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Hi Matt It's ok Thanks for the clarification. Domain's age = authority and trust in the search engine's eyes and hence an effect on rankings. Everything has it's own impact within the algorithm I agree. Thanks a lot.

Thank you very much

Thanks a lot Alvaro. I understand the dilution of the link juice. Having big problems getting rid of duplicate content caused by image attachments in Wordpress.

Thanks, I think I will go ahead with that.

Hi Jason, This is something I can't really give a confident answer on unfortunately. Our list of clients these days don't really lend themselves to legitimate causes for a press release so we haven't done one in a little while. My best suggestion would be to look at them very closely before submitting and check for the usual quality factors (trust, authority, linking practices etc) and more importantly, try to find sites that actually have real traffic to amplify your efforts rather than just being launched into the ether to be seen by nobody

Totally Agreed... webmaster tool (now search console) gives the functionality to tell google about your site updates instantly using Fetch facility in the tool, so you can index your site's new or updated content as well you can find the errors on your web pages like crawl errors, indexing errors, and more. you can see the manual action as well if your site spreading spam on internet. and after fixing the issues you can send reconsideration request also. so, it is a big benefit for verified site in Google webmaster tool.

Thank you Logan and Matt for your answer. The reason why I wanted to change the URL was that it contain the year 2011 and to make it look updated, I wanted to remove the year 2011. But now, I am going to leave it because I don't want its ranking to go down.

Thank you both @gaston riera and @peter nikolov

Disavow w/o any doubts. Also report for scrapper and hosting weird redirects (and maybe malware soon!): http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160202_M1_GH/ just see waterfall diagram and watchout for iTunes, Alibaba, Bing, Codecanyon, Walmart, and few more. Starting from today Google also sent notes about spam: http://www.thesempost.com/google-sending-confirmation-notices-for-spam-reports/ so for now every report count. PS: I just make another test here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160202_19_Y1/ this time with "save results body". Seems not so trivial! This site is trying to add someone in mine list of CodeCanyon. Also trying to manipulate Groupon + increase visits of Indeed job offer.

I saw this for a client as well, who I know for sure isn't running WordPress at all. Personally, I think it's a Google mistake.

Is this sneaky or not?    It's dumb... and kinda sneaky. Dumb, because they would have been smarter to point the links to their main website, instead of using an intermediate website. It's dumb because they waste money on domain registration and hosting. It's dumb because there is a loss of power in the redirect. It's dumb because Google doesn't like links on press release sites or any kind of site where you pay for a page that has pagerank-passing links on it. So, its dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.. and kinda sneaky.

Agree with Trevor and would add that they have NAP info on the page and "lawyer" in their domain name.

I have a few thoughts for you. First, it may take time. In many cases when a penalty is lifted it can take 1-2 weeks to see the benefits of the penalty being lifted. Second, this is probably obvious, but is the brand name relatively unique? In other words, if your brand is a common word or a keyword, then you may not see a return to good rankings. Google may decide that when people search for that word they're not necessarily looking for your brand. Next, it's possible that the site is trapped under Penguin and you need to wait till Penguin updates. With that said, Penguin doesn't usually affect brand terms too heavily, unless, again, the brand is a common keyword. " Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. " - This doesn't sound normal to me. You should not lose rankings after filing a disavow unless you have been extremely aggressive and disavowed really good links. Even then, it takes a good amount of time for the sites in your disavow to be recrawled and the disavow applied. So, if your drop happened shortly after filing the disavow it could be coincidental. There have been a LOT of changes in the SERPS recently and it may be that your site is one of the many that is seeing wild swings. With all of that said, there are cases where Google makes mistakes. I've had a few cases where I just couldn't figure out why a site couldn't rank for their brand name. Here's an example: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/VFnodOiYXqc;context-place=topicsearchin/webmasters/pedorthic. In that case we were able to get a Google employee's ear and magically, after not ranking for months, the brand terms were back within 24 hours. But, this type of situation is likely quite rare. I am guessing that in your case, you need to give it a bit more time. Best of luck!

Scrapebox is a great tool. You can use it to do white hat link building by using it in the research phase of link building. It allows you to find hundreds or thousands of potential websites using search engine commands, check if those sites are indexed in Google, and export into a .txt file or excel spreadsheet. Personally I love using it, because it saves me a ton of time by automating certain aspects of keyword research and outreach target research within specific niche's. If you're using it for just automated blog comments, then you're using a tiny fraction of that tool. Yes you can do blog comments in mass quantities if you want, but that's not the real benefit of a tool like that. Google "How to use scrapebox" and you'll find a ton of resources how to really use that tool, like Neil Patel's write up here - https://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-link-building-chapter-8/ It's also a lifetime subscription where you'll always be able to get the most recent updates, so it's well worth the price.

Hi Dmitrii, Thanks a lot for your feedback. This really helps making some content based decisions. Best regards, Bob

I agree with Chris. It is not a question of quantity but natural quality. Hummingbird and Penguin from Google had become smarter and and they quickly detect excessive link building campaigns. Google warned that it is now forbidden to cheat the authority of a site this way and strongly suggests indexing nofollow links. Social Network are strongly recommended such Google Plus, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook are the strongest. Modern new types of directories are created and respects Paid Link and Link Scheme such as WISE. Many directories are penalized by Penguin for not meeting its new recommendations of Google. A natural baclink profile is now the best way to achieve your goals. Google will always follow a Nofollow link coming from a site that has a strong reputation and will now transfer "Trust" instead of Linkjuice.

I wouldnt say only backlinks were the reason as backlinks is only one part. I gained links from Wiki - as you know Google loves Wikipedia and pulls a lot of information from Wiki to knowledge graph. I build backlinks from Wiki and some other sources to our main page. After about 5-6 months, the answer box was showing. I also remember one thing that I forgot to mention earlier. It can sometimes take a lot of time to kick competitor out of answer box and get yourself up there. Food for thought - If you can build a click through relationship between searches and the webpage in question, I am sure Google can start giving you more favor if you increase click through rate for that particular keyword of yours. If you are already ranking higher then chances are that you are getting more clicks already but maybe from a different geographic location your competitor is getting more clicks and has a better click through rate.

There are a couple of methods to help reduce any ghost/referral spam you may be getting, one is to use your htaccess, (this reduces crawled traffic only) and the other is to set up filters in GA. This post from Carlos Escalera, is one of my favourites. https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter Hope this helps.

However, once you have a good 404 page, it is really worthwhile to use the Moz tools to find and correct any 404 errors you have. Every redirected URL has the chance to enhance your domain authority.

If your "brand" is going to be "Region Family Holidays" then an EMD is fine. Just make sure you're branded that way, and try to cultivate a variety of natural backlinks. If your brand is "Acme Travel UK" and the site is regionfamilyholidays.co.uk then you'll be fighting a losing battle.