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The other commenters sum it up pretty well for me. It can work, in the short term, but it's also a lot more risky than it used to be. The tactic has just gotten abused way too much. The problem is that, if it fails, it tends to fail hard, and your whole investment just crashed and burned. If you're looking to get a quick jump in ranking for the very short-term, then I'll be straight with you - it can still work, in some cases. If you're looking to boost an existing business or build something long-term, then I'd stay away from this tactic. You could burn your entire site.

I'd agree with what Ash said in that this technique isn't strictly speaking "black hat" - although the definition of black hat is open to interpretation! I checked their backlink profile on Open Site Explorer and found lots of evidence of this tactic being used lots and lots of targeting of exact match anchor text: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.6611111.com%2F This level of exact match anchor text is probably the reason they are ranking for various keywords. However this is the type of link building that Google doesn't particularly like, at least not when it makes up the majority of your link profile. So I'd expect it to stop working for them at some point once Google figure it out properly and reduce the value of those links. I hope that helps a bit!

Well, there are plenty of folks out there who can help support your wordpress installation.  Be sure to be familiar with these as you get ready for your move: Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz

The anchor text you use internally doesn't really hold much weight. If you want to rank for that keyword then just use it as your URL and don't worry about the internal anchor text. As for the meta description, yes you can keep the keyword in there but keep in mind that has no relevance to Google's positioning of your page. Your META description is simply used to entice the reader. Don't attempt to stuff keywords in there. If they fit in naturally (or by 'accident') then fine. If not forget about it. Just make that description read as awesomely as you can. This is what will convince the potential reader to click on your page so it is vital. (Same thing with Titles which are arguably even more important) In other words, just market it and get people interested in it first. Forget about the search engines. They'll get interested in it if people get interested in it. Hope this helps.

It's spam - As a competitor, I would report them.

I think it definitely does.  I have a website that only has a link from my Google Plus page and that page has a domain authority of 20 (It's only about two months old).  Moz's dofollow link to my homepage of my website gave me a boost in rankings. Most profiles pages don't have dofollow links in general, so when you do get one it can be powerful.  If everyone on the site gets a dofollow link from their profile I would probably think it would diminish the value of it.  Since most of them that do offer dofollow have some sort of threshold (like Moz does) I tend to believe that it bears more weight. Just know it isn't just a simply yes or no question.  If the site that is giving the link is a poor site, then it an actually hurt you, just like any other link.

Yes we're going to disavow the links. The spam is exactly targeting the right keyword/anchors. And we're the only one receiving spam.

I had the (mis)fortune of trying to deindex nearly 2 million URLs across a couple of domains recently, so had plenty of time to play with this. Like CleverPhD I was not able to measure any real difference in the time it took to remove a page that had been 410'd vs one that had been 404'd. The biggest factor governing the removal of the URLs was getting all the pages recrawled.  Don't underestimate how long that can take.  We ended up creating crawlable routes back to that content to help Google keep visiting those pages and updating the results.

I do plenty of link building, but honestly, I'm not familiar with this term. Based upon the fact that they're asking you to link to each other, I'm guessing that they want you to create a link to their site from an internal page on your site, and that they will do the same in return. If that's the case, it's a slightly better version of reciprocal linking, where you each have a page A linking to each others page A. If the link posted by SEO 5 Team is what you're referring to, that's much more commonly called second tier link building, which is essentially building links to a page that in turn links to you or your client. Whether or not this person's offer is worth it depends on the site you'd be linking to, and the site you'd be getting a link from. Most likely, it's not worth your time.

You can do that, but it is less specific on what you are actually doing with your server.  The 503 and retry after lets the spiders know exactly what you are doing (no confusion).  Thank you for the clever remark below.  

I know many SEOs who have gone through the process and preach the necessity of an honest and thorough reconsideration request. The more details you give, the more they're likely to take it seriously. I haven't heard that it's necessary to throw anyone under the bus, but it probably is true that if you're only apologizing because you got caught, they might not be so sympathetic. If someone actually did damage without your knowledge (like an old agency), then I'd come clean about that, but don't go off ranting about how it's all their fault. If you hired them, be honest about it. I definitely wouldn't make up a story for sympathy, as that can go wrong fast. These requests, if they get through the first filter (I suspect), are reviewed by humans, and they have a much better ability to detect BS than the algorithm does.

It's not related to Gmail. The server itself was sending out email spam (Joomla is a CMS program used to manage websites). I bet he means he got listed on Spamhaus. First off, web spam and email spam are two entirely separate things. So you can be blacklisted with anyone in the email realm and not have it affect your SEO. Second, I've heard the "blacklisted IP" theory regurgitated for nearly 10 years now and nobody has ever proven that a specific IP was the reason for a site losing ranking. So you could, in theory, share an IP with an entire link farm and not lose any ranking (consider how many blogs share an IP under Wordpress.com or Blogspot). Google surfs the web just like everyone else (using DNS lookups) and they rank domains, not IPs (which are subject to change). The only way I could see an IP getting you in trouble is if your server got hacked and the hacker was using it to proxy attacks against Google (as in DDoS attacks, not spam). Then you might have some issues with SEO but your server being hacked would be a far more serious problem at that point.

Are the search engines seeing the signals they are looking for from a real business from your website ? On the most part yes. The website has good original content and is a professional website. The website is updated with new content at least once a month. If you are targeting one and only one primary keyword, that's a wrong approach. Think beyond one primary keyword. Kind of! the keyword is has been targeted more but others such as marquee hire auckland, schupepe marquee hire, tent hire and stretch tents are other keywords. The points you mentioned about directory links, anchor text links and link "bombing" are obviously clear signs of problems. Possibly Do you control those links ? Are there any natural links ? Have you received a unnatural links penalty ? I contacted google about a manual penalty and they said no. Do a complete audit of your backlinks and clean up what you can. A good idea. To me though it could be a simple case of dropping off because of the new website been put in. The site dropped off about 18-19 January. Below is from webmaster tools. It seems to be too much of a coincidence that this has happened at the same time? [image: d0gQBEEQpBwSBEEQBCmHBEEQBAFSDgmCIAgCpBwSBEEQBEg5JAiCIAiQckgQBEEQIOWQIAiCIEDKIUEQBEEA+A8QRa0B4jhE6wAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==] In google reconsideration request (I was checking to see if the website was manually penalised – it wasn’t) they hinted at the above (server stops serving pages) which was around 6/1/13 and it gets to the lowest around the same time as the rankings drop. Also it states if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your sites pages”

Thanks Carla and Marie,

If it were me, I would do a spam report and send a DMCA notice to both the host and to the contact on the site. I would press the issue as hard as I could. Basically contact anyone who will listen and can do something.

This is so crazy. Let's keep working on it. I hope that together we can come up with a way to handle this for people in the future. Thanks for reaching out to me. Very interesting stuff.

Hello, You could also create a campaign, let's say "Smart Shopping" and promote the idea. You can start by creating a mission page where you can tell people about the idea behind the coupon website, and ask for their support. For example you could create badges "I'm a smart Shopper" or something similar, badges that visitors could take and add on their website. In this way you could gain backlinks without actually doing any linkbuilding, you can earn a lot of visibility including in social media, and so on. Just make sure you mission and arguments are strong, and you coordinate your content marketing efforts in this direction. For the  blog you could even write case studies, or reviews for Extreme Couponing - a reality TV Show. These are just some ideas you could use. I would also urge you to watch this Mozinar: http://moz.com/webinars/strategic-web-marketing and this great video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA for inspiration And an example of a support page with badges: http://www.protectiamediului.org/sustinere/

I agree with Lynn. In fact, you may have already boosted the authority of your site by ditching those 1000 links--without even adding any more links. My thoughts on second list that they're not all the same value. Designwebkits doesn't look bad to me but the others, not a whole lot more valuable than the first, other than 1000 links from sites like these might be less likely to get you penalized.  I say that not necessarily because of the PR of those sites (because even low PR sites can be very good links and/or grow into  very good links) but because they just have an air of the type of generic sites that really don't have a brand, personality, real reason for existing other than to help some other site rank better in some way. Links from sites like those aren't ones that you can hold up in front of a group of your peers and announce proudly that your site has--and if you can't do that, their value to you is dubious. That's my take on them without running a OSE report on any of them.

Hello all, Thank you for your answers, Oleg, I am not that keen on meta refresh, as it is poor user experience - apparently it needs to be about 10 sec, as shorter time G. may treat as 301. Wonder what is the shortest time I can use which will lose the link juice but wouldn't disturb my visitors. Gagan, in regards to 301 redirecting the bad page to 404 page..isn't that easier just to make it 404 without redirect? Mike, what do you think is the best solution to keep the traffic but cut off bad links to specific landing pages. I will be testing 302 soon from old URL to new one. Wonder if I ALSO should put 404 on the old one...or maybe no index...or it doesn't matter? What are your thoughts?

Thanks a ton.  I do have one last question, well for know.  I am not sure about the etiquette for Moz, so I don't know if I should ask it here.  But I will anyway, live and learn. Let's say I have a site with domain.com and a store on subdomain.domain.com We want to link the main\subdomain back and fourth.  Would this be a valid thing to do in the navigation since the point is to get the customer to the store?  Or, do the spiders view subdomains as separate entities? I would rather put the store under a directory but it is hosted by a third party. I have read the following but I don't know the validity, "Each subdomain is considered a separate site for SEO and rankings. But links to within site sub domains are considered as internal links by Google." I assume if that is true, I have nothing to worry about with concerns of nofollow on those links.