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Dear Bary, First i want to appreciate for the articles that you  had send me. They were really helpful. Now in my case the constraint is that we can not change the content and because of this we have 2 issue. 1. We dont want that any of our partner gets cannibalized by the other partner. Actually after we have pointed canonicals the traffic of one of our partner has increased significantly and others has decreased in the same manner like atleast 5 times. 2. If we dont point canonicals than according to this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling- legitimate-cross-domain.html what is the LEGITIMATE way of handling it. Regards

Yes they "should" be punished. But they probably won't, at least not for a long time. To Google's own detriment they don't act on spam reports nearly enough, which results in spam working more than it should, which results in more spam... and frustrated competition who were playing fair deciding "If you can't beat them, join them". The all the combined intelligence over at Google you'd think they'd figure out that for long term benefits it's best to act on the spam reports instead of just gathering data from them.

Do you think comments are a ranking factor because of the keyword usage or because search engines can check comment count, for instance? How a search engine can determine who comment if it's a local comment system? What about facebook comments?

Seeing Hayneedle sites back in the SERPs today.  Looks like they removed the heavy crosslinking. Strange that they seem to be at full previous rankings.  Maybe this is old data? I would have expected them to have lost some power without cross linking or something else devalued.

Scary stuff, Brian. I know that sinking feeling. Just got bombed myself. Whether by Panda, because of user experience or a little too over optimized anchor text, I am not sure yet. Two weeks and my ranking have yet to come back. Clean up the site, remove the bad links and cross your fingers for a speedy return is about all you can do. Good luck with it.

I'm guessing they must have some pretty authorative links to over-rule the fact that their link profile is like that.

yes, part of it could be dynamic sitemaps, however consider these factors: 1.  According to their Moz ranking, Yelp has a Domain Authority of 93/100 - that's a lot of domain authority. 2. They've got over 16 million pages indexed at Google. 3. Of these, about 5 million are search results 4. Google claims to be able to explore forms - their bots are claimed to be able to simulate human behavior in form usage. 5. With about ten million pages indexed that are not yelp search results pages, that's an awful lot of raw data for Google's bots to experiment with in trying out that search for.

Great information from all of you.  Thank you!

Good response Barry. According to GA, some directories perform better than others. We assign a two-tiered cost index (cost per visit vs. cost per action). We obviosuly cull the directories that don't perform well. Most of these are small regional sites that get significant local TV exposure and are quite cheap ($25). The group that makes the cut (see paragraph above) perform quite well. Good point on the no-follow, but many of these probably don't have the sophistication to understand no-follow.

Ideally, if you do have any contact with the webmaster you'd be better off asking them to change it. If you don't, starting to network with people already willing to link to you is a great way to get more links anyway. If you really don't want to try and speak with them (and again, you really should) then I have done something similar with affiliates; when they send a visitor I send them to a co-branded page based on the referral header, and haven't seen anything bad happen. Although Google is getting better at reading javascript it still doesn't seem to follow links run in real time. As you're not intending to deceive the bot your use of it is fairly legit, but I couldn't tell you how it'd be interpreted once the datacentres have a look at it. Here's the guidelines - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355 - up to you if you think you're breaking them

LOL!  I guess she's not into girls, which is fine by me!  LOL!

There definitely are and have been for a long time... I was one of them for a while, I linked spammed with software to get sites up. That is until I realized what proper SEO was, and how much better it is, especially in the long term. That's just the problem though... it did work to a certain extent, but it came with its problems.

What is the keyword they are trying to rank for?  A brief look at their site shows me that there really isn't much content and the title tags aren't optimized.  They mostly all start with "Fine Lets Ltd" which I'm guessing is not the keyword they are trying to rank for. So, this could be good news because there are lots of things that could be done to help them rank better.  I'd be more concered if the site looked amazingly optimized and it was still ranking poorly.

Hi, I analyzed both pages with OSE: Me: Page authority 22, Domain Authority 20, Linking Root domains 4, Total Links 489 Competitor: Page authority 20, Domain Authority 8, Linking Root domains 1 (the domain itself), Total Links 5. The given Keyword is part of both urls and and the first part of the title tag and in the content of both pages. I am writing at least one article for the topic per month with all my SEO-knowledge (which ist obviously quite bad...) While this site has only one article on the front page and contains 6 pages all in all (Impressum, Contact details...) Well, I jsut dont get it why this page which is only set up to rank high and to sent people to an ajacent AmazonStore is ranking so well (Pos 3). I am an Pos 6.. It has no external links at all and no good content. Looks like a panda has to come again and eat the damn website...

In theory, you're correct - the premise being they'd not want to risk penalizing innocent site owners. In reality, Google makes mistakes all the time.  Some bounce back, others don't. Also, Google is constantly changing their rules.  And based on rule-changing patterns I've studied over the past several years, if a technique even appears to be in the shady category today, it's very likely to be a primary target tomorrow.  Because of this, I prefer to focus on methods and tactics I believe to have a much more resilient long-term potential.

Kevin, can you give us any type of update as to how this turned out? Did the rankings drop back after a bit, or are they still there? Did you figure out if they were using any shady tactics?