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Hi Antonio, The best way to check if the site is using cloaking is to go into your Google Webmaster Tools acccount and "Fetch as Googlebot", then compare the code to see if googlebot is being shown the same code as the user. However in this case, I would suggest that your concerns are being prompted by the use of CSS to hide text within the page so that it is not visible to the user. I located this in your main.css file #homepage-content { position: absolute; height: 1px; width: 1px; overflow: hidden; top: 0; left: 0; } Basically, this is a massive amount of text which has been shoved into a div that measures 1 pixel x 1 pixel in the top left corner of the page. This is a practice which is not viewed kindly by search engines. As to improving optimization there are a couple of things that are fairly obvious: Using Flash for the rotating images is not our preferred option for a couple of reasons. First, any user with an Apple iOS device will see only blank spaces as these devices do not support Flash. Second, bots are not able to retrieve information from Flash documents in the most cases. jQuery is a much better option as the presentation is visible to everyone and also allows you to obtain some SEO value from image file names, alt tags and inserted text. The majority of the images in the flash presentation do not really represent what people expect from a  "Resort". If you want people to convert then you need to engage them and I think that the images that are being used now are not helpful in selling the product. Hope this helps, Sha

The post seems to have been updated with a retraction of sorts, saying that it's rare but can happen, which is my stance (indeed I mentioned it in a question a couple of days ago). I actually think it's more rare now than it used to be, but there was a time when you could do a lot of harm to someone by pointing these bad links at them. Alas I'm not going to be able to back that up with any solid examples, because I was too much of a n00b and on the fringes of SEO when I first learned about it 4 or 5 years ago and it's not something I've been a participant in myself since. EDIT: What I will say though is we're not talking about getting low quality sites pointing links in to you, that's almost never likely to harm you. Pharmacy links, malware, spyware, paid networks and such like which can be traced back to an offending site are more along the lines you want to think about. Spending time setting that kind of thing up and putting just the right amount of effort into making it difficult, but not impossible, to trace to a competitor was the sort of thing people were being paid a decent amont of money to do.

Rand posted a nice video a while back on Whiteboard Fridays' about the effects of out linking.  The basic jist of it is that you can link out to quality domains without any real benefit or being penalized - however - if you like to poor quality domains then it reflects poorly upon you. Sorry I can't find the link right now, I'll post it up if I find it!

Hi Keri, I decided not to pursue these links - I don't really want my client to be associated with junk like this, even if it would help them in the short run. So I can't tell you what the effect of those links would have been... Annemieke

Hi Robert, I'm following up on older, unanswered questions. Can you tell us what you ended up doing with the site, and how much pain you went through, and any lessons learned? I'm interested to here what decision you made here. Thanks!

The short answer is no. Your site can benefit from other unique sites (such as your blogs) which link to it. In order for those links to have value, the PR of the linking page needs to have value which means other sites need to link to your blog site. In order for that to happen you would need to create quality content and place it on your blog sites. Your main site would benefit more by placing your blog articles directly on the main site then by receiving links from your other microsites.

There's no direct punishment for buying a used domain. The problem comes in that you're probably not going to keep the same site structure. At this point you need to realize that you need an exhaustive 301 remap so you keep as much rank from the existing pages as possible. The bad things about a domain buy? Well, you're getting whatever reputation the old site had (links, reviews, social commentary, etc) and if that was negative that now becomes your responsibility.

As Joseph said, using a 301 redirect will not be tracked as a referral but instead will be direct.  Taking over a company with many indexed pages can be time consuming but as he said, over time your authority and in links will be improved.

Thanks everyone for your info.  Most of you seemed concerned about my onsite SEO and i had a professional SEO guy build my entire site from scratch using only html and no flash, etc.  The page is hand built and optimized for the key phrases far better than the competitor's page that is outranking me.  Here is my theory:  Google always gives you a boost about a month or so later after you build about 10 or 15 links to your site and then after a few months of no links you start falling again until you get new links. I think this flurry of new links has temporarily boosted my competitor and they will start falling again unless they start building new links.  I think Joe Ant and the other directories are well respected enough that Google will count these links but the pages in the directories are low enough page rank that they won't keep my competitor high in the rankings for very long.  Do any of you agree with me or have any opinnions based on your experience with this? I'd love to hear your experiences.  Thanks again for your input! Ron

What are good sources to buy traffic and video views? If you want numbers then I don't think that there are any good sources.  However, if you are promoting to a specific audience then try Adwords. Most SEOs don't recommend buying traffic... instead they recommend setting a goal of who you want to target and what you want them to do when they arrive at the site - then defining a traffic source to accomplish that goal.  Possible traffic sources might be Adwords, banner ads on specific sites, etc. or it could be as radical as buying a successful website.

Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? If they are small articles on a blog, they may be using blogvertise.com. A blog network that lets you buy links on the blogs on the network. The owner of the blog writes you a very small article with your link for a fee. How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? blogvertise.com again How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? Often these kind of tactics work for a time, but often they eventually do get some kind of penalty. These grey/blackhat tactics can work for months, or even years..often depending on how black they are. How are they not being penalised? They might at some pont. It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation. I always think a lot of link building is somewhat grey unless someone is linking to your content because its awesome without any incentive or encouragement.  It's not perfect, but you have to work with it.

Thanks for you valuable answer

Google will never look down on whatever.com as your anchor text. Nor will they ever have a problem with your page title being used as the anchor text. The two bigger items to be concerned about here are: 1: where are you placing this anchor text. In other words are you putting this link on a trusted domain with high page authority? Or are you placing links on problem sites. 2: what keyword(s) are you focusing on for that specific page - i.e. if you are trying to rank highly for "two month old widgets" but your page title is "six month old widgets from whatever.com" then it doesn't do much good to use your page title as anchor text.

I agree with dvtruong and Erica; doing guest posts on relevant sites is a good way to get links. It seems as if your competitors are doing a little black hat, which is never good and Google will catch up with them.

Please see Carin's response to this issue in another Q&A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitive-edu-research-via-open-site-explorer In short, it's a bug with the last Linkscape index. OSE is scheduled to be updated on Tuesday and that will (hopefully) resolve this issue.