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Hi There I would look at the page as a whole - and the anchors coming to it - http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.familyfootwearcenter.com%2FWolverine-Boots-c38.html The reason it may be an issue, is that in my 10 seconds eyeballing that report I can sense a pattern. And that's exactly what Google is looking for. A pattern of 'link building' activities to try and boost that page for 'wolverine boots'. The problem is the page doesn't appear to have many (or any) natural links or natural anchor text. So I'd work on the page as a whole to reduce unnatural links into it. You can also dig deeper with Webmaster Tools to get more in depth than OSE will show.

Dull and unnecessary While outreach is important, something that often gets overlooked is linkable assets - why is someone going to link to your site? I talk a little bit about linkable assets on my own site here, but it is essentially creating content or 'something' that is going to entice others to link to you. People are more precious of their sites than ever before and don't give links away easily, so it's important to give them that reason. Get those creative juices flowing and make some noise. -Andy

Hi Sandra, I apologize it has taken me this long to get back to you about this post. It looks like you are in good hands and it is all settled. Sincerely, Thomas

As others have said, this will achieve nothing. However, there is a good way to use Google+ with new posts, and that is to optimise the first 35-50 characters as you would a blog post or other page you are trying to optimise. The reason being, that first part then becomes the page title for that particular post. -Andy

Thomas has a lovely answer. I'll just throw in that sites that have the top-level domain like .edu or .gov tend to have very good trust scores. Links from these sites will earn you more MozTrust.

Great answer with some quality humour. Love it! Thumbs up for you sir!

I agree with both responses, I would like to add my experience to the mix, my site decreased in Domain Authority and Page Authority due to the loss of a few sites that were no longer linking in a few months ago, my site is relatively new and the Domain Authority went from 20 to 18, it has since increased to 19 after a few new sites linked in so that could well be the reason for your DA drop, I am not aware of any recent Google Updates but I do know that my Moz DA was updated a few days ago so that may coincide with your recent drop, I am not sure how often Google updates the link data in GWT so it may vary from what you see in OSE and Majestic SEO, as Chris says, the historical link option for Majestic SEO is very handy and the data seems to be updated quite frequently also. Hope this helps

Maybe, it's more likely that they've simply moved to an updated, more sophisticated version. Generally speaking, PageRank above 4 is good. Also, try installing the MozBar and judging by Domain Authority or MozRank. For the metrics out of 10, look for 4 or above. Out of 100, 30 or above.

I would always nofollow any affiliate links. You can send them through an internal redirect first, which can be blocked in the robots.txt file. That's mainly if you just don't want them to know it's an affilaite link at all, and helps with internal tracking. Either way, don't give Amazon.com followable affiliate links.

That's what I did.  You can see the results in the attachment and should be able to figure how to replicate. ycDrxaQ

Thanks, Marie. That's a big help. It's your third point that I'm most worried about. Not all of our backlink profile consists of spam. We have some really good links - from the BBC, various other UK media like the Guardian, the Independent, even from wikipedia - but these links are mostly years old, and there isn't that much beneath them. We have a handful of good links at the top, and then a whole mass of spam, with very little inbetween. By the time I finish disavowing, there will probably only be about 30 or so legitimate domains pointing to ours. Google used to rank our website well,  even before we employed an SEO. We've kept some of these rankings, particularly in image search*, so I've some hope that we'll make a recovery from penguin in other areas, but I also know that penguin hits can be permanent. *This is, or rather was, our one bright spot, even after penguin hit us. You used to be able to type in just about any region or game park in Africa - our main business - and our images would come up first in the results. We lost these rankings not with penguin but when we changed our website dimensions a year or two ago and had to upload new images to replace the old. Those that we didn't change still rank well - type in Serengeti, for instance, and we're still right at the top. I've never been able to understand why we do so well in image search and so poorly in the main search results. Not sure if there's a question anywhere in there. I think I'm just waffling now. Thanks again for the advice.

Chris, Even though Google crawls more of the web than any other service, it has a metric it uses to determine which and how many links to show you in the tool.  It does not show all of your links, even though it knows better than any service exactly how many you have. Moz, does not crawl the web as deeply as Google but it does report on all of the links it finds.  Rather than attempting to index the entire web, Moz focuses on crawling the pages down to a depth that have an impact on search results.  If the pages it crawls have outbound links on them, those are the links that are likely to passing some amount of pagerank/authority to the page their pointing at.  Below that level, the quality/pagerank/authority is too low to be of any assistance to the page it may be linking to. So, where GWT links represent a sample of your total links, open site explorer is a tool designed to show you the total number of links that are helping you with your rankings. Other tools exist as well, and they use different crawl strategies and that present links based on different metrics.  I think the more you understand OSE, the more useful you will find it.

Dave Naylor is a well respected SEO practitioner in the UK... https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/ Contact them and ask for a quote....they're a solid performer, eh!

Telling someone there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty is misleading. While it may not officially be called a "duplicate content penalty," you can get penalized for duplicate content, and not protecting yourself from it opens you up. So when someone suggests to clean up duplicate content, it's bad form to butt in and imply that there's no need, since no such penalty exists. That's all I was trying to say. Won't spam this thread anymore discussing it.

It sounds like part of the reason for your question is frustration and uncertainty about what to do next. I often feel exactly the same. So you may want to read this post which helps you work out where to start and puts the issues with disavowing well down the line http://savvypanda.com/blog/guide-how-to-use-google-disavow-tool.html In a nutshell Use google webmaster tools to figure out where most of the links are coming from Work down the list in order and email the websites to ask them them to remove the links Once you hit diminishing returns start using the disavow tool. This is a good approach as it makes the problem manageable and you can then be systematic about moving forward. If it's like everything else I've ever done - 20% of the sites will be responsible for 80% of the links and at least some of them will be nice and take stuff down. That will give you a nice morale boost when they do it, and then another one when you get some rankings benefits. And then you will be over the hump and  it will just be another task you have to undertake Hope that this helps Denis

Sounds interesting, I would be interested in hearing other people's points of view, as far as I'm aware it wouldn't have a negative impact on SEO and I can't work out why it would. Do you have an example of the page you are hosting the infographic on ?

Travis, your comments are a massive help. Thanks so much. That Screaming Frog tool is also really helpful. I had noticed that different backlink checkers were giving me different results, and so I've been working with several (Webmaster tools, webmeup, Moz, and ahrefs) Originally, i was just working with webmaster, and so it was something of a revelation when I first looked at the data provided by the others and found that there were about five times as many spam links pointing to our site as I had first suspected. I think many of the sites pointing to ours have been deindexed, so won't show up in webmaster tools. I had also noticed that recent reports I'd generated were picking up on far fewer spam links than older ones, despite me not having managed to get rid of that many links. The post from Robert Fisher helps explain why. With most of the links I'm deleting, I think they're clearly spam. The seo company we used depended mostly on article directories, but also some forum and comment spam - some on legitimate sites, most on forums that were clearly just created for SEO spam. What I'm thinking is that I will focus on deleting the links with the most repetitive anchor text, and leave a few of those with more varied anchor text. From my understanding of penguin, google doesn't so much penalise you for having a large number of links from spammy sites - it penalises you for having a large number of links with identical anchor text, so I'm prioritising those links with keyword rich anchor text ('Tanzania safari', in our case) and leaving in place for the time being some of the smaller number of links with less repetitive anchor text (a small number say 'trips to Tanzania', for instance). The content audit looks like a mammoth job, but I'll try and work on that this weekend. I know that our site has a lot of duplicate content, for one thing (in some cases for good reasons). Perhaps we've been hit by panda as well as penguin. Thanks again.

I don't think that would be relevant since it's not a copy of the article and any way, it just references it. I also doubt that the huffington post does rel canonicals because that would lose them traffic.

Hi Chris you really brought some extra information, thanks for that going the extra mile.

Hi Dennis,Chrissmithps and Chris Menke thanks, its a good staff to help. Thanks again!