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I assume you have checked Google Web Master Tools for any warnings/messages? and did you buy a load of cheap links and guest posts.... eg:- http://www.beveragesalesanddistribution.sitew.in/#Page_1.A

Hi Hernant, You should probably adjust the plugin to make sure you can add exceptions to it. Adding rel="follow" won't change anything to do this as follow is not a valid value for the attribute.

Hi David, Thanks for the question and I'm glad to see that you found my list of infographic sites I think that infographics can still be a good way of marketing your website and getting links, the key really is to make sure that you're not just doing an infographic for the sake of doing an infographic. To be more specific, it shouldn't just be created in order to get links. There needs to be a solid, accurate story and data behind it as well as a nice design. Too many infographics these days are thrown together very quickly and shouldn't even be infographics! These are the ones that are probably not going to help very much in terms of links or traffic. I believe that this is what partly led to Matt Cutts saying back in 2012 that Google may seek to discount links generated by infographics at some point. It sounds like you don't need to worry about this but I wanted to point it out anyway. Re your questions - I would avoid using commercial anchor text and stick to branded anchor text - this helps reduce the chance if the activity being seen as spammy and causing you problems with Google. I'd certainly recommend linking back to the original source of the infographic or the data behind it, I'd avoid linking back to commercial category pages because this can also make it look a bit spammy. In terms of how many you should distribute to, it is less about the number and more about the quality of the site. The list I provided was put together over two years ago now (I need to update it!) so I'd recommend you review the sites and make sure they're of a good quality before submitting to them. Ultimately, you want your infographic to be covered on good quality sites that have the potential to send you quality, relevant traffic. If you use this as your benchmark, it will mean that you should end up going for good quality sites. I hope that helps and best of luck with your infographic! Paddy

Passing page juice to sources is a good idea in most cases. Moreover, if you are linking to websites with good quality and unique content, you must pass the page juice for sure.

I wouldn't count on affiliate links passing value to your site in the long term. http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06 Note that most of the presentation is addressed to affiliates rather than to the program owners. Google tries to identify affiliate links and discount them, so you might not be gaining any value from these links anyway. If the links come from low-authority or low-quality sites AND have anchor text, it's surely not worth the risk. From Google's perspective, you shouldn't try to gain link equity from a link when financial compensation is involved. Ads, affiliate links, and other paid-for links should technically all be nofollow. Images and branded links for affiliates may help avoid penalties (even though Google will probably devalue the links eventually), but where you're already penalized and in need of a manual reconsideration, I'd just get as close to what Google wants as possible.

Yes, domain authority. We were tracking this ourselves using open site explorer. Thank you for the information, my suspicion was either 1) Our SEO company did as you suggested, Cyrus, or 2) They were building some good links, but google devalued a bunch of them due to algo changes, although they are not telling us which algo changes we were affected by.

I'm going to answer generally since there's not a lot of info here.  If you can manage to get good relevant links to your page, that's always helpful.  I'm not sure what you have on the domain right now, but if you have some sort of placeholder page with decent design and some kind of teaser or information for what will be there, this can be a very effective way to drum up excitement.  Off the top of my head mailbox (http://www.mailboxapp.com/) had a placeholder page for months, where you can sign up for a waiting list for the app.  It drew a lot of press, a lot of sign ups, and yes, a lot of links to a page that was not much more than a placeholder. On the other hand, if you don't have anything there now and don't plan on doing so, I would stay away from just trying to build spammy or otherwise unrelated links.  It could and probably will hurt you in the long term.

Thanks and assumed that was the case, Chris. Actually, I emailed them from their contact form, then saw a direct email link on that Contact page, so I emailed Tarek as well. He replied by email and also then called our office to apologize for the inconvenience and let us know the link was removed and we have confirmed this. Now, if every other webmaster would respond this quickly and politely, it would make our jobs a LOT less frustrating. Thanks for responding Kevin and Oren! - Patrick

Hi Kyle, Thanks for your question. "I really can't be arsed giving every single site it's own full SEO treatment :)" Being honest, without putting major effort into each site, I doubt you'll be able to dominate an entire SERP for even a medium competition keyword for a decent length of time. As has been mentioned below, there have been efforts by Google to tone down results from the same entity (admittedly, to varying success) but it feels like for the work that is involved, you may as well spend the time building a single site and marketing that one really, really well so that it stands the test of time. I'm not really sure what you mean by link blocking to be honest, but if you want to clarify, I'd be happy to follow up. Cheers. Paddy

Hi Wardy, probably I was not clear enough, sorry! Y suscribe to your original proposal, "speed test tool" as a correct anchor, Good luck!

Hello Dave, Overoptimized internal linking text can have a negative impact on your site's rankings in Google. Well-optimized, user-friendly internal linking text that does not go overboard can have a positive impact on your site's rankings in Google. For example: If the anchor text of all internal links going into your "Blue Widgets" says "Buy Blue Widgets Online" and you have pages for "Red Widgets" that have hundreds of internal links saying "Buy Red Widgets Online" and the same for Green Widgets, etc... that is probably overoptimized. It would be better if they all just said the name of the category (i.e. Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Green Widgets) since the "Buy... Online" part is implied. I hope this answers your question. Good luck!

SEMRush has a whole load of keyword data on the domain you mentioned. For merchantcircle.com, it's got (at the time of checking) the ranking poisition for 424,216 keywords and the url of the ranking page. (Unfortunately it doesn't have the page that you mentioned.) Looking at the page, there really isn't all that much content, so determining a keyword that the page might plausibly be raning for is pretty easy. A quick look at the <title>and the <h1> does give you a pretty big clue that "Spokane Painting Pros" is the likely target keyword.</p> <p>The Moz Rank Tracker does report that for "Spokane Painting Pros", the specific page mentioned, is ranking at #9, although it can't tell me if the site is getting any organic traffic for that keyword. (Google Webmaster Tools might have some more information on the keyword including impressions and click-throughs)</p></title>

Janice: Curious how your changing the domain name went a few years ago. Did you experience any negatives to doing so? What about positives? -- Thanks. (yes, i know this was over a year ago)

Thanks Travis!

In light of the fact that the client admitted that he recently paid for building spam links, it is more likely that the links being attributed to a negative SEO campaign were actually purchased by the client himself (knowingly or unknowingly) and that they are just recently taking effect. Nonetheless, in your reconsideration request, be clear about differentiating what links the client attributes to that SEO firm's efforts and the links are attributed to the negative SEO effort, which are continuing to show up. Treat them as separate issues in the same reconsideration request.  Start out with something like "We have two issues going on--the client hired an SEO firm that built links from these specific domains [domain 1, domain 2, domain 3,....]  but we also have these other links that are accruing from what is believed to be negative SEO and which we are disavowing as they show up...."  and then explain your outreach process for the links attributable to the client.   If that doesn't work, there's always the option to drop another reconsideration request with a different tactic.

In terms of Google +, I need to swot up on this as I'll admit I don't have much of a clue!  Noticed a mozinar video about it, I think, so will look at that as a starting point. Cheers for this: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies.  I've had a brief look so far, but will look at the article more thoroughly when I get chance.

Just adding to what the others have said, but there could be a number of reasons: WMT is slow You actually lost the links The links aren't being redirected properly, i.e. multiple hops, no redirect at all 302's and other redirection CAN actually show up in WMT, you'll see it listed as "via this intermediary link.... The advice the others gave is solid, you'll need to double check with some kind of HTTP response code tool to check. Please supply a URL. Cheers, Dave

I am not sure there are titles that will ensure anything. Just like any direct mail or email marketing tactic, people get used to overused ones quickly and easily. My advice is not to use the same title every time, but craft each on to each person you are reaching out to. Trying to do guest posting en masse is not going to be worthwhile for you.

Here is my experience... Client runs a large ecommerce site and also creates a feed that is used for the Amazon listings. When title on ecommerce site = title on amazon, only the amazon listing ranks (images and product descriptions are the same) When title on ecommerce site is slightly different than title on amazon (e.g. "brand model t-shirt" vs "brand men's model t-shirt"), both of the pages rank in search. So titles MUST be different in all channels, images/descriptions should be different, but not nearly as important. If you have a handful of products, I'd invest the time in creating several variations of the descriptions/images. If you have thousands, you are better off spending your resources elsewhere.

Sorry for the delayed response. This post at http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal is a good starting point for how to recover from a penalty or manual action.