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If you have specific links which appear in OSE but not in Google, you can open a ticket with the SEOmoz help desk requesting more information. They can look at the OSE data and help determine if there is an issue with the Linkscape tool, or whether the data appears valid. Keep in mind the link could have been there a month ago when the crawl was performed and the page has changed since then. As far as removing the links, the only course of action you have is to contact the webmasters involved with the links. If they choose to remove the links, they can help. If they choose not to honor your request, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Anyone with a website can make a link with the anchor text "this site sucks" and there is nothing you can do about it.

and the good news is if you implement high quality content and focus on high quality links and social signals, you should eventually be able to overtake them. I've done it a number of times.  As frustrating as it is to deal with, it can be dealt with.

Hi Fellows, Thanks for the thoughts Mike, Charles & Kieran. All good ideas! Best...Mike

Thanks for the reply. Yes, user focused content is the key now. I like to know more view points on this.

Thanks for all your input. I have noindex, nofollowed all of the suspect stuff and asked for my paid link to be removed. Hopefully this will resurrect things. Regards, Marcus

Another thing that has occurred to me with this - it's not so much whether the links are passing value / negative value, but more that the anchor text is telling the search engines that our site may be a place to buy viagra, vicodin etc - and surely that's never a good thing?

if we just duplicated our homepage, would we not get penalized? You would not receive a penalty as long as the SEO was handled properly. If you have a page mysite.com design for the US and another page mysite.com/uk designed for England then search engines should understand clearly that each site is designed for a particular country, even though they are all in English. A few added points: a ".com" site is not thought of as a US site automatically. Google makes that determination based largely in part of where your site is hosted. You can also set your site's target country in Google WMT to avoid any confusion. there is a langauge meta tag which is something like "EN-US" for the United States and "EN-GB" for England. By setting that tag you will help search engines understand your target audience. be certain to localize your page. For example the US says "center" while English people say "centre". There are different monetary units, systems of measurements and phrases associated with each culture as well. if our host was able to simply put the pages on different servers, would that be sufficient? No. A different server with the same host would not be sufficient. You need to change your C-block and usually a host will retain the same C-block for all of their servers. having a page targeted at say, Mexico, loading from a UK server may not be great for page load times. True, which is where cloud hosting is very helpful. The prices are fairly reasonable and it is an option you may want to explore.

You can choose to show different content to different regions based on IP and many large sites use it to some extent. One key point from the Google Webmaster guidelines is not not show Google something complete different again from all the other regions. If you do it will be seen as cloaking. Therefore you should decide which regions version of the site you widh Google to see. In terms of how much of the content you can change I am not aware of any best practices on this matter so it may be worth reading through the relevant sections on the Google Webmaster guideline pages.

Thank you!

I completely agree with what you just said but I assume that snippet alone needs to be that....amazing, to be picked up by other, right? I mean there is not much you can share in a snippet, a few sentences maybe an image what about videos? Have you tried link building using any type of video? Could you share your homepage metrics, just PR, PA and DA.

Ditto. I am facing a competitor who is similarly succeeding by using comment spam tactics. It seems fairly certain to me that Google is giving some value to these links even though most of them are no-followed. I suspect that at some future date they may get better at devaluing them or penalizing for them, however, at present comment spamming seems to be an advantageous tactic.

If I am hearing you correctly, you're basically purchasing a typo domain name? Or one that could potentially infringe on another's digital assets? Seems like a whole lot of work to me.

Amazing!   lol

I'm endorsing EGOL's comments but I'm going to add that it's a really tough call. I think he's right that those links can dry up (especially over time). I also think that exact-match domains are losing some of their value, and Google may start pushing that harder. Clearly, though, they still have value. I think a lot depends on the content similarity between the two sites and how much you can maintain new content that's relevant to the old links. If you can really support the old site's audience and selectively 301-redirect (on a per-page basis), you've got a better shot. If you just buy it for the domain name and then gut it and 301 everything to the home-page, you'll start losing that link-juice fast. Of course, it also depends a LOT on the price-tag, IMO. Any domain change carries risk, though.

Well there are two ways you can sell a link, using white hat methods or black hat. White hat: the links have the nofollow tag applied and are clearly indicated on the site as paid links or advertisements. If your client chooses to use white hat methods to sell links on their site, then that is not a concern at all. I am guessing the above information isn't of interest, and what you really want to know is more about the black hat method. It's simple. If you client breaks the rules and gets caught, then yes there is a significant risk of all the bad things your client fears happening. Search engines have tremendous resources at their disposal. It's their job to grab information from many sources and relate them together. It is likely they could relate your client and his many sites together.

Definitely not hide any heading tags! But what about advanced development techniques like tooltips and lightboxes? If you want to display a part of the page only on a certain user interaction? Would this impact your OnPage optimization negitively when the spider sees an html tag with a css property of hidden?