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Actually if you feel some of the links you have created in the past could be problematic in the future and you know they are the type of links that have caused other sites a problem then I would remove them. Penguin 2.1 has affected Businesses who have used bad link practices a long time ago. I would say it is better to be safe than sorry and fix it now before you do get hit. It would be harder getting out of an Algorithmic penalty. That is my opinion anyway

Askives is one of those sites that appears on the backlink profile of almost every site I audit.  I put it in a category I call "not seo made" and just ignore it.  A good number of those Chinese and Russian sites are the same too.  You'll find a bunch that look like this.  They often have "alexa" in the url: http://alexa.chinaz.com/ I don't disavow those or try to remove them.  Google is most interested in the links that are self made in an attempt to boost rankings. Now, there are some Russian sites that I come across in link profiles that just have random spun text and anchor texted links.  For those, attempt to contact and if you can't find contact information, share that in your Google Docs spreadsheet so that the webspam team can see that you tried and then disavow it. Good luck!

Good response Jesse.

Hi there, would you mind making your question more specific so we can help? For instance, is this a question about a tool? And did you see Gary's question? Thanks, Christy

Hey! It seems that you already have the correct answer: "It is a punch of useless content.", "now it is better to focus on your product site or create 1 good websites rather than a network of sites". Content without added value means useless, and therefore outranked by better sites.

Thanks everyone... It's not as restrictive as patient records... Basically, because of the way our health service works in the UK we are not allowed to promote material around our medicines to patients, it should be restricted only to HCP's. If we are seen to be actively promoting to patients we run the risk of a heavy fine. For this reason we need to take steps to ensure that we only target this information towards HCP's and therefore we require them to register before being able to access the content... My issue is that HCP's may search for a Brand that we supply but we have to be very careful what Brand information we provide outside of log-in. Therefore the content we can include on landing pages cannot really be optimised for the keywords that they are searching for! Hence why I want the content behind log-in indexed but not easily available without registering... It's a very difficult place to be!

Hi, The question you should really be asking yourself is if the keywords in the image alt text are an accurate description of the image. The goal should be to get the image to rank for relevant queries in image results or universal results. If you're simply targeting the same keywords in the title and image alt text, but it's completely relevant, then I wouldn't worry about it so much. Google's over-optimization penalty (I assume you're referring to Penguin) usually affects sites with much more nefarious spam techniques than what you've described. Things like keyword stuffing accompanied by a ton of keyword-rich links to the page from low quality sites. If you want to check to see how the algorithm changes affect your site, you could look at the Penguin update dates on Moz's algorithm change page and compare it to your site traffic. If you've been hit by Penguin, you'll likely see a steep drop in traffic after one of the algorithm change dates. -Trung

Hi, Redirect and RedirectMatch are two ways you can implement redirects on Apache web server. The RedirectMatch directive allows pattern matching while the Redirect directive is for a single file. Here you go for more information: http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html#301_Redirects_RedirectMatch Hope that helps. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

Content has been my primary method of attack for a long time.  I have tried PPC and still do it occasionally.  The problem with PPC is that the competition is fierce.  So, I attack all possible keywords with substantive content - usually having more content than all of my competitors combined.  That earns me great organic positions for a majority of the long tail keywords. I place ads on those content pages that divert traffic to my sales pages.  After building up a site I get a significant part of my sales from traffic that landed on content pages.  I know how many visitors enter through those pages, their conversion rates and the average value of a sale, plus my profit margin.  That allows me to know the average value of an ad click.  I then compete those ads with adsense using Google's DFP ad server and am glad to take payment for a visitor instead of sending them to my store - because I know that the potential profit is sometimes higher.

Great book.

Just to voice in - I agree with what's being said.  You can't target them all and the title would read horribly.  Even if you got rankings, your clickthroughs wouldn't be what they should be. I like the one Todd came up with.

Google changed its webmaster guide lines a while ago making guest posting and press releases a bit more grey hat i.e they recommend against it (with the exception of no follow links). Basically you can still do it, however you're doing it for the user not the search engine. Thus as it's against the webmaster guide lines most people are looking for alternatives and thus it's not used as much. thamls

Old post but for anyone that feels that waiting for Google to penalize someone will take too long or not work... here's an example of a major competitor of ours getting hit on the last: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/therichest.org It took about a year and a bit. We even offered $XX,XXX to purchase their sites, and after discovering their techniques, just waited it out to see their huge decline.

I agree the strategy is ill-conceived. Either it was executed by an incompetent company, or one that is into "churn and burn" tactics. By the time Google catches on,  it will have moved on to the next client.

Try contacting the webmasters of the spammy sites to takes the links down before disavowing (see Matt Cutts video on the subject).

Where do you find the link profile?

Thanks Richard, Indeed, there are lots of strategy's who are more legit and a great content strategy is what I am counting on. I will dive deeper in the competitor. Thanks for the "browse SEO" link. What other tools are you all using in order to understand the competitor strategy?

Thanks for the reply, should I 301 redirect the other sites to relevant pages in the main site, or just let them die off? My competitor's sites do not link to each other, but have very similar layouts, similar products and same contact numbers. What would be the proper way to report him?

The most blunt answer humanly possible to this: Here's the thing, ethics and Google rules aside (sorry Matt C.), if Google eventually catches this site selling links, they will likely penalize you for having bought one. ...so... Google is very successful ($29 billion in 2010) and it is almost all based on the quality of their search results. If the penalties did not match the benefits, you are putting this revenue at risk (again, $29 billion). How do you think they will take that? How would you?

Thank you for some great information!  I am reading it over now! The concern is not necessarily the page rank or da of the actual sites with the content linking to the other site, but that google might reduce or diminish the link juice of the actual links since they would likely detected as originating from the same server. It might be 5-10 websites, original content...but not really something we can "test and see" Thank you again!