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If you use the profiles and have engagement on it i believe it is.

These situations are becoming much less common than they were a few years ago.  But this still occurs often in niches with low competition. It can also occur when a domain has more authority than you realize or links that are not being displayed in the tool that you are checking.  They could be new links or redirected links. From what I have seen, this type of page rarely beats a good page on a well-established domain.

I agree with you 100%.

No followed links are links that don't carry any 'link juice'. A lot of websites like twitter and facebook as well as comments on websites have no follow links because they don't want people spamming them to get easy links. Root domains are like www.seomoz.org or www.cnn.com. So if you have 300 links and 30 linking root domains that means that 30 different sites are linking to you. This is From The SEO Moz SEO Guide. (It's under chapter 4) " Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax: Lousy Punks! Links can have lots of attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" tag. In the example above, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, we've told the search engines that we, the site owners, do not want this link to be interpreted as the normal, "editorial vote." Nofollow, taken literally, instructs search engines to not follow a link (although some do.) The nofollow tag came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guest book, and link injection spam (read more about the launch here), but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines, but it is clear they do not passas much weight as normal "followed" links Are nofollow Links Bad? Although they don't pass as much value as their followed cousins, nofollowed links are a natural part of a diverse link profile. A website with lots of inbound links will accumulate many nofollowed links, and this isn't a bad thing. In fact, SEOmoz's Ranking Factors showed that high ranking sites tended to have a higher percentage of inbound nofollowed links than lower ranking sites." As far as how to fix it, when you have no followed links that generally because that is the way the website has the structure setup and there isn't anything that you can do about it. If you have a lot of links and not many linking root domains, you just have to try to diversify your links through link building.

Stephane - in my opinion, you're right to be confused. This question demonstrates PERFECTLY the stupidity Google has perpetrated with this latest round of unnatural link notifications. Up until now, Google has clearly stated that if you get one of these warnings, your rankings are going to be impacted and you must take action. I know - I was in the room at SMX Advanced in June when Matt Cutts stated exactly that. Now Cutts and Google are backpedaling and saying "actually, just because you received the warning, doesn't mean we are actually going to take any action - you may or may not need to do something about it. and you have no way of knowing unless and until your rankings tank" I've always respected Matt a great deal, but this last round of notifications and his explanation of it (for better transparency) are absolute bullshit and rather than clarification, have just horribly muddied the already murky waters. For what it's worth, here's what I would recommend go ahead and clean up any obviously spammy links you may have acquired, assuming there are any (but don't panic & go overboard) keep careful documentation of your clean up efforts do NOT submit a reconsideration request - at this point there's nothing to reconsider as your rankings haven't been affected make sure you're tracking your organic search traffic volume and rankings carefully so you can spot any drops as soon as they happen continue to try to acquire good-quality, varied, natural links from other good websites (to help offset any questionable links) if you see any significant rankings drops, then submit your reconsideration request with the documentation of the link cleanup work you've done (and including the links you haven't been able to clean up because they're outside your control.) The link warning won't go away because it's just a message that's been sent and can't (to my knowledge) be recalled, but if you do in fact have spammy links and clean them up, you "shouldn't" see any future effects on your rankings - but you'll have no way of knowing. You'll just have to sit and wait to see. Paul

Hey Donnie- Thanks for the response! That sounds like a great idea. I wasn't sure if Google, although de-indexing the site itself, would find it spammy that all the same content turned up on another domain. My thinking was although de-indexed they wouldn't necessarily 'forget' the old content, if you know what I mean. Thanks again for the helpful response!

Thank you for your response. In the meantime, I chose to email the webmaster so that he can have the link removed. I've got thousands of natural links to my website and near 1000 pages of unique, useful content so hopefully removing that link won't cause any major change since I wasn't ranking for that keyword anyway.

I think you should probably figure out what's setting off the red flags and fix it.  They like to give warnings first if it's not a huge issues.. but they could drop the hammer on you at any time. Best, -Jason

No problem, I feel for your predicament. Let me know if you need any help with anything. Thanks, David

Hi Caru, Firstly, paying for advertising space isn't a problem with Google, it's what funds most web businesses, including theirs. The issue they have is with people purchasing links with the sole purpose of passing PageRank to manipulate the search results. So in your scenario; paying for a premium classified ad to be seen first is just good business, and most sites will make these links 'no follow' anyway to give a clear indication to Google that it is an advertisement. Even if they don't no-follow, it will be pretty clear on any kind of manual inspection that you are paying for advertising rather than PageRank. That's the gauge you need to use really, as without seeing each site you are talking about it's difficult to say. Have a look at each site subjectively, and ask yourself if you'd be comfortable in having a member of the Google Webspam team manually inspecting your link there. If, like you say, it's purely for PageRank, then you might be setting yourself up for trouble. It's a similar situation to directories. It's far too simplistic to say all web directories are dangerous, as some of them are genuinely great links from hand curated niche enthusiasts. It is the same with classifieds, there will be some great ones to be on for both marketing and SEO purposes, but there will be a great deal that exist solely for SEO manipulation and these are the ones you want to avoid. In a way, I think you answered your own question when you said 'some sites send us clients, many of them never do. We keep putting ads there because of their PR' So when you ask what is the worth of these links, I would say very little. They are unlikely to pass any PR, and they could potentially land you in hot water in the future. How could you explain in a reconsideration request to Google that you advertised on a platform that you knew no one visited? Another quick thing to remember is that there's diminishing returns on links from any single domain. So once you have got a link or two from a domain, whether great or spammy, there is very little value from a purely SEO point of view from achieving future links. Thanks David

What do you mean "not being counted as links".  Do you mean that seomoz isn't picking it up in opensite explorer or that it isn't appearing in webmaster tools? If you just mean open site explorer then don't worry. OSE only crawls a small portion of the web and it's purpose is to give you some analysis rather than a defininitive link. If Google isn't picking it up and it has been there a while you just need to get some links pointing back to it.  Drop your twitter handle if you are guestposting / using author boxes or maybe as your link on some blog comments and it'll soon get picked up. Overall though, if you are worrying about a single link getting indexed then you probably are not using your time in the best way.  Focus on what to do to get more links, rather than worrying about the ones you get.  The payoff is far bigger.

Thanks for your input. I know they have some duplicate content at the moment, but I didn't think it would affect it this drastically. No links appear to be spammy and over optimization doesn't seem to be the issue.

If you used software to submit those links and they were accepted, then I can say with almost 100% certainty that 100% of those links are weak and low quality and are probably sending you "negative vibes" as we say here in the caribbean. Nowadays, there's less than a dozen (maybe a handful) of 'general directories' that you can get your site listed on that are within Google's guidelines on paid and editorial links.

Thanks for your reply guys. That all makes perfect sense. I want the site to be as useful as possible so seperate pages will help that cause.

"we are clobbering retailers in a very competitive space" Which is always nice to do!

No you don't need to do it every time you add content. If you have sitemap in place ( On your website), it will automatically update itself.

Thanks Jennifer.  It's good to have the SEOmoz seal of approval.  I have created a link to the blog post now.

I see there seems to be quite a large discrepancy in the number of links / linking domains between the two. Are you sure both are getting the same amount of links built? Have you manually checked?