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As Egol & Michael said--stop immediately. Here is some helpful information for disavowing: http://moz.com/community/q/best-practice-to-disavow-spammy-links http://moz.com/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-create-an-excel-spreadsheet-to-remove-link-spam-post-penguin Good luck Daniel!

that was the other that I was trying to think of! Thanks

TextLinkBrokers offers high quality placements for guest posts. As long as you aren't using commercial/exact-match anchor text and stick with branded/generic terms you're good to go. They also don't use any networks and spend a lot of time building relationships with authority sites. Check it out.

The "Just Discovered Links" tab on OSE is really good too. I'm using my ahrefs tool less and less. I would run this every week, since this tab only goes so far back.

Sounds good I'd love to hear the follow-up sometime. If you can vary the anchor text or keep it to something like "Click Here" or better yet your brand name that would definitely help avoid penalties. Also try to keep the possibility of adding a no-follow to those links open with any webmasters you work with. You might even want to pick and choose certain domains to automatically nofollow from. That's what I would do. Good luck!

The problem contuses !

Hi Patrick It is a little tricky to say for sure without the context of the site. However, the one link you've cited, those are typically not an issue. I'm pretty confident Google sees that as a "junk" site, scraping links, repurposed content etc that's not "real". I would worry about links that were done to clearly attempt to over-optimize - either through being paid, anchor text, sitewide links on low-ish quality sites, links within content that is not at all relevant. Conversely, you can be proactive by trying to build links that look as natural as possible - domain/brand/propword anchor text. In fact I think Cyrus' video pretty astutely describes what to look out for. You really have to discern if links were done maliciously (if you did not build them) and those would be the ones to use disavow. Hope that helps! -Dan

Really good questions. This is something that is taking on another aspect per recent updates to Google's webmasters guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en&ctx=NCUI and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721312 My initial though is to separate each piece to make them unique, but then we have five to ten wimpy little posts. Not to mention that these types of posts add value to the end user with related and relevant context in the links that make it to these link round ups. Another thought that might prevent a site from getting pinged for negating the above guideline links is to make that content appear in the source like you might with comments - loaded via JavaScript/AJAX so it never really load. But that is a whole other violation that might hurt your site in the long run. What to do? Great question!

Ben, Thanks for the help too. I did a post about the cnbc page on google+, not too long ago, so I'm sort of waiting for it all to match up again. Thanks for the advice and help!

Good discussion going on here fellows! Matthew, I am just going to throw out a bunch of ideas for your consideration, and some of these will be questions to gauge a better understanding of your client's unique scenario. Is the client physically located in Grimsby? Have they established a unique (non-shared) physical address there now? As you might imagine, if the actual local record has been merged and then suspended, it is going to pretty much kill the business' chances of achieving high local rankings. As the Local SEO on this project, your top priority is to get this worked out with Google, and it will take time. You've got to be incredibly persistent. Have you cleaned up the total web record of citations for the business? If the client was listing two businesses at the same address in Google's local product, chances are, this data exists elsewhere. If the issue with the addresses has been resolved on a physical level, you need to engage in a citation cleanup campaign to edit all references so that they reflect the new, allowable address for the single business, if the client has now got this straightened out. Remember that Google looks at the whole data cluster about each business and draws information about this from the whole web. If Google continues to see two businesses at the same address, they will continue not to 'trust' the business. You mention ranking around 11-17, so, here, I am assuming you are talking about organic rankings rather than local ones, meaning that these results will be most influenced by organic SEO factors (domain authority, age of domain, content development, links quality, on-page SEO, etc.).  Has the client given up trying to rank well in the blended local pack of results because they've been de-listed? Have you decided to focus on organic results only, because of this? In sum, the typical goal for a local electrician is going to be to get as high in the local pack of results as he can, with a combination of local and organic factors enabling his high ranking. If the business was actually de-listed by Google, that is an extremely tough situation and one that the company has to work night and day to overcome via direct dialogue with Google staff. Until this can be resolved, the client will always be held back from being where he needs to, and in your shoes, I would be doing a full audit of all elements of marketing the client has engaged in to be sure they haven't made other spammy choices or violations. They have got to be squeaky clean in all areas and plead with Google to re-consider their eligibility for inclusion. You may or may not be able to achieve this for the client and should be operating under that understanding. It's very difficult to get back into Google's good graces once they've hammered down on a violation, but this is what has to be seen as the big goal. Sorry not to have better news, but I hope this information helps!

Is the comment on each page, or is there a sidebar saying "[You] commented on a post", or something to that effect? If the actual comment is on each page, it's something wrong with the site and it'll disappear when the admin corrects it. If the other option, then it should also show several other commenters - it shows the latest comments and yours will be removed when enough people comment to push you off of that list.

I did a test last month on google.fr with the keyword "cuisine quimper" (kitchen + town name); with one dofollow link, I got the 11th rank. Then I added 3 good nofollow links... and got rank 2. Nofollow links value is probably very low but not equal to 0. All details and screenshots : http://internetbusiness.fr/liens-nofollow-utiles-pour-gagner-des-positions-dans-google Do you own test :). Anyway, good nofollow links can bring you direct traffic and help your linking profile to be more natural. linking-nofollow-cuisine-quimper.jpg Historique-liens-cuisine-quimper.jpg Autorit%C3%A9-cuisine-quimper.jpg

Hi John, I would say that keyword research is the main activity to focus on. It can really make or break your launch. If you choose keywords that are very competitive , they will take a while to rank and bring traffic to the site. The idea is to choose keywords (long tail or low competition phrases) that you can get ranked for relatively quickly and start seeing traction.I've added some resources below to assist you. SEO Chat discussion New Website Launch Quicksprout Article Search Engine Watch Article All the best. Cheers, SEO5

I wouldn't expect you to remember!

Great point about packaging links upon delivery! A different department handles that but I'm sure they'll be open to adding some embedded links. That's a great idea. Great advice also about approach. I of course wouldn't complain to an author and would try my best to successfully manage the relationship, but I wasn't sure if I should expect to be linked to when our content is used. It sounds like I probably shouldn't expect anything.

For most purposes, OSE works very well and provides a great amount of detail about each link--plus, it is included with your membership. It's your best place to start and though it takes some time to feel comfortable with the metrics, the more you use it the better you'll understand it.

The closest thing I've been able to come across is Facebook Insights. It is essentially Facebook Analytics and displays the information fairly well. https://www.facebook.com/insights/

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. We actually used to work like that under our company name. One of the main reasons for splitting at the time to separate sites was that Google stopped allowing different display URLs for AdWords - we would advertise buyahipflask.com but redirect to macdonald-sporrans.com. We got significantly better click-through rates for the individually branded domains. We also felt that it was easier to develop good relevant content and social strategies around individual niches, rather than a single brand. IE I feel it would be hard to make our single site which might have 10,000 products on it, rank well for 'quaichs' which is only about 200 of those products. However, I fully agree with your points about our current setup. Perhaps my ideal would be to have single sites with better names/brands!?

But his actual mind never allow you to build links from websites having zero value. Teginder

Interesting. Well thanks for the insight, appreciated as always!