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Hi Stephane, I'm wondering if you've seen any rebound at all since the penalty was revoked back in May?

Very curious Google would send you those links. Is there any reason to think they are non-editorial? Perhaps they were placed as part of automation or copy and pasted from another site template? Is there any relationship between the tree sites? In my experience, there's no safe level of anchor text ratios. And exact match branded links can cause you trouble, especially for sites with lower Domain Authority. Mix these with low quality links and it's a headache combination. Unfortunately, even if the links are editorial, your best bet may be to get them removed. You could also try submitting another reconsideration request and explain why those links are editorial. By definition, most blogroll links aren't editorial (as they are placed by a CMS automatically on each page rather than a human) so this may be an uphill battle. Keep us updated. Best of luck!

On the dofollow vs. nofollow thing, I've written about it before: http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Since-Quora-renders-all-outbound-links-with-nofollow-attribute-what-is-the-SEO-value-of-such-Quora-links-then Don't worry too much about that. I don't think it's suspicious to have 0 nofollow links, and I don't think Google could draw any valid conclusions based on that alone. Anchor text is a little trickier. Penguin initially set a pretty low bar - even at 50% high-value anchor text you were pretty much safe. They've since honed in, and will continue to do so. More importantly, they're looking at non-achor-text ways to target manipulative links. Generally speaking, if you can control the anchor text, it has a high potential to be a manipulative link. This is what happens when you "build" or "earn" links rather than trying to build an audience. Look one step down the funnel, instead: rather than looking about the perfect links individually, look at how you're going to get the perfect links. For example, rather than trying to build anchor text, build a good piece of content that will also get you relevant anchor text. Want to rank for insurance terms? Build a bunch of useful content pieces around insurance.

thanks ill look into that.

I figured as much. Its a shame that it has come down to that. Its amazing how my website still gets about 3000 comments a day, all of which are in a spam queue. People seem to think they are still counting for something. What would you say is your favourite way for building links now then? (without spilling your secret sauce of course)

Thanks, Rob. I did notice the search volumes are the same. And it is true that the searches are very close. With Semantic update this may become even closer as they are the same in reality. It crossed my mind though that there may be a benefit of choosing 'i phone' over 'i-phone' as people are less likely to type in a hyphen rather than not, especially on mobile. Every little helps.

Jorge- Can you check the age of the domain name?  I've seen instances where sites that have been alive for a long, long, long time can outshine other sites with better statistics, but they've withstood the test of time for Google.  That's one place I'd look to see if there is a substantial difference.

Nofollowed links are worse than "dofollowed" links as they do not flow link authority. Its unlikely that all of your links will be dofollow but if you have too many nofollowed links, could be a bad sign. Usually nofollowed links are 1-15% of the profile but depends on industry. Compare your portfolio to successfully ranking competitors to see where you should be at.

On the big question, I definitely agree with Gary - Penguin can cause an algorithmic penalty, and that can impact your entire site. It's definitely not something to mess around with. Google devalues links all the time, but that's separate from Penguin. When Penguin 1.0 launched, Google made it clear the update was punitive. As for when Penguin runs, we're really not clear on that. Penguin data seems to be updated outside of the real-time algorithm, but it's tough to say whether that only happens during an official Penguin update or if the data is updated more frequently. My gut feeling (based partially on the few Penguin recovery stories out there) is that it has to be a bit more frequent than the confirmed updates, but it's certainly irregular. I don't think every six months is accurate, honestly. Recovery is tricky - since Penguin is algorithmic, reconsideration shouldn't help in theory, but the reality is a bit more murky. Penguin does need to refresh, and the links do need to be re-crawled - Gary is certainly right about that. Those timelines can be highly variable, though.

Thanks for the reply, Tom. The statement you make about the rankings not magically appearing is great to hear. Have been trying to explain this to the client for a while so always good to see someone else agreeing with me. For now will continue the strategy of trying to clear up the links as best we can and looking at keywords which were not being spammed to death before and trying to rank for those.

You are correct, BOTW isnt one of them- it is currently marked in LinkDetox as a "toxic" link

Anthony, Marie, Chris, thanks a million for your responses, all most helpful. Chris, it's funny you should mention this: "...site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you." The most recent response I had from a site owner was exactly this. The email stated the link had not appeared there by chance, it had been placed free of charge by either my client, or someone acting on their behalf. Which is true, unfortunately. Marie, the particular sites I'm dealing with at the moment I will never want links from in future Thanks again for your responses, you've definitely answered my query.

Thanks Peter

Hi Matthew! Link building in today's SEO world is about relevancy, trust and authority. The guest posting option is fine (asking blogs if you can write something for them), as long as what you're writing is an original and quality piece of content, and you're reaching out to trustworthy blogs that are, ideally, closely topically relevant to your own site for a link. In a perfect world all your links would be from relevant domains. However, links from irrelevant domains aren't bad - they still pass trust and authority, and having irrelevant links is part of a natural, diverse linking pattern. But if all or the vast majority of your links are from topically irrelevant domains, that becomes a problem. I use Blogger Link Up and My Blog Guest to find prospective blogs to approach, but do your research, make sure you are reaching out to quality sites. Consider creating other content besides articles as well that stand a good chance of getting shared. Videos and ebooks for example. Although having a peek at competitors' link profiles might give you some good ideas, don't just copy everything. Again, you want only quality links - links from relevant trusted websites to your own. So don't try and copy anything that doesn't meet this criteria. You want your links to resemble a natural link building pattern and that gives you the biggest clue as to what is acceptable nowadays - so from a variety of sources, using a variety of linking/anchor text including the URL itself as you'd expect if they were just creating from people sharing your content around, and in a natural context (e.g. part of a review, or a resource link in a genuinely useful comment on a relevant article). Be very careful about deliberately creating links with your exact keywords in the anchor text. For example, if you were targeting the keyword 'car wax' you'd be better off linking to your site with natural variations such as 'here's a great article on car wax' 'here's how to apply car wax' 'the pros and cons of using car wax'. I think anchor text carries a lot less importance nowadays and Google will take more of a signal from the content on the linking page and linking site (but on the other hand, if you create lots of exact-match anchor text links to your site, Google does then pay attention as you risk a penalty). So yes, get natural-looking links from authority websites in your niche and you should see an improvement in your rankings for your target keywords.  Link building aside, focus on creating great content first and foremost, because in time that'll earn you natural links anyway. Your second question - if people start talking about your article and sharing it, yes they will just share a link and that's what you want. You don't want them to share the actual content of the article. There would be loads of duplicate copies of your article all over the web then, and that's not good for SEO! (sorry if I have misunderstood this part). Getting all those social shares is good though, it's sending a signal to Google that your site has something worth sharing, that perhaps it's an authority on your subject. Hope that helps a bit!

If directories are all you can think of, this list should get your head buzzing with new ideas: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

I don't control the original site, it's a SEO directory. There are links from it to a page on my site that I want to remove, so I figure I'll 404 the page on my site and re-direct the url back to the directory site. It is rhetorical given that you've already confirmed that it's enough to 404 the page.

I was thinking along the same lines as you guys, just wanted to see what the general conciseness was. Thanks for your replies

My pleasure, Steve.

Thank you very much Chris, All the best Iris