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Hey David, Have you noticed similar fluctuation for your competitors on TOP 3 positions as well? Google sometimes change the SERP randomly to provide diverse results for the users. But this doesn't look like the case. Do you have any blog on your website? You have the article for "Nikon CLS" but if you have only one on your site, it might be not enough. I'd start publishing regularly on your site which should massively help with the rankings. Cheers, Martin

Sometimes it's easy to be blinded by the technical aspects of SEO and overlook the most basic things. Put it this way, my troubleshooting started from the links down, rather than the site up, so don't feel too bad - there's a lesson there for all of us, I'd say. P.S. I think I preferred Toast Good luck and happy snapping!

Hi David, I agree with Tymen—you should continue guest blogging AND building out the content on your own website. The reason why that page ranks so well on the SERPs is because Photography Life's has a high domain authority. If you had posted that guest blog on your own personal website, it is probable that it would not even rank on Page One of Google. By creating more guest blogs for website with high domain authority, you will likely improve your own site's authority—thus increasing the chance of having your site rank better! In all, backlinks are an off-site way of increasing your SEO, rankings, and thus, potentially leads and sales. Backlinks are judged on their domain site quality for users, relevancy to your site’s content, and domain authority. As with most SEO tactics, there are no quick fixes and easy wins within a link building strategy. We've written a blog on what makes a good backlink so be sure to check that out if you need more information. Hope this helps! Good luck.

Hi David, The proliferation of links throughout the sites you left comments on is probably just a function of some weird trackback settings on their part - not a whole lot to be done besides disavow the links, which you've already done, although you might also try to delete the link from the original comment and see if that helps. Your site sinking from 4th to 7th is not an indication of a penalty - if you'd been penalized, you wouldn't be anywhere near the first page (although I do think you are describing link building behavior that puts you at risk for a penalty - more on that in a minute). Instead, what I suspect happened is that the sudden influx of low-quality links has diluted your page's authority. Since a lower percentage of the total links pointing to the page are high quality, you have gone from sending the signal "great links, with some not-so-great ones too" to sending the signal "LOTS of not-so-great links, a few good ones" which sends a lower quality signal to Google. Your question has a couple of big link building red flags in it, and I think it's likely you're at risk for a manual link penalty or a Penguin smackdown. Blog comments and directory links are classic examples of low-quality/spammy link sources. You have recently seen how blog comment links can result in a deluge of link spam to your site. Basically, anywhere that you can put a link on a site that you don't own, without a human person approving and curating the link, is going to be a link source that, at best, isn't valuable; at worst, it could actively work against you. I know that it's tempting to go out and grab these easy-to-get links, and sometimes it seems like it could be OK if the site is topically related to yours, but these are tactics that have been heavily abused by spammers and are beyond useless in modern SEO. Instead, focus on getting higher-quality editorial links to your content. It takes a lot more work but is a much lower-risk strategy in the long term. These links have the added bonus of potentially being a source of converting referral traffic to your site as well. Here are some resources to get you started: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building https://moz.com/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building https://moz.com/blog/targeted-link-building-in-2016 https://moz.com/blog/case-study-how-we-gained-more-than-100-links-for-a-travel-website-via-content-marketing Good luck!

Hi Marie, I think if you feel I am not going to be penalised, I will leave them alone. Best wishes. David

Although you have more than enough answers I figured I would chime in since I have had some experience with this. Bottom line, whatever work you put in, you will get out. Google progressively becomes more and more intelligent and is more and more capable of determining who wrote what first. Simply put, there is no easy way to get content anymore. Search Engine Land wrote a great article about content. Now, we are in a time where EVERYBODY writes content. I'm not totally sure what you do but I'm guessing its wedding photography? I personally think that utilizing your creative gift of photography for links is a great idea. Maybe think of some other ways you can leverage that talent. Make an infographic of how wedding photography has changed over the years, or a youtube video on the 10 best wedding tips. As a wedding photographer (if that's what you do, I'm sure you have plenty of tips that are outside of box. Remember, if you pay with bananas you are gonna get monkeys. Same goes with SEO. If shortcuts were easy and effective, they would just be the way.

Hi David, Yep, keep the file updated. The best answers I have seen are directly on Google's Webmaster blog here (scroll down to the Q:A section). Good luck!

HeY!!! We have a coupons and deal website. Coupons are added and removed from the website on a daily basis. But crawler isn't crawling it that often. Lately we started fetching and rendering the page, but that is a time taking task as we have more than 500 stores with coupons. So, I was looking for some API or some method using which the crawler would crawl the website as defined. Suppose "x" store page should be crawled every alternate day as we daily update the coupons there, whereas "y"  store coupons are update fortnightly so , they can be crawled weekly. Can somebody suggest me something..

Thank you so much laura! All the best. David.

Hi Linda, are archive pages a duplicate page of the blog post? So they are actually separate pages? Best wishes. David.

Hi Chris, Just read screaming frog is good for 500 urls and then you have to pay, I thought it was too good to be true! David.

I would definitely fix them. The meta data is important to your site. It tells searchers and engines what your pages are about and leads to how relevant they are compared to your competition.

Hi Alex, Most of the time it's up to each SEOer on what they think and down to some judgment. I stay away from cheesy directories. I do sometimes submit to niche directories that I think people may be using to look for very niche sites etc. You can also consider the big boys like yahoo etc. but I never think you get a return on the cost to submit (I've also a feeling the yahoo directory is closing soon!) Sorry I can't say this is good this is bad its just a call you've got to way up.  is it worth the risk for the return?

David, Great to hear that your rankings are improving - I was looking at the above comments with Hutch and I noticed you mentioning that your competitors are creating backlinks on their clients' sites even after services have been rendered. It's a tactic I have come across before and while it technically isn't "illegal" I do believe there is something "unethical" about it. That being said, with new algorithm updates coming from Google I expect this will backfire on them within a year or so - having multiple links from a single domain is not as powerful as a diverse link profile. In regards to future link-building endeavors, definitely try out Link Prospector - with some dedication and focus I can create about 10-15 links to relevant websites within an hour. Remember not to over do it, as forming too many links (I put the number as higher than 15/month although some would argue higher or lower). It is a paid tool, but if you are only handling a few websites there aren't many better in-depth link search tools I have used for the cost. In terms of forum access, I believe you have access to the forums regardless of if you have a subscription. However, you are only allowed to read which I find isn't as powerful as being able to address specific questions directly to knowledgeable individuals. I treat it a bit like a consultation firm for SEO services - if there is something I need a specific answer to, this forums beats simple Google searches any day of the week. Hope your SEO endeavors continue to bear fruit! Best, Rob

Hi Chris, Thank you for your lightening response! I also appreciate you looking at my site and giving me feedback regarding my meta description. I will get on the case! best wishes. David.

As an FYI for anyone else reading this as well as your future knowledge - the Broken Link Finder may take a day or two to catalog your whole site based on how many pages, how many links in your theme, etc.  So while it may have missed it today, I would bet that after 2-3 days it finds every broken link. I've never found one it missed, especially with the above issue (no http).

Ok fair enough, thanks for all the info! There might be some golden content in me yet! david.

Awesome - thanks for all the extra info David! Just to clarify, do you mean 301 the author archives to the homepage? Yoast does this when you check "disable author archives".