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Thanks, Michael. have put in the disavow so hopefully that's fine. One would hope that Google could tell that a furniture site wouldn't intentionally spam for jewellery related terms!

Thank you for your answer. We are already in Wikipedia, both in Swedish and English, and they are ranking higher than the negative posts. We are running a blog where we post something new every week. We are on all social media channels there is. So, we have lots of good stuff that we would like to rank even higher. I read somewhere that Google love forums and these kind of communities. So i guess it will be harder to push down these kinds of posts.

The way you are managing the widgets just fine, those links should be nofollow, as they are now. If you haven't receive a manual penalty notification it could be just as you said, a new site, with few links. Keep working on it, post content, etc so you can earn links the right way. Hope that helps!

Hi, As everyone else has mentioned, nofollowed links are not passing PageRank and therefore should not be influencing search visibility as assessed by the Google Algorithm. If there is no manual action in place then there should be no reason to disavow them. However, I look very differently at nofollowed links in the backlink profile of a site that has a manual action in place. In that case I ask two questions: Is the site one that is in any way undesirable? Are the nofollowed links part of an obvious large-scale manipulative effort? If the answer to either or both of these questions is yes, then I choose to both attempt to get the links removed and also disavow. The reason for this: of course I don't want links from dubious sites which even though not passing PageRank could be doing damage to my brand and reputation  and; when asking for reconsideration (judged by a real human being conducting a manual review) I believe that ignoring links that were obviously placed with the intention of manipulating search rankings simply because it didn't work, hardly shows a commitment to the "good faith effort" expected by the Webspam team. So, I go to the extra effort to try to remove and also disavow. Marie is quite correct in suggesting that there are cases where links on some pages are followed and on other pages nofollowed - in fact we see instances at rmoov where URLs that contain multiple links to a site are actually a mix of followed and nofollowed links as well. As suggested ...you have no control over those links at all, so once you have decided which ones really need to be dealt with disavowing is the safest option available unless you can actually get them removed. Again, I think the point has been fairly well made above ...Local directories are not all bad. Check for compliance with the Webmaster Quality Guidelines (which for paid directories includes a clear statement in their terms of service which indicates that you are paying for a site review and not for inclusion). The most relevant Guideline is the one about what Google views as "Link Schemes" Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Paul, Great Tip, most of the time though the sites ranking fine in Bing and as it works differently to Google I find no need to disavow vast amounts of links. I'm curios to see where Yahoo is going to go as I know they decided to get back in the game.

As previously mentioned, it's natural that sites get certain links without doing anything. These types of links are natural. Typically I see many of them have nofollow attributes on their outgoing links, but some do not. I wouldn't worry too much about them. It wouldn't hurt to disavow them, but again most likely they're not going to hurt your site's rankings.

Talk about nice timing. Marie has posted about this very issue today on Moz: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase I recommend that read to everyone who has doubts similar to mine.

Thanks everyone. There is a definite drop in organic traffic and our normal presence on page 1 is 7 or more pages in the hole now. Haven't had notification of a penalty, though it feels like it. Cleaning up some technical seo problems at the moment with sitemap structure etc. I tend to agree with Andy... if it walks like a duck.... Open site explorer is where I will start. Thank you. I will try Majestic if i need to dig further. Really appreciate the responses.

Hiya, If you've not got a penalty technically you don't have to worry but if you wanted to be proactive you could do some of the following: As you mentioned disavow some links you feel are not great and don't add to your sites portfolio. Get in touch with some of the webmasters ask the links to be changed to your domain instead of exact match. along side the above you could look into getting some more links to "out do" the links as a percentage but i wouldn't recommend it. Hope that helps you out a bit.

There is definitely no need to strive for more internal links pointing from your home page unless your internal pages are suffering from being "orphaned" (not linked to from anywhere) or having very few internal / external links pointing to them. You definitely don't need 1,700 links pointing out from your home page and it's doubtful the number of links on any one page is used as a ranking factor of any particular significance. The goal should be to pass PageRank to important parts of the website and aid usability, so if 24 links is doing that job for you, then 24 links is doing that job right.

Hi Mark, Once you've got the website properly locally optimized, on-going activities will typically include content development, citation building and earning reviews. You may also want to pursue earning links and social mentions. I recommend that you read this article to see how you're doing on the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide Hope this helps!

You can do this on a mass scale so that you can extract all outbound links, just did it yesterday

Hi AJ, I would compile a list of the stuff they made I would then take a look at the sites. Odds are, some are actually good sites with good traffic. You should be able to get a few good ones at least.  You can opt to change the content. Keep those and remove the links on the rest. IF they had unlinked brand mentions, just remove those mentions as well. No need to take down the whole thing If you want, you can actually replace the links and point it to one of your employees blogs, a social property or somethin' that isn't really ranking or has nothing to lose - Just being honest here because simply repurposing it instead of scrapping a whole year's worth of your "investment" is always better in my eyes.

Cheers!

Hi there, As you know, there are tons of websites that publish IP blacklists and not everyone of them are authentic. It is no uncommon that IP that belong to legit companies get blacklisted. While these are false positives, there is nothing to worry if you find your IP blacklisted in one or two places. However, you might want to investigate if your IP has been blacklisted in many places. You can use the following tool to check the same: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check For barracuda removal request, here is the URL: http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl/removal-request 1. Does your ranking get affected if you are associated with a website who is linked to you and is on the blacklist for spam only on Barracuda? No, not at all 2. If a website has a bad rating on WOT or WEBUTATION. Does that also hurt your ranking? Not directly and moreover, WOT and Webutation scores/ratings can be easily inflated and manipulated. As long as your website stands upto the expectations of your visitors and serves the purpose of its existence, you should be good. Those were my two cents. All the best to you my friend. Regards, Rafi Devanur

Hi Rajesh A rewrite is not a redirect. So whether it's a 301 etc is irrelevant. Rewrites work without redirecting the user elsewhere and simply convert one URL structure to another. Might be a good idea to talk to a developer about it because rewrites can cause issues with other pages or other rewrite rules if not implemented correctly.

Hi Chris, Your post has made me curious about your competitor's link profile. If the industry is tough to get links to, what has he done to get 6,000 links. Sounds like you know the number of links he has - have the analyzed where they are coming from? Are they natural and high-quality or are they weird and potentially a red flag to Google? I also think your industry sounds interesting. If you are doing construction for farmers, specifically, I'm guessing you're building some kind of agricultural structures. Would this be something that you could create an interesting infographic around that could be helpful to others in your industry, earning you industry-relevant links? How about videos? And I completely agree with Erwan's comments about developing great content on the site. And here's a great WBF from Rand on earning links via social mentions: moz.com/blog/the-top-4-ways-to-use-social-media-to-earn-links-whiteboard-friday Also, this one from Paddy Moogan is a bit old now, but still contains some good, creative ideas: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-links-in-tough-industries Local SEO is a very interesting field in that, in many cases, linkbuilding isn't even really necessary. Yes, in really tough verticals like law, it may be, but often it isn't, provided the business has an established, excellent website, clean citations and ongoing reviews coming in. How is your competitor doing in these areas and is there a chance you could surpass him in these things? Hope these thoughts are helpful!

So, these are sites that scraped your post and then linked back to it? If that's the case, the links are good, in a sense - they help Google remove the duplicates. I'm not sure what you mean by "there are 2-3 always". What does your link profile look like outside of this. If there are 66 links like this, and these are the only 66 links you have, it's possible you could be at risk. If these are 66 out of 6,000 links, then I probably wouldn't worry about it, especially if they're not paid links or somehow engineered (part of a link network, etc.).

Pursuing any avenue just for links is the wrong way to go about it. Press Release links have gotten hit bad lately because of their misuse and overuse... but if you have some news on your business that is actually PR worthy then shopping it around to respectable sites and getting your news out there to the right people can increase your qualified traffic. Same goes for guest posting. Its been hit bad lately but its not about the links per se. Getting your name out there, branding, sharing useful information or something humorous or poignant can help people learn who you are, increase your qualified traffic, etc. etc. and you don't need a followed link to reap the benefits. It also wouldn't hurt to look into social for branding and community purposes. And a product/tool/widget/infographic can also be a great way to gain links and/or spread via word of mouth/social mentions. But be sure not to go embedding any hidden links in sharable widgets or you'll get bitch slapped by Google as well. As Andy put it, creativity is the key here. There are so many ways of earning links, getting shared and being seen online that there practically is no limit to what is possible.

Thank you for your responses.