assisted them. Unless this is a known company in it's going out of business is extremely well-known. Then scrap everything I just said.