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If the content is originally yours, then you can add canonical tags.  It's not a guarantee that the search engines will follow those tags, but it's a start.  You could also try to report the competitor site to Google and Bing and tell them they are stealing your content.  Keep in mind the search engines usually take a while to respond. If your site stole the content, then you just need to remove it and create your own, unique content. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

If the links between each site are relevant, and the content on each of those sites is 100% unique (it sounds like you may need to work on this aspect) a few links between them are probably not causing any harm, and may actually be helping. A lot of businesses have multiple websites that link between each other. The real test is to be honest with yourself when asking the question: Is this link here for the visitors, or for SEO? Without seeing the sites myself, I can't say whether it looks spammy or not. I hope this calms your fears (the person asking the question only had one less site than your client): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8 watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

I'm also wondering if anybody has had any experience with askives.com. There are a few sites like that and they must be pretty common among people forced to use the disavow tool... Is there a list anywhere of known sites whos links are viewed as spammy by Google? Thanks!

I agree with Mike, this is the article I was going to point you towards. So in summary: You can stop yourself from passing page rank to another site by adding a nofollow but you cannot save yourself from losing link juice by adding nofollow. This has been the case for several years already (If you go on what Google is saying).

Thanks Kristina.  That's what I was thinking.  I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

Thank you so much Lynn. it has helped so much for my understanding of reading these data, as well as seo. I will definitely take these knowledge to my future sites as well. loosk like natural linkings is the way to go

To make my self clear "xyz.com " is your domain name Site Wide non relevant Footer links have a bad rap so any anchor text keyword used bedsides your domain name may one day get penalized . You still gain by having the link and the text near it does use keywords so not a total loss. But then again this is just a safe approach......

If the companies you are working for are as big as you say then link your brand for two reasons: 1.  Most importantly - if your clients catch on to what you are doing they might view it as ethical, especially if they hire their own SEO person who is a purist. 2. If you're getting thousands of links for the same word over and over and over it could be over optimization... My suggestion was to link the whole sentence as it accomplishes all your intended goals. Alternatively, If you want to go this route, set up some sort of spinner.  Link Live Chat, then your brand instead or maybe the whole thing so that across all domains you get different links altogether.

anyone?

Hello, You have 3 actions you should take at the same time: 1. Build new high quality links 2. Reach out to the webmasters of those sites and ask for link remval 3. Use the disavow tool for the links that are not removed to avoid being hit by a Google penalty. Actually, those low quality links can trigger a penguin penalty if they abuse the use of 1 unique anchor text or they can even trigger the unnatural link penalty if the number becomes really important and your site gets a manual review by Google riders. Hope it can help. If you need further assistance, feel free to ask. Regards,

Thank you for all the constructive criticism and ideas Everett! I appreciate it!

OK, strictly from an SEO perspective as you request: Slight, but potentially worthwhile.  There has been a lot of talk of lexical co-occurrence or co-citation (co-occurrence would be more accurate) that talk about Google being able to recognise your website or brand as an authority in its industry even without links.  In short, if your site can be cited on a number of authority websites, even without links, Google may see it as an authority and promote it in search engine results.  Here are a few relevant posts: http://moz.com/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday http://www.iacquire.com/blog/its-not-co-citation-but-its-still-awesome/ I think we're a way off seeing this as a major part of the algorithm, but there's no harm in preparing for it. More influential than 1), but in essence it is a link to your site that is telling Google not to pass on any PageRank, thus it shouldn't give any SEO benefit.  There are a few case studies that, over time a nofollow link will pass value (such as this one), but I wouldn't see it as beneficial as a dofollow link. The biggest benefit SEO wise.  If the link is relevant, contextual, from a page with not a lot of outbound links and on a quality website, it can be a great link for your site.  Of course, if the link comes from an irrelevant site, with loads of spammy links, lots of outbound links and your link appears in the comments, footer or blogroll, it could actually do more harm than good.  So it obviously pays to research the site before hand. Having said all that, I'd always combine guest blogging with engaging with an active audience, not just exclusively for SEO.  But as requested, there's my analysis and I hope it helps!

Thanks for checking out our site. Good point on the sharing buttons. We have some minimal options on each blog but that is about it. I have a hover type social share on my to do list for sure. I will looking into "share this".

Hi Karl, Thank you too! Both you and Matt have cleared this up for me. Essentially providing the link is relevant and from a relevant source, it's useful irrespective of rankings to a greater or lesser degree. Very few people in the UK security sector use social media. I have been looking at it, but just don't see it working for us as there is not enough people using it. Have a great day. Si

Thank You for all the Responses. It is good to know that I am on the right track!

I will again recommend not to use exact match anchor text but try multiple anchor texts around your targeted keyword plus i would highly recommend using the idea of co-occurrence

Thank you for taking the time! There is a robots.txt (Just updated it then :)) and I am on Yoast... I just noticed many of the pages fall away from the front page. That was my main concern. Fingers crossed they will crawl back up. RT

Hello Gary, You should know that using followable affiliate links is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines, as they are viewed as paid links due to the monetary relationship between merchant and affiliate. With that said, lots of people take the chance anyway and so long as you're aware of the risk... I do think the alt attribute text contained within an image link (as well as the title attribute in the link) is considered by Google's algorithms. It probably would make a very small difference. However, I would not overdo it by stuffing either the file name or the alt text with lots of keywords. Your brand name, or the name of a product or service would probably be OK, but highly-targeted, non-brand alt text in banner ads that link to your site, especially since a lot of banner ads are site-wide placements (i.e. potentially thousands of pages on a single domain) are not a good idea. If it were me I would include a nofollow tag in order to avoid any potential link-based penalties in the future, in which case you needn't worry about alt attributes or filenames beyond making them useful to the visitor.

As a matter of dealing with all the links uniformly, your best long-term choice is keep the links make them all nofollows.

Hi Anthony 100 links per page is not a rule anymore at all. Check out Matt's video from 2011. I think you may have been hurt by some link building though. Check out this screenshot of your top anchor text according to open site explorer. You'll see a lot more commercial keywords for anchor text - and this is the sort of thing Google is not looking at so favorably anymore. You'll want to see if you can change the anchor text of those links to branded keywords if possible (not all, but as many as you can). And in addition you'll want to think about building new links that are more natural. I like PointBlank SEO's list of strategies: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies And you should also focus a little on local SEO and local citations and review acquisition. I love Whitespark's Local Citation Finder and Moz's GetListed.org for help there. It is great to clean up on-site stuff too of course! My post on WordPress SEO should help out there. Good luck! -Dan