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Along those same lines, does anyone else know of any good services that will provide physical business addresses in certain locations?  I know of some virtual office providers, but only found ones that do major cities, not smaller ones.

The website is not severely penalized as it still ranks for its domain name - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1239&bih=869&q=discoverhookah&aq=f&aqi=g-s1g-v1g-sv4&aql=&oq= It wouldn't do that, if it had a filter penalty or was deindexed. The home page doesn't have any text on it besides text link. The sub pages are super poorly optimized. So no, I don't think it has a penalty. It just needs some SEO love.

I would not get a link from this as it seems very suspicious, are you sure the subdomain has links pointing to it? Otherwise, I would suspect a penalty from google that has not been resolved.

100 ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS [APPROVED ARTICLES] -> 1 article submitted to 100 article directories What is the "quality" and "relevance" of the directory to your article's subject. Are the articles unique versions or the same article submitted to 100 directories? If unique article versions added to topically relevant higher quality directories, with optimized back link, then good. 50 PRESS RELEASE SUBMISSIONS [APPROVED & SCREENSHOTS]-> 1 PR writing & submissions to top 50 PR distribution sites each Eh, depends on price and quality of press release. Is it newsworthy? There are plenty of services in which you can do it yourself. I would say it primarily depends on whether your press release is news worthy or just an ad. 150 PRIVATE BLOGS SUBMISSION [APPROVED ARTICLES] -> 1 article submitted to 150 private blogs submission This is likely to be garbage. Same rules as article directories above. 100 WEBSITE DIRECTORY SUBMISSION -> 1 url (home page) submitted to 100 top free web directories Likely worthless. But depends on directories. Are they truly the "top"? Perhaps more impt. if they allow full business citations. Are they geographically relevant? Topically relevant? 50 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING [CONFIRMED LINKS] -> 1 url of site submitted to top 50 social bookmarking websites Most likely garbage, imho. 40 PROFILE BACK-LINKS [CONFIRMED LINKS] -> 1-3 url's of site submitted and create 40 profile websites What sites? 50 SEARCH ENGINES -> submission to all the major search engines Garbage. 20 NEWS WEBSITES -> Ping all links from reports to news websites Really depends. Likely garbage. Hoped this helped.

Just the name makes me wary. When I searched on "free mass traffic software" on Google, I couldn't find a site with the software -- only affiliate sites promoting the software, offering little information about the software, and offering a cloaked affiliate link. All of those are warning signs to me. "Mass traffic" is not the same as "targeted traffic that helps me meet my goals". I run a site that sells products related to RC model warship combat. If I could somehow magically redirect 1% of all queries for Lady Gaga to my website, I'd have mass traffic that would likely not result in a single sale.

Thanks Dejan! Very helpful!

depends on the site, and you should only do it to websites your actively involved with. keep it to a minimal level even there.

Thank you for your comforting reply, Andy. The institutional site is hosted on the same server, though we bought an extra IP for it from our hosting provider, so I guess there's no problem there. Well, let's hope we win this dance-contest

I have to disagree with your .gov comment. I've seen a lot of.gov/.edu with autoapprove comments and the amount of OBL's on page is ridiculous. Sending an obvious signal to google because a large majority of the pages are so spammy. However if you can get a link from a .gov with moderated comments.. fair play.

Thats what I hear from chatter from the google employees, they are too busy working on new features to look back at how people are exploiting them. I think we'll see a big change in the future now that it got a bunch of press.

Thank you

The SEO industry in general likes to "move along" whenever they catch wind that Google has cracked down on something. This is a mistake, though. Google may use X algorithm to find sites that are employing Y strategy. IE, for reciprocal links Google targeted large sprawling partner pages, not just whether or not two domains linked to one another. You could still succeed with merely a different method of placing the reciprocal links... That being said, I would never tell you that blog roll links don't work, I would merely tell you to use those strategies on sites that are less important in the long roll. But, of course, I would probably tell you to use just about any and every strategy, as long as you divide those strategies across sites so as to minimize risk.

Hi Joel, you might want to consider reading questions more carefully before you reply. This has nothing to do with removing links but building an distributing a theme with links in it!

Shailendra, Its a common thing when a bad link causes a devaluation. But, Google doesnt penalize for just 1 bad link, its a bad neighbourhood that it mostly targets. There is very little that you can do at this point of time. It maybe a good idea to keep a lookout for your GWT messages.

Well, that's a slightly different question In the above example, yes I would redirect them. It's the same website, same content and Google, I'd imagine, can figure out LA = Los Angeles. I definitely wouldn't have the same site on multiple domains as, generally, only one of them is going to be credited with creating the content and shown in the SERPs. Also redirect all the other TLDs to the dot com. If the site was widgets.com and I had bluewidgets.com (where blue widgets was a popular item) I may consider putting blue widget content on the second site as the exact match domain gives (for the time being) a reasonably big advantage with ranking for that term. Additionally, if I had say LALawyers.com, I may create a faux affiliate style site comparing LA lawyers and pushing my companies to the top. Unless you're putting significantly different content on the sites (and I'll again refer you to the microsite Whiteboard Friday above) I would always redirect the other misspellings, TLDs and synonyms to the main site.

Thank you Barry. I took your advice and went to the Google Webmaster forum. If anyone would like to track this question further, please check it out here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=47ea8f99d39f510d&hl=en Thanks