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Hi Enam,

Your questions are answered below, but there is a larger issue here. Buying 50 domains to redirect for SEO value will not hurt you, but it will also not help you in the slightest. None of those domains have any juice to give, and they aren't doing anything for you, good or bad. There are reasons to do this sort of thing (branding), but not for SEO. Also, PLEASE SEE ANSWER "C" BELOW.

A. No.

B. No.

C. Location forwarding, for the love of all that is holy. Right now you are masking your website with 50 different domains.

Matt is correct. Keyword density is no longer a thing that helps positively with ranks, in my opinion. It can hurt you if it is overused though.

If you're worried about content being naturally over-stuffed, that's a valid concern. If your client is in the pizza industry, how do you not use the word "pizza" all the time? The answer is: creatively. It'll be different with every industry, like with pizza, focus on toppings, dough, cheese, sauce, etc. to dilute the density.

Don't force it in, make it look natural, keep it in the H1, title, URL, and other best practices, but try to mention it only when required in the content to reduce mentions. Anything above one mention in the body isn't required, but sometimes quality of content requires it to be mentioned more.

How did you know you received a manual action if there's no message about it in Webmasters? If there was a message there and now it's gone, then congratulations! You got it removed, and they had poor communication while informing you of such.

Also, just because a MANUAL action no longer exists doesn't mean you are free and clear. You could still be penalized for spammy links, just not manually.

Link cleanup is a good thing, with or without a manual action. Clean up your stuff, so you can  know where you stand on that front. Then if you are still suffering, look into other areas.

I'm assuming you submitted a disavow report? If so, it must have been within a week of the reconsideration request, which is too short in my opinion. I like to give disavows longer than that to be recognized by Google.

Google wants to see you put a lot of work into link clean up, multiple contacts to the webmasters asking for removal and such.

Google is a slow moving machine and its tough to be patient. It's possible you were too fast for Google. I would recommend trying again. Update your disavow report, force crawl, wait 2 weeks, explain everything in a new reconsideration request.

SEO tools are an indicator. Never rely on one exclusively. Also, Moz looks at white hat factors. Your competition may not be playing by the rules. If that's the case, just hope Google handles them and keep doing your thing the right way.

You need to be uniform across the web. Determine which number you want to be pronounced on the website, and schema it. It's okay to have the other phone number on there as well.

As for the uniformity of the listings across the web: put both numbers. I've spoken with a few of Google's Local Page Experts (or whatever their title is), and they've confirmed that, at least for G+ and Maps, the big deal is having the same number on your site as you do other place and putting both numbers in (one as an alt) is fine.

Totally agree here.

Keep in mind, there is a lot of more to the ranking ability of a site for a specific keyword than just PA, DA, links, and social.

On-page, the context of the links, etc. There's a ton of things, and Simon nailed it: if you don't know why something ranks, study it, it's an extremely valuable piece of information. It's hard not to just hate on a site and think it "got lucky," but it's ranking for a reason.

I wouldn't attribute this to a page layout penalty.

Make sure to keep track of your rankings, so you can check to see if there was a dip in ranks that correlates with the dip in traffic. Keep in mind the ranks do fluctuate, especially if someone else is actively focuses on the terms.

This could very well be other people gaining ranks above you, or search volume being a little low for a bit. The data isn't large enough to determine trends. A few dozen impressions here and there could be anything. Take larger time-spans of data to determine trends to figure out why things are happening, but this isn't a display penalty in my opinion.

I agree with the other responses on the point that the quality content you generate should not go into a G+ post. Put your good stuff on your good site, and share through G+, it still is, technically, social media.

With that said, there is a great way to generate content and increase your ranks (of your G+ listing) with content in G+, and that's by relying on others. Get more reviews, link your G+ in places that people will see, so they follow you, be engaging with them on G+.

Don't think of G+ as another site for you to put content on. Think of it as another social media site where you can attract an audience and be engaging. By doing that, you are allowing others to produce content for you on G+ while you provide value by engaging them.

This is definitely a unique situation in my experience, so keep that in mind, but I'd think about (after making sure nothing on- or off-page could have caused the manual action) submitting 11 reconsideration requests at the same time, telling them everything you looked into, the tests, and the situation with your entire account getting manual actions. See how they respond to that.

I do see a red flag right away in the page source. When I viewed the page source code I saw some spammy looking links right before the footer. This could be an indication of a hack. If all of your websites in webmasters are on the same server, or your login for all of them is the same, or something similar, it's possible you had all your sites hacked. If you put those links there, then remove them.

Manual action messages are very vague, so sometimes it takes some digging to identify the root of the problem. The above is an idea of where to begin.

You can recover, but I wouldn't recommend hiring one of those companies that said you couldn't.

Hi Chris,

You have been misinformed. Disavow is your friend when done correctly. If you know you took a hit for bad backlinks, you can recover. This comes from personal experience of fixing this issue. You are usually talking about 1-2 month recovery period when link cleanup is done right.

If you like your brand, domain, and you were ranking before a link penalty, then clean it up. Should be cheaper than a new website as well.

It sounds like it's time to get aggressive with your hosting company. Tell them they botched it. Tell them it's effecting your business. Also ask them how they attempted it in the first place. If you don't know what they did, you can't fix it efficiently. Discovering what they did without their help could possibly take a lot of digging and technical knowledge, but it's possible.

Hello,

There is some good news and bad news here:

The bad news news? That old site, cheaptubesinc.com is not 301'd. Notice how to URL doesn't direct to the new one when you type it in. You have two identical sites going on due to a botched 301. In order to help with that,  more information on how you attempted the redirect is needed..

The good news? It is probably an relatively simple fix. Once you fix that 301, things may settle in.

Hope this helps.

Agreed, if you're doing it, don't rely on it to increase your website's PageRank, but powerful citations on those reputable directories can help with Maps and getting some targeted traffic.

When you go to your Places for Business page, click to edit details, then at the bottom of the page there is a "Get help with this listing" link, which will allow you to tell Google to call you. You'll get a Google Local rep on the phone who can tell you exactly what's going on and possibly reverify it on the spot.

You'll never get a straight answer from Google, but here's what I've witnessed:

• Paid directory links CAN be beneficial if they are human-moderated and/or reputable. Something like BOTW has been a good historical example. There are also niche-specific reputable paid directories.

• Be INSANELY CAREFUL. If you're skeptical about a specific directory site, don't do it. It should be a well-known brand in the niche, for example, Martindale-Hubbell for Law.

• Think of it more as citation building than link building. There is SEO-value, but don't rely on directory link juice.

• If you're careful, rely on the directory site's authority and reputation, and do a little research, you should have no issue having some paid directory links in your link profile with no penalties.

A disavow report is a must. Also make sure there's no manual action message in Webmasters that may require a reconsideration request.

Definitely contact all the webmasters to request removal and document the requests, they will be useful for the reconsideration if needed.

If it was a bot, it seems like there would be a lot more than 5 links a week. A number that low looks more like someone manually adding things, which could be a sign of negative SEO tactics by a competitor (if it's not an SEO company you hired that is just bad at their job).

In my experience, it doesn't matter where the byline is. I've dealt with sites with is almost everywhere and recently had a site with it in the footer with no issue. Maybe not the ideal place to have it, but still an option it seems.