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Hi all, We have launched the exit intent pop-ups on our website where a pop-up will appear when the visitor is about to leave the website. This will trigger when the mouse is moved to the top window section; as an attempt by the visitor to close the window. We see a slight ranking drop post this pop-up launch. As the pop-up is appearing just before someone leaves the website; does this making Google to see as if the user left because of the pop-up and penalizing us? What is your thoughts and suggestions on this? Thanks

Hey guys, This case study started from here. A simple summary, I discover that I got +1000 backlinks from Blogspot though Google webmasters tools after making a connection with owners of these blogs which points to my new blog. Before starting I proudly invite Thomas Zickell and Gary Lee in this discussion. I wish you accept my invitation. Let's go to the main point, I've used Google webmaster tools so I will start with. Then Ahref which used by **Thomas **and then Majestic which used by Gary. Take a look at "001" screenshot, you will see that Google webmaster tools discovered 1291 links points to my site. Take another look at "002" screenshot, you will find that there are 22 domains points to my site. Most of them are good links since they are coming from websites such as Google.com, Wikipedia.org, Reddit, Shoutmeload, WordPress.org, ...etc. Beside +1000 backlinks came from Blogspot.com (blogs). Also, there's some bad links such as this one came from tacasino.com Necessary to say that I've got some competitors and they nicely asked me to stop the competition for some keywords and I've ignored their request. So, I'm not surprised to see these bad links. At "002" screenshot, we can see that Google didn't discover the bad links as they discovered the good links. And they discovered a lot of backlinks which not discovered by any other tools. **Let's move to Ahref, ** I will use screenshots provided by Thomas. At "003" screenshot, you can see Ahref report that say 457 links from 10 domains. By the way, social engagements data are wrong. I got more than zero engagements .. really. At "004" screenshot, you can see domains points to my site, links with anchor text. Take a look at the second link you will find that it's a spammy link coming from PR2 home page since it's is over optimized. the third link is also a spammy link since it coming from a not-relevant website. Beside other bad links need to be removed. So, Ahref didn't discover all of my good links. Instead of that it discovered few good links and a lot of bad links. In a case like this a question come needs to be answered since there are some people trying so hard to hurt my site, Do I have to remove all this bad links? Or, just links discovered by Google. Or, Google understand the case? **Let's move to majestic, ** Gray Lee provided data from majestic which say "10 Unique Referring Domains, with 363 links, 2 domains make up a majority." Since Gray didn't take any screenshots I will provide mine. At "005" screenshot, you can see some of the bad links discovered by Majestic. Not all of them discovered by Ahref or Google. In the other hand, Majestic didn't discover all of my Good links. Also, there's a miss understand I would like to explain here. When I published the Discussion about +1000 link. Some people may think that I trying to cheat you by providing fake info and this totally wrong. I said before and I'm saying that again you are so elite and I respect you. Also, I'm preparing for an advanced case study about this thing. If any expert would like to join me this will be great. Thank you for reading and please feel free to share you thoughts, knowledge and experience in this Discussion. EE5bFNc jYg21cf Xyfgp28.png iR4UOwi.png D1pGAFO

Hello all, I would like to get your opinion on whether I should invest time and money to improve a website which was hit by Google Penguin in April 2014. (I know, April 2014 was nearly 2 years ago. However, this site has not been a top priority for us and we have just left until now). The site is www.salmonrecipes.net Basically, we aggregated over 700 salmon recipes from major supermarkets, famous chefs, and others (all with their permission) and made them available on this site. It was a good site at the time but it is showing its age now. For a few years we were occasionally #1 on Google in the US for "salmon recipes", but normally we would be between #2 and #4. We made money from the site almost entirely through Adsense. We never made a huge amount, but it paid our office rent every month, which was handy. We also built up an email database of several thousand followers, but we've not really used this much. (Yet). In the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012 the site attracted just over 500k visits. After the rankings dropped due to Google Penguin, traffic dropped by 77% in the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012. Rankings and traffic have not recovered at all, and are only getting worse. I am happy to accept that we deserved our rankings to fall during the Google Penguin re-shuffle. I stupidly commissioned an offshore company to build lots of links which, in hindsight, were basically just spam, and totally without any real value. However they assured me it was safe and I trusted them, despite my own nagging reservations. Anyway, I have full details of all the links they created, and therefore I could remove many of these 'relatively' easily. (Of course, removing hundreds of links would take a lot of time). My questions ... 1. How can I evaluate the probability of this site 'recovering' from Google Penguin. I am willing to invest time/money on link removal and new (ethical) SEO work if there is a reasonable chance of regaining a position in the top 5 on Google (US) for "salmon recipes" and various long-tail terms. But I am keen to avoid spending time/money on this if it is unlikely we will recover. How can I figure out my chances? 2. Generally, I accept that this model of site is in decline. Relying on Google to drive traffic to a site, and on Google to produce revenue via its Adsense scheme, is risky and not entirely sensible. Also, Google seems to provide more and more 'answers' itself, rather than sending people to e.g. a website listing recipes. Given this, is it worth investing any money in this at all? 3. Can you recommend anyone who specialises in this kind of recovery work. (As I said, I have a comprehensive list of all the links that were built, etc). OK, that is all for now. I am really looking forward to whatever opinions you may have about this. I'll provide more info if required. Huge thanks
David

Hello, According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site. There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?

So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche. I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/ This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic) Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com. Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?

I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!

The term "Beruk" which means "Ape or Monkey" in english brings up this page of wikipedia amongst the first page result: URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khairy_Jamaluddin The page does not contain the word "Beruk". External links to the page do not contact the anchor-text "Beruk" Given the above scenario, how is the page still ranking on first page for this keyword?

So I am working on a potential new client and they run several very well established and well ranking ecommerce sites. They have 1 site which is new and underperforming which they want me to "start" on as a trial. The idea being that if they like the progress I would take over SEO on the other sites. After a little research I am concerned that this site may be have a penalty. The site is www.discoverhookah.com The MOZrank and MOZtrust are actually pretty good considering the site is 6 months old, but if you look at the links they are ALL junk. They seems to be some reciprocal linking as well. I believe this is something they have done on their other sites and been ok with because they are 10+ years old and very trusted, however for a new site this link profile worries me. I do not have their analytics yet but looking at their traffic in compete.com shows a HUGE drop off shortly after the site went up (like from 2500 to under 100 visitors). I dont really trust compete.com's numbers outside of being and good indicator for trends, but it has me concerned. The client did tell me they are getting virtually no traffic. I am waiting on the crawl report to confirm its not a crawl or onsite problem but i dont think it is. I have 2 concerns: 1. I am taking this site on the cheap in order to establish a successful project, so I can work on their other sites, and I dont want to walk into a losing situation on the cheap! 2. I believe their webmaster is following some misguided SEO strategies but she has been with them for a long time. I dont think she wants to do theor SEO anyway, as she is very busy with maintenance and development, but if I could prove a penalty it would go a long way in helping me win the whole account from an SEO standpoint.