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Two great answers here already. Basically, you may have a strong resource to work with but Google is also keen on not allowing brand new site owners from benefitting too much from the authority of newly-purchased websites. Google is a domain registrar for the sole purpose of accessing comprehensive whois information and understanding when websites / domains change hands. If a domain's registration information, hosting and content changes drastically, there is nothing stopping Google from removing the authority that domain once had. Again, this is not to say that the domain won't be useful, but you will probably need to build a useful site on that domain that reflects the quality of the links that have helped it achieve a PR6 in the past. Simply redirecting it to a new location will probably not be of much use - I seem to remember that Google started stamping out that practice's usefulness five or six years ago. $100 also seems quite cheap for a PR6 domain, but maybe you lucked out!

I would imagine that because Chevrolet is part of the brand name that it shouldn't cause any issues but using Chevy might be more beneficial anyways. Also if I recall correctly from when I did keyword research for a Chevy dealership/parts seller, Chevy was actually searched just as often if not more often than Chevrolet. Obviously that's subject to location though.

Marie is correct - this is unlikely to work unless you are VERY careful to not let Google know that the websites are connected, as they're partial to transferring penalties from one site to another if you try to get rid of a penalty by starting a new, identical website. Simply redirecting a penalised site is a trick that used to work back in 2009, 2010 (you don't mention redirection, but it's worth noting that this used to work, so if you see it mentioned online it's probably old information). Even if you do not redirect the old site, Google may still recognise that the content is identical to a website it previously penalised, especially if all the new site's registration information, hosting, template, etc. is the same as the old site. That's not for sure - you may get away with doing this if there are no ties between the old, penalised site and the new site, but using identical content is a big give-away. Assuming that your penalty was links-related, the safest way to do this is to remove the old site's content, wait until Google cache the old site with the content gone (so the content is completely out of the index), take the site down and re-publish on the new domain. That said, Google's ability to remember what it has seen before could result in the scenario Marie describes.

There is no magic number of frequency of links that will secure you good, long-term high rankings. Richard is right, you shouldn't consider link building as a painting-by-numbers game where you decide on a number of links from one type of source and fill these numbers into a chart as the links are built. Check out the link building category on the Moz blog. It contains years worth of high-quality content about creative, sustainable link development ideas. Please keep in mind that "social bookmarking" is a very outdated technique. Depending on what you actually plan on doing, a lot of these links may be nofollowed as well, making their usefulness for SEO purposes negligible.

Yes mate i have already checked most of the profile found paid or something link other there are no option to create our profile link. Only very less website where we can follow us.

We can't really say as we can't see the sites OSE shouldn't be your only way of checking a site's details. There are other factors involved, their fresh content, maybe they have old 301s, more links (OSE wont be able to see all of it) and so on. Add to it that maybe they have better bounce/UI/UX and a better social following. If you could share a bit more info, I think the moz community would be able to help further

Yes it should follow through the link with exception of no-follow tags and robots.txt etc.

After you fix it you can ask google to fetch the page in WMT if you need a sooner update but if you wait they will re craw it fast too.

Thank you. That is a great answer!

There has been a sudden leap from a couple of sites employing the same tactic. In fact one site I checked also had a very similar backlink profile (possible a sister brand to the one I mentioned in my first post above) and they too have climbed in recent weeks. I will look forward to any further insight you can provide on the matter Good luck.

Hi Kaushal, Thanks for the question. There are a few ways to deal with this problem which are recommended by Google here. In summary, you can: Use parameter handling as you have done Add the nofollow attribute to problematic URLs Block problematic URLs in robots.txt There is also a thread in the Google webmaster forums which may be useful to you: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/CCORJBI-mEg Overall, it comes down to having a good site architecture and cutting down / removing / blocking URLs that you don't care about from a search perspective. I hope that helps a bit! Paddy

I like what David and Samuel have to say here. There is and always will be room for press releases when it comes to spreading PR and information. Businesses will continue to put releases out there and often link back to themselves, but they should be sure to link with brand terms, generic words ("find out more", etc.),  or URLs (similarly to the way people generally build links now). You wouldn't put out a press release linking back to yourself with "car insurance" and spread it to 150 different sources now, if you knew what was good for you. News stories and releases are always going to get picked up and spread, but what Google is looking for when it comes to actually hurting sites with links like this is a lack of a natural pattern. Does the site receive next to no media attention, but suddenly has 500 links from an identical piece of copy, whilst also receiving no new social media attention, no additional coverage (e.g. no one has taken the press release and written their own story about it nor conducted an interview with a company representative)? The pattern there is unnatural and warrants further investigation. Is the company regularly being cited, mentioned and written about? Does it put out a release about a real new product or development and have that release picked up by real news sources, some of whom put their own thoughts on the web about the company development? This is natural-looking. I hope this makes some sense. Essentially the goal is to spread information in the way you would if Google was not an issue, with the resulting coverage being beneficial to your SEO efforts nonetheless. Putting out press releases about nothing and expecting links back from newswires, etc. isn't a brilliant idea but using press releases for PR can be very beneficial for SEO when done properly.

It really depends on what you define as blackhat. On-page trickery (cloaking, redirects for search engines bots, etc.) can be discovered by browsing as a search bot, digging into code, viewing caches, etc. Danny Sullivan and Rand uncovered a large amount of cloaked (and stolen) content on stage at SMX Sydney a few years ago. It was quite entertaining at the time Some people are basic enough to use tactics like hidden, white-on-white text, as Martijn says. I'm yet to see that tactic actually working post-2004 though If it's links they're using, the easiest way is to use a tool like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs or similar to check the links out. Sneaky people can block the OSE / Ahrefs / MajesticSEO bots from crawling the sources of their backhat links if they have access to the linking sites. You can block the bots either in robots.txt or by rejecting the visits to stop the bots from noting that the links exist. That way, the backlink analysis tools will never see that blackhatsite.com links to rankingsite.com, and so forth. It takes a big network that the spammer controls to block link research tools' bots' access to every link you build, however, so this isn't too common. Whether all big brands / well ranked sites are using blackhat tactics pretty much depends on your definition of blackhat, but it's certainly true that it is very hard if not impossible to rank top 3 for competitive terms (car insurance, poker, credit cards) without parting with money that results in links being built. This doesn't mean that they're all buying links, but they're definitely investing in marketing that results in links, and the whitest of the whitehats will say that this is technically not organic, natural link development. It is, however, what we do - marketing.

I dont know if you think this would be a big factor, but iv noticed on moz that we have 'keyword stuffing' on quite a few pages. This is just a result of the category names on those pages etc. would this be the cause?

ha Spencer, what a muppet i was being, helps if i had used " after rel= it's easy to spot when you spell it right! lesson learned again....

Hi Chris, Correct me if this information is outdated, but Open Site Explorer sees no inbound links pointing to the site. Ahrefs (a similar tool) sees <a>two</a>. Along with David's points about on-site optimisation, this is a big problem - even with all the changes Google has made in the past couple of years regarding site quality, links are still a very important part of the ranking algorithm. It's very hard to rank well without quality inbound links from third party websites. I would look seriously into link development - the link building section of this blog is a great resource for ideas and current practices.

Hi Taysir, Going on Google's wording, that blog post is correct - you do come across instances of people claiming disavowal has worked well when they've disavowed links they weren't responsible for building. The problem is convincing Google that you weren't responsible ("_If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action" - _there's a possibility that you can claim until you are blue in the face that you were not behind the links Google dislikes, and they still refuse to lift a penalty). I would go for a reconsideration request first if I were you, as the blog post recommends. I also consider disavowal a last resort when link removal fails - it was foreseeable that people would disavow without doing any other work (and I'm sure Google saw that coming too). For context, at my former agency we would spend months removing every bad link we could find for new clients before filing for reconsideration or using disavowal. One came to us with over 7,000 bad links in early 2013; we removed and removed and finally had the penalty lifted later in the year (it was worth it - it was a high-value domain otherwise). Explain everything you have done or tried to do in the reconsideration request. Be honest but as concise as possible, and cite your actions with things like spreadsheets of sites researched / contacted / failed to respond. In short, that blog post is also how we dealt with disavowal at my old agency. I'm sure it works for some people who disavow things they weren't responsible for, but the misuse I have seen of the tool is also really high. One person told me once they had disavowed one link in their backlink profile "to test impact." Ah... that's not what it's for.

OK guys, that's good enough for me, will not be disavowing. Thankyou to all of you for your help.

I don't think so, if anything there is a benefit. The only thing I don't like about press release sites is that you don't have control over where they submit your release. You pay them a fee, write your release and then how for the best. I haven't seen any negative effects from doing press releases. Just make sure what you put out there is something someone will find helpful or useful.

Any SEO agency should be able to do this for you.  We do a one-off removal for clients for a set fee and they pay once - after that, we do all the work for removal. If it's denied, we do resubmission and get it taken care of.  That's something you should be looking for - make sure they don't do it once-off because if they don't get everything, you'll be paying again. (You don't want someone to be overly aggressive with the disavow, either. You will lose the good links as well.)