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My only experience with them is getting e-mails from Disqus when they've added another generic comment to my blog, linking to a competitor. This has happened about a dozen times over the past several years, so they either do this a lot, or happen to work in my niche a lot (which, by the way, is usually well behind the curve in the digital marketing realm).
They might do fantastic work in other realms, but this alone would preclude my ever working with or recommending them.
This is by far the most likely explanation as far as I can see. Thanks for checking it out Takeshi!!
I looked at this page and others that have come in like it, and cannot find the links.
Yes. A trackback as if its a link from Wikipedia. I can't find any record of the link being on wikipedia however. Its all very confusing.
Edit: Added a screenshot of the (temporarily) approved trackback. At the bottom the link "North Carolina" points to the wikipedia article mentioned above.
Example:
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Dobbs_(North_Carolina)
Comment: Awesome web sites...
we arrived across a neat internet site that you could possibly like. Just take a look if you need...
It looks like a comment, but when I approve it goes under trackbacks. I'm assuming wikipedia doesn't have an army of blackhat spammers hitting up blogs to increase their rankings 
I've been getting some very interesting spam on my wordpress blogs lately: trackbacks on wikipedia articles that are obviously spammy. By that I mean that the comment on wikipedia are obviously spam and the link to my blogs are removed before I even arrive at the page or get the notification. The trackbacks are posted on valid wikipedia entries.
My concern is that this is a move by an unsavory competitor to try to get my sites in trouble. I can't really see how this would be effective though. All I can come up is that it might eventually get my domains banned from being linked to in wikipedia. I can't think of any problems this would cause in google or other SE's.
What could be the purpose behind such a spam campaign?
Any feedback?
When I redesigned our main site the navigation looked something like what you described. I cut our main navigation options down to 5, with no flyout navigation. I had to debate the other stakeholders about this choice, but I finally convinced them it was the way to go. Our conversions doubled when the new site rolled out.
One of the tenets of good UX is: Don't overwhelm your user with too much choice.
I think if you can find a way to significantly reduce their menu, you'll not only improve the SEO but you'll make for a better user experience as well.
Another thing to consider about flyout menu's is "How will this work on mobile and tablets?" The scary answer is "Usually not at all".
I guess what I'm rambling towards is that I think you should probably reorganize their navigation to reduce the number of options, get rid of the dropdown aspects, and move the secondary dropdown menu items onto an on-page secondary menu on the pages themselves.
The algorithm on all search engines is going to be a black box to SEO's. The best we can do is run experiments and extrapolate theories from the data. When I've tried to look into this specific subject, I never found any really good, trust-worthy reports on how exactly the Yahoo or Bing algorithms are different than Google. If someone else can show this, I would be stoked and owe them a beer.
That being said my impression is that the Google algorithm is more advanced and more tricky than the other two. If my assumption is correct, it could be that your process of removing links that Google finds questionable is hurting your rankings in the other engines that don't detect bad links as good as Google.
What you should focus on is what all the engines undoubtedly value in common:
Links from high quality sites that are relevant to your page
Creating content that people share, spend time on, and don't bounce off from.
Vague and cliche, I realize, but old tired truths usually are. ![😕](https://moz.com/community/q/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=4jds23d1a2r ":\")
There's nothing in the pasted code that shows why the crawler thinks your site is inaccessible. You should check for the existence of a robots.txt file in your sites root folder and make sure its not blocking access. You can also check the .htaccess file to see if thats blocking access.
In terms of the rel canonical, there are a couple things I'm noticing:
Good luck!
Let me give you an example of one of the best "like" campaigns a friend of mine recently launched. They're in the office furniture business. Snooooooze. Here's what they did:
1. Announced a contest to win a top-of-the-line office chair.
2. To enter, you had to submit a picture to them of your current office chair, the more awful and woe-begotten the better.
3. They posted all entries to an album on their facebook.
4. Their fans were asked to "like" the chair that was the worst off and most in need of replacing, whichever photo got the most likes won.
5. The photos went viral because they were funny, and the contestants and their friends were spreading the word.
Edit: Obviously, I'm suggesting you try to come up with something like this haha. I'm not just rambling on
That's pretty weird...
Perhaps googles estimates for traffic are incorrect and overstated.
Maybe your title and meta description needs some work so that searchers are more enticed to click to your site.
The text in links pointing to a page is only one signal used by the search engines to rank a page for any particular keyword. There is also on-page optimizing, for example using the key phrase in the title tag and H1 tag.
I can't comment on the overall strategy of only linking with your brand name though, I haven't seen any compelling strategies for overcoming penguin other than getting on with white-hat tactics.
You need a certain number of likes, I believe currently 100, to claim a vanity URL like the HuffPo has. And now you must pay to reach all of your page fans, only the most engaged will see your updates without paying facebook. However as mentioned by Collin creating the page itself is free.
This isn't so much an SEO question as it is a branding and perception question. I think the prevailing wisdom is to ask yourself, "How tech savvy are my customers". If they're technophiles, go with the non-www version because its shorter, easier to tweet and print on cards, and is just more hip these days. If they're not so tech-savvy you'll want to go to the www version so that your customers see it and know they're looking at a web address.
Just my 0.02c
You could do this with one or two clever regex commands, the composition of which I can't think of cos its too close to quitting time on Friday. But yeah you don't need 9000 rules.
Technically its a lot more involved than a blog, probably requiring more bandwidth and processing power if it becomes successful. And it requires more technical know-how to get it set up properly. Then the challenges of building and maintaining an online community are significantly greater than just publishing a blog and attracting a readership.
But again, if you can pull it off you'll have a fantastic resource and a great way to market your brand.
Do you mean start your own social network? The challenges and technical hurdles to doing so are much higher, but the potential rewards are also much greater.
I would say start a blog, get a post or two a week on it, and publish those to your social media accounts (especially linkedin, twitter, fb).
Once you've got that down, if you still have the resources to create a social network then go for it! You can use existing services like Ning or Drupal Connect to speed up the process.
Good point donford. I first noticed this maybe a week ago... knowing that rankings can shuffle like you described I bit my tongue and waited a bit. For some reason today it popped back into head and I did a search in several regions and found them still ranking.
Maybe I'm asking this too soon? I'm not sure how long the google shuffle lasts.
Honestly I don't mind that they rank #2, I just want to know their secret 
If its possible to fix the site without altering the directory and URL structure, that's going to be your best option.
However, I'm guessing you're going to be fixing URLs as well, and if that's the case you'll want to use 301 redirects to tell search engines where the content has gone. See http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
Finally, wherever possible try to get the owners of the sites with backlinks to update their links to you.
I'm not familiar with the real estate niche, but all the local's will still apply: Yelp, Manta, CitySearch, BBB, etc.
You may want to edit this question to include Real Estate in the title: "How do I increase domain authority? (Real estate site)". I know there's at least a few mozzers who know this industry very well and that might bring them into this conversation.
I would update the existing posts, and change the post date to the day you update them. Because these aren't really news articles or blog posts, they should go into the same post, not a new one. And because the information is current as of the day you update, if you have the date on the page it may as well reflect the date of the information. Having it current will probably help you rank better too, since current info will be more valuable to searchers than info 3 years old.
Here you go: SEOMoz Domain Authority guide
Basically you want to start getting your site linked on high quality, authoritative sites.
heheh yeah I wasn't impressed when I clicked through to the site either. I guess the 13k pages may have something to do with it, although amazingly many of them just 404 like this page http://www.opendooradoption.org/china_girl.htm (and wth were they going to have on that page anyway??). My site only has 2k+ indexed in comparison, but I don't feel good about churning out crap content, so that'll have to stay the same for now.
Thanks for the reply Phil! I may give that a try.
Keyword: "adoption agency"
Site: http://www.opendooradoption.org
These guys are ranked #2 for this very competitive term in all US regions. They're beating Bethany (and my company) who are orders of magnitude larger in both company size and link profile. Their domain authority is 40, and they have less than 200 links pointing to them with "adoption agency" in the anchor according to OSE. Their on-site is pretty much nonexistent.
Does anyone have any theories as to how they accomplished this?
301's pass authority so I can only imagine Google would be smart enough to also pass penalties. The best way to fight this is to start legitimate link building. Unfortunately I haven't heard of any quick fixes to being hit by Penguin. See http://www.dotcult.com/penguin-recovery-posts-are-lying-to-you
I would go with one page for all the reasons you mention. FB pages aren't really a way to do local SEO, so your main concern here is whats going to be best for your fans.
If the home page is ranking for "custom colored marbles" then I wouldn't change it and try to move that KW target to a different page. Your home page is your "custom colored marble" page. Double down on your efforts for optimizing the home page for that phrase, and then work on other phrases on other pages. Trying to switch the page that is ranking for a term when that page is already in the top 10 is most definitely a risky move I couldn't recommend.
To the contrary, some consider a certain amount of comment links to be part of a "natural link profile". Put your efforts and worries towards getting high quality links, the bad ones don't really matter too much unless that's all you have.
Also, it sounds like what you're doing is beneficial to the humans reading your comments, so weigh that benefit against any potential negative of the bots who are reading your comments.
In online communities you need to achieve "critical mass" to prevent the eternal churn that happens when your visitors feel like they're in an empty community. If you have an advertising budget, consider spending a lot of it right up front. Otherwise a social campaign could work, consider link-baity types of content: quizzes, contests, badges, humor, and the like.
Anyone else notice the new Display Network tab in Google Adwords is buggier than a cheap NY motel bed?
Everytime I load it in firefox I end up twiddling my thumbs for several minutes before hard closing the program. Very frustrating morning...
In case anyone else is feeling this pain, I just tried it in opera and it finally loaded ok.
Short answer: Leave them up until you're sure that all the links pointing to your 301 have been updated or removed.
The only time this is an issue is if they type "horse buggy" into their address bar on browsers that default to putting ".com" on the end of any invalid URL. But since you're already stuck with that as it is, the next best thing is to whoop em on searches for "horse buggy".
If you anticipate more people searching for "horse buggy" than for "horsebuggy.net", then you should optimize for "horse buggy".
A bit more detail:
/ begins the regular expression - from here on we're replacing what evaluates as TRUE
replay looks for the string "replay" in the URL
\ is an escape character, meaning evaluate what follows as is. We need to escape because / has a specific meaning in regex, but we want it to actually look for a slash
/ follows the escape character, so now its searching for "replay/"
. means any character other than line-break
In regular expressions the / character denotes the end and beginning. Try this instead:
source: /replay/(.)*
target: /
The source can be parsed as "start at replay, escape a / into the string, then any other characters or none at all."
This isn't white-hat in my opinion, its grey-hat. Its a huge list that provides no benefit to anyone reading the page. On the other hand, they're only making their own site a nightmare, not anyone elses - hence the grey instead of black.
I'm surprised this ranks at all, this page should be recognized as zero quality.
Yeah check out URL Normalization under the Indexing tab.
There is no penalty for including multiple sitemaps. See this google blog post on the topic.
In addition to potentially getting more pages indexed as mentioned in the seomoz post link above, it will help keep you and the future site maintainers sane when its time to update or edit the sitemap.
Those are "access denied" errors. In other words, you are displaying links on your site that can only be accessed if you're logged in. Don't worry, this isn't a really big deal.
To fix it you would need to use a server side language, like php or asp, to check if a user is logged in before outputting the links. One really elegant way to do this is to change the destination of the link depending on if the user is logged in or not. If they're not logged in, send them to a registration page telling them the benefits of signing up. This could really boost your conversion rates. Of course, if the link is to an admin section this wouldn't apply.
Rel Canonical should help with the issue. You should also go into google webmaster tools and put in all your URL parameters, so the crawler has a better idea of whats going on with being able to get to a particular resource with several URL variations.
Robert check this article out re: frontpage and htaccess
Frontpage is an html editor that helps you build a site. Apache is a server that site can run on. It sounds like you have both.
You'll want to edit the .htaccess file in the root folder of your website, wherever the file for your homepage sits.
Rel Canonical is considered a best practice in SEO, so you should just always include it in your pages, even if they're the only copy of the content you know of. It will help prevent any scrapers from stealing your content down the road.
And re: you're sorta right. Technically speaking, what we're doing with that htaccess code is 301 redirecting every URL, either to the www or non-www version. So say you go with my method anyone going to http://example.com just gets 301'd over to http://www.example.com
Actually in cases like your example above its more an issue of an ambiguous URL rather than actual duplicate content.
The thing to do in the example above is to choose which version of your site you want (with www or without) to always use, and then set your server accordingly. In Apache this means using your .htaccess file.
If you decide to always display www (my preferred way) then this should be in your .htaccess:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
If you want your URLS to not use www:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
You want to go through each page of your old site and if it had any links or authority at all, create a 301 redirect for it. That tells the engines your page has permanently moved, and tells them where to find the new page. This will preserve the majority of your authority for every page.
If you 302 them all to the homepage you're telling the search engine "this content is related and is a substitute, for now". However, you want -all- your pages to continue being indexed with as much authority as possible, not just the homepage.
After you've got your 301's set up correctly, then you can focus on creating a 404 page that is helpful to your users. Usually this means suggesting content based on the keywords in the URL, or including a search or link to the homepage.
According to teh Google you'll want to create a second sitemap specifically for your mobile pages. See: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648