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Thanks Luke, this is very helpful

Stay away from article directories IMO.

Google says that you should use the disavow tool as a last resort after asking the webmasters to remove the links, and even then only if you think it's hurting your rankings. I obviously can't tell without looking at your links, but I see a lot of people worrying about spam links when they probably shouldn't be. It's normal to get some less-than-perfect links in your profile, and they're probably not going to hurt you if you aren't building them yourself.

Great! Thank you very much for the thorough response. I already sent it with the appropriate considerations. I am familiar with the Point Blank SEO Links i am halfway through :-). I will read the second resource, ASAP. Thanx Regards,

Be skeptical of paths that involve buying links - usually a sign that it's not a good route.

"Google will slam you into a wall, pick you up, throw you on the floor, punch you in the junk, toss you out of a window, and then start dating your mom." beautifully put!!

if you are talking about WordPress.com as opposed to WordPress.org meaning self hosted word press verse  free/$17 a year with domain WordPress. I believe that is true they do not want you using their network  however for $30 a year you can use advertisements on your website with WordPress.com as far as redirects go they're all answered right here. http://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads/ I hope I have been of help to you, Thomas

Awesome, makes way more sense now - Thanks a ton for all your help!!!

Thanks!

Word is about Penguin 2.0 and that's the reason to post this question and start the discussion we are having. Rankings in top 10 keywords have dropped across the board. Meaning Google, Yahoo and Bing have done so as well. I am more keen to believe it's a website issue than simply blaming it all on Penguin 2.0 here. Or simply the campaign to remove spammy links is coming through for this website alone.

Don't really agree with the answers posted here. A lot of people need some incentive to do an action. Maybe paraphrasing it a better, including "if" and "then do" terms in the text there will help a lot. So for example: "If you love the help you got from our website, make sure to tell your friends" will help a lot. Many people simply need to have the idea planted in their minds to do an action like that. Thanks!

An additional point worth bearing in mind is that many sites actually designate links on their site generated through user generated content as 'no follow' meaning that the link does not pass any page rank from that site to yours. Of course you would still potentially get referral traffic to your site via the links you have posted and that is no bad thing, but in terms of SEO benefit it would be negligible if the links are no followed.

I searched "love messages" in the east coast of the US and you are top of the 2nd page. Give it a couple of days before making any conclusions about the update. I'll agree with Karl look into those links, some are fine, just looking at a few of the linking pages -- they look questionable.

In that case have the contact and disavow plan on tap and ready to execute if needed. Google doesn't want you to just disavow links that they think are bad; they want you to go through the process of attempting to get them removed. Even if you know there is a 0% chance, you'll have to do it and document your process. There are a couple of good YouMoz posts detailing this.

Assuming you're not just using cheap press release services and are happy to invest time into PR activity to improve the chances of it being successful, it makes sense to tailor you press release for the audiences you send it out to. Don't think of it in terms of unique vs duplicate content, consider whether the article is a good fit for the audience of the publisher you're pitching it to. If it isn't re-write it so it is.

Thanks Dana.

In your shoes, I would send a short reconsideration request and explain the situation: that you don't do link building, that what you think it might look odd is that link but you didn't requested, is natural so you can't touch it - and see the reply - if you have some manual action in place or not. They are not hunting us down - but they do send a lot of notices like that to innocent people so it's worth dealing with it so you won't be colateral damage in this spamy link war. Cheers.

I agree that it is really hard to convince people to generate content and even when you convince them they will usually fail to produce it. Now.... keeping that in mind... can you understand why it is not a good idea to distribute you content to other websites?   Especially if it is great content.   Keep this very limited, very valuable and very hard to get resource to yourself so that you get all of the traffic, you get all of the links, you get all of the likes. The people who will not produce the content just do not have the will to compete.  So, if you can produce content, instead of doing SEO for people who don't have the will to compete start producing content for your own site and you might have great success.

Just throwing this angle out there ... it depends on a few factors. Let's say you've got a blog for a local business that really has little momentum. The fact that they are getting any links that is from an external IP address (given that is the case) may be better than if they hosted that same content at domain.com/blog. To me though, if it is done right, and the blog is getting traction, visits, shares, retweets, and links, you would prefer those are associated with your main domain, i.e. domain.com/blog I'm not a fan of the subdomain option, assuming it shares the IP of your main domain. That is kind of the worst of both worlds.

If you have no links pointing to a page then it has no PR at all. It will also have no PR unless it has a outgoing link, see the original algorithm. yes put the internal links in see http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank