Questions created by mgane
-
Do dead/inactive links matter?
In cleaning up the backlink profile for my parent's website, I've come across quite a few dead links. For instance, the links in the comments here: http://www.islanddefjam.com/artist/news_single.aspx?nid=4726&artistID=7290 Do I need to worry about these links? I assume if the links are no longer active, and hence not showing up in webmaster or moz reports, I can probably ignore them, but I'm wondering if I should try and get them removed regardless? I've read that google is increasingly taking into account references (i.e. website mentions that are not links) and I don't know if inactive spam links might leave a bad impression of a website. Am I being overly paranoid? I imagine disavowing them would be pointless as you can't attach a nofollow tag to an inactive link.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgane0 -
Common passwords used for spam accounts?
This is a bit of a longshot. I know that many of the spam forum accounts, blog posts etc that have in the past been used for SEO are generated automatically. Does anyone know of any common passwords that are often used when setting up these accounts? I only ask as, trying to clean up the backlink profile for my website, I found myself in desperation keying in random passwords trying to access the spam accounts created on various forums by our former SEO agency. Eventually I got lucky and worked out the password for a series of forum accounts was, not very imaginatively, 'seo'. Having worked out this, I was able to delete the spam signatures on about 10 forums. But there are many other accounts where I have no idea of the password used. I guess I'm just wondering if there are standard stock passwords used in the past by many SEOs? Not likely to get an answer to this one, I know, but worth a shot.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgane0 -
Do I need to verify my site on webmaster both with and without the "www." at the start?
As per title, is it necessary to verify a site on webmaster twice, with and without the "www"? I only ask as I'm about to submit a disavow request, and have just read this: NB: Make sure you verify both the http:website.com and http://www.website.com versions of your site and submit the links disavow file for each. Google has said that they view these as completely different sites so it’s important not to forget this step. (here) Is there anything in this? It strikes me as more than a bit odd that you need to submit a site twice.
Technical SEO | | mgane0 -
Should I be taking a gradual approach to link removals?
Quick background: My parents run a travel company and have seen their google ranks drop dramatically in the last few years (usual story: they employed an SEO agency, saw good results to begin with, and then a massive decline in their rankings post-Penguin). Over the last few months I've been working to remove as many of the spam links pointing to their site as I can. However, as I've been doing so, our keyword rankings have been declining even further, not improving. This time last year we were bottom of page 1 for one keyword, then we suddenly dropped to page 5 around Nov with the Penguin update, and now, since I started cleaning up our backlinks, we're no longer in the first 20 pages - we've vanished. Similar situation for other keywords (though not as dramatic) I've been pretty careful to only delete links that are clearly spam (article directories, forum signatures, spam comments on blogs with a keyword-rich username linking to our domain etc). It may be that some of these links were still helping us, but I'd be surprised - they were pretty obvious cases of spam. My question: Is it normal to see this sort of decline at the start of a clean-up campaign? Does google see a sudden decline in the number of links, spam or otherwise, as suspicious? I've devoted weeks already to trying to work on the problems affecting my parent's website, and the situation just seems to be getting worse and worse! Do websites ever recover from a severe Penguin hit?
Link Building | | mgane0