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If they are tags then they should show up in the tag section of Posts or possibly in the comments. Not sure if you allow uploads to your site, but if you do you should check out the upload folder(s). Keep in mind, these URLs could be showing up somewhere out in cyberspace, not necessarily on your site. Take those steps I pointed out and you should see those ugly URLs go away within a few weeks, not accounting for other factors.

You're most welcome, glad you found it useful!

Hi Daniel, Whether these links are all okay or should be removed depends on what else the sites link to, and what else they get up to besides linking to you - if they have been picked off for spam tactics (either linking out, inbound links, on-page spam, etc.) then you'd want to avoid having them link to you, even if they are otherwise genuine industry partners. Sadly some legitimate businesses also run less-than-clean websites from time to time. I would ask the agency who provided your link report for an explanation as to why they placed some of these industry partners in a "remove" category - they may have some very good reasons, or they may have mistaken the intent of the links. I would say that even if they are mistaken, both you and the agency need to ask yourselves if there's a chance Google might also mistake these genuine links as manipulative or unnatural. Unfortunately that can happen as well, but if you are filing for reconsideration you can always explain that x, y and z links have arisen due to a mutual respect / partnership that does not carry with it a commercial benefit to either company in direct relation to the link. Google has been extremely authoritarian over the last few months about links, and there's a possibility that they'd say a partnership link wasn't "natural" because it had commercial intent. Sometimes it's damn hard to figure out exactly what they mean by "natural". It's incredibly frustrating. However, backing up again to where you're at right now, I would say that you need an explanation and thorough analysis of why genuine links have been flagged. You never know, the agency might have found something that's actually going to save your next reconsideration request.

Hi, If you want those pages to be indexed and rank well, and there is a possibility of duplicate content between the secured and non-secured versions (or other content), you should implement the tag. Google crawls HTTPS pages (a simple search for inurl:HTTPS will show the extent of this), although if the pages are behind check-outs or log-ins, blocked by robots.txt, etc. and otherwise not available for crawling, there is no need to use the tag.

Helpful article on this topic listed below: How To Protect Your Site from Negative SEO

Yes, like Keri said. The 301 might not be working. It's actually normal for google to index 301ed domains. Ive seen it more than a handful of times. So it's probably a matter of time before it disappears.

Justin, I've had experience turning around link audits and removing penalties in a short time frame. Feel free to contact me directly and I can take a look and let you know what I think. Sean Green seantgre@gmail.com

Hey There - I too am not very familiar with "under the hood" of Maganto. Sounds like you may need to do individual redirects / URL re-writes. I'm not sure if there is a way to do it automatically. Here are a few reousrces that might help; http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/294348/ http://blog.maximusbusiness.com/2012/10/magento-url-rewriting-regex-and-301-redirects-tips/ If you can't find it there, please circle back so I can send the question to another Moz Associate who might have more of a working knowledge with Magento Thanks! -Dan

Hi James, Don't worry too much about visual aspects - Matt Cutts once said that Google doesn't pay a lot of attention to this themselves as there are some amazing white-papers out there with amazing work, but they are just pages of text and have none of the latest visual wizardry that we tend to see. Have a look through the site. Does the content read well? Does SEMRush throw up any concerns? Does the content seem unique (check this through Copyscape or pull some sentences out and search for them through Google)? Where you can, just try to get a feel for what the site has to offer and how you can envisage trying to get a link from them. -Andy

Formally everything that can be seen just by the bots and not by the users, it is consider cloaking. Be aware that toggled content sidebars or columns, if it is visible by the users after completed an action, is not considered cloaking. So, in your case, if you are just showing one slide of a slidedeck with multiple slides, it could be considered cloaking. Obviously, you should not freak out and, as Spencer wrote, understand what are you hiding. If you're hiding images only with no crawlable text and without alt text, then you should not worry, also because those images are substantially invisible to the bots (they know they exists, but they doesn't any worded description of the photo). Instead, if you are hiding text, maybe optimized seoed text... than it is much better to quit the slideshare and use just the image with text you really want to show to your users (and Googlebot).

Samuel's three questions are really good and are exactly what you should be thinking about. I am not so sure that you're directly asking for trouble by getting this link in "followed" format, although a Google rep would say that those links should be nofollowed. Definitely only do this if you believe you should be getting this link regardless of whether it passes authority. I say this due to it being a link on a directory - they're notoriously iffy for SEO, but obviously there are directories where you SHOULD be listed for marketing's sake. Because this is visibly paid and followed, beware of any alternate intent Google might assign to listed businesses.

It's not an exact science in regard to any one signal, however yes, the more you can reinforce the ability to strengthen topical focus, the less likely Panda would find category pages to be weak.

I would be very surprised that the hidden text is actually working, and I would think that google is just ignoring it and other factors are making it rank. Something like font size = 0 or same colour as the background, would be so easily picked up by a bot/algorithm compared  to some complex things it can pickup on.

Bob, I would suggest creating great content and then using social media and email to spread the content like fire. A term that we stole from Jay Baer is content is fire and social media is the gasoline to that fire. For example why don't you add an important piece of content to your email signature or email it to a few influencers in the community. They might find it important and want to share it with everyone or even link to it.

Too close on those numbers, especially in terms of spots 8,6,5 & 2. You're going to have to take a deeper look. I'd start with digging into the link profiles. Find the links that your competitors have that are really high trust links--I'm talking BBB, industry accreditation sites, quality PR hits/mentions etc. Find the easy wins and try to identify the really high level links that your competitors have that you may be missing. My second priority would be to check out your bounce rates and time on site. It may be that traffic is better served on those sites and therefore Google is giving them the nod in the rankings. Third, I'd check out http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013\. Dig in and see where your competitors are beating you in that regard step by step. Process of elimination I'm afraid....we can't really know for sure!

If you feel like you have done everything within your power to try and get the links removed, but there's just no way, then you should disavow the URL or domain.  You should attempt to reach the owners of the domain 2-3 times before giving up.  During my link removals, there have been a decent number of webmasters that finally responded on my 2nd or 3rd attempt. As for disavowing URL or domain, if the entire domain is something you'd never want a link from, disavow the entire domain.  Even if you only have ONE link from the entire site.  Still, disavow the domain.  Only disavow the URL if you think the site in general is good quality but you happen to be on 1 particular spammy page for some reason.

Ok, so company ran out of business, the domain got expired; you bought it and point it back to your website. I don’t see anything wrong, technically! The only thing you should consider checking is the link profile of the domain because a bad link profile can lead you to an unexpected bad situation, where as a good link profile will only help. The question is how people will react to it? This is very much depends upon industry to industry, customer base and business itself. Let’s say the company which ran out of business contain a bad offline reputation, redirecting a domain might redirect the reputation as well (same is for the positive side). You have technical details clear but before making a move, make sure about how you potential and current clients feel about it. Hope this helps!

Andy's correct. The answer is most likely yes.  So if screaming frog find these pages, most likely the Google bot will as well. Also, as long as the spider can find the page, it doesn't matter if it's static or dynamic. However, If you have multiple parameters, Google may decide it's not a useful page and won't index it. Make sure to include a sitemap with all these url's as it may help in getting them indexed in case your site architecture is poor.

Hi David, It sounds like you have had a partial recovery and looking at your other replies below, that the manual action you have applies to the links themselves which means Google have reduced their value and your rankings accordingly. So whilst they may not be actively hurting you, it is always good to have a clean slate and remove manual penalties if you can so that you know there is nothing holding you back from ranking. In terms of your actual question, if you have links that are clearly outside of Google guidelines, you may as well get rid of them if you can. They're probably not helping and if you are able to get rid of them, then it may help prevent any future problems if Google tweak how they treat those links. It sounds like you have recovered a little though with your ranking returning, so removing other links may not be a high priority for you, but like I said, it's good to get a clean slate and be sure that you can move forward building good links with nothing else holding you back. I hope that helps a bit! Paddy

I'm not sure that you'd encounter a situation where Google is intuitive enough to decide on UX and equate it to a ranking factor - although they do definitely try to render pages and understand websites from a user's point of view. Not to get all UX on you on an SEO Q&A board, but if this truly is a bad user experience, consider investing the time to fix it, but as long as Google can crawl a sensible hierarchy through internal linking (ignoring the breadcrumb issue), I don't believe this will be actively moving you down the rankings. Cheers, Jane