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Thank you very much Peter! I believe you are right totally about the links opening in the new window. I always thought that it can't be good to have so many links opening in new window. Thank you very much! All the best Iris

Thanks, could you be more specific as for the networks that still work? Please email me at seowar [ at ] gmail [ dot ] come

Sam, my friend...please never think along those lines like how and why someone doing spam or blackhat tactics and still be able to rank high in search engines. Even if someone from Google guarantees me in written that there won't be anything happening to my site  if I go the blackhat way, I will still stay away from those as I am here to stay forever and I never ever think of doing anything that the search engines frown upon. Please don't bother about those who do blackhat and still get away with it. Thinking along those lines itself is incorrect. Let them do and they will repent one fine day. Today, there are thousands if not lakhs of sites that do not follow the guidelines of search engines and are still ranking high. Just because they are doing good despite their shady tactics, we should not follow them or even bother or worry about them. Its obvious that they are not doing the right thing and we just have to laugh when we see them. They won't last long. Here is the deal, if you want to be here forever, then stay clean.Only quality content and quality links can secure you a lasting high rank in Google. However, you can report those spammy websites here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en and here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport You need to login to your Google webmaster tools account to be able to access the URLs above. So don't worry my friend. I know how does it feel when you see worthless sites ranking high in search engines. We are here to play a fair game and not to manipulate the search results to rank high in search engines and please do not even think about those who try to out-smart the search engines and their algorithms. Wish you all the very best. Regards, Devanur Rafi

Thank you very much Peter! All the best Iris

It is recommend you try to get in touch with the webmasters of the sites before going down the disavow route. I second this as well. Disavow is not a plan A, but an plan B, C, D. In the process of link cleaning

Takeshi thank you for the reply.

Happy to help! Let me know how  it works out.

If you go too cheap, you're going to get content that could do you more harm than good. I've had people in Q&A ask why a site wasn't ranking, and I went to look, and there was content like "think before you beverage" instead of "think before you drink".

Only if notified of unnatural links would I file a reconsideration request.  Focus on building more links and creating new content.

Hi Jesse, You've received some thoughtful advice so far here from the community. I think it would help if you could clarify your business model, as this is quite important in terms of Local SEO. Does your client have a single physical address or multiple physical addresses throughout California? I'm having a hard time picturing how a single location business could repair appliances throughout the whole length of California, so maybe I'm not understand your business model correctly. And, if the situation is that the business only has a single physical location in the city of Los Angeles, why would you need to rank in cities statewide? In other words, how would it help for the business to rank for 'appliance repair Eureka' unless services can be rendered up there in the north? I think the more specific you can be about your business model, the more targeted advice you'll receive here. Hope this helps!

Here's the only correct answer to this question: "Nobody knows". According to Google, you need to identify your manipulative links, disavow or preferably remove them and then wait for a Penguin refresh.  However, they've never been clear on whether removing is necessary.  John Mueller hinted in a hangout that disavowing was the same as manually removing but then he went on to say that it could be better to manually remove. I have seen some sites make some sort of recovery with Penguin, but the scary reality is that very few do.  In order to recover you need to have a good base of natural links (not self made, but earned) and also be able to attract new links in the future.  And, you need to do an extremely thorough job on cleaning up your link profile. "we are looking to keep our domain but create a new site to disavow all our links. " - If you start up a new site on the same domain then you'll still have all of the same bad backlinks that got you into Penguin trouble so you won't be any further ahead.  EDIT:  That is, assuming that most of your links point to your home page.  If you have bad links pointing to inner pages then you can change those urls and effectively remove those bad links.  But, in most cases the bad links are pointing to the home page and those can't be removed by changing the site.

Thanks. Our address is on our site, and we have hundreds of citation. We are a paid YEXT partner as well as Locaeze. Our area (DC Metro) has literally dozens of towns wihtin miles, so we need a stratgy for us (and our clients that works) We feel we have tried everything. THanks so much for your reponse! Scott M /CEO ImageWorks

I've used various directory sites such as Zvents with no problems. If you can, try to use a different description on the event site than you do on your own site, this will keep your site from running into duplicate content issues, as well as help the content on the event sites get indexed. Including links is somewhat risky in the post-Penguin world. You should be fine as long as you don't overdo it, but sites like Zvents will syndicate their event listings to dozens of other sites, so you can quickly end up with a bunch of links pointing to your site. If you're worried about Penguin, using the URL as a link is a pretty safe approach. Just don't be spammy about it and go submitting those links to hundreds of sites, they probably don't carry much link value anyway.

Thanks Everyone for your input! To further clarify, the 2 Chinese sites in question have essentially slurped our pages and in their automated process, have created non-existent links that have never existed on our website and that have no pattern similarities in URL structure. Based on this, I am inclined to disavow the PR1 site, but work to 301 links from the PR5 site via .htaccess. Thoughts?

Thank you so much mrcensorious I was using some tools also in English(German language is not a problem for me, I have worked several years for a German company based in Cologne. Some best Ice cream is there as well!) But they all seem to give different results. I am pretty sure that I have some nasty stuffing most likely on the site. I will try the tool you gave me, I was on look up for a good density tool. Thank you very much and have good day! All the best Iris

I hope I am not hijacking this post with this question....if I am - I'm sorry. My website is www.enchantingquotes.com.  I sell wall quotes and "wall quotes" is the keyword that brings me most of my business.   Moz Analytics is suggesting  "Use Keywords in your URL".  I understand how to do this for adding a new page or category.  What I need to know is how do I do it for my main page (so that my url reads enchantingwallquotes.com - I also own that domain).  Any help is hugely appreciated

Why would it will be a problem? I mean if webmasters convince they will defiantly going to link to the source you are trying to promote and I think this will not really a problem for Google as well as you are providing better information. This is similar to Content Refresher and Google is cool with this tactic! Hope this helps!

Hi Vince, There is Link Risk at http://linkrisk.com/ Also here is a review from back when they were in beta testing   http://www.stateofdigital.com/linkrisk/ I have not used them because when I did my link analysis only Link Detox was available. If you give it a try, please share your experience.

Joseph, i literally just signed up for this tool last week. I love it! I was testing the link juice recovery tool though last night, trying to figure out how it works. Do you have any resources you could send my way to help me understand the tool better for link building?