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what Dr. Pete just said is right on the money and I would go with his advice. Respectfully, Thomas

Thanks for the feedback, Bradley. Sometimes you just need a fresh set of eyes! Be on the lookout for a PM, I have some other points I'd like to discuss with you if possible. Thanks again!

Thank you for your response. Does anyone else feel as though no following these links would be my best bet?

Exactly right. One of our sites has ~52,000 backlinks and the vast, vast majority are now considered bad in Google's eyes (years ago they weren't). We have a competitor who has only ~600 backlinks but they outrank us on some main keywords. They have some spammy backlinks, but we have a lot more so it's hurt us more. It's definitely quality over quantity of links.

Hi Jonathan, Image links are just a regular signal just like normal links. For example it happens quite a lot that you link to a company somewhere on the web by using the company logo. I would say this is just a brand signal as other links are as well. That's why I would definitely recommend also trying to get 'image links'.

We removed the links in June, but they are still showing up. At that point, there were 17,000 links from one site. Now there are around 8,000. If they are removed, they should no longer show in the report after Google re-crawls, right? At what point do we determine a last ditch effort? Are there any disadvantages to using the disavow tool other than the loss of potentially useful links?

In my opinion and dealings they have. One thing I have noticed they do not frown so hard upon is redirecting the same word, different extension to the same site. Like site.com, site.co.uk, site.com.au Google is on to the tricks that your client is using, if the domains are not getting many direct accesses, then the 301 redirect will end up dying after a couple of weeks or a couple of months and be useless. Its a spammy and costly suggestion, but I know how clients that are set in their ways are. I would recommend to them to maybe set up variations of the same site at the different addresses. Different images, different content, different everything. Maybe have the same logo, but have the contact forms feeding into the same email address. I think more than likely you have been put into a tough situation by a not so good seo company that the client had before.

While the blog format of showing a snippet with "read more" links is commonplace and perfectly acceptable, I would argue that it DOES matter whether the blog is on your domain or not. It would be better to have it on your domain. You don't want to seem like you're trying to beef up the content on your product and category pages by simply pulling in someone else's RSS feed snippets. The longer you wait to move your blog over to your main domain the more difficult it will be. I would do this sooner rather than later.

Hi There I agree with Kurt's sentiments. I would highly recommend cross checking with a second set of data. If you are only using Moz to track rankings, try supplementing with a daily rank checker. I like Authority Labs, and this is exactly what I do - I use both Moz and Authority Labs. I would also recommend checking your Webmaster Tools "average position" data - which you can link to with Google Analytics - and filter by search query. You can see exactly how you ranked for each term day by day. So that's step one - verify they are actually jumping around as dramatically as they seem. The "Google Dance" as we sometimes call it (when rankings bounce around) could possibly be due to low click through rates and poor user metrics in the SERPs. If you notice right now, when I search "code red 7" and your result is number #4, Google is changing the page title (it's not what you have). This means for some reason they have determined your title is not as good as the one they came up with. So you may want to have a look at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en and refine some of your titles a little bit, as well as descriptions. Good Luck! -Dan

I would have thought if that were the case would effect the other partial match variation rankings too, which it hasnt since all others are still on page 1 ! The kw in question (along with the other kw still ranking on page 1) are partially matched with the domain

Thank you very much for your advices. Really helped me out here. I will message you sooner or later and tell you how it went, if you are interested. This week I will make a presentation for the team with the reports. I think this should be addressed ASAP

Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301? Yes. 301 redirects make sure end users, search bots and link equity are passed to the new page. It is true though that not all link equity is passed with a 301, however good or bad it is passed. I have found this out with my own testing with clients as well as a few post i found on SEO round table and Google groups. Does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped? Where you tracking your external links use OSE? If so they crawl a different amount of domains and URLs each time they update their index so chances are you are looking at different data sets each time.

as long as the link looks naturally possible to be there...id go with it. It's not like you are running a nationwide campaign of asking for positive reviews in exchange for flowers or gifts

it's a pretty good site. Youll get referrals from time to time. For niche topics, you can get more views since you will be higher up. Just add your site, it's basically an RSS directory, but owned by a former apple employee. lol

Thanks Thomas for jumping in with such a detailed answer. Let me build on it a little though as I think what Belcaro meant was, does it matter if your URL is: www.example.com/category/subcategory/page1 or should it be: www.example.com/page1 Personally I'd rather go for the structured version for a couple of reasons. 1 - I thinks it's good for users, it helps them know where they are on the site if they just landed on that page 2 - From a tracking pooint of view, it means the content drilldown report will work in your Google Analytics From an SEO point of view I don't think having one or the other will move the needle much so I'd try not to worry about it either way. I hope this helps, Craig

There is no defined time limit for a 302, rather than a clear header response for search engines that the redirect is temporary not permanent (which is a 301 header response).  By default at some point you should correct to a 200 response or a 301 response.  You could in theory leave the 302 but it is not good practice. Having said that my thought would be how trusting a visitor would be being sent to a different domain mid way through browsing.

Anyone else got anything to add to this? Thanks

Another option is to ask webmasters to change your anchor text. But you'll have to do that on a link-by-link basis, in order to provide anchor text that is relevant to both the source and target page. Also, we've seen a lot of luck changing some portion of your profile to generic anchor text like "read more", "more info" or "website", as well as others using the destination page's title as the anchor text. Finally, you can resort to raw URLs in some, as well. What we try to do there is use a raw URL where we can use either the brand name or the destination page's title in the same sentence.