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I think this could be an attempt at negative SEO.  But whether or not the links will hurt you is hard to say.  I see all kinds of odd links that just randomly appear in some site profiles, but these look like they were made deliberately.  One other explanation that is not negative SEO is if someone at your company, or a well meaning friend has ever purchased a cheap link building plan.  I've seen links like these appear as the result of fiverr gigs or purchasing one of those "buy 1000 links for $100" type things. Google says they're really good at determining whether negative SEO is happening and just not counting these links.  However, if this were my site, I'd probably disavow these once every 2-4 weeks just to be sure.  Make sure you disavow them on the domain level. If it is a competitor who is using xrumer or something similar to pepper the web with links to you then hopefully it will stop when they decide to give up.  There's really no way to determine who is doing it though as these really are all most likely automated. I think that anyone who is in a really competitive space like this needs to be monitoring for negative SEO regularly.  Again, I think in most cases it won't hurt you, but Google is certainly not perfect and I wouldn't take the chance.

Linda, OK, thanks. Grateful to have another opinion on it. It seems like this site has suffered, but the rest of links look reasonable. However, the previous SEO done appears to have been link building with complete absence of keyword research and subsequent optimisation of pages, posts, etc. Regards, Steve

Eric, I understand how it feels to get that first great link. Don't reindex or resubmit sitemap. Here is a little trick... Go into webmaster tools and the 3rd or 4th button on the left going down is CRAWL. Click that and the third item on the dropdown is Fetch as Google. (You are going to use it for getting the page crawled, but that is not the original intent for this tool.)  Click Fetch as Google and put the URL of the page in. IF the page is your home page, leave blank and then hit fetch. That should get it crawled fairly quickly.  Note. This does not mean it will show up in links to your site in the next few days or even weeks. I have seen it take two months to get a link to show in GWMT. Hope this helps, good luck as you go forward. Edit: Sorry click Fetch and Render then click Index. Forgot about this. Robert

I have direct experience with this. It looks to be pretty useless to contact the authors of old posts and ask them to insert links to your site, with anchor text or without. This was a very very popular link development tactic three of four years ago. It was pretty easy to scale and it was effective. For Google, negative the positive effects of this tactic was likely quite easy: Cached versions of a page contain no external link to www.yoursite.com Page exists for extended period, gains PageRank Link suddenly appears on page to www.yoursite.com, often with optimised anchor text If you're being really obvious about it, you've paid for this link and set a time period of one year for the link to be up. All of a sudden after a year (or a set period), the link disappears, and www.yoursite.com seems to have a lot of links that disappear from older posts after one year. This is so blindingly obvious and easy enough for amateurs to spot: it's unfeasible that Google can't spot this too. A natural link is going to appear in a new blog post, not an old one. How many times have you gone back and edited an old post to include a new link? I can think of once or twice in my history online where I have done that with the legitimate intention of adding a good resource to the article. I am not adding links to insurance websites, jewellers, etc. A new post may or may not acquire authority, but if you are trying to place links based on authority, look at the website the new post will go up on. Do its posts regularly receive a good number of links, decent traffic, social media attention, etc.? This tactic of placing links on old blog posts was effective in the past, but I would be confident saying that its effectiveness en masse disappeared some time around 2010.

You can wait, the decission is from google, but i agree with the last response. Make google knows they doesn't want to cache / see this page with robots or another method, and then, wait. There's no more options for somethink like that.

Hi there, The answer here is always very subjective. It is perfectly natural for businesses to link their sites together. Why would you not do that? Google understands this; the relationship between businesses owned by the same entity can and should be partially represented by links. Moz links to Open Site Explorer's website. Amazon.co.uk can link to Amazon.fr. If I link my blog to a website promoting consulting services, this is natural and fine. What Google and other search engines want to figure out and discount is if you create a huge network of websites, attempt to obscure the fact that they are all owned by you, and link them together in some pattern that attempts to increase the SEO value or all or some of them. That's manipulative and you can't expect such a tactic to work in the long term. Effectively hiding a network like this is usually costly and time-consuming and barely worth the effort in the end (although some folks still do it very well). Google likely doesn't pass the highest amount of authority between links where the linking sites are clearly owned by the same person or company, but there is nothing "wrong" with interlinking the sites you own. Your competitor is likely ranking well due to a number of factors, not just because their websites are linked together.

I hear what you're saying.  I think it all comes down to motive.  For some widgets, if someone uses your widget, they're recommending your site and it's possible the link may be ok.  But, let's say I have a car insurance site and I make a widget that is a hit counter and thousands of people embed it with a link that says, "Widget provided by carinsurancesite.com".  Should Google really rank me higher for car insurance because I made a hit counter that people really liked?  No. There are also many cases that are debatable whether or not they are ok, but ultimately we don't know how Google decides whether widget links are acceptable or not. The best way to talk with a Google employee about questions like this is to ask a question in a webmaster central hangout with John Mueller: https://plus.google.com/events/castmn1nmp3o0r3lgkc4djmhvl4

Hi there, The first question, as the others have stated, is whether the content has been duplicated. If so, that's a problem no matter where the websites are located. However, if you have two totally different websites from a content point of view on the same topic, hosting them together should not be a big problem. The only issue would be Google's understanding that the two resources were owned by the same entity, and therefore ranking them together might not constitute the most diverse user experience for people searching on the topic. Google reads registration information as well, and also understands that some servers / hosting services host hundreds of thousands of websites so some topic cross-over is natural without the sites being owned by the same person or company. If you had two sites selling pet food on the same dedicated server for the sole purpose of having two sites rank for the same pet food queries, I'm not 100% sure Google would ignore their hosting though.

believe I found a hint opensiteexplorer linking pages: limboland.net | *.limboland.net/ | Top Linking Pages | Page Authority | | http://business.limboland.net/factoring/delaware_llc/delaware_llc.html | 29 | | 39 | 281 | See http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains.html?page=2&scope=domain_to_domain&site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.delawareinc.com%2F&sort=domain_authority&target=domain Anchor text linking to some page on https://www.delawareinc.com/ | your story heidi lowe gallery,1,6 | Query Google if the phrase with myamar girls etc is indexed for the limbo land site: myanmar girls site:http://limboland.net/ See the smoking gun? This site links to yours and uses the exact keywords and is a doubtful site at best. I would disavow this entire website. Hope this helps. Gr Daniel edit?usp=sharing

No worries.  I haven't labeled you as a blackhat.  In fact, my apologies, but I didn't remember that I had answered a question for you previously. So, your questions are mostly ones that can't be answered in a general sense.  They'd require someone to know the intimate details of your penalty/algorithm demotion/technical on site issues/etc etc etc.  There's no black and white answer to any of these questions. Google doesn't often just completely deindex a site.  Most penalties cause ranking demotions.  If you get affected by an algorithm (ie Penguin for unnatural links) then your site won't rank well until the links are cleaned up AND Penguin refreshes again.  But for algorithms your site won't get deindexed. Google does not give warnings to say that you are going to be hit soon. Google says that any site can recover from a penalty or algorithm change provided you fix the issues.  But you've got to have good stuff there in order to recover.  In other words, if you got a penalty or an algorithmic demotion because of unnatural links and once you've removed those links there are no natural ones there then don't expect recovery. I've written some articles on Moz that probably answer your questions: http://moz.com/blog/google-algorithm-cheat-sheet-panda-penguin-hummingbird http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase http://moz.com/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

I agree.  You don't even have to put 'reviews' or 'complaints' in your query and they rank.  My guess is that you can pay to have the bad reviews removed... so by working hard to rank page one for the company's name.... BOOM, revenue.

Egol is right - pages like this can persist in quieter niches, especially if there are not a huge number of other results to take the thin results' place. I notice that this guy's page for London has a lot more content, probably indicative of the fact that the competition for rankings and business is a lot higher in London than it is in surrounding areas.

Thanks! You can email me at ryan@cloudhashing.com to discuss things further

I think you should be rewrite your dynamic url will be good for SEO point of view. Thanks, Akhilesh

That's the problem...it's often hard to tell whether a link is natural or not.  For example, a local directory listing might be ok, but it could be unnatural.  If it helps, I wrote a Moz article that describes different kinds of unnatural links: http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines

Thanks for the responses everyone! I will look away and stay focused on helping my clients.

It will if its a too old article say like 1 yr old. But it also depends on the article. some articles are ever green and even its old it is still valuable.

"What questions do people call in about?" Good idea Keri. You can also come up with a list of what a consumer that is buying a model of truck will type. Such as: Common problems of model Easy fixes for issues with model Consumer reviews for model Publisher reviews for model Things like that. As Egol stated, you can easily waste a TON of time blogging about stuff no one will read or care about. Do a few searches yourself. I'm sure if you spent 10 minutes searching around you could find some topics worth covering.

Hi Akhilesh, Can you provide some context to your questions? They are a little surprising, since in several other Q&A questions you've gone and offered your services to other people asking for service providers stating that you have a talented pool of SEO experts.

Parasite hosting is when someone places a webpage on a domain that is not theirs and intends to rank it organically. You might want to do this if you want to ensure that anyone searching for your brand, for example, reaches a page that you own or created.  For example, you might want to rank a Yelp page, Facebook page or others to control your brand results. Conversely, others may want to rank for keyword terms by creating a page on a website with a high authority (let's say domain authority), as the page they create will inherit some of the trust and strength of the root domain.  Some people rank those pages in a white hat way, others may choose to aggressively link to those pages - as they don't have to worry about their own site being penalised for it.  You can see there where it becomes a gray area for SEO. The most extreme example would be people in very spammy health niches, eg viagra, compromising a site and creating a new page to sell their products or promote their shop for a quick rankings boost.  This is just outright black hat SEO and illegal, as it involves hacking into a site to create a page. So you can see there are different degrees of parasite hosting, each with different levels of ethics. Hope this helps.