I posted like 6 questions. How many would you like me to post?

Let me know

Thanks

Hi Aaron,

My Question would be this: How would you recover from a CreditCardGuide.com Google penalty?

For me, the CreditCardGuide.com penalty is such that you go from #1 to the 50s or 60s in terms of ranking ability for your most competitive terms - the worst of it is that this includes your own domain name...so a search for "creditcardguide" at Google results in your site not being in the top 10.

One caveat to the penalty - let's pretend that there was not a big buyer present? I have seen this happen to other high quality sites/domains without a buyer behind the scenes.

I would also say that the existing link building strategies have been quite clean for over 1 year, the ranking has been consistent for the most competitive terms in the top 5 for the past 12 months, the site isn't spam/hasn't been hacked, etc.

I don't know if SEOs have a name for this penalty...lol...that's why I'm calling it the CreditCardGuide penalty. :)

Have you seen any site recover from this? Thoughts?

Thanks!

-James
semvironment

Great idea Aaron, I was actually wishing you had some way of submitting suggestions like this. When I get a chance I'll submit a question to the Google Moderator page under the name SEOsean.

Thanks again!

-Sean

Aaron - since I don't have a specific "question" / scenario to ask about, I hope you wont mind me responding here in the comments section.

It seems to me that the questions posed so far are pretty specific which, can be helpful when a lot of SEO articles are more broad in nature.

But ... why not draw some themes from the board, which would include the top voted topically-similar questions?

Also, Rand announced he might be doing a "what makes this URL rank this way?" series, which I would love to see matched by SEOBook.

:)

Dear Aaron,

I provide creative consultancy for SMBs. As an additional part of my service, I am working more on SEO for my existing clients. They love my advise and also gained on my advise for growing their business. But I am still finding a exact way or providing SEO service effectively.

My Questions are:...

1. HOW SHOULD I START SEO ASSIGNMENT ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL?
2. WHAT ARE THE NECESSARY STEPS? (OR RATHER A CHECK-LIST)
3. HOW TO PREPARE AN EFFECTIVE & AFFORDABLE PROPOSAL FOR SEO JOB A CLIENT CAN'T RESIST?

To our more & better SEO success ahead....
Ali.

Pretty sure you can't currently use External NoFollow in a robots meta tag, but the ability to do so would be very nice.

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="EXTERNAL NOFOLLOW"

This could be backed by an anchor level 'follow' tag for those special links that you feel deserve juice passed.

The reason I suggest this is because I am currently working on a large site with hundreds of external links (mostly irrelevant)and having to rel="nofollow" each external anchor is a pain. Globally no-following all external links and then do-following links to quality sites would be so much easier from an SEO developers point of view.

How about a discussion on whether a pagewide/sitewide external nofollow facility for webmasters is a good idea or not?

Shamelessly asking for others to vote up my question on how to attract educated clients (and have them accept your proposal).

Some SEO gurus who broke their bank in the early days of Adsense claim the days of arbitrage are largely over for high profits. True or Myth?

Thanks, and I'll take my answer off the air. ;)

I'm surprised I've never heard you analyze and talk about companies like ePrize or Softcoin. Maybe I haven't been reading long enough. :-)

I have never heard of those companies.

ePrize is a company I used to work for. They handle most of the online promotions for companies like Coke and any other online promotion you see nowadays.

Here is a quote directly from there site (eprize.com)

"ePrize promotions offer the opportunity to build one-to-one relationships with your customers, while engaging them in a unique brand experience. The average website visit to an ePrize promotion lasts 3.31 minutes, with a smaller percentage of our promotions retaining site visitors an average of over 10 minutes!

Loyalty and sweepstakes programs can keep consumers coming back to your site, each time interacting with your brand on an increasingly personal level.
To view the case study of an ePrize promotion with a brand engagement focus, click here. (Dell Promotion) "

Seems somewhat related to SEO. Offering online promotions has proven to be a good way to drive traffic to ones site.

Last year they came out with a product called MyCaffiene that had a lot of potential but never seemed to of made it. It allowed smaller companies like mom and pop shops offer instant online promotions to their customers. The price was cheap compared to what the larger companies paid since they only had to pay $1 per customer lead (no money up front). Consider the possibility of offering a chance to win a car or $10,000 on your website, and I bet that would generate additional traffic to your site. Unfortunately the industry is now being dominated by what we call "sweep whores". They are the people who come only to try and win the prize while not showing any interest to your website or product in return.

Despite this, eprize has grown considerably thoughout the years. 2 years ago their sales where around 40 million. Now I believe they are twice that amount. At any rate, it's an interesting idea.

With a lot of focus on link juice flow through a site, does having a sitemap linked from the foot of every page mean you're diluting the effectiveness of your sites natural navigation based flow of link juice?

It would be interesting to see how you'd approach the design of a 10 or 20 page site around a niche product or service based business -

I have a blog on a specific subject locally (not in English) since 2 years. I do not have huge traffic, however people interested on my niche know and follow my blog from time to time. Soon I will launch a social networking site on the same niche. However, I will try to penetrate both locally and globally.

My blog domain name is a meaningless, easily remembered domain. I also bought a very generic domain name for the niche in my local language. But it will be useless for the global.

I can't decide, if I should use a domain which is very generic for local, and try another for global, or should I use my blog's domain(I can move my blog to a subdomain under that). Would my blog's history be helpfull for the new site rankings?

Thank you.