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Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. I have come to terms with the fact that I am going to need help on this one. I am trying to make a case to my boss for a "second opinion". UPDATE As this window was open my boss called me in for our meeting. I explained the circumstance and basically his answer was: "Give me a timeline of everything that needs to happen. We can't cut anything until we build anything (unfortunately I fear he may have stolen my sentence from my interview when I said "don't burn a bridge before you build a bridge")." So we will go from there. I do think he is beginning to understand the severity. He made an analogy to the Corleone's going 'legit' in the Godfather but wasn't comfortable doing so until we had a plan to go 'legit.' Thanks again everybody! You have all been a tremendous help!

because you have no backlinks you have six total and your site apparently has an incredible amount of duplicate content after running it through screening  frog and site liner you have a ton of broken links as well. From only scanning 250 pages total I was able to come up with quite a few huge issues with out the www. 400 Bad Request: Top Issues 1,301 pages were not scanned. 772 broken links were found. Your site is missing an XML Sitemap. WWW vs. non-WWW: Server error. Your Pages 250 pages scanned of 1,551 found. Normal Pages: 67 Skipped, Redirect: 10 Errors: 173 Not Scanned: 1,301 Duplicate Content Duplicate Content: 15% Common Content: 59% Unique Content: 25% ** the complete PDF report is right here http://cl.ly/WF4O will** http://www.siteliner.com/www.hemjakt.se/omrade/centralt/?siteliner=broken OSE backlinks http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hemjakt.se%2F After using the elite addition of Ahrefs ( the different editions offer different abilities) Summary of links found for www.hemjakt.se http://cl.ly/WEkK You have roughly 2 domain backlinks total from utilizing both tools I would run it through MajesticSEO but I do not see the point. you need to fix the problems with your site I have a guess as to how you are ranking, but I do not believe it was natural. If you had built that many pages on a website and really gotten only about 5 or 6 backlinks out of that only 2 our from domains/ IP's to link to your site total I would find that impossible to believe. You have clearly scraped them or somebody else has been doing a lot of scraping and you may not know about it. Here is a lot of information I hope this helps, Thomas Ub0hJuM.png x0OTizY.png bI0jrFJ.png MbiU6fb.png

Yes, you'll still see your disavowed links in Webmaster Tools.  There is no external evidence that shows that the links are disavowed. Here's more info: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2330944/7-Things-You-May-Not-Know-About-Googles-Disavow-Tool

Be very careful about making assumptions regarding competitors. Just because you see one thing, does not mean either that one thing is helping or hurting a site. SEO is a vast, complex environment. If a site has enough very strong signals across many areas, one or even a few very poorly executed things may not hurt the site. Or it may not hurt the site "until Google catches up with it". Duplicate content, regardless of method (within a single site, across multiple domains, across a mix of domains and subdomains" is never a true best practice.  Ever.  it's artificial, and Google most definitely takes the position that if you are attempting to "artificially" (in their view) manipulate rankings in a non-best-practices manner, that's a violation of their guidelines, policies or TOS.

If the site was submitted, and its already in effect, you will have to wait and see if there is any negative linking. You will not be able to disavow any URL's until you know about them. At the same time, Google isn't stupid. If this was all that it took to bring down a website in ranking, people would be using it daily on their competitor's URLs. What I am trying to say is: wait and see. A one time submission is probably not going to make or break you in any way. If you were submitting daily pings, and had a track record of being a spammy site, then I would think otherwise.

Thanks for all the help!

I had this once, I checked a paragraph from our site and found an American firm using our content. Our intellectual Property Management company Demys got involved and it was quickly resolved. Other issues I have had is duplicate content on four site, check for duplicate urls which resolve to the same page using Screaming frog.

Andy - I am actually using cognitiveseo which incorporates all the links from places like moz, majestic and ahrefs.  You can also import your webmaster tool links as well with a few clicks. It then has a link browser, highlights unnatural links (which you can modify), and will create a disavow file for you.  After the initial panic, when I wrote my first post here, I know feel quite comfortable with how I am dealing with it. I think the stats update every couple of days, so its not instant like going to places like ahrefs and majestic direct, but as it collates all the data from all sites I can deal with that limitation.

"Do I need to include all of their references and would that be duplicate content." Do not include large sections of content from the source, have the sources quoted at the bottom of the page as links. I would imagine you are putting your own spin on some of the information contained on those sites? You can make each one be its own line, and have a few links related to each section. Here is an example: http://moz.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow If you look at the bottom, she links out in a very organized fashion, so a user can find the source link they are looking for easier. You can also link out as you mention certain sites, or subjects. For better distribution, use a few less costly press relesases to judge how well the article will be received. Once you see it gaining traction, or the attachment rate with users, then I would possibly look at doing a larger PR. For your infographic, show a lower resolution version on your webpage, both for fast loading times, and also to have the full image downloadable as a file. This will allow you an extra URL where the image is hosted, and you will be able to track users that come to read and view the graphic, and also those that want to download what you display. This should give you some extra insight if the infographic is truly successful, and people find it useful. You could also add this as a destination URL goal in analytics.

Thank you to you all for your valued feedback. Marie, please do let me know when this article becomes available. I'd be vary interested to read. We use Moz to analyse and correct the general health of a website to eradicate errors accordingly. Panda - I'm aware Panda updates have happened more frequently. All duplicates and the quality of content has been implemented for our client. Penguin - I have disavowed "all" poor quality backlinks, ensuring good quality links remain. We did this manually checking each link and the referring websites for quality assurance. **But how do we know when the Panda penalty has been lifted, when it's obvious we have a Penguin penalty in place? ** **Does a business who are desperate to advertise online simply begin creating new "valuable" **content, reach out to industry influencers etc,  to achieve backlinks with authority - meaning waiting maybe months before the penalty is removed, if removed? Or, create a new site, "completely" separate from the old, and implement our marketing strategy knowing that the spammy practices conducted in the past will not affect my clients new site?

Hi Michael! Because of Google's bias toward physical location, simply mentioning the names of neighboring cities in which you have no physical location is unlikely to earn you a place in the local pack of results for 'used cars' in these cities, and will not typically be enough to gain you a spot in the organic SERPs, either. The exception to this would be if you are in such a niche with such low competition that it's easy to rank for anything - which isn't typically going to be the case with a used car dealer in a big city. Meanwhile, the mention of these other cities in the titles of pages that you are trying hard to get to rank in the local pack for that main, physical city may actually somewhat dilute your ability to achieve that goal. Rather than saying, "Hey Google, THIS is our city of physical location!", you are splitting up the title to say, "Well, we're relevant to a whole bunch of places," when, in fact, you're really only strongly relevant to the main one. Chances are that you'll need to consider whether the development of landing pages for these other cities is a good marketing decision and a user-friendly strategy. This typically involves brainstorming to see if a business has a legitimate presence in other cities, beyond the fact that it's near to them and that customers travel from there to the business. With SABs (service area businesses), this decision is quite easy, because the plumber may be based in Metropolis, but is traveling to Gotham City, Star City and Red City to fix sinks. With something like a car dealership, the link is less obvious. Does the dealership do something in these cities that would warrant the development of content specific to these locales, that would then provide a sensible set of pages to be optimizing for each individual city? For example, does the dealership offer unique specials based on the customer's city of origin (Red Star customers get 5% off their purchase of a used car this summer). Or, perhaps, does the owner send a mechanic to vocational schools in another city to give presentations. Does the company participate in seminars or events in these other cities? Maybe vintage car shows or charity events? If you can find a legit connection between the business and neighboring cities, then you have something interesting to write about and a user-centric reason to be building and optimizing pages for these cities. If no such connection exists, you may need to consider PPC ads, instead, targeting these cities. You might like to read about this whole concept of city landing pages further at: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

There's a few pingbacks on my blog that are broken links. How do you remove pingbacks?

I'm in agreement Robert.  Hitesh, it does feel like we're missing some part of the story.  I have reviewed hundreds if not thousands of sites that were dealt unnatural links penalties and I have yet to see one that was given unfairly.  I have seen the occasional example unnatural link given that truly was natural, but I've never seen a site get a penalty when all they had were natural links. Again, if you'd like to share the url I'll take a look and give you my thoughts.  But other than that I think any answer that you'll get here is going to just be speculation.

Hi Michael 1. Bullets - This is also something I have not heard much about, but you could try to method in this post for bulleted lists in SERPs which Google goes on to explain here. 2. Landing page code - Do you mean having this show in the title tag and use "near me"? I don't think there's a way to do this. Google does not dynamically change title tags for you in such a way. 3. You can make a brand image show up, usually only for brand searches, by using rel=publisher: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1713826?hl=en

Hi Akhilesh, Link velocity is determined by hopefully real natural factors. For instance, your client and you discuss a way to get some attention brought to whatever their product or services. Let us say you put out a press release and because that product is unique enough or interesting enough therefore it will be picked up by a lot of bloggers and legitimate media outlets including sometimes national news stations. I have a client who currently gains 60 links a day on average naturally he went from gaining maybe two a day to a natural 1000 today when it hit Fox news, NBC ABC etc. we got lucky to an extent but we knew the negative link velocity was going to occur it was not like this was in a be a surprise. So I can tell you that Google does view things that are not manipulative to their rankings as legitimate therefore will not come after you. To imagine a peek like that for a week and then a consistently higher daily link intake than you had before that is great but it did not affect the rankings negatively when it came down but what was really doing was just settling it had no idea that there was going to be a slowdown to that degree until it occurred. At the end of the day I am still extremely happy of what we did we got the website a lot more domain authority and domain trust long with a lot more traffic we have quadrupled base traffic in one quarter. The use a lot of techniques because you have to use Google plus, twitter, linked in whatever will get you attention and it has to be high quality or people will not stick around. I know people use that word a lot but it really has to be a lot of work done. I have put a lot of time and wrist a lot of my own money proving that press releases are completely legitimate method when used correctly not when you are just throwing stuff out there hoping some is going to catch it and then write it. I recommend actually putting in the time and the money with a real quality public relations agency I also recommend using Wistia in order to have your clients make a once a week the video similar to white board Friday's however make it relevant to their industry. You know they talk about it I got to speak to Chris at search love and they grew their business by speaking about relevant topics in their industry and getting ranked that way through videos pointing back to their site. That is amazing because the cost is not high it has white hat it is great for content and the end-user it should be implemented immediately. You should also transcribe them this will create content for you that is natural and one-of-a-kind. Videos have the schema in them if there using the super or Seo embed on Wistia in addition to helping your site rank they keep people on your site longer and if you allow them to have the embed code (the I-frame embed code) and the video is good enough it will be shared people will simply put it on their website and it will point links back to your website. You can do this with other video providers I believe there is a tool on distilled if you look up "Phil Nottingham distilled back link video tool" you will find it. Keep in mind though all the stuff that you need is already in Wistia if you can give those PR releases out with your video you will get a lot of links. I hope that answers some of the questions here are some links on link velocity and other methods being used that are okay with Matt Cutts by the way PRWeb and PRNewswire our extremely well known however PR serve is a new PR agency that promises not to charge you unless you make money. There are referral only system however it is not impossible http://www.prserve.com/ http://www.linkresearchtools.com/tools/clv/ http://blog.ahrefs.com/link-building-lessons-matt-cutts-stay-googles-good-side/ http://blog.ahrefs.com/filling-gaps-link-profile-ahrefs-competitor-backlink-analysis/ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/link-research-tools/41291/ http://blog.ahrefs.com/build-links-manually/ Sincerely, Thomas

Hey guys, Thank you so much for all your inputs. Sorry I was very busy couldn't get back sooner. I appreciate you advices. Chris

If you're adding links from external sites yourself, those links aren't quite natural.

You're not using a geo redirect are you? If not, then it does seem like you have had an algorithm penalty (assuming there isn't a manual notice) on WMT.

Hi, just curious, does anyone else have any other thoughts? Thanks

Thanks Jane, That makes everything except possibly the BBB not any good. Glad to know. That pretty much leaves us with content marketing. What's your opinion on the best online guides for developing content marketing in an industry where it's tough to find article niches, i.e. nobody links to the content in our niche. Thanks, I'll close this soon. Bob