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As per Eric, it has indeed been turned off. To be fair I had not used it for a while due to it being unmaintained and I wasnt that sure if it was accurate anymore.. Other solutions that I have used for authority signals are developed by MOZ. I would suggest installing the MOZ toolbar extension and also take a look over the opensiteexplorer. You can get some information you want from there like Page Authority and Domain authority. plus spam score and more.

Thank you both of you for the replies. I try to report as I find them, but will be even more vigilant now about it. As for Rebecca's questions: It's a algorithmic bad ranking penalty, still call it a penalty since it's penalizing us and reason I think it's penguin is the site in question has traffic patterns that best fit a site suffering from panda and penguin issues. Panda is part of the core algo and hasn't recovered from a single keyword and it's synonyms ranking better than page 5. Penguin is the only algo left that corresponds to the traffic being lost as far back as April 2012. Other reason I say it's penguin is the client's backlink profile is horrid, over 20% follow links are that keyword or synonym anchor text to crap sites, if that's not the trigger for the penguin issue then I'm getting results from doing the wrong things. Both our redesign and link cleanup have directly increased keyword ranking however every increase that happens isn't passed page 5, I've seen it one page 4 before but only for a day, nothing longer. So it seems to be able to rank higher but is kicked back almost right away faster than it increased. Really seems like it's being " adjusted " after going passed page 5.

I completely agree with Eric - you're getting these links because you likely rank well in an image search. While it is completely up to you to decide to keep those links or disavow them (I have links from some of the same domains and have kept them without adverse effects), if you choose to disavow, I would recommend disavowing the whole domain. These types of sites will only continue to add images - adding links to your sites - and disavowing a select few won't be as effective as disavowing the entire domain.

Hey There, thanks for writing in and sorry that you are running into this issue. The Unlinked Mentions query should automatically be including the search operator -rd:yourdomain.com when you go to that tab. For example, when I go to that tab while researching moz.com, the system autofills the mentions field with the search query: moz OR moz.com -rd:moz.com. The -rd: operator means "exclude this rootdomain." Can you tell me if that operator is not being included automatically when you go to that tab or if you are removing it from the query? I tested this feature for a number of sites and the operator was correctly included automatically on all of the tests I've run, so I'm not certain why you may be running into issues with the operator. Any further details you can provide will help me dig into this further.

Hi Krishna! We'd love an update—did Dmitrii's or Patrick's response(s) help? And if so, would you mind marking one or both responses as a "good answer?" Thanks!

Hi there, If you're trying to make more relevant some page, as you do some traditional linkbuilding, internal links shuold come too. As Eric stated, dont create links just looking at the relevance of the page where the link would go, be careful about the visitors, be constructive and creative. About the content, It would be advisable to create specific content for that targeted page. Even more, some blog posts about that scholarship, with its corresponding internal links. Dont abuse from the blog posts, remember to look after the audience. Hope it helps. GR.

1.-Creating Great content and then doing outreach , guest posting and social promotion on it 2.- Use digtial pr - Give out samples, high res images,  provide expert advice , create relationships , Find interesting angles to pitch blogs and sites 3- Create deals and promotions and then promote it 4- Create link bait: create Crazy products like unicorn meat, Be controversial , create amazing tool To sum up provide value to the web in return for exposure and eyballs - value comes in many forms You asked for an example so here is one we did - when we saw 3d printing was all everyone talked about - we took our sample ring sizer and made a 3d printable ring sizer - https://www.brilliance.com/services/3d-rings it got tons of links And here is an infographic we did that got over 400k repins on pinterest http://site.pishposhbaby.com/blog/2014/03/12/keeping-track-baby-habits-infographic/ Best of luck

I see in my slide page, the link I paste on Description box is same as general text. And I see link I paste on Slide. What is backlinks?

One more idea is if I write some code that says if a link on my site gains more than say 3 votes that it turns into a dofollow. Again, I plan on submitting links to competitors sites for any ebook I can find, so it sould actually be a helpful resource.

Sounds really spammy, in my opinion a single link on the prestigious national organisation may serve them better

My only response would be this. Sometimes it can work especially in the short run, but is often penalized. I would wait until the next penguin update comes out and take a look at the competitors site again. Again, not linking site wide from the footer is not a hard-and-fast rule but more of a general best practice. The problem is that these are not editorial links per se. As such they are at constant risk are being devalued or penalized by Google. You can roll the dice and sometimes see a short-term victory. But more often than not you risk getting burned.

So there were no external links pointing to the subdomain admin.site.com ? If that's the case you could probably just noindex/nofollow the thing or let it 404. You could write an .htaccess rule to rewrite the domain name, but it's actually probably not worth it now that I think about it. The exception, of course, is if the subdomain had external links pointed to it.

I would advise against it since most reputable blogs I would assume have a rel="nofollow" for links when public commenting is allowed. For example Moz has rel="nofollow" on users profile links also. So I would not advise using that as a strategy for creating backlinks.

When you specify Https to connect to a website, the actual connection requested by the browser is different. That’s something that you need to set up on your site – and you’re quite correct. The HTML doesn’t need to change for that. Instead of using https on only sensitive parts of your site, you may go ahead and use https for your entire site. This does not affect accessibility or performance in any way and it’s a great way to hedge your bets against future Google algorithm changes. Changing the text “http” to “https” in all of your links that point to other parts of your own site is likely the one technical task you’ll need to do yourself. You should set Up 301 Redirects.

This is likely just a lag issue. I have found GWT's to be very, very slow at reflecting changes such as links that were there and are not anymore. There may have been a link there the last time that page was crawled and GWT just hasn't crawled since the link was removed.

Hi Lars, My first questions is whether or not a disavow is strictly necessary. It is absolutely normal for websites to showcase a small amount of spam in their link profile and in many cases I have seen a link profile that is "too clean" merits as much skepticism as a website with spammy links. The purpose of the tool is to alert you to potentially spammy or harmful links, but this does not mean it is causing your website, rankings or traffic any harm. The first thing I would do would be to determine exactly how problematic this issue is based on your overall link profile rather than focusing your efforts on a few spammy links. Additionally, it is worth determining whether the links you are referring to are follow or nofollow, since a disavow merely creates nofollow tags instead of removing the links entirely. If they are already nofollow links, then there's no point in conducting a disavow. If you are dead set on removing them, however, here would be my process for your 3 questions: If the page featuring the link to your page no longer exists, then the link no longer exists. At the very least it is not providing you with any metric-enhancing data and won't have a follow attribute. Nothing to worry about here. This is a disavow situation if you don't have access to Webmaster Console. Same as 1) above - if the page linking to you doesn't exist, then the link doesn't exist. If the page exists and you have no option for removing it or contacting the webmaster, then you have to run the disavow here as well. Again, I will stress that disavows should be treating as a last-ditch effort when facing a ton of spammy follow links. If you are not meeting these criteria, then it's probably not worth going that route. Hope this helps - if you have any other info that might help feel free to get in touch and I'll help as best I can. Cheers, Rob

I wouldn't be too concerned Google themselves recently said in their webmaster guidelines "Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most)." Think of it more from a UX perspective, if its good for the user keep it!

I'm not sure I can give you some references, I can Google, I guess, but you can as well. It's type of idea-knowledge you get from being in industry for some time. Read the comment below by EGOL, he has good point about number of internal links to the same page as a logic factor.

I think that Google will consider the trust and the authority of the linking website. Google will also consider the context and relevance of the page and the paragraphs and the sentences that are associated with the link. So a link to a privacy site from a privacy page is relevant in my mind.  Nobody knows what Google really thinks about these things, but to me the value of this link ranges somewhere between good and superb.

Thanks everyone!