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I work with an organization that is ranking #2 for a branded search term, second to a competitor. They have zero similarity between their names, and we've worked with them to up their SEO game around all major areas (one drawback: SquareSpace is killing their site speed). Their DA is 59, the competitor's DA is 77. What are some smart, specific ways that we can help our client come back out on top?

I realise this is incredibly controversial!  And I also realise I’ll get a ton of trolls pulling me to shreds but… I’m in need of running a short-term experiment, but to do the experiment I need to get a test site ranking high very quickly (not worried about if it gets penalised, it is only a short-term test).

It happend to our website. We have seen major ranking fluctuations for our website because of one back-link. What kind of links those can be? Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?

one of our site had a poor site architecture causing now about 10.000s of 404 being currently  reported in google webmaster tools. Any idea about easily detecting among these thousands of 404, which ones are coming from links from external websites (so filtering out 404 caused by links from our own domain and 404 from search engines)? crawl bandwidth seems to be an issue on this domain. Anything that can be done to accelerate google removing these 404 pages from their index? Due to number of 404 manual submission in google wbt one by one is not an option.
Or do you believe that google automatically will stop crawling these 404 pages within a month or so and no action needs to be taken? thanks

Hi forum, my company has done almost ZERO link building, and most of the traffic we receive to our site is for our branded search terms (people searching for our company name). Our content and on-page SEO is pretty solid, but how would you suggest getting started in link building? We've dabbled in comment marketing, but almost all of these were unfollowed links. We already do PR and submit it to prweb.com. We have submitted to quite a few online directories and are currently working our way through relevant directories provided by SEOMoz. We do not want to pay for links, and we want to do all of this in house. We are committed to putting the time in to get high quality links by hand. Does anyone have any advice? A "Beginner's Guide to Link-Building" would be excellent. The specific site we are working on is http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html if that is of any use. Thanks!

Hi everybody, There's a lot of information about getting sitewide backlinks, but so few about on-site optimization. Is there a maximum of links to put on a page ? Is there a maximum of link that a page should receive ? etc ... ? So, what is the optimal strategy ? And I'm only concerned about on-page and on-site link, not backlinks commming from other sites. Thanks

We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.

OK, last question of the week.  I promise.    I'm doing something right.   I distribute for manufacturers.  For some of my less known manufactuers I am #3 or #2 rank.  For my main product the manufacturer is #1,2 with some numerical code as the discription. The manufacture will sell direct.  To get the customers attention I need to PPC, and luckily it's inexpensive. Is there any way to control what the content is of the listing?.   I would like to state in my #3 rank " 10-10-PP, In stock, same day shipping, best pricing." Does Google choose what to display and if so is there some where on my site I can influece this?  For you experts, perhaps this is the joke of the week.? Please do not have a heart attack when laughing.