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Hi Holly,

I'll share my perspective on this and I hope it's helpful to you. I've been doing SEO part or full-time since 2008.

The most successful way that I've found to generate repeatable high-quality new links to our website has been to do a lot of aggressive linkbuilding via guest blogging with other blogs or websites in our field. It's been very successful but it is time consuming. My personal goal is to try and get one new targeted link with good anchor text every day. Some days are better than others - I've had days where I get five or more links in a day, and days where I don't get any.

Guest blogging can be time consuming (it's a lot of writing!) but you can get great, targeted links from it, and Google usually recognizes them quickly since they tend to crawl and index blogs very aggressively. I'm not always shooting for A-list blogs in our field either, but a variety. I generally looking for websites that have a mozRank of 4.0 or higher for this. People in the middle of our field are usually much more responsive and helpful (they're hungry for content, like that we offer to co-promote our blog posts, etc.) and work with me more often. If their mR is under 4, the link may not be worth the effort and I'll only consider it if I really think there's some other reason its worthwhile.

I also try to produce about one good infographic a month, and post it to our blog and offer embed code and everything else good with it. These are the days that I can usually get five or six new links from spending about $400-500 and about two hours of my own time providing data, guidance, etc. with a designer to create the graphic. It depends on your budget, but to me that feels worth it. Overall, this has been really effective for us and I've been meeting my goals.

I haven't seen Dr Pete's webinar, but 10 links in a day does seem a little high - That's quite a lot. You might be able to do that if you gave up on trying to get specific anchor text and went for volume, or if you have a uniquely dedicated following who write about and cover many of your activities on their own blogs or websites (like I suspect SEOmoz does). I would encourage you to try to concretely network with more blogs and websites in our field/niche and expand your relationship with them, and keep the goal in mind:

"What can I do to get a link today?" or whatever your goal is that will deliver SEO success to you. From my experience so far, this hustle has been more valuable than any other piece of specific advice I've had. I think I have to thank Justin Briggs for that one - I think his quote that inspired me to that was "Link building is hard. Just f-ing do it." or something like that. I re-interpreted into the above.

I hope this helps!

The best way to do this is to look at your client's analytics application (such as Google Analytics) and look at what keywords they are already receiving traffic on. If they are receiving traffic on a keyword, they must be ranking at least somewhat well, and that will give you a great base to start with for showing them what keywords they rank for. This is by far the easiest and best way to go about this.

Alternatively, you can also use tools like http://search.grader.com/ if they get enough traffic, but be warned that Search Grader does not work very well on sites that do not get much organic search traffic ( < 400 organic search visits/month is a good cutoff)

Hi,

There can be a brief negative time where Google is re-indexing the URLs and moving the value to your new pages - It usually seems to be two weeks or less before you get a complete recovery.

Depending on how poor the URLs in question are it is probably worth it to change them - If you're using, say, Wordpress query valuables like ?q=234 for URLs right now, you should absolutely change them. If they're just a little wrong and pretty close to what you want for your keyword strategy, it may not be worth it and you just want to align the page title and other factors better instead.

It wouldn't help your domain authority - It would hurt it quite a lot. That's because all of your work is going to be split up, and none of your domains will share in each other's success. You will have to do four times the work to build your domain authority. I would strongly recommend against doing this.

Having that many domains is just setting yourselves up for confused customers (who get onto one domain for your business but can't find what they were looking for), CMS headaches as you bounce between sites, and there are no practical benefits to doing so.

For Google, that content will not get indexed.

Robots will win the fight of Robots vs Sitemap, as it says "Don't access or index this content, even if you find a way into it". Sitemap.xml is helping them find their way to content that they won't access or index.

Bing and other engines may be different on this. I'm not sure. I would guess that Bing at least will also respect Robots over sitemap (as it seems the proper behavior), but I have not tried this ever.

This is definitely okay to do. Especially if your old account was poorly managed and didn't show good results, it's absolutely fine to set up a new account and use the coupon. Because your past account history can impact your quality score and other factors, if you have an outdated account it can actually hurt you. If you're turning over a new leaf or have a new agency/person administering your account, it's a good step.

It's good in Google's eyes as well - They are very happy to give you the first $100 for free if they think it'll make a lifetime customer out of you. $100 really isn't that much in AdWords budgets, and if it brings in a long-term customer then they'll quickly recoup the money.

I feel pretty safe about recommending this as well because the Google account rep that I spoke with when I first signed up for Google AdWords and their Engage platform recommended that I set up new accounts for any of my clients that I was working with, specifically to take advantage of $100 coupons that I could give my clients only with a new account and so that they would get a fresh start with me and not have any past mistakes count against then. If I was in your position, I would absolutely do it this way.

We've had some pretty good success in beating exact match and partial match domains in the SERPs. I don't think I could attribute it back to any one thing that we did, but here is something that we did:

We aggressively pursued many exact-match or near-exact anchor text links from a number of websites directly to the page we wanted to rank. Your link profile may already be stronger than theirs, but it needs to be even stronger. This is pretty tough - When I look at our stats vs the exact match domains that are still page 1 but now lower on page 1, they have very few inbound links. Below is a screenshot from page 1 of Google for "marketing automation".

I know OSE hasn't crawled a lot of inbound links for this page or some of our competitors, but you can see the rough impact. We have a DA of 86. They have an 11. You might not think they would even be in the same ballpark as the other domains ranking for this term, but Google loves exact match domains, at least for now.

AQfsB

Hi Michael,

Tom Anthony wrote a great introduction on the SEOmoz Blog here on how to use Google Docs to help automate this kind of work. Check out his post here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitive-analysis-in-under-60-seconds-using-google-docs-12649

There's still some work to do to set it up and configure it the way that you want, but it'll help get you closer to what you're looking for with automating OSE reports.

It's extremely important the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs that people arrive at. If they do not match the search engine will consider the sitemap "dirty" and not valuable as it is not accurate to the actual layout of the website.

Essentially, the search engines consider a sitemap URL that does not return an HTTP 200 status a bad URL and reject the sitemap. This is absolutely something that you should work to correct.

Agreed on all points - Just encourage the bloggers to do the right thing, and they'll link to you plenty. They don't like being bossed around, and they know what to do (and what you're looking for) anyway.

Here are three tactics that I use for finding good places to guest blog:

1. Look at the link profiles of the current 1-20 for a keyword you're interested in. There will be a lot of noise and some unwinnable links, but you can get some good prospects as well.

2. Look in Google Analytics at what sites have linked to your last 5 (or 10) blog posts on that topic. Anyone who's already linking to your content at all is probably a great target for further link power.

3. Identify and reach out to any industry websites or publications that might be hungry for content. It's easy to say "They have staff writers, they probably are all set for content." I've found that they are often actually pretty hungry, and always interested in fresh viewpoints and perspectives. You might not think of their site as a "blog", and they might not call it a blog, but if it has an editorial space where you can write great content and collect a link or two, you've got a hot lead.

I hope that helps!

I'm sorry but there isn't enough information in your post to make a diagnosis.

Some questions:

What have you been doing? What SEO efforts were you doing? What does your link profile look like? Has anything changed about your website?

Are the ranking results now back to the same before your big rise, or are different people ranking now than before?

Do you have any spammy backlinks that Google may have caught on to, or keyword stuffing/other bad habits?

Were the keywords actually generating traffic for your site when you had the rankings, or were they ranking without delivering traffic?

I still see you on Page 1 of Google for many of the keywords that are in your meta-keywords tag for your homepage. Can you please be more specific about what penalty you think you are seeing?

Your domain authority and mozRank are much lower than the other websites that are on the first page for some of these keywords, and while you have many links in OSE, they are from a relatively narrow diversity of websites, where the other sites listed highly have similar numbers of links but from a very diverse list of domains. How are you working on your linkbuilding? What methods are you trying?

Because you have a partial match between your domain name and many of the keywords you've listed in that tag, it could also be partially due to Google's continuing reduction in the value of keyword-matching in domain names. Matt Cutts has said on a few occasions that they are working on turning down the influence of exact-match keywords in domains, and I would not be surprised if this was at least partially related to their changes around this. I have no evidence for this being involved in your current issue, but it may be related.

Thanks.

I don't know of one that is free, but the tool available from xml-sitemaps.com is very inexpensive.

If you're working on this professionally you can consider it a business expense, and $20 is very reasonable for the quality of the software and the fact that you'll only have to pay that once for every site you need a sitemap for. I know that doesn't answer your question completely but I hope it's useful either way.

Best,