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Hi Robert, You're doing the right thing! Ask the right questions (you are) Ask them in a reputable community (like this) Take the combined weight of your own experience and good feedback from the Moz community to your client (your next step) You should expect to get a blizzard of counter-argument and obfuscation from the link development company.  These days, it's very likely that the rep in question spends a lot of time on the phone trying to explain away the fact that his company has a "Kick Me" sign on its back, and that his comany's activities put their clients at risk.  He's just trying to stop the bleeding. Your advice to your company is directed toward making sure that your website is in the best possible position to earn your company money over the long term.  The rep is just trying to keep yet another client from cancelling on him - which is a goal not aligned with the long-term health of your website.

Hi, Whether you report this or not is up to you - there's always been a lot of debate in SEO circles about whether it's a good idea to do this or not but the end of the story is pretty much that it's up to you. The technical answer to the question is that yes, soliciting links with products is directly frowned upon. Plenty of people still basically do this but in a more subtle manner, where they are "developing a relationship" first, often not directly asking for a link. Products for publicity is an ancient trick which Google won't get rid of, but they definitely can and do say that they aren't happy with a direct exchange.

All backlink analysis tools will give you a different number of links to your site. Generally, I find Moz shows the least and AHREFs shows the most. For the most complete pictures, gather link data from a variety of sources and remove duplicates.

Hi, There are likely to be a number of factors that play a part in this, although there is no rules from Google on how to achieve it. If there were, people would be changing them based on what they want, rather than what Google wants. It is also worth remembering that Google only show these for brand searches, so a strong brand is important. That said, if I were looking at this myself, I would include the following: Clean internal linking structure with good anchor text Correctly code your links to ensure they can be fully spidered Links to your desired pages Pages with a low bounce rate and good organic traffic that already appear in the SERPs for their desired phrase(s) Unique page content that is no duplicated anywhere else Unique and appropriate page titles and descriptions There is never any guarantee that you can influence these sitelinks or have Google guarantee a demotion, but follow a bit of best practice, and you might have some success. -Andy

To avoid duplicate content you need to use the rel=”alternate” href=”x” tag. You dont have to buy a domain, here are several ways you can organise your website. ccTLDs - [example.ie] Pros Clear geotargeting Server location irrelevant Easy separation of sites Cons Expensive (and may have limited availability) Requires more infrastructure Strict ccTLD requirements (sometimes) ****Subdomains with gTLDS [de.example.com] Pros Easy to set up Can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting Allows different server locations Easy separation of sites Cons Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is “de” the language or country?) Subdirectories with gTLDs [example.com/de/] Pros Easy to set up Can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting Low maintenance (same host) Cons Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone Single server location Separation of sites harder URL parameters [site.com?loc=de] Pros Not recommended. Cons URL-based segmentation difficult Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible You can have even the same content for example, if you have a version for the UK and another for the US the content will be very similar. Hope this helps watch?v=8ce9jv91beQ

Hi John, As the others have said, there are issues with all three types of links. Number 1 is obvious. Number 2 comes from a site that appears to blog about absolutely anything, as long as they're paid to do so. The site has posts about buying a car in Philadelphia, passport photos, saving money on gas, business protection... and piano lessons. It's pretty obviously a source of income for the blog owner, with these posts placed in between personal updates. Number three is from a piano website, but they even list "reciprocal links", which was an outdated link building technique in 2006 I would say that Google is well within its own guidelines to suggest that these links are bad.

Matt, tell you from the experience that your concern is right but you are missing a thing that should really consider! You are removing and disavowing all the bad links this is exactly what you should be doing (give a try on removing them because this is very important here) and then try to build so high quality links at the same time. If you see less margin of quality resources available within your niche try to do something that get you press ad authority links from media sites. This will give you some positive points in the eye of Google and get you more chance to recover!!

Your original question mentioned using it as a source of linkbuilding several times.  It sounds like a place to "guest blog" and Matt Cutts is on the warpath against guest blogs these days. I think that such a blog would be fine if all of the outlinks were nofollowed and the posts were placed there to drive a little traffic and to get some brand mentions.  I think that traffic and brand mentions are valuable. But, if it were my company, we would not be using our valuable content creation time producing content for a satellite site.  The only way that satellite site will have valuable links is if there are links given to it from outside websites - and if I can produce content to attract that kind of link it would be better placed on my own website.  That way any link that hits it will directly power my own domain and deliver traffic to my own domain.   Traffic and links going to an outhouse only have fractional value. If you have a couple of colleagues who can help you diversify your content do an article exchange.  They write a nice one for your site and you write one for their site.  There is only one link on the page going to their site and it is a nofollowed link in their bio space.  That way both of your primary sites get a blog post and both of your sites get brand mentions and a bit of traffic exchange.  No link manipulation.   This is superior to posting your content on a satellite site because any links that are given to the articles benefit your main site instead of the satellite.  Makes it look like you have colleagues in the industry. That's how I would do it.

Hi, The guys here have already left some great comments. It's hard to guess why / where the links are coming from without seeing them, but I agree with William that five per week seems low for an automated bot. Those things usually do thousands, unless it's being run by someone who doesn't want you to notice the activity. Either way, a person is probably behind the activity at its root - do you have any idea who might want to maliciously hurt your website? There is a possibility that the activity is not being carried out in order to directly hurt you, but that your site is part of someone's larger negative SEO attack against someone else. Some negative SEO attacks will target a business (let's say Nordstrom's, for purpose of example). They'll point thousands of links to http://shop.nordstrom.com/ from some terrible pages, but will sometimes mix in links to other sites to muddy the waters a bit. Are there any other sites linked to from the same pages as yours? Any trends you can spot? Moz and OSE sometimes miss the real underbelly of the internet - the stuff that's available if you know where to look for it (and Google usually knows where to look for it) but for the purposes of regular marketing / SEO, is fairly irrelevant. My former agency built its own backlink analysis tool and did the same thing. We could do deep crawls to find this crap if we needed to (and so can Moz) but it's thankfully rare that situations like this come along that require such a deep look at links. Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc. will show you links from the part of the internet that they believe counts. Frustrating when things like this happen, but if you are finding these in WMT then you should have sufficient information to go through with a disavowal and / or reconsideration request.

Good call Lesley!

Just an update. Our site eventually returned to the 1st position for our main keyword. The competitors site seems to have levelled out in position 9 There are other long tail terms we'd like to rank for that these are still dominating which I think is still a little crazy based on their link profile. I'd have expected them to have been hit a lot harder by Google? Thanks to all who contributed to this post so far, I will continue to watch and update this post should things change drastically.

Thanks for your help... I will let you know if I find something good for markup. Maybe someone will respond with that info as well?

The advantage of having a subdomain is - if it gets hit by a penalty, it doesn't take the entire root down, however if you're using subdirectories and its gets a penalty, it propogates the root....

I think perhaps the intention was that they didn't want these pages to be indexed. This makes sense for certain things/links from a homepage, like "My Shopping Cart." But honestly it looks like a lame attempt at Pagerank sculpting, which Google has been wise to for many years. The two "nofollow" links that concern me the most are the "Site Map" link and the link to their blog. Why in God's good name wouldn't you want a bot to follow links leading to your sitemap and blog. That's nonsensical. Regarding the other "nofollow" attributes, those aren't necessary either. Get rid of them all. Matt Cutts has said on several occasions that he sees no practical reason why any Web site would want to "nofollow" any internal page. Here's a video where he says that:   http://youtu.be/86GHCVRReJs So, bottom line, "If it's a link within your site to another page within your site, I would leave the 'nofollow' off." There you have it. I hope that helps! Dana

I hate to make it more complicated. But any website that scrapes content is surely looked down upon by Google. So, I would disavow links from those scraper websites as well just in case. As you wrote, something surely happened to you after that Penguin 2.0 update. So, I would disavow anything that could even remotely raise a red flag. (Note: You can write a note to Google explaining the situation directly in the disavow file -- as in, it was not your fault.) Still, I'm curious by the fact that you got hit despite the links being nofollow and/or having mainly brand-name anchor text. It might just be the sheer volume of links from release-distribution sites and scraper sites that caused it (if it was a LOT). Google's not always good at understanding context.

Thank you both.  The URLs with TM are indexed by Google with TM in it, I suspect it will have impact on ranking if we simply remove the TM from URL, although nothing else changes.  301 is a protection, to certain extent. Happy Easter. b.dig

Hi Kevin, It's inconclusive how careful you have to be when starting afresh after an irreparable spam penalty - also, while I understand that the client needs to see results, I have anecdotal evidence of horrific backlink spam being resolved and penalties being lifted - my former agency worked on a site last year with a backlink profile full of thousands of bad links. Literally thousands had to be removed or disavowed. It took about six or seven months to fix, unfortunately, but the penalty was lifted earlier this year after the biggest link take-down project I have ever seen. However, if you simply cannot fix this, I would go with the .com. Penalties certainly regularly pass through redirects, and I would not be confident that other forms of redirection like 302s and meta refreshes wouldn't count in this case too. Even without a redirect, what Mary says about penalties following brands is feasible since it's not going to be a secret to Google that this is the same business on a new domain name. One thing is certainly true: starting with the new domain is the only way to go if the client cannot commit to a lengthy take-down process. Have another look at whether you have exhausted the disavowal process though... there might be more to get out of that route before you ditch the domain completely. Disavowal is meant to help in situations like this, but it's also true that the team there can be very difficult to get a positive response out of, even when you have done your best to remove the links and are demonstrating that you can't do more. Cheers, Jane

"how can I add for example 500 characters text for game which have maximum 2-3 hours playtime," And that's exactly the point.  I've answered your question on another forum but thought I'd chime in again here.  How does your site add value that the user can't get elsewhere?  It appears that the vast majority of these games are ones that don't belong to you.  So, if I am searching for a particular game, why would Google want to show me your site rather than the site of the person who created the game? I don't say this often but I think that removing your penalty will be close to impossible.  You would have to convince Google that your site adds significant value and should be included in the search results.  And that's going to take a lot more than just adding a blurb of content to each game.

Sorry for the late reply! Short answer: yes. That looks like a gradual drop that could be caused by lack of new activity and/or engagement with your site. I'd be surprised if it was link-based.