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Thanks, Alan, I understand now...

I'm assuming you are referring to link that you did via some networks....  where it is a little harder to remove the links since there is no direct connection between you and the link host? Assuming that to be the case - (since otherwise the course of action would be pretty straight forward) - then I would do as I stated here. http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-low-quality-links-be-removed Sorry to post a link to a previous one of my answers - but it was quite a long one. Did you get the notice regarding unnatural links in GWT ? Let me know if I can help further. Carlos

I'm looking at the URL and going off of memory -- I think that's just for the search appliance and not for Google in general. You might want to look further at the documentation, but I think that's just for their search appliance and not the web as a whole.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef/10134 This is what we use it does all come down to the extensions you have installed. But you can exclude any extension that does not work right ' But a new stock site if configured right does just as well as any other site in the serps

Hi Jeremy, I think you need to look at links to your website now, just because you have got a grade A with your on page factors you need to now gain links to this well optimized content to show Google its worthiness of ranking well. I would suggest looking at the different link building strategies to get some ideas on where to improve things. Gaining links will increase your sites authority which will help it to improve in the rankings on Google. Also remember when building links it is about quality rather than quantity in this climate. Also remember just because your site has a grade A from the ranking tool does this grade A look natural or does it look over optimised for the keyword you are targeting? here is a good Q&A on link building - http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice There are lots more on the this section and the blog if you have a search. Hope this helps!

At some point, someone has hired one of these worthless 'link building' packages online that pays for however many forum profile backlinks. Whilst many of them have been deployed incorrectly (thankfully for you) - You can tell this by the fact BBCode was used on the forums when some of the forums in questions don't accept this and use an HTML editor instead. This kind of artificially generated link profiling was targeted in the Google Penguin algorithm updates, this could largely prove the outcome of any recent deterioration in your domain's performance as it is blindingly obvious most of the backlinks are from link spam. Perhaps the company you wrote the article for, once published, then buy useless packages online to build lots of links to their content which then links to their own website...? If it were me, I would take down the article and request a URL removal from the index in Google Webmaster Tools. It may even be worthwhile creating a 301 redirect to point to somewhere else so that lots of 404 errors aren't triggered on your site (if there is any worthwhile traffic coming via any of the links pointing to the article). You can view the link profile for this URL here.

Hi Michelle, In addition to what Alan said, I might take a couple of more actions on this page. Since it sounds like you're a beginner, don't worry if you don't understand all this stuff, but I wanted to include it for anyone else reading this question. I've also tried to include links to relevant sources where you can learn about each topic addressed. 1. Yes, add the canonical. This basically tells search engines that even those these pages all have different URL addresses, they are meant to be the same page. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization 2. The "numbers at the end" are called URL parameters, and there is a setting in Google Webmaster Tools that you can use to tell them to ignore parameter settings. This is advanced stuff, and Google does a pretty good job these days of figuring this stuff out on their own, so it's best not to adjust these settings unless you're comfortable doing so. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687 3. Honestly, there's no reason for this page to appear in search results, or waste search engine resources crawling the page. So, if possible, I'd add a meta robots "NO INDEX, FOLLOW" tag to the head element of the HTML. http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html 4. Additionally, I'd slap a nofollow on any links pointing these pages, and/or block crawling of this page via robots.txt, because there is no reason to waste your search engine crawl allowance on these pages. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569 5. And finally, I think it's perfectly legitimate to block these thowaway pages using robots.txt. Alan has good point about link juice - it's usually best not to block pages using robots.txt, but in this particular case I think it would be fine. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt Honestly, addressing all of these issues in this particular case probably won't make a huge impact on your SEO. But as you can see, there are multiple ways of dealing with the problem that touch on many of the fundamental techniques of Search Engine Optimization. Finally, to answer your question in a straitforward answer, to dissallow this directory in robots.txt, your file would look something like this. User-agent: * Disallow: *mailto/ Which will block anything in the /mailto/ directory. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Thanks a  lot for your input everyone, I will submit manually and continue to get quality backlinks.

Glad to help! One day hopefully you will return the favor to someone in need.

Hi Nicola, Thanks for being active in our Q&A, but please remember that members come from all walks of internet marketing and some are just starting out. (We all once where there.) Part of the reason we have Q&A is to help out and be generous with our knowledge, among other TAGFEE tenants, even when the answer or ways to find the answer seem obvious to us. Have a great weekend

Hi Ben, Thanks for the response. I did check the rank tracking software when I saw it, and unfortunately it's not what's causing the problem. It's not causing massive traffic changes to the site - somewhere in the realm of 5% to 15% depending on the month. It's still a decent chunk of people, though.

No, but they might write to it, modify it, or do all sorts of other nasty stuff I've seen hackers do when they get a hold of any writeable file on a system.

That is correct, you just submit as you would normally.  There are two ways to submit the file: Via the webmaster tools interface.  Have you created your webmaster tools account yet?  Optimization -> Sitemaps -> Add Sitemap By referencing it in your robots.txt.  Just add the following on a new line: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Joshua, thanks for taking so much time to respond.  To answer your questions: 1. yes, I am  using google webmaster tools.  I also confirmed there were no manual actions agianst us. 2. noticed the drop in March.  Most of our site is fine, but the drop was about 25-30% of our traffic that we were getting from a couple of keywords that disappeared completely.  That's why I am pretty sure it is Penquin related - both the timing and the fact that the words didn't move down, but rather disappeared.  However, I have had several people look and they can't find anything that looked "fishy". Thanks for all of the suggestions.  I will take another look at the title tags - I thought I had most between 35 and 70 characters now.  I know we have an issue with the thin descriptions - we have many products that are very similar (ex. 500 award certificates that are all the same except for the title and image and it is hard to write flowery content that is different for all 500!  Same for our trophies!). I will also look at adding the branding to the titles. Penguin is really killing us and I am just hoping something works!  Thanks again!