I agree. If you still have two weeks of work with them, they can use that to take the links down.
Best posts made by EGOL
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RE: Is my SEO company a scam?
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RE: At a Loss With What to do With This Site
Content like this will probably do it...
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_PMV.HTM
"Many a man who asks for a loan adds to the burdens of those who help him; If the lender is able to recover barely half, he considers this an achievement;"
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RE: Finding Long Tail Searches
For pages that already exist on my site, I can submit the URL to SEMrush and it will give me a list of keywords that the page already ranking for in the SERPs. It also gives the ranking for each keyword.
If you don't have a page for a keyword, then go out and grab a competitor's page and do the same thing.
Also, if you have a short article, do the above. Then improve the 200 word article to 2000 words, then do same thing in a couple of months. You will be surprised and the increase in rankings and breath of keywords.
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RE: Matt Cutts - Guest posts are dead comment
**Anyone seen a dip in rankings from their high-quality blog post strategy? **
Just browse through Q&A here and look for posts with a title something like...... "Wah! my rankings dropped." You can see plenty of people are still getting smacked.
Probably part of the reason is that people who are doing "high quality guest posts" today were doing "spam quality guest posts" last year and have that link profile on their site.... and some of the people who think that they are doing "high quality guest posts" today are really doing "spam quality guest posts".
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RE: Previous keyword overuse on past blog posts: looking for a plan to proceed with new posts
Yes, that is what I would do.
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RE: Matt Cutts - Guest posts are dead comment
Sometimes I think that Mr. Cutts will say these things knowing that many webmasters will believe him and stop doing what Google wants them to stop doing. Then later they may make some algorithmic changes...
I think you are right! Thanks for the laugh.
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RE: Do references to neighborhoods and local attractions in body copy provide any benefit to geographic rankings for the city in which those neighborhoods/attractions exist?
It can be kickass if you are writing for a real estate site or a tourism site or a site about the local community.
If you are writing a page for a welding service in Chicago it will probably not be as valuable.
If your service is all about the city of Chicago, these words on the page make your page relevant for the city. They support the fact that you wrote unique information for the page and probably know a bit about the area. They can also combine with other words on the page to bring in long tail traffic.
The most important thing to know before you do this, is that these words need to be incorporated into information that is valuable for your visitor and they engage the content. It might keep visitors on your page longer, cause they to share the page. This is why you don't want to hire an oaf to produce these pages. They gotta be good.
This stuff will not produce miracles. You gotta have a good site that is valuable to visitors.
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RE: DA vs PA when building links
If websites have good DA will be trusted as per Google norms.
I do not believe that this is true. I think that DA and "trusted by Google" are very different things. I think that some sites with very high DA are not trusted by google and penalized by google.
I think that links to or from some high DA websites could be harmful to your rankings.
I would like to hear Moz or Google respond to this.
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RE: Do references to neighborhoods and local attractions in body copy provide any benefit to geographic rankings for the city in which those neighborhoods/attractions exist?
I think that you have a good approach.
If you are a homebuilder then you could get photos of homes in the actual neighborhoods and post them on the website with street address and nearby landmarks. Doing this will build a portfolio of homes that people can view online or drive-by.
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RE: What is the normal timeframe to complete these tasks?
I have to disagree that an "SEO specialist" would complete any of these tasks, to be honest.
Lots of this stuff is done by robots and the "SEO specialist" (ahem) takes credit for it.
... and the webmasters who want their site to receive genuine "bookmarks" or "shares" or "listings" have content that is either so skimpy or so bad that they don't need an SEO specialist.... they need a magician.
- Create ten pieces of unique content for specific audiences .... with the intention of having that content appeal to the user-base of those audiences.
If you do what Jane suggests, and do it exceptionally well, you will not need an SEO specialist or a magician because your visitors will do the bookmarking, sharing and listing for you. Visitors to websites love to tell their friends when they find fantastic stuff. It makes them feel like Christopher Columbus or Indiana Jones and they wanna tell their friends about their discoveries. Also, a busybody or a gossip can be better than lots of SEO specialists. They tell everybody everything - but this works best when you have juicy stuff to talk about.
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RE: How many keywords do you recommend tracking?
I track "baskets" of keywords.
Let's say I am running a website about hammers and I want to rank #1 for the root keyword of "hammers". Early in the planning of this business and its website I do keyword research and determine that I will be selling hammers made by different companies (with a number of models from each company), hammers used by different occupations (and numerous hammers for some occupations)... I will also have lots of articles about hammers that include: how to select them, how to use them, how to avoid injuries, care of your hammer, etc.
So I am going to go for the root keyword of "hammers" (which might take several years to accomplish - but I am the hammer man and I plan to hammer at this until everyone else drops dead).
Then starts my baskets, each will be a keyword "project" at SEMrush. These keyword projects will each have many keywords tracked. We might have a few dozen projects running for this website. These will track website performance for different parts of the attack. Knowing where you are succeeding, where traction is hard to get, where you are making money, etc.
BRANDS: Estwing (and a keyword for each type of hammer, perhaps weight as well, or length), then Black and Decker, Kobalt, Irwin, Vaughan, etc.
HAMMERS by OCCUPATION: carpenter, mason, auto body, etc.
**ARTICLES: ** how to select, how to use, types of handles (wood, drop forged, fiberglass), how to care for, safety (each of these will have several articles)
REVIEWS: field tests of many types of hammers
RELATED PRODUCTS: that can be sold beside hammers
OTHERS: that will be discovered as the project progresses
Now we start a content attack and a battle that will advance across time, tracking keywords on all of these levels, using sales data and profit margins as we learn them to prioritize the attack.
Your website might be smaller. Your content attack might be simpler. Your industry or business might have broad or narrow product lines and content opportunities.
So the number of keywords tracked might be dozens, hundreds or thousands. You might have a nascent site and be tracking long tail easy, or you might have a mature site and be tracking mainly single-word root keywords.
I track a lot of keywords. But each day I mainly look at the progress of the baskets, looking at individual keywords occasionally, but focusing on the big picture. I load the baskets at the start of the project, knowing that I might not get to writing for some of those keywords for weeks, months or years - depending upon the size of the project. As the project advances and I populate the keywords and the baskets, things start moving up, up, up. That is what energizes me and keeps me on the attack. A person's mental state is worth a million dollars. The taste of blood and money is worth even more. It helps keep me motivated and keeps me hammering hard.
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RE: Creating A Scholarship For SEO
TheDude: Thanks for sharing this information. Sorry that this has not worked as expected.
I am surprised that the spectacular prize has not produced a spectacular impact. Really puzzling when free money isn't like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Good luck.
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RE: How many keywords do you recommend tracking?
I have had an account at SEMrush for a long time and they have a long history of what I track.
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RE: Pinterest and Link Juice
Don't bet on anything.
Pintrest can follow or nofollow at whim. Google can honor them or ignore them at whim. What they do now and what they do in the future can be changed without tellin' you. (There are four combinations here... that means that you got a 25% chance of bein' what you want.)
If you are going after these it gotta make sense for reasons of traffic and exposure....
Honestly, most people who see your images there don't know you made 'em and aren't coming to your website. And most of the people who do see your image and come to your website are not buyin' anything - they are just interested in stealin' more of your images.
Pinterest is a valuable strategy for a very small number of websites. Everybody else has been fooled.
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RE: Some ideas for promoting a brand new website
Many universities have a "study abroad" program. These programs usually have a faculty or staff member who assists students looking to spend one summer or one semester studying at a university outside of the USA.
If the program has a website it can usually be found in Google with a query like this....
site:.edu study abroad program
Many universities also have internship programs. These can be arranged through a central office or through faculty members in individual department. Internships are normally served within the USA and within a short distance of the school. Some might be open to internships abroad. You can find them with queries like these....
site:.edu internship programs
site:.edu engineering internships
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RE: About Link Earning?
Forget about links.
Instead focus on content that will be useful for your visitor.
An article that explains how to use a product with a nice video, illustrative photos and clear text will inspire people to buy. It will also be out there in search and pull in traffic, and some of those people will buy your product. These types of articles, done well, can serve you in many ways.
Articles that compare products are also good. Photo tours of product features, articles that calculate costs or savings, histories of product development.... think about all of the popular cooking, home repair, history, even reality programs that are on television.
If people are calling you or emailing you with questions, your replies to those queries can be a great starting point for articles.
(Note that I am deliberately using the word "articles" instead of "blog posts" because I want to elevate this content to something that is much more substantive and will be fully integrated into your website. Too many people think of a "blog" as a caboose on the tail end of their website where they go to slurp coffee, type prattle, and make mindless pages of yada yada stuff without mental effort. If you want content that works you gotta make something of substance and attitude that can be promoted on your homepage.)
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RE: About Link Earning?
My point is... When you focus on your visitors needs and interests you are in a better position to produce content that will be shared widely, convert visitors into buyers, rank high in search and get the links that you are looking for.
When you start building a great website, people will start typing your domain into google search and that is more valuable than links. When google sees visitors asking for you buy name, that is when you have something.
It is possible to be so focused on "links" that what is really important is ignored.
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RE: Opinion On Fiverr Blog Mentions?
Justin, Daniel, Bryan.... Love the responses!
Got me smilin'
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RE: Value of links within related articles sidebar
The search engines probably value these links in some way, but nobody outside of the search engines nobody knows exactly what their value might be.
In my opinion, it is essential to have these types of links on your pages. They decrease bounce rates and help engage visitors.
If you go to almost any of the most important news sites you will see links to their related content in the side bars and immediately below their articles. You will even see them within articles. They are often accompanied by interesting images, beautiful images, provocative images, all to get your attention. These content blocks can direct visitors to related content, most popular content, most shared content and serendipitous content.
Some websites even make money by displaying links to content on other website using services such as outbrain, taboola, and others.
Promoting your own content in this way is a very important thing to do. Promoting the content of others might be a good idea to make money, but it might be a better idea to promote your own instead of giving your engaged visitors to other website for a few cents.
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RE: Owning a ton of domain names
what is the point of spending thousands of dollars to own all these variations?
I would allow them to expire and spend the savings on beer.
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RE: How many links and mentioned shall I collect for a new website per month?
You got a comprehensive answer from Patrick.
Adding to his comments on "writing content".... new websites are often promoted before the content is full and impressive. Your goal should be to welcome visitors with enough content and high enough quality content that they say WOW!.
Promotion is a lot of work. You want to get full value out of that, otherwise visitors land, see a small amount of content, and even if it is great stuff, their motivation to share or return is diminished.
If they are not saying WOW! then keep on the content task until you will get your full mileage.
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RE: Will our website traffic be adversely affected by Google by allowiing other sites to post our content on their sites?
We're a radio station posting original content each day.
Nice work! You are making a big investment to make this happen. I hope that you are getting a lot of traffic from search out of this and that people visit your site daily to read your new content.
It's been proposed that we all contribute content to this group so any radio station can grab this content and post it on their own websites.
Those weasels who proposed this want to ride your train. I bet the ones who propose this run the laziest stations on the planet. Tell them to get off of their lazy duffs and write their own content.
As the site with the most content and web traffic, could this potentially harm us?
In reality it has a greater chance of tanking your competitors because they could be viewed as the republisher - because your site is probably stronger and may be credited by google as the original publishing source. BUT, that can not be guaranteed.
If you think that there is little overlap of direct traffic, meaning people who visit your site are unlikely to visit their site, you could consider this....
For a monthly fee, you would allow them to publish a certain number of your articles on their site but the requirement is that they have rel=canonical properly installed on every one of your articles. That would generate income for you and the article would be attributed to your site, thus protecting you and them from Panda problems and duplicate content filtering.
Or, with rel=canonical installed on every page, you could allow them to use a limited number of articles and you get the ad revenue. I think that there are some ways to do this that will be to your advantage, but I would not do it without contracts and regular inspections of how things are implemented.
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RE: My current SEO plan
Great, maybe you can get your partners to write this stuff.
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RE: My current SEO plan
**I am not sure why the car accident pages were de-indexed. **
New pages often perform fine until Google figures out that they are cookie-cutter duplicates. Then they are filtered from search results. The next time Panda runs the rankings across your entire site could be reduced. What you see today could be just the start of your problems.
If you want unique content, make it entirely, completely, absolutely unique. Shortcutting by plugging in different place names and synonyms has not worked with Google for several years.
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RE: My current SEO plan
Landscapers, architects, and construction companies who want search visibility in multiple cities write articles with photos and descriptions of previous work that they have done in those cities. Companies who have stores, beauty salons, and restaurants in multiple communities have photos of their places of business with nice descriptions of what they do, the people they serve and the professionals who work there. If you are unable to do these things they you really have no business presence in these areas and Google sets a high bar to block out spam.
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RE: I Know How To Get A Link From Huffington Post ..... Should I ?
I am betting that this "author" is not authorized to be offering links for a fee in Huffington Post articles.
So, you might pay $1000 for this link and be told that it is permanent, but this person does not own the Huffington Post website, then the site owners or staff can take his article down at any time or remove this link at any time.
Also, if that author offers to make links for the wrong person and they report him to the Huffington Post, he will be fired, and all of his links will come down.
Ask him how the check should be payable and then you will find out if he is the link seller or if HuffPost is the link seller.
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RE: What's Your #1 High Authority Backlink Strategy For 2015?
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Publish articles that are "best on the web for their topic" (or as close as I can come to that) and always with unique perspectives and great images. If you do that your visitors will spread the word about your content for you.
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Grammarly, Hemingway, any good graphics program
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RE: Are SEO fundamentals accurate or real?
I agree. And that is the reason why it is better to spend your time improving your website than worrying about a site above you that is impossible to understand. It's possible that they earned those rankings. It's possible that Google has incorrectly ranked them (which most often happens in low competition SERPs such as the ones here).
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RE: Spam Link Building Discovered - What would you do?
"Manufactured links" on "duplicate websites" have been discounted by Google for at least 15 years. If you build an identical website and link from Identical Page A to Identical Page B, Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time. In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.
If these people were competing against me, I would enjoy seeing them buy a few more domains and put time into tossing up identical sites. No need to report them. Google has deindexed these "New" websites.
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RE: Getting links on old blog posts
I agree with you, Alan. That's how most people do it.
I've found through a few small retail sites and a couple of information sites, that publishing useful or interesting content can be enough that other people will share it for you. There are still niches out there where one or two people, working as a team, can produce, in two or three years, more content and better content than all of the competitors in the niche combined. Once you have that, then some of the people who find your site and see the depth of content, will share it for you. And, there are some topics where people will search deeply for the right information.
If you have a hardware store or a toy store or a jewelry store, you don't have to attack the entire industry. Instead, focus on a very small niche of products that are typically not represented well in local stores, and that do not have an online champion.
The niche must be chosen carefully.
I don't have any interest in social media, or making personal connections, or in soliciting others. But, I do have an interest in learning the deep technical details of things and enjoy writing about them. Through that, I provide the community service similar to what you provide. Then a steady stream of visitor questions coming in and being answered, first by email and then published to the content library that provides a service to a consumer community - these are coming from people who may have first purchased at amazon or or some other vendor who places 100% of their effort in making the sale but places zero effort in helping the customer after the sale.
These people are out searching deeply. They feel like they have been abandoned. This is today's internet - Walmart, Amazon, Jet, and others are all focused on the aggressive price competition. Service after the sale and deep information for the consumer has been abandoned at the very time when you think it should be abundant. Nobody wants to write it. How many times have you purchased something and could not understand directions that were written on another continent and then translated into English by someone who knows the language poorly.
That leads to a problem in that you become the default service department for amazon! They don't do it. But if you step into that role you quickly obtain a knowledge of what information people need and when you answer an email, you also place another brick in your relevant content library. So, although I am not making any direct outreach at all to advocate a brand, engaging a community, or soliciting on my own behalf in any way, the questions keep coming in, the content mass continues to grow, and it attracts more and more traffic year over year.
Most business owners are not going to do this because they don't like to write content and they don't have a situation that allows them to invest a lot of time now and not be paid back until years down the road. No SEO will do this because the upfront labor is very high and the return isn't fast enough to satisfy a client. These opportunities are perfect for the person who enjoys working from the cloister.
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RE: Why would backlinks trump content and keywords / DA?
I frequently see backlinks being the biggest factor at deciding rank for keywords, while content and keyword page grading can say great things, it always comes down to backlinks it seems
I believe that it is important to consider the age of the document and the on-site traffic that might flow into it. New pages with great content might have very little popularity on other sites. If you see them ranking high then it is the authority of the domain on which they were published that is lifting them to high rankings. Young product pages on amazon, new pages on wikipedia are examples.
Great content that has not been marketed to other websites but that is seen by lots of people who visit the domain where it is published can climb the rankings to top positions but that takes more time.
Great content on less visited domains can still rank high over time but the climb up the SERPs can take years to happen.
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RE: Moz authority. Should this be taken as just a guideline.
**this didn't really answer my question about OSE. I'm curious about how sophisticated the tool is. Does it take into consideration reciprocal links for example? **
A lot of people worship the numbers out of OSE. I do not.
I don't use them for any decisions, although if I hear that a site is 25, I think that it is probably a lightweight.
I beleve that almost everyone who uses it sees lightweights ranking above heavyweights on a regular basis. In fact, one of the most common posts in Q&A is something like this.. ... "Wah! my site has a DA of 32 and a spammer with a DA of 26 is beating it. I am getting screwed by Google." These posters have high levels of consternation and distress.
So, it is a service that a lot of people are using to "bet their fortunes" but it is not accurate at what people perceive as its primary job at worst, or is widely missunderstood at best.
That's my honest opinion.
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RE: What are the possible effects of a small blog migration on an existing link profile?
Here is what I would be thinking if I owned that blog....
It has been out there for many years, has around 248 posts and has only accumulated a domain authority of only 14. That tells me that the blog is probably not a vibrant asset. It has probably attracted very few links, has not attracted much attention, pulls in very little traffic and refers almost no traffic to the primary domain.
A link from this blog will be worth very little. The second link will be worth less than the first, the third less than the second and the 100th link will be worth almost nothing - that is if the links are branded links. If the links are keyworded and that blog is loaded down with them, it is possible that the links could be passing poison to the main site.
So, before I spent any effort on this site and its content, I would look at the analytics and see if the blog pulls any traffic, identify the valuable posts and at the same time identify posts that have less value than the cost of moving them.
If there are some valuable posts and they are moved with 301 redirects placed permanently on the old server then the move might have a positive benefit to the main site. At the same time, I would not hesitate to prune posts that pull no traffic, serve little business purpose, or have attracted no external links.
Effect on the link profile of the main site? If the blog site has very few incoming links of its own that are from domains that are not already linking to the main site, then those links might be useful if they are 301 redirected. But, it depends upon the quality of the links. The DA of the domain is 14. I would not expect much. I would treat this as a salvage job that might cost more than its value, rather than an opportunity to recover treasure.
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RE: Google.com showing as backlink provider in Webmaster Tools?
I get lots of links from Google sites, orkut, productforums, groups, plus, app
If you drill down you can get the details.
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RE: How much 'ranking power' would a link from a privacy policy page of a Big Brand have if the site content is totally unrelated?
I think that Google will consider the trust and the authority of the linking website.
Google will also consider the context and relevance of the page and the paragraphs and the sentences that are associated with the link.
So a link to a privacy site from a privacy page is relevant in my mind. Nobody knows what Google really thinks about these things, but to me the value of this link ranges somewhere between good and superb.
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RE: Anchor text and internal link building very fast
Just a few years ago, internal links where hugely important.
Today, the impact is reduced, but I can still add a link to the persistent navigation of my website and the page pointed to by that link will move up in the SERPs. I can even add one link to the homepage of my website and that page will move up in the SERPs.
This might not be so true for nascent sites, but for mature and powerful websites the effect is obvious and strong.
Google uses logic. If you have lots of links to a page all around your site then that page must be pretty important. If there is a page deep in the bowels of your site and you link to it once from an obscure page then Google knows that the page is not very important.
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RE: Is it okay to post my blog posts to both an internal blog on our domain and an external blog?
The only safe move here is to create amazing content for both blogs - but why have 2 blogs? Why double your effort when you could be using all the content to prop up the main site?
Andy makes a very good point here. If you have a good article about Brass Widgets on your website and you decide that you want to write a second Brass Widgets article to publish on another website, then you are going to publish a second article that will compete with you and take some of your traffic.
Even if the articles are slightly different or very different they will still be "competing" - either at the short tail keyword level or the long tail keyword level. The result will be damaging to your traffic. The amount of damage will be proportional to the strength difference of your domains and the diversity of keywords in the articles. If the second domain is a lot more powerful than your own domain you could lose almost all of your traffic to the second website.
I have a website that publishes only unique articles. Some of those articles have been written by other people in my industry who have similar articles or entire websites about the topics that they gave me to publish. I never asked any of these people to write an article for my website. Every one of them came to me with an offer. With content written by these other authors, my website frequently outranks their website for primary and secondary keyword of the industry. They might have a website that is powerful for the topic, but I have a website that is authoritative in the industry. It can be hard to predict who will win at different levels but my site now competes and brings in lots of traffic for topic areas where I have never written.
Publishing on your own site, as Andy suggests, builds the strength of your site and does not invite potentially strong competitors into your keyword space. There are benefits of sharing articles. You get exposure as an "expert" on another website, which might have amazing traffic that includes visitors who will seek you out to do business. You can often get a link on those websites that will send lots of traffic to your website. The best situation for all is if you simply want to get your message out to as many people as possible, but if there are competitive concerns then you must weigh the value of a link with the value of the exposure and the risk of a very strong competitor moving permanently into your space.
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RE: Inbound link with low DA
There are lots of good sites in Ukraine. I'd make my decision about the quality of the site rather than where it appears to be located.
There are probably more spammy sites out of New Jersey than out of Ukraine.
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RE: Backlink Building - is it worth it?
After you are finished reading the Moz Guide to Linkbuilding that Jordan suggests, I would do a content audit to determine if you have valuable content assets that can be marketed as "important things for other webmasters to link to". If you have these kinds of assets then you have a chance at attracting good, editorially-given links. If you don't have these kinds of assets then you are entering an area of simply "building links" that are not supported by valuable assets on your website. That type of linkbuilding is very different because it will either be paid links, traded links, dropped links or other types of links that Google will classify as linkspam and slap you with a Penguin problem or an unnatural link penalty.
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RE: Backlink Building - is it worth it?
Some people write content that explains how to select the product, how to maintain it, demonstrations of how to use it. These are great for attracting links. DIY sites are the best examples of this type of content. These article pages, if done well, can attract links, pull traffic, and ads on those pages send visitors to your sales pages. Or, you can offer items for sale on these pages and those sales will come after your content has inspired the person to buy.
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RE: Link Audit
There are a lot of dynamic websites out there that shuffle content several times per month, week, day or hour. Your client's link might have been indexed but is really only there 5% of the time.
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RE: Link Audit
I have never disavoed a link. Not one.
Yes, lots of these spammy websites link to my websites, but I think that Google is smart enough to know that they are not meaningful sites. I simply don't think that it is a good use of my time to query who is linking to me, go out and sniff those pages, decide if they are worthy, and spend time on disavow.
I think that it is more important to get my next page up and keep focused on advancing my business. I don't think that Google expects me to engage in hand-to-hand spam fighting - especially against automated content built by spammers.
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RE: How many external links do I need?
In my opinion, 80 to 100 words is really really skimpy. You would gain more by increasing the quality and detail of your post than by changing the number of external links. Google is probably going to put more emphasis on your content and how your visitors respond to it than they will put into evaluating your external links. In addition, I think that you will gain more from Google if you have highly-related, high-quality content on your own site and are linking to that.
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RE: Are Side Bar Links Bad For SEO?
Sidebars are fantastic.
They are great placed to add photos that are relevant to your content, great places to display ads, great places to promote your best content and great places to promote related content. All of my sites have a sidebar that is right-sized for skyscraper or rectangular ad units.
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RE: Link building for manufacturing business... Tips?
Looks like you have been in business since 1975. You probably know enough about these products to "write the Bible" on them. You are the experts. Start writing about what people ask about them and what they don't ask that they should be asking.
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RE: Connecting Two Websites Without Upsetting Google
I think that it makes better sense for the reader and better sense for you, to put all of this stuff on the original blog.
The backlinks that any second blog will create will be worthless unless you have links into the second blog from third party websites. So, instead of building that second blog, just put all of that great content on the main blog and get the backlinks straight to the the site you are promoting.
Building a second blog just for backlinks is like trying to kill a rabbit with a ricochet. Just shoot the damn rabbit.
I don't think that Google is going to like this second blog very well if you are making it to manufacture backlinks for your first blog. Google was killing that stuff twenty years ago.
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RE: Connecting Two Websites Without Upsetting Google
Thanks for your thoughtful response. As you point out, there are many different business models, and what might be best "general" practice, might not quite fit every model.
Moz Q&A is great for this type of discussion.
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RE: Link Building for Charities?
I don't know Google's position. However, I do have thoughts about this...
Great websites link to other great websites all of the time. If you have a great website you can feel confident about linking to another great website that links to you.... but this is usually not done by agreement, it is done for the reason of attribution [such as in a footnote or reference] or in a helpful gesture to your visitor [done instead of giving an unlinked mention because you are damn selfish or scared to link to another great website that competes in your space]. People who run great websites are too busy running a great websites and don't have time to fart around swapping links. They don't gotta do it.
I think that obvious gaming of the system isn't going to work much of the time. Google is smart enough to know that one crappy website linking to another crappy website is done to game the system. Nobody links to crappy websites, except other crappy websites who can't get a link any other way AND people who are paid to link to crappy websites.
Our practice on linking is... we only link to pages on other websites that have content that is superior in some way to the content that we have on our page.... OR.... link to pages where attribution is appropriate - much like the footnotes in wikipedia.
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RE: Best practice in terms of link volume in a page
What's the best practice in terms of regulating number of links (internal or external) in an article?
I am all about linking to other relevant pages on my site within the text of an article. I don't think that "how many" is the right question. I think that there are a few other questions that are more important....
A) How relevant is the link to the overall article? If the link is not great match then don't use it.
B) If you are piling on links that people don't need, don't use them. Just because you mention something or somebody you don't have to link to it. Only link to it if you think some portion of your visitors need the information at the link's destination and will click through to it.
C) How does it look? Do you have so many links that they are distracting? Cut back if the page is blue and smells like spam.
D) Some webmasters link to pages on their own site within the text of the article, but references and citations to outside websites are footnoted and placed in a box at the bottom of the page.