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Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.

I have seen a very definite change on one client site which uses an exact match domain. With that said I believe what was occurring was double anchor text from internal linking and external linking carrying the domain name into the back link. Honestly, this is only a hunch, but the site has been increasing in traffic for the past 2 1/2 years pretty steadily. This was the first big down cycle and as Google has stated this will not affect the domain entirely, but it will change the pages hit by spam. I'm going to run a couple of tests on dummy sites that get at least take 10K of traffic every month allowing for comment spam and link spam to it individual pages and watch the fallout. I do agree with you about what Dr. Pete mentioned it delayed Google has to crawl all the sites depending on your crawl budget and even regional internal Google page rank it could affect some more quickly than others. US sites will be the first to feel the peak of Penguin. For anybody tuning in on the subject here are some good references. https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/23/penguin-4-0-is-finally-here-google-confirms/ https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-penguin-says-now-real-time-part-core-algorithm-259302 I hope this is of help, Tom

Hi Chris, thanks so much for the answer and thoughts on what you would do! I totally hear what you're saying about the keyword stuffing. As I look back over it, it seems like it would make a great drinking game. Every time you read "Wyoming" you have to take a drink! (Would be a VERY short game haha) Awesome. Based on your feedback, I'm going to go back through and make sure each article is: Not keyword stuffed. Interlinked effectively and organically. Cut any crazy confusing wording. Thanks again Chris. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to look this over and give your honest option. You rock!

ok thank you so much, Let me check if this helps

Hello all of them are low competition keywords and i can rank a site from first day at page 2 or 3 so its low competition for them. so I want to target them all as all of them drive traffic my confusion is suppose i target two keywords in title and all others in content will google still favour those keywords in content and will rank site for them the same way if i used them in title??? Thats my main question hope you understand

Thank you Joshua for your additional reply and insights, may I ask you what are your two mentioned specific word phrases you wrote above about? Just curious, because those could be "brand" related keywords like "Virtual Sheet Music" or "Classical Sheet Music Downloads" which are both our own trademarks, therefore they should be considered as "natural"... you know what I mean. As for our affiliate links, yes, those are the URLs I am concerned about. I was thinking to 302 redirect those instead than 301, but I am afraid also to lose a big deal of juice from them by doing that, even though I am aware that Google could have already discounted those links at some extent, but I am not sure how much, and I don't want to risk losing that little juice that could help us with rankings if not really needed. So, my choice would be to leave things how they are, and, yes, as you are suggesting, start building more "link-baits" to have more natural links, but as you know, that takes time... I am eager to know your thoughts about my points above. Thank you!

It makes no difference, as long as they are viewed as separate accounts. If you have sites running out of directories of other sites then this can cause problems if the domain settings are not correct. Basically, make sure each account has its own Cpanel account, and you should be good to go. If they share the same IP address it makes no difference. If you are super worried about this, then I would assign a separate IP address for each account if you have WHM access.

I would NOT replicate this linking pattern for your client's websites. In the long run, it could do more damage than good. I will save you the long explanation, but it's just not a good long term strategy. Do the things you know are right, and not the things that could pose a risk in the future. For small businesses, the easiest way to combat companies that use BS linking strategies is to look at the TOTAL health of one of your client's websites. This would include keyword density testing, a complete citation profile analysis (using Moz Local or Yext), domain choice, on-page health, page load speed, etc. Basically everything that Google says matters, and do it to a "T". Beat them with quality quantity, not by replicating the same tactics.

I would say yes. Those sites are still authority sites, they are just in the software niche. So if you are in software I would think they would be beneficial.

Hi J.P., i have personally found this article and the solution it proposes to be the most helpful - http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/. Hope it helps.

Canonicalizing http://sub.test.com to http://www.test.com will tell Google that those two individual pages are the same and it should only index http://www.test.com--it won't affect other pages on the subdomain. If you only have a few subdomain pages that are duplicates of root domain pages, you can just use canonicals to indicate which pages you want indexed. You won't need to noindex the duplicate ones--they will fall out of Google's index naturally once Google sees which are the preferred, canonical ones.

I would suggest not disavowing a list of this size. My suggestions to you would be to create a robots.txt file and upload it to Google search console. This way you can continue to get traffic from the affiliate site, but it will tell Google not to crawl the domain. Hope this helps, if you have additional questions please feel free to ask. Chris Hickman GetBackonGoogle.com

Thanks everyone.  I sure don't intend to use this tactic because it looks awful on a website and I would hate to have Google decide it was spammy . Rosemary

Sure thing.. glad to help!

Hi, Can you provide a list of some of the long tail phrases you think you should rank better for? By helping you with a few specific examples, we can likely help you better understand what you should be doing across the board. Ira

Good point EGOL on showing that after you crush your main market there is actually an opportunity to produce secondary sites, I hadn't thought of it in that way before.

Hi there, Just wondering, what do you mean that you'll get penalized for any off-page work? If you earn quality links, I can't imagine they'd be an issue.

Its early for me and I haven't had enough coffee yet so I may be misreading things. Why do you have three sites on the same IP address with three separate mirrored WWW versions? As far as I can see... No reason you can't use Rel=Canonical to fix that issue though. If the code is going to be the same because of how they are mirrored then you'll have one site canonical'd to the right version and the right one canonical'd to itself... which shouldn't cause any issues. Can't guarantee that it will work in every instance though. Canonicals are a suggestion not a directive. So the bots will try to respect your tag but if they feel it is incorrect, improper, deceptive, etc. they can always choose not to.

If you go to the OSE results page, start clicking on the links, view source, then do a search for APBSpeakers you will find them. Here is the Huffington Post one, for example: “When I turned 5, I had had symptoms of AIDS. I had had fungus in my brain, blood infections, pneumonia,” Hydeia told Oprah back then. rbkyf

Hi Ben, For the specific issue you've noted, we simply need to add a snippet of code to your htaccess file to redirect all /index.php traffic to the root...   https://yoast.com/magento-seo/#www  Gives a good tutorial on how to do this depending upon where your base install is located. If you are worried about duplicate content on product pages, I would definitely recommend you check out some of the SEO modules for magento (like yoast)... and fully check out that article on magento optimization.. they do a great job of covering the common magento issues, and I personally refer back to it quite often - https://yoast.com/magento-seo/ Cheers, Jake