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Thanks for answering this question as well. We are interlinking between the 3 EMDs but not in a spammy way imo,

Thanks Gianluca Fiorelli, for your thorough answer, We will consider ending each Meta Title with "- Vakantiehuizen-Italie.nl". We will probably first test some individual pages. I asked the question concerning the C Block links because we are interlinking between our different EMD's. Which could look suspicious.. Moreover, sometimes I encounter websites where I can submit all three EMD's in once. Which results in a (many) links to the three EMD's from the same C-Block. I am still not sure if I should worry though...

Thanks for your suggestions Peter and Matt!

Thanks for sharing the links Thomas! I'll check these tools right away.

I am seeing it with providers of local SEO services - either having over 10 "resource" pages with links to totally unrelated sites or linking each letter in the word "Copyright" to a resource link page. These are clearly link manipulation schemes - why is it that Google hasn't penalized more of these sites? And SEO providers are still selling and profiting from these services. Disgusting.

Thank you - we are doing competitor anaysis, but I hadn't thopught of compiling a list of common directories. Neat idea! Thanks again for responding

For what keywords this site is dominating the SERPs, can you show the complete,  info, i will analyze it, ?

Hi Devanur, I just sent you a private message. Thanks a lot man!

I'm don't think there would be zero risk, but the risk would certainly be minimised. It's authenticity that really matters in all of this. If people are writing topically relevant blog articles that link to pages on the same subject and it's being done authentically, then you are working and operating the right side of the line. Peter

But what if I remove the 301 redirect rules in my .htaccess file right(a few minutes) after successfully checking the redirected URLs?

I'd say use both links for information that is relevant to the post and serves to enhance the post, and if those two links aren't enough, write such an awesome post that you'll be given an exception because the post just wouldn't work without those resources. I manage YouMoz, where people can guest post for Moz. We don't have a number limit on links, it's just what makes sense. I'll have a post submitted with no links that I return because it needs links, I'll have a post with links that need to be removed, and I'll have posts that have a valid reason for each of the 25 links they include in the post. http://moz.com/blog/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning is one post that would not have been published if there had been no links, or we limited the author to just two links.

Maybe I'll just wait to see what happens over the next few months in the SERPS. The only social network I could find linking was 4 tweets & their 2 youtube videos, they don't have any Google+  or Facebook pages, no reviews and they don't appear in the local listing. The niche is very competitive I just noticed that they do however use these Zemanta for what looks like related articles - which I am not familiar (so am just going to do a bit of research on them)

If you've deleted the URL, you'll be in good shape.  A gazzilion links to a non existing URL won't do anything to the domain that URL is on-figuratively speaking. If you 301'd that url with all those spammy back link to the the site that belonged to the owner of that post, they'd might have to come crawling back to you in the hope of getting the 301 removed.  Not sure I would highly recommend that though.

First, don't freak out. What does the anchor text look like? Is it for a term you're trying to rank for on that page? Chances are actually pretty low that it's going to hurt you. Google has a few intent- and source-detection mechanisms built in that work relatively well. If this is a high-value page that you're making a lot of money on or that is ranking well, don't move it and don't 410 or 404 it. It's Google's job to filter through spam and spam attacks, and they do an OK job. I don't think it's totally wrong to disavow the links, but my experience is that people generally over-react. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-bad-links-disavow-17195.html TL;DR this is all good advice, but don't drop or redirect a high-value page.

Thanks Marie. I went ahead and deleted that page and submitted a disavow request. Hopefully that will prevent any future issues.

Yes, that should work.

Hi, while thousands of lines in the .htaccess file is not recommended, here you go for more info about the question at hand: http://moz.com/community/q/thousands-of-301-redirections-htaccess-alternatives Best, Devanur Rafi

Do you have at least a guess on the percentage of improvement?

Thanks Peter!

Thanks Alex, that is definitely something I'll have to look into. All pages are translated by hand.