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Thanks - I'll get in touch with their hosting provider asap.

So did that process of escaping the special characters solve your issue, esiow?

Thanks for your response. We'll definitely go for this improvement. But can you please explain what you mean by "an unintuitive UX idea" ?

Damn... this is always a horrible thing and the most frustrating aspect about this is that there is no effective solution that can help to protect anybody in advance from such black hat techniques... sorry to say that but this is a development which becomes more and more common... wish you the all the best!

Woohoo! Thanks for the update! If you have any lessons learned or a case study you think the community could benefit from reading, feel free to submit over at YouMoz. http://moz.com/blog/inside-youmoz-how-to-guest-blog-for-moz

Actually, I did contact them as soon as I saw it in my report, but when I tried to find the link I was a little lost. Thanks for the help!

I've got clients who are seeing penalties appear recently with backlink profiles like this, where the same content is published on a ton of subdomains of really weak sites. Those backlinks will be seen as spam, guaranteed--the only question is, how long will it be before it hurts your site via either an algorithmic or manual penalty? Any time people are creating a strategy like this, and selling links on all those subdomains to lots of people, it's only going to be a matter of time before it gets on Google's radar.  It might be that some other website gets tagged with a manual penalty, so a Google spam engineer looks at their profile and sees a pile of links from these same subdomains, and says "whoa, Nelly, better add this to our list of Really Bad Places"...and then a month or so later, everyone who has a pile of links from these subdomains gets an algorithmic penalty.  Or, it might happen that 100 other webmasters all disavow links from all of these subdomains, and maybe 100 is the magic # of disavowals that Google uses to determine domains that are most likely spamming. Either way, I'd say the clock is ticking on these subdomains, and if it were me, I'd disavow now, even before the penalty happens.  Remember, you'll need to wait a few months after the disavow is uploaded for it to have an effect anyway....so ideally, you want your disavow to be read just before you get penalized.

Dave, I think you're on the right track with the KPI you have listed. We have been making a shift towards removing all keyword data provided by Google Analytics (thanks (not provided)!) and focusing more on landing pages. We still monitor keyword rankings but we try to tie our efforts into the landing pages reports when discussing progress with our clients. As in: "We are targeting X Keyword on Y Landing Page. X keyword's ranking has improved while organic visits to Y landing page have increased". Now it is difficult to get that granular for every keyword/landing page combination, however providing a couple of examples will help show the impact of your efforts and hopefully calm down a client who's seeking #1 rankings for every keyword as soon as they sign a contract! Hope this helps and good luck!

I selected the plugin called Redirection mostly because it has been downloaded 1.4M times.  My thinking is that popular plugins tend to get more testing and tend to be more compatible with other themes and plugins.  It works fine for me. Best, Christopher

How many domains do those 24 million links come from?  It's possible you could find that they distill down into a manageable number of domains to manually review.  I think that tools like Link Detox can help in an initial review of links and perhaps you can use that as a first pass to find as many spammy ones as possible.  Then, I would take all of the links that were marked as suspicious or healthy, and visit one link from each domain manually. In my experience, the only sites that I am seeing recovering from link based issues (either manual penalty or Penguin) are ones who have been EXTREMELY thorough on their audits.  It sure is a lot more work to evaluate links by hand but I think it is necessary.

As always, thank you very much! I appreciate it.

What phrase did you drop on? You seem to have a very small link profile, and much of that is nofollow - I'm not seeing a lot of potential for high rankings here, honestly. It seems like the site is just starting out.

Yeah, technically, you're supposed to make a good faith effort to remove the links, but Google isn't clear on how many, how much effort, etc. This seems to hold true for Penguin in addition to manual penalties. Most of the Penguin recovery stories I've head have involved pretty deep cuts, to be brutally honest.

Hi Peter, Thanks for the feedback.  You're probably right that testing the waters is not worth the potential long-term implications.  This certainly helps. Regards, Mike

Thank you for the answer guys.  I  agree with you and Schwabb.  We originally did this for design purposes to try and have a clean HTML5 Outline with the header, banner, and any sub banner content that comes before body content, included in the outline.  We were annoyed by having a H1 at the very top of the page and annoyed by the fact that it could be interpreted as trying to game the system.  Our research at the time of developing the site's theme didn't give us a better alternative so we chose design, especially when Google site cache was showing that our H1's were still visible with a CSS class that contained the display: none property. Since then, we learned of a better way to do this that involves removing the header content from the outline and still starting the page content with an H1.  This Distilled blog article is a good example of this. We'll be rolling out a new theme update soon to fix this to satisfy things from both a design and SEO perspective.

Trung is exactly right. You might as well pick any domain name and ask that question again. Personally, I would try to differentiate myself from my competition with my domain name to some degree.

You may be interested in this Slideshare by Wil Reynolds: http://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/the-10000-paid-content-paid-linking-test-that-is-100-google-safe Wil owns a large agency and tests out services like this including nRelate and Taboola. Some are better than others. As far as Google is concerned, as long as the links are "nofollowed" the recommendation services should be perfectly fine. In Wil's case, he used these services for link building, with mixed success. On the other hand, any content recommendation service that places followed, non-editorial links on the web is worth approaching with caution. I'm not familiar with the Engageya platform, but this is something I'd definitely check out first. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your content.

Hi, it's possible. What do you mean by "It just happens to be the time when we removed a bunch of paid links"? When were the links removed in relation to the traffic drop? I would take a deeper look into which pages caused the traffic drop. Look at the 30 day period before the drop and compare it to the 30 day period after the drop. Where is the majority of the traffic loss coming from? Which keywords? Penguin tends to impact the homepage or the specific keywords you are over optimizing. In regards to paid links, Google has a very hard time detecting these unless you are being blatant about them, and you will typically receive a notice in GWT if you receive a penalty for it. Check to see if there are any manual penalties on your site in GWT. If not, chances are Google has not discovered that the links are paid (yet). The main thing to watch out for with Penguin is low quality links (relative to your high quality links) and the anchor text of your links. With the latest updates, you want to keep your keyword anchor text below 25-30% of your total links. So if your ratio is higher than that, try to get that changed. And focus on building more links, because 70 is not a lot. The stronger your backlink profile is, the more resilient it is to spammy links.

Good idea.