Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yeah - if your webmaster got hit on the head.

301 redirects are totally doable on Apache, all the time. They're also doable on IIS.

They're set in the configuration file for each domain, or in the master config file, so site templates have nothing to do with the ability/inability to do 301s.

Any chance that 'impossible' means 'we don't have access to our own server'?

Actually, I do see meta descriptions on the blog pages...

Hi lemonz -

1. Sounds like you tried this already, but: If there's any way at all to find out who was hired to build those links, or what service was used (if any), you can likely go to them and get most of the links removed, all at once.
2. What do those links point at? The home page, or something else? If they point at other pages on your site, and those pages don't have much other link juice, you might consider changing the pages' URLs and 404'ing the old ones. That would cause the social bookmarking links to fall out of Google's index (I think) and reduce the penalty.
3. Worst case, keep a detailed list of the links you've tried to remove, the reason it failed (no contact info, site owner refused to remove, etc.) and then send that log to Google with a re-inclusion request.

And, no matter which of these you do, try to 'bury' them with good links. That's always a good idea. Focus on the kinds of links, and link-generating content, that would make sense for a normal business doing normal marketing. That should help you improve your profile.

Hope this helps!

I'd unselect it.

Thinking from a UX perspective: If I want to see an image, I want to see an image. I don't want to get redirected to the post itself.

And Google's imagebot won't be able to (or will refuse to) index the images for that reason.

Normally, on WordPress, I use one of the Lightbox plugins: Someone clicks the image and sees the full-sized version in a DHTML layer, without leaving the post. That lets you display the image on the same page, doesn't seem to hurt image indexation, and gives a good user experience.

One other note - you don't say, but if you aren't, you should create an image sitemap. There are a bunch of good WordPress plugins that can generate the XML for you. That's been a huge help for me.

My rule of thumb: If the directory would be a great place to have a presence if Google didn't exist, then do it. Otherwise, I tend to steer clear, post-Penguin.

Google attempts to execute javascript, in some cases. But it does a really awful job of it. With the code you've got, it'll ignore the script content.

The smart change to make here would be to switch to a CSS plus javascript solution. The best solution is something like jquery, where you have an HTML list of images, then use CSS to hide the images and javascript to reveal it.

That way, if a crawler hits the page, it sees the entire list of images and ALT attributes.

That's called graceful degradation - it's best practices for SEO.

While it'll take a lot of work, it's worth doing. It'll give you a long-term, SEO-friendly page that also works better for different devices.

SEOMOZ crawls and updates their link index on a schedule you can see here:

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape Schedule

If this is a fairly new link, it may not have gotten indexed yet.

Also, note that page rank may have little or nothing to do with MozRank. Toolbar pagerank is notoriously inaccurate, and could be up to 6 months old. Plus, Toolbar pagerank doesn't reflect all the factors Google uses in PR calculation. And (as if that weren't enough) toolbar PR is based on a sort of Richter Scale - so a jump from, say, 4 to 5 could reflect a HUGE change, or a tiny one.

We normally focus on MozRank, instead.

No, but they might write to it, modify it, or do all sorts of other nasty stuff I've seen hackers do when they get a hold of any writeable file on a system.

Eesh I don't recommend 777. 644 or, if you're going to change it right back, 755 at most.

If you have a list of the linking pages from which your SEO firm requested removal (and you should) you can use ScreamingFrog to crawl that list, with a custom filter set to look for your URL. It'll spit back a list of pages that still have your links on them.

Looking in my log files, Google hits robots.txt just about every time it crawls our site.

What are you trying to accomplish using fetch as Googlebot? Any chance CURL could do the job for you, or another tool that ignores robots.txt?

Well, you don't, if you don't want to do SEO. But if you do, then you'll have to generate content and demonstrate value above and beyond your competitors. Since they're generating content, you have to compete.

Hi Ryan,

First question: Did you receive a warning notice about unnatural links? Google's been sending those out to most Penguin victims. I still see you at #1 for your brand name at:

http://portent.co/MDY6Qy

Normally with a Penguin penalty I'd expect to see you buried for your own name.

It's more likely you got caught up in an onsite, content-related update. Although there are some fairly suspect links in your profile, like this page:

http://www.hasenchat.de/chat-verzeichnis/index.html

It also happens to be your highest-DA inlinking page.

I'm late to this particular party, but here's an approach that's worked for us  helped a friend in reputation management crises:

First, you need to get some indexed content for the phrase you're going to insert into suggest. I'll go with "Gibble Gibbet".

1. Add a page to your own site;
2. Or even better, find a phrase for which you already have indexed content.
3. Either way, get some Twitter/other social traffic going to ensure it stays indexed.

Now, you need to get some search volume:

1. Don't think of this in terms of directly generating search volume. Instead, think of this as a social engineering experiment.
2. Determine what phrase you want to show up in search suggest. I'm sticking with "Gibble Gibbet".
3. Create a test on a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Tell everyone involved you need them to tell you the first 2 results they see when they type in "Gibble Gibbet".
4. Send out the test to 5,000 or more people.

Depending on the term, the search volume around it, and the competition among different queries, this should get you what you're looking for.

Not that I've ever done this.

It was a friend of mine.

Infographics done right make information more digestible. That tends to attract a lot of attention - especially if it's about a hot niche topic. For example, I'm a cycling fan - if someone did an infographic on the Giro d' Italia (a big bike race going on now) I'd be all over it. Put it in front of the right audience and it'll get re-shared a lot.

They're also helpful because there are lots of infographic directories/review sites out there. If you can submit your graphic to those, you gain some easy links.

If you then make the infographic embeddable, you can pick up a lot more links and re-shares as folks embed the infographic in their own blogs.

Creating a good infographic requires real expertise in data visualization. I strongly suggest hiring someone else to do it for you. Expect to pay $3,000 or more for a real pro. I've seen them offered for as little as $1,000, but generally those aren't data visualization folks - they may make something pretty, but it'll be hit-and-miss as far as a really great graphic.

If you are a good data person, then you might want to try creating your own infographic first. Use a tool like http://infogr.am/ . The worst case is that you have a sketch you can provide to a graphic designer to guide their final version. Best case, you discover you're an infographics artist at heart

Hope this helps!

I'm not really suggesting that you send your articles elsewhere.

What you need to do is write stuff on your site, then promote it via social, and get links that way.

Post-Penguin, "In the meantime" is dicey. You can submit to directories, of course, but many of the free ones are getting dropped from the Google index. Stick to reputable ones like Best of the Web.

Be very, very careful about guest posting. You need your posts to show up on sites with really high-quality content. Shotgunning your writing out to blogs that cover everything from hosting to hotels is going to get you right back into trouble.

Your best move is to understand that Google does not like to be tricked. So anything that feels 'easy' or 'quick' is going to get you into trouble.

That said, some fast link-building tricks:

1. Fix broken incoming links by replacing the missing pages or 301-ing to relevant ones. Nothing's faster.
2. Find and fix canonicalization issues on your site. Duplication screws up your link profile.
3. Check your log files for any 404 errorscaused by external links but not crawled by Googlebot. Those are links that Google's likely given up on because they've been broken for so long. And they're often the juiciest. Fix those too.
4. Get your site to zero 404 errors overall.

At the same time, work hard on your content strategy. You have to get this going, or you won't have a prayer in the long term. You have to demonstrate value to Google and visitors. Outside being the cheapest (bad plan) or the biggest (not exactly a quick strategy), being a great resource is your best plan.

Again, content. You have to have stuff blogs want to link to.

As the underdog you can make the biggest splash!

Here's a formula that always works for me: Pick a topic that's on everyone's mind. Making sites run faster, for example, seems to come up a lot. Write a huge list of tips for speeding up your site, from server tuning to coding to database management.

Then, when you publish it, submit it to Hacker News, Inbound.org, StumbleUpon.com, Twitter, etc.

And, e-mail a link to the post to all of your customers, so that they can read it. It's a great service for them, so even if no one ever links to the article, you've built value with existing customers.

Make sure you have easy sharing buttons on the post, too, so that customers AND strangers can all tweet/like/stumble/vote for the post.

I will say this: It doesn't happen overnight. I wrote for years before I had my first big hit.

But every post you do that 'fails' now will potentially generate attention later. You're building an asset every time you publish.

You're going to have to think very long term. Don't expect 1-2 weeks of work to do you any good at all.

Plan out a six-month content campaign, with topics, folks you want to contact about each new piece of content, etc.

At the same time, look to your onsite SEO. Make sure you're 100% within best practices.

This will take a sustained effort. The entire reason Google's doing things like Penguin is that they want sites to offer value to searchers. So make sure your site offers lots of value, in the form of content.

You're in the business of managing lots of servers. You could easily write content about:

1. Security
2. Performance
3. Deployment
4. Testing
5. Log analysis

The list goes on and on. Write about your industry and your specialty - it'll get you lots of attention.