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Thank you, that's a great help

Mike, In my experience, low DA links often come from automated websites that are created solely for the purpose of ranking for longtail keyword traffic. Most of these types of sites often times don't have proper contact information so that you can get the links removed. I'm of of the opinion that you are better of investing your time in acquiring high quality (High DA) links from other credible sources. Enough of these links will offset these low DA links that you are concerned about.

We also lightly speculated it could be a competitor falsely claiming to be them and is trying to sabotage their link profile!

Hi Guys, I agree with Takeshi and Michael. As a city specific directory creator I think that you have to look at value here and yahoo and BOTW just are not offering that value anymore. I know that for us, the changes have forced us to look at value of content (which thankfully has always been a key to our success), user engagement and social interaction. Unfortunately not all directories can do this because they are so broad. When looking for a directory, I would be looking for niche and trying to find the opportunity to leverage knowledge for link. We now accept high quality unique articles and interviews in exchange for links. I know my take is outside the box, but google wants socially engaging user friendly content, give them socially engaging user friendly content Jeremy

You can remove the links from PR Web press releases, even after publication. No need to disavow unless they have been picked up by other sites and do-followed. That said, I seriously doubt they can get you into trouble...unless they are part of a sustained pattern of misconduct, say dozens or hundreds of press releases from spammy press release sites (not PR Web, which is reputable.)  Your backlinks from PR  Web may even be helping. There is much confusion on this subject. Two general and casual remarks Matt Cutts made years apart have been taken out of context and widely misinterpreted. The conventional wisdom seems to be that all backlinks from all press releases are always and everywhere useless or harmful. This suffers from the defect of being untrue. And it's s just as silly as saying: "All directory listings are useless -- or harmful." or "All guest blogging is useless -- or harmful." or "All infogrpahics are useless -- or harmful." Life is complicated. Context is everything. And much depends on your overall link portfolio.

Hi Juan, Have you looked through the link building section in the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links? There is a lot of good information there. There is no easy solution where you download a piece of software and increase your rank. You may see rankings increase in the short term, but then likely will need to spend a considerable amount of time removing these links after getting a notice from Google about unnatural links. Also, review Google's guidelines about content. Under Link schemes, they discuss unnatural links that violate the guidelines (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356). These links include: Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature, for example: _Thanks, that’s great info! Paul paul’s pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diego_ Google also frowns on user-generated spam, including "Spammy posts on forum threads" and "Comment spam on blogs" (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721437&topic=2371375&ctx=topic)

I wrote this guest post for Bluehost: http://www.bluehost.com/blog/educational/websites/the-ultimate-guide-to-supercharging-your-wordpress-blog-2097 As I'm in the process of building a link list for a disavow request, I'd like to get your opinion whether this guest post can harm my website?

Thanks Jeremy for your quick reply.

If you are focusing any of your strategy on local search there are worthwhile directories to look at using such as Yelp, foursquare, hotfrog, bing, google+, citysearch, superpage, YP, localize, info group. Regardless of the value that comes directly from these links, there are other more indirect but valuable results of being listed and getting reviews on the review directories. SEOMoz getlisted.org is a great free tool for these. Also, if there are any reputable niche or industry directories that relate to your business, those are worth investigating. Hope this helps.

Hi Nick, I think I'd echo what Alan said. Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one. As such I'd probably be inclined not to 301 the whole site. Assuming your second site is topically similar you might consider reaching out directly to those high quality sites that are linking to you and asking them if they'd be willing to link to your other site instead. Similarly you might consider moving the link worthy content to your second site and (assuming all the links to your content are 'good') just 301 those pages. I hope this helps, Hannah

Thanks Takeshi!

it's 5 years using their historical data

Definitely need that updated, it will also bring us more credibility when we tell our clients, no that is not the way anymore. I also have a client who had previously developed this kind of linking strategy. The poor guy probably spent hundreds of hours creating his links,on the old seo advice, and we have noticed a huge drop in their effectiveness. At the end of the day, his links were about keywords, not about content. I think as an SEO, we have the responsibility to really make it clear to our clients that if they take a different approach, and create high quality community orientated content that contains some links, but is not all about the links they will not only benefit from the juice, but also benefit from google author rank. I welcome the move towards quality content, as it means that genuine experts in various fields will now be heard.

No problems Stewart happy to help. Yes that would be the case, as long as they aren't "SPAMMY" websites or those blogs selling links then of course it is safe to do so. That is link-building! Also be sure to not over target anchor phrasing, make it as valuable for the people reading the information as possible and you have a sustainable SEO strategy.

Thanks Andy, feel a lot better now

Thanks Jesse for your response.

For easy niches? Yeah you could do it and it could get you to rank. For harder niches, I'd go with new content and stick with the big PR sites only. The free PR sites usually just scrape it off them anyways. Either that or they are just article directories dress up as "press release" sites. BTW, Prlog ranks pretty well on it's own, it'll probably beat prweb in terms of referral traffic to you.

Just to make sure you know, Sida - it's possible to migrate a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted one (like www.mysite.com/blog) and still keep most of the ranking/influence/linkjuice of the original blog flowing to the new site. It's relatively straightforward to do. The benefit is, you get the best of both worlds - everyone going to the old site gets automatically redirected to the new site, so no concerns about duplicate content, and the ranking value gets passed to the new blog. This means the new site will have all the old site's content, so it won't look "sparse" at the beginning. It also means all the traffic going to the old site will automatically land on the equivalent page of the new site, so the new blog will immediately have traffic. And as I said, almost all the ranking value of the old site will be moved to the new site as well. The key requirement to accomplish this is, you MUST buy the Offsite Redirect service from WordPress.com which is what will redirect visitors and linkjuice to the new location. It's only $13/yr last time I checked. (1 yr is often enough) There are many tutorials on the web for how to do this. Here's a good tutorial from wpbeginners.com and there's a version with a video on Mashable's site. (Iin your case a couple of adjustments will be necessary as you'll be transferring to your blog in a subfolder, not at the root of your site) In my opinion, if you've got some good incoming links to your existing content on the WordPress.com site, it would be well worth the hour or two necessary to properly migrate it to your new main site blog. Something to think about? Paul

Interesting - hadn't heard that re: G-docs. Makes some sense. I only balked because I've seen plenty of people provide links directly in the request in the past and ultimately be successful. I can see where it could turn into a headache for Google. I would be surprised if they refused a request solely on that, but you never know.

good thing I just found out about it, would have been a waste of time to write a quality content for this site and get no link juice. Although visitors referred do count, we were not banking on Squidoo for anything more than link juice. Time to get real serious in guest blogging. I just need to network and that is the hardest step as far as my research shows... Any ideas where a good writer with very few people in his network of fellow bloggers can get a good start at this?