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looking forward to it!, patiently waiting!

There are plenty of very large sites doing this--it's natural for them to link to the sites that they own. It all really comes down to the sites' link profiles, and if their link profile is diversified enough. If those links are the only links (or a large portion of) the links that they have, there might be an issue. But if the parent site is trusted enough, has a high enough Domain Authority, then most likely the site won't be penalized for the parent site linking to them.

Thanks Tymen, but the question was specifically regarding www vs. non-www.  Thanks anyway!

Hi Bob. Are these sites duplicating themselves in the same niche? It sounds like you have one main site, and two that are secondary to that. Is that the case? There's a lot that goes into a decision like this, but it may be that the multi-site approach is diluting your brand.  If all three sites have their own distinct voice, social media interactions, branding, design, and so on, then keeping all three as separate entities and addressing the issues within each would be fine. On the other hand, if the other two sites serve as doorway and paid link portals pointing towards the main site, you should really consider making the one main site the best resource and store within the niche. Broadly, the traffic increase options are standard: paid advertising where applicable or ROI appropriate, funnel improvements which pay dividends when traffic increases, improved rankings, link garnering content, and so on. A classic blog post by Oli Gardner on the subject is here: https://moz.com/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928 Cheers!

Yeah the second batch of sites I listed have been around, or at least displacing our pages, since probably July of last year. I'm waiting for them to be penalised and disappear, but they've recently updated their layout with a responsive design and seem to still be going strong.

Hi there, For manual penalty, please check your search console under manual actions tab. For algorithm penalty, you may notice huge drop in traffic and rankings, and may not rank for your brand name

In your case, Interspire to Magento migration solution can solve your problem with migrate Products and Categories SEO URLs and migrate 301 SEO URLs of categories and products from old store to Magento shopping cart. It supports multi-language and multi-store. Check it: http://litextension.com/shopping-cart-migration/interspire-to-magento.html

I can definitely say that keywords in a URL can make a difference in a competitive vertical. We have an article on site with a slug of "best-place-to-buy-a-mac-online" and you get one guess what keywords it ranks for. That said, if you're talking about changing URLs sitewide, I would be very cautious. Maybe make changes to one or two pages to start and watch them for a few weeks.

Most likely not. The links may have been created by a 3rd-party bot, a Fiverr project, or something similar that can't be easily traced. The only thing left to do is ask yourself who benefits from the negative SEO attack. Even so, that's likely a large pool of search competitors.

Thanks Rand. I suspected so. It was a very intriguing experiment you conducted. My take away... there are no more short cuts without getting into trouble with Google... just smart and hard work, keeping your plate clean. Thanks for your response!

This looks to me like someone who knows SEO is important but has no idea what they're doing. Russ is right, superfluous meta tags haven't worked for nearly 10 years, if they ever did at all.

Hi, When I see links like this, the first thing I worry about is whether your site has been hacked. But yes, attempts at negative SEO are possible as well. Whenever, Google is asked about negative SEO like this they say that they are generally really good at determining that these are not links that you made yourself and that you are safe to ignore them. But, they do always recommend disavowing just to be sure. Here are my thoughts on your questions: Do these links hurt your SEO, even if nofollowed? If nofollowed they are no harm to you. However, in some hackings what the hackers will do is point thousands of nofollowed links from domains they control and then, somewhere down the road they can change them to followed. As such, in this case I'd still disavow the nofollowed links. What else can you do other than disavow? Not much unfortunately. If you find that a lot of these links point to a particular page you can 404 or 410 that page and that will get rid of the links. But otherwise, sadly, there's not much else you can do. Most likely Google will ignore these links but no one can say for sure.

Thanks so much for reporting back! Nonetheless, the responses here helped strengthen my case that on-site elements like this should not exists solely for bots, so I'm making headway!

Thanks for the information Verb - the reason we track those other keywords separately from traffic is because I normally find their rank a good marker around the primary keywords but I understand what you're saying so there is more clarity in the focus. I'll look for one of those tools and see if SEOprofiler works or similar. I've done the adwords method before but it's a bit laborious so I would prefer something automated if possible. Thanks for the reassurance! It appears that yesterday evenings tracking in moz has updated and a lot of keywords have gone back up again so fingers crossed there was just a glitch / settling in phase! Thanks

I should also add that when you look at a company that provides link building services you should have them evaluate your site for content. What I would do is show them a couple so so pages, and a couple real good ones. Allow them to pick which ones they are willing to promote, if they choose the good ones you know you have the right people... my thoughts, Don

Hi Kerry, I have also been seeing a huge influx of these links from image directories and have had a hard time finding out more information about them.  Finally, someone else seeing this same thing! I've been disavowing them but there are so many and they just seem to keep increasing. Would love to hear from more mozzers if they have been seeing these and if they are harmful.

I see. I guess the question is whether to nofollow them and disavow them both. They had a spammy footer linking everything together, got rid of the footer, and kept a few of the links except transferred them to the body content somewhere. Make sense?

I see the exact match domain #1 - plantas de casas .com so that makes sense. According to Majestic, you have 958 live links and 135,000+ historic links. That's a HUGE drop off in links. You used to have 1363 referring domains and now have 244. Those drops are cause for some worry. montesuacasa.com.br has 46k links and 731 historic referring domains - many more links than you and many more still alive. If I look through your historic links you were getting 128,000 from one site jeso carneiro.com.br - this site has pretty good authority itself but your link is now not found. So that was helping you to #1 - now it's not.

Yes, the move to HTTPS takes a while sometimes to fully swap over to your new versions. In the meantime, you may see some dips in ranking even though Google swears this doesn't happen. We have verified several times that it does. In the meantime, check your website in Google using site: and you'll see that there's a mix of https and non-https. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:www.thepresentfinder.co.uk/&gws_rd=ssl Fetch your site in Search Console, check your sitemap for https links and then resubmit sitemap in Search Console. Then it's just a waiting game on Google's end.

This is one of the biggest issues I see with ecommerce sites these days. Automatic feeds of data, titles, descriptions, product info, etc. right into the store. It never ranks all that well without massive authority. To be honest, the more you can change pre-import the better. Add something to the titles, change them up manually with an intern - whatever it takes to create unique value. For a while I was outranking Polyvore, David Jones & Amazon for the word "skirt" just because my product and category descriptions were massively different than anything on Google at the time (longer, more detailed, more useful.) In this type of situation, don't be afraid to experiment. You're not going to outrank eBay, Amazon or the OEM for most products individually but if you try mixing things up you may find weaknesses that are easy enough to exploit. Whenever I imported, I'd alter the CSV files directly and then import. Made life so much better (and drastically improves rankings on long tail searches.) (A small, small e-tailer won't do this but a mid size to large one always should be.)