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Hi Thomas, It's highly likely that a link from a page like this is useless no matter where the link is placed, I'm afraid. Unless the directory is highly cited from other reputable sources, closely edited and genuinely listing the best in a particular business (which I would say it isn't, since it's selling link space and is very long), Google will understand not to pass authority to the sites listed. If there is any boost from having a link on a page like this, it will be temporary and may well carry much higher risks in the long term than it does short term benefits. You may spur on indexing of your URL by having it listed there, but you are also likely adding it to a bad neighbourhood. Do you trust all the other sites the page / site has linked to, most of which will also have paid to be there? The issue is also that if you are well aware that you can pay to be listed, Google is probably aware of this too. It should be very easy to crawl for terms like "submit your site" and look for £, $, € values listed by submission request forms. I would honestly consider removing your site - your competitor likely does not beat you because of this one listing or listings like it (especially if their site has been on this page for quite some time). For context, when we do link clean-up operations for new clients who have a lot of poor links or whose sites are under penalties, we remove all links on pages like this. I hope this helps, Jane

Hi Scott, Check out the Moz Recommended List - included are companies whose services Moz recommends for consulting, covering SEO, CRO, design, etc. You may find a good agency or freelance consultant through this list that meets your needs or who can refer you to someone appropriate. I echo the statements regarding contacting the person who developed your website if you had a specific developer. He or she may be able to help too. Best, Jane

Sounds like a perfect plan with extra preventive measures!!

Hacked? Penalized :O… relax, looks like you are over conscious about your data available on GWT which is good to an extent but increase in back link profile never always means you are hacked or penalized by Google. In order to verify what exactly happened in your website, my advice is to go to Open site explorer and check the just discovered links and see who linked back to your website recently. If what you see scares you (in terms of quality) you have to worry about and take preventive measures accordingly!! (Like removing the links or disavowing them). Incase what you see looks good to you, than no need to worry about the insane increase in links that point back to your website. Actually, Links are the byproduct of a great effort on generating quality content, so if you have one, people will naturally link to it!! You don’t always have to put efforts to gain links, sometime it works without that as well! P.S: Although I don’t see any point of penalty here, but just to make sure take a look at your Google Analytics profile and see if the traffic is normal then relax and if it is insanely dropped in the last few days (or may be weeks) then compare the date or drop to the Google update calendar (available here) and if you see the data matches or nearby then you should put the penalty option in consideration. Hope this helps!

Thanks Paul, I'm more curious about how and why these links are created.

The next time Google crawls the previously-linking page, it should note that the link is gone, as it will cache the page. Any benefit or detriment that the links was passing on should technically be nullified. Moz's crawl will update when it re-visits the page as well, but the frequency of Moz, Googlebot and the updating WMT is really hard to predict. If the link is on a highly-traffic, well linked-to page, G and Moz should pick it up quickly. If not, it can take a long time. The Moz index is updated about every 3 - 4 weeks; again, the removal of one individual link requires the latest crawl to have noticed that it has gone, which is likely but not a certainty.

Hi James, In this case, I would try and remove the poor-quality links. Disavowal is a good tool is you can't remove something, but if a link is truly gone, it can't hurt you again in the future. It can be time-consuming, but the process of removal works best if requests come from an official company email account. We have found that it's best to follow up a week or so later if you get no response. Any links you can't remove that you feel are particularly bad, you can disavow. This isn't a necessity and you might want to wait until you think they're hurting - Matt Cutts did say this week that you can feel free to disavow links when you're _not _penalised, but I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to that advice. I'd definitely try to remove them first. This should eliminate the need to start with a fresh website or fresh content. Cheers, Jane

If I look at the link profile of my own websites (which have never received linkbuilding services) I am shocked to see links from some awful looking sites.  I don't get excited about them because they are links from black hats and spammers who build mashup websites by slapping together information scrapped from other websites, grabbed from business directories and stolen from other sources. If I look at the link profile of almost any other site that has been on the web pulling reasonable traffic for at least a couple of years I will see the same thing.  Even the best sites on the web attract tons of spammy links without doing anything to produce them. So, I think that it is really hard to assess the links that you see pointing to other websites.  If you see stuff that looks like manufactured links... they probably are manufactured links but they are on spam sites of a type that google is not going to penalize you for. If I was in the lending space I would not be surprised by very many things.  And if a website does have really spammy link.... they might have been disavowed a long time ago.  Keep in mind that disavow has been around for a couple years or more and tons of people - especially in the lending industry - have disavowed an awful lot of links.

Hi again, Sorry for the misunderstanding. The links being from identical content should not be harmful to you - this sort of citation is fairly common, e.g. when a site has shared a piece of viral content like a video, infographic, tool (calculator etc.) or cited case study that others reproduce and link back to. I'd be far more concerned about the quality of the linking sites. I think the duplication question will also be even less of an issue if you remove the poor-quality links: identical citations from high-quality sources will pass as normal and not malicious liking activity.

Hi Marie,  Thanks for the input. I always hate trying to short answer something like this...cause I know someone's going to fill it in. You make good points. I still think given he has around 6500, if half of those are sitewide, it isn't to his benefit. What do you think? (I know you do a lot with penalty removal.)  He has gotten a partial penalty. Best to you, Robert

Hi Maria, With such low external linking root domain numbers (8 and 5), it is likely that links are not the primary ranking factor here. Their 1,388 links are most likely not an attempt to trick Google: they are likely to be from site-wide links where the site has been naturally linked to from a side-bar or blogroll, etc. It's quite common to see this (although if you dig around, you might find that they have done something dodgy - you'd need to look at the specific examples). The same goes for the 773 links from 14 domains. To the best of our knowledge, Google generally takes the total linking root domains or total linking c-classes number most seriously. By c-classes, I mean that Google may discount links if they all come from separate sites hosted on the same server or set of servers. This is to stop someone renting space on three servers, building 800 little websites and linking back to their hub site. This used to work well many years ago! Moz reports on the number of root domains here, which is most likely totally fine for these types of analyses however. If you are ever suspicious as to whether someone is using a "link network" (renting a lot of server space on the same servers to build lots of linking websites), check out the IP addresses of the sites they have links from. You can use a range of free tools for this, like https://www.site24x7.com/find-ip-address-of-web-site.html. Do all the sites have a similar or the same IP? Definitely operated by the same person. Use Bing to search for that IP address and you can see all the other sites hosted on that IP, e.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip%3A69.163.214.222&go=&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=ip%3A69.163.214.222&sc=1-17&sp=-1&sk= In this example, this IP is just shared by a lot of sites hosted with Dreamhost, but that kind of snooping can be interesting for backlink competitive analysis as well As far as why you are not ranking as well goes, it's likely that a lot of other factors are in play with low link numbers. How active are you all on social media? How old are the websites / domains? How long have the domains been registered to their current owners? Have the sites ever been severely penalised in the past? How good is the internal optimisation of the sites? Definitely keep up the link building work because it's a very important ranking factor once you build a higher number of high-quality links and differentiate yourself from the low numbers of your competitors. Also take the advice in this thread about engaging in other audience / content driving activities. Cheers, Jane

Well I appreciate your experience enough to believe you are probably correct.  I have read many of your responses to people here.  You know your stuff.

Definitely don't use nofollow. Using nofollow won't solve the problem of having too many links, and will just end up hurting your site. It is almost never a good idea to use nofollow on internal links. What you should consider instead is to have navigation that changes in response to what section of the site the user is in. For example, if the user is in the automotive category, it makes sense to have links to tires and oil, but it's not necessary to link to a subcategory for perfume. Having contextual navigation is great from an SEO perspective, and also provides for a better user experience of not overwhelming the user with a hundred choices. That being said, limiting a site to having 100 links per page is a very old Google recommendation and is not a hard and fast rule. Having a lot of links on a page makes it more difficult for Google to crawl and dilutes the link juice on a page, but is sometimes necessary. Amazon.com, for example, has 300+ per page. How many links Google is willing to crawl is a factor of your site's Pagerank.

Hi We will also have one site doing what you have suggested, but we built one local site in our city while we worked on the business plan for the rest. That site has been live for 6 months and as we used the location for google local business and verified it our local site gets about 500 unique visitors a week from the local area (for free) which gives that location more than enough business. To get the same from adwords would cost £175 a week. We wanted to replicate this covering the country. As for the updates, Wordpress Multisite you can set up a master site that can propagate all the changes into the others automatically Mike

Completely agree with Chris.

Does the client have a PR team or anyone that reaches out to writers when there is a story like a new product or brand? If not, that needs to happen first. Hire or contract PR help, best with someone that already has contacts that you can benefit from. When you have that, then yes, press releases are helpful to get the word out about a new product or brand. But don't rely on the press release itself to bring recognition, stories, or anything else. Press releases like any other piece of content needs to be promoted to the wider audience. On the technical side, press releases should not be used for link building. A well executed press release along with the right promotion will bring links, but not from the release itself.

First, I'd suggest thinking of all the possible intentions of that search... The real question is why would you want to attract traffic that likely won't convert? do you think the people typing 'cut throat razor' in searches are actually your target market? If not, imagine the bounce rate, which will have a negative impact on your site's ranking if it's extreme. my suggestion would be to start looking at attracting long-tail traffic or using a a tooll like ntopic, or seochat's related keywords tool to get more relevant traffic around your target phrase. good luck!

Hi guys, thanks for the responses. We have used the Screamingfrog tool and spotted a bunch of 403 pages so we are looking into that. Images were all used with permission. I have mentioned the telephone number and address thing to the guy. I have checked about the national geographic link and there was definitely no bribe involved.

Thanks Moosa, that makes perfect sense to me now

Hi, Having more product pages doesn't mean better ranking.  However, having more pages just simply mean that they have more pages for Google to crawl but doesn't help with ranking.  In the end it comes down to backlinks, on page SEO (product description, title tag, url...), social mentions and etc. I believe your competitor has better quality links as you've mentioned and probably performing better on other on site and off site activities.