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Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags.

I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.

And... as it turns out, I was part of the problem. I had a DoFollow directory on my site that people could use for a little Blog Love action.
There was also a thread on a photography group that has been going on since 2009, that I encouraged people to use over the years.

I've written a blog post here http://flauntyoursite.com/jig-is-up/ denouncing the practice. I have a bit of clout in the photography communities, so hopefully this spreads out there.

Marie, if you wouldn't mind reading this and letting me know if there's anything you think should be added, I'd appreciate it.

I let people down big time. I hope the word can get out there and fix this thing.

Thanks Marie,

I will shoot you an email. Most of my clients are photographers (I do custom website design as well as SEO), so if this is something that's happening more and more, it'd be good to have a solution for them.

Thanks EGOL,

I spent a little time investigating to rule out other issues. I didn't want to rush to a conclusion. But I'm fairly positive we're looking at Penguin now.

Since Penguin isn't really my area of expertise, do you have recommendations for good services that are skilled in determining which links would be causing problems?

Thanks!

Thanks Chris and EGOL,

Most photographers actually do use commenting as a means to up their DA/PA. They occasionally get posts from wedding blogs as features with links back to them. But the majority of the industry uses comments. Plenty of sites have maintained rankings with that link strategy (I'm not saying if it's good/bad or even sustainable over the long term, just saying what has worked for years). 
Could this just be a situation where having hundreds of more links than your competitors could cause the problems?

Also, are there any tools that you'd recommend that could start to actually figure out if the links truly are bad?

And EGOL, what is it that bothers you about the links to other sites? Most photographers do this as a way to promote vendors that were at the wedding. Reading it I admit it's a bit link heavy in the amount of text they have on each post, but is there anything inherently wrong with 5-10 outbound links on posts?

Thanks guys.
William

Search Term is Indianapolis Wedding Photographers.

Site is http://www.tallandsmallphotography.com/

Their metrics are through the roof compared to everyone else's. They've dropped from 27 in May to 40 Now. 'A' Grade on-site optimization.

Either there's too many links, or there's some bad links involved... I don't know which it is...

Short answer: Highly doubt it.

Long answer: I haven't seen anything from any of the ranking factors Moz, or anyone else produces, that would indicate so.
And under normal linking I can't imagine a situation that would cause a User based issue (like increased bounces because you got launched in another window), unless it's really excessive.
For example, I deal with professional photographers sites, and they sometimes have a portfolio site, and a blog, and sometimes they are two different systems with two different experiences and often times open the other in a new window. That is very annoying and a can kill a user's experience and they end up with high bounce rates.

I think if you're just sending links to other useful sites, target="_blank" is perfectly fine to use. I do it on my site all the time.

It's nothing to be alarmed about in this case. It's just letting you know that it found a 301 redirect. It happens quite often.

In your case the 301 is set up so if people use http://timelink.com without the 'www' it redirects it to that address.
There are two addresses for most websites if not set up properly by the hosting company, a www version and a non-www version. It's just a matter of preference of which to use, but it's important to have one redirect to the other or search engines could potentially find two versions of the site. Since you've been building links to your site, you want to ensure that there is one, and only one that the search engines are finding.

That's a long bit of background on the why. But again the short answer is that in this case it's not a big deal.
There may be other cases though, where you find a 301 that was not intentional.

I know this almost a year after it was asked, but since I was doing a little research, I thought I'd provide a solution I came up with.

When I design a site, I want an attribution link on every page. I can't rely on a visitor saying "I love this site, who designed it?" 3 levels deep, not finding an attribution at the bottom, then thinking that they'd find it on the home page. It doesn't even make good usability sense.

So here's what I set out to do with my sites moving forward:

Still doing Sitewide links, but only the link on the Home Page will be followed. All other links will be NoFollowed.

If you use WordPress, you can use the following conditional statement. (Of course you'll want to replace your own Anchor Text and URL (unless you design pretty websites and want to give me the credit ).

if ( is_front_page() ) { echo "[](;</span><span style=) [   echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";   
   echo ">Flaunt Your Site](;</span><span style=)";

} else {   
   echo "[   
   echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";](;</span><span style=)[   
   echo " rel=";   
   echo "nofollow";   
   echo ">Flaunt Your Site](;</span><span style=)";
} ?>

It's important to leave the Space between the " and the rel=" otherwise it will collapse the url into something not readable and give you a 404 when you try to click it.

Hope this helps some of you.

Thanks much Erica!!! Looking forward to it.

I really love the webinars! I listen to them on long walks occasionally, but I haven't seen one in May or June.

When will the next one be? Thanks!

I apologize if this should have gone to the help desk...

I use UBL for creating citations. It submits your Local Listing information to over 200 Buisness Listing sites like Yelp, and others. I don't use it primarily for link building purposes, as I don't know much about how quality the sites are or if they're even followed/no-followed links, some may not even have links, etc. They're primarily for the Citations to improve Local. So I pretty much forget about links when I do that.

And based on what I'm hearing from the Google Penguin update, Directories may not be that great of a place to build links currently either. Or at least there is a little more of a vetting process that link builders need to go through right now before selecting a directory to submit to.

Well, looking at your site, I'd say that you have a decent amount of content. But it's lacking a good foundation.

Will going to WordPress improve what your site... Well, it depends on how you create the pages, plus you'll have to make sure that all the urls are matching your old ones, and a whole slew of considerations you'd be faced with when migrating.

Based on where you're at, there is quite a bit of work either way you  look at it. If you look at the SEO Pyramid http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-pyramid You'll see that there are certain things you're missing from that first foundation step on your site.
I would spend some time here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo and see hat you're missing on your site.

From there you can look a little more into whether you want to switch to WordPress or something else.

I do think that since you have a fair amount of content, simply dropping that into a WordPress site that you slowly build and get used to on a test site (hidden from robots) would be a big help for you to move to that. Using Dreamweaver is pretty outdated for a lot of things (I'm sure there are some advanced users still using it), but WordPress and other CMS's are so much easier to use.

Thanks for this! It wasn't working for me initially, and asked around. looks like you missed a "]" in the first line. So it should be:

if(isset($_GET['redirect'])){

I was able to get it to work at the root domain. A.com --> C.com

After getting this all sorted out though, I realize that I really wanted a pop up screen that could be closed, and that it would require me to spend even more time on it, and trying to add javascript as well. I decided to just scrap the idea.

Another problem I had was that the ?redirect=true at the end of the URL, messed up the direct linking to subpages and posts as well. So instead of :

C.com/blogpost-20 I would get C.com?redirect=true/blogpost-20.

Since there is no such page, it just returned the contents from the home page.

I appreciate your help though. It just seems like more effort that I want to put in, and probably more than the client wants to pay for.

OK. Well, those landing pages can just be regular Pages in WordPress. You could have a drop down menu saying something like areas served or something.

You can even add in the images that you have already done. I'd consider getting rid of all the text as images and make that stuff actual text though. There is good content in your specials that would be good to crawl.

BTW, I love the SLO/Central Coast area. I like to drive up through there from San Diego every once in a while.

I'd have to see the site in question, and see what you'll be adding to the site.

You would use a "Table" for content, but you would use a DIV floated to the right to make a sidebar.

If you don't have any content on your site currently, some will help. But it sounds like you have a foundational problem with your website already. Having a well crawlable and technically sound website is the first step in putting together a good SEO campaign.

Looking at WordPress.org will give you a very small taste of what can be done with WordPress, but if you look at sites that have been built with it, it will give you a better understanding of what's capable.
At it's core, all WordPress is doing is managing the content and displaying it how you've told it to do.

Well, there's a ton of ways you can do that.

In fact your whole site could be WordPress, and then you wouldn't have to use Dreamweaver to create and edit your site in the future. (Juts a thought).

But yes, you can have either multiple WordPress blogs, or you can have one blog, and only show certain categories for the pages you want... There are about 5 different ways to get what you would want done.

The site that you reference just looks like 1 WordPress website. So you may just need a WordPress expert to show you what WordPress does and can do for you.

Site 5 is great. I do reseller hosting though them. I was just chatting with Dawn today actually. She always saves my ass.

If you are experiencing lags in loading, a CDN will help.
But if you are using something like Youtube and embedding your video (which you really want to cause their servers are faster and geared for video), you don't need a CDN.

I understand your concern for speed. 
For you, caching would suffice. Serving up cached html files on a shared server is quite fast. So i really don't think you need cloud hosting.

CDNs really help when you have a lot of images. What it does is split the server load from one server to two, and you split the number of http requests over a couple servers speeding things along. I would really only consider it if you have lots of photos.

For 500 visitors a day, I think Cloud and CDN are a bit overkill. Most cheap shared servers have a 99% uptime.

I think it really depends on how critical you have 100% uptime. (and even then most say 99.99%).

CDN would be beneficial if you have lots of images and you are international.

There are cheaper solutions for CDN as well. Amazon Web Services is based only on what you use.

There's a plugin in WordPress called W3 Total Cache which caches your whole site (rendering it pretty under heavy traffic), plus it will tie into AWS. The plugin is free, and then you're only using what you are using from Amazon.

Again, I just think it depends on how big you are, and 500 unique visitors isn't really a lot to handle for most hosting accounts.