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One sneaky trick that your competitors don't want you to know about... I could really use that headline with this. Imagine things this way, you are doing backlink profiling on a competitor that ranks above you. You see that he has a bunch of spammy forums posts. But no matter what you do, you cannot out rank him. So you start forum spamming yourself to try to catch him in the SERPS. But then you get a penalty. The disavow tool has more than one use really. It will let Google know not to penalize you for links (or give you credit) but it will also mask your link profile too. I would just disavow them and be done with it. Let you competitors try to figure out what Google is giving you credit for or is not.

If you have permission to use their images, just get images from them, name them accurately, and give them accurate alt-text. Duplicate content has to do with your own content, in general. Since the point of naming images and alt-text is to help Google understand them, it's not a big issue if an image has the same alt-text as another or appears multiple times on the site (especially since they should all be coming from an images directory, no matter where they are on the website). Also, images are much more likely to be naturally reused than text, as licensing photos is a long accepted practice.

Agreed with Oleg.   On the Time and Quartz pages you are essentially looking at their blog index.  Their CMS (content management system) does some fancy footwork to show the url of the post you happen to be looking at.  It isn't one page with a different URL for each section. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, you can create content (posts) for the material, applications and types, and then list them on pages for the customer type.  If not, you can simply make pages like Oleg suggested.

No worries and good idea to toss the question of concern out to the Moz community. In the future, if it's anything having to do with Google or any new "up and coming" solution or search criteria change, then check with Google first, then check the Blogs here at Moz or elsewhere because I'm sure content writers would LOVE to be the first to hit on a new idea for how to rank in Google. Hopefully you can put your clients at ease Patrick

Hi MyOwnSEO, Absolutely, there are a couple ways you can do that. Create an Advanced Segment You can create an advanced segment which filters out any results coming from a certain keyword. Since you know that keyword is currently being abused, I would exclude that traffic from your reports. Used the Advanced Filter Go to the report you want to view. Then click on the 'advanced' link next to the tiny search box directly above the table of data. Now set an Exclude rule to filter out any of the results you wish, based on dimensions / metrics of the report you are viewing.

hey moosa, how would you know which one to rank for codes there are so many variation from discount codes to promo codes to voucher codes. which one seem to be better?

Hi Andy, Its just one guest blog in a week, so i am not going with high volume. Anchor text is also just brand name. So there is no intention to improve the rank of a specific keyword with guest blogging.

When it comes to formatting URL's, I think it's important for the URL's to make as much sense as possible from a hierarchical stand point. Moz has a really good article on the optimal URL structure. So you can sort of think of the blog keyword as the subcategory keyword from the example in that article. Further more, look at how both moz and Matt Cutts structure their blog URL's. http://moz.com/blog https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ Hope that helps!

Yeah, couldn't have said it anyway better. domain.com/xxx will be better for your SEO. I would strongly suggest to keep everything on a single subdomain, if you are to look further into the case, Moz did some pretty good experiments on this post: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

Hi AKClinics, The answers above are all great,  but given that this thread is likely to be read by others who may be dealing with a manual action instead of a Penguin issue, there is something else I think needs to be mentioned. In general, since nofollowed links are not passing PageRank, but as Marie explained above are passing a suggestion to Google that they should not be counted, there is no need to include them in a cleanup effort or disavow them. However, I have seen many instances of nofollowed links built by SEO agencies that are part of a wide scale effort to manipulate the algorithm. In one memorable case a link builder truly excelled sarcasm by creating comments with multiple links on every single page of a site with thousands of pages. Every one of those links was nofollowed, but the fact that the link builder didn't know the links were of no value does not alter the fact that it was clearly a manipulative effort. So, where such instances appear when conducting analysis for a site with a manual action my preference is always to try to remove those links and to disavow them. There are two reasons I take this approach: Make it clear to the Webspam team at reconsideration that the site owner is genuinely committed to cleaning up the fruits of all overtly manipulative linking efforts regardless of whether required by them or not. This helps to reinforce commitment to a change of mindset for the future. Leaving those links out there is not a good look for the Brand. People who happen to see those comments or dig into the backlink profile in the future will form an opinion of the Brand based on what they see. Leaving masses of obviously undesirable links in play is leaving the Brand open to a negative interpretation. If I can possibly get them removed then I will. Since you are not dealing with a manual action, you don't necessarily need to worry about this, but for those who are, I would be wary of just disregarding all nofollowed links without checking to see if they are part of a wider scale manipulative effort. Sha

A client of ours just had this happen to them as well. We saw a large spike in referral traffic from them, which led me to do some digging into their company. Looks like a search engine trying to grab traction and leads through a fancy landing page. If it continues, I will simply be blocking the site in my reporting software.

Hi 1080HDWallpapers, try to get listed at some top sites on your niche to start with.

Glad to help

Hi Tom, I went ahead and made the purchase, in my opinion not expensive but with domains you know... it's worth whatever you are willing to pay for it. thanks again for your help and guidance to check out those great links!

Been through the disavow on my site- While missing out on a few possible links, sucks.....are they high enough quality to warrant the possible negative consequences of lost revenue from the penalty coming back? Personally speaking unless that's a link from the Wall Street Journal or CNN, I wouldn't be poking the sleeping bear, it's just not worth it.

Sorry...didn't know about the no-sig thingy...am new to the Q&A area...but  I hear you!

There is no harm in testing stuff, but as Ruben says, don't put it on your main business website or host on the same c-block. I've been spammier in my 'youth' and totally get where you're coming from - it can be a real buzz getting one over on Google. BUT I now work in a purely white hat way, and the buzz you get from doing it 'right' is much better - AND the results last for longer so it's a win win for me!

Hi, yeah already tried all of those! Thanks

It's currently not a massive ranking factor. It will only really come into affect if there are two very closely matched pages, then if your page is HTTPS it may rank higher than the other page. The sooner HTTPS is implemented the better, but it's not something you need to rush into as Google is only currently applying a lightweight boost so that webmasters have time to implement it to their site. Also, it appears that AdSense and Trusted Stores programs don't work well with HTTPS, which I'm sure is something Google are working on. Within 12 months or so there is every chance that Google may decide to make this a stronger signal as more sites migrate to fully HTTPS. Regards