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Hi Jimmy, Thanks for the really fun question (note: negative SEO isn't fun, but trying to figure it the algorithm is Couple of reasons why I think this would be difficult: 1. We have very limited working knowledge of both co-citation and co-occurance. What we do know at this point is little more than theory. So working them into an actionable strategy for positive rankings would be hard enough I imagine, let alone negative SEO. 2. The signals produced by these measurements are likely to be weaker than traditional link signals, thus reducing the incentive to use them. 3. One of the reasons we believe search engines may use co-citation and co-occurance is that they are harder to game (especially when combined with authority and trust metrics) so it follows that they would also be harder to game in the negative. That said, it's so new I barely know what I'm talking about. Really interesting area

If you are asking them to write about you and give their honest impression of your product/service you are marketing. If you are asking them to write about you AND asking for a followable links you are violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines. What you are doing is clearly walking the line between these, but my opinion without having actually seen any of the posts/links is that you are leaning toward the marketing side. Where you might run into trouble is if this tactic represents a huge proportion (say about half or more) of your total links. Relying to heavily on any one link building strategy, especially "iffy" ones like this, is never a good idea. Round out your link profile. If you need to pause this campaign while you do so then so-be-it.

I wouldn't worry about it too much from an SEO perspective. You could set up filters in Google Analytics to get rid of the noise so you can see your metrics without these referrals in the mix.

You may also want to read the Beginner's Guide to SEO, especially the section on building links at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links.

I have found it to be quite useful. Its good for client pitches and looking at their back link profiles before the meeting. Its also a useful tool for examining the back link profiles of sites you are thinking about approach for link request or blog post.

Thank you for that, i will have a look now. I know when we have looked at our links we have found a lot of people link to our site, but trying to decide if these are good links or bad links has been hard for us. We did find a lot of directory sites and also game sites that were linking to us and we could not understand why they were doing this.

No reconsideration requests are needed for Panda.  It is algorithmic. Good luck.

Thanks for the insight everyone! I was also thinking about the possibility of canonicalizing them to pages on the ecommerce site, but am afraid that might have the same detrimental effect as redirecting them. @Nakul and Todd: The content is not horrible, but they are basically set up as blog rolls. I don't think anyone particularly "likes" the content nor do they share it. For the most part, they are product reviews and announcements from our manufacturers, and I have stopped adding content to the sites because it seemed like a waste, when I could be generating new and better content for the actual e-commerce site and our real blog. That said, there is a tremendous amount of content on these sites from the last 4 years. It was apparently working very well for the company, but not after panda and penguin. Some of the domains are exact matches for our head keywords (that we lost rankings for), others are exact matches for product titles or model numbers. I don't think there was ever an unnatural links warning from Google, but I've seen sites not get a message in GWT but still clearly be penalized for it. @Moosa: Both. Failed in terms of not generating conversions (or possibly generating a few here and there), but relative to the likely negative effect, I'm just not sure how to handle this. They are our sites, so dissavowing them wouldn't do much good. I could go through and manually remove links and canonicalize them, but I'm wondering if it's better to just take the sites down...

Well, it depends on how much this site means to you.  It sounds like you got hit by Google, and once that happens the road to recovery is not easy -- as you are seeing -- but also not always possible.  Getting rid of paid links, writing blog comments , forum posts and article pubs. are not strong enough to turn the tide.  I don't want to tell you what to do, but from what I understand (I have not had to attempt a recovery personally) it will be easier to get a new site up and ranking.

Don't think the space makes any difference. Take a look at this old article from google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html "If you have multiple content values, you must place a comma between them, but it doesn't matter if you also include spaces. So the following meta tags are interpreted the same way: "

Hi Ben, The answer to your question boils down to usability and link equity: Usability: Did the old URLs get lots of Direct and Referring traffic?  E.g., do people have them bookmarked, type them directly into the address bar, or follow links from other sites?  If so, there's an argument to be made for 301 redirecting the old URLs to their equivalent, new URLs.  That makes for a much more seamless user experience, and increases the odds that visitors from these traffic sources will become customers, continue to be customers, etc. Link equity: When you look at a Top Pages report (in Google Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer, or ahrefs), how many of those most-linked and / or best-ranking pages are old product URLs?  If product URLs are showing up in these reports, they definitely require a 301 redirect to an equivalent, new URL so that link equity isn't lost. However, if (as is common with a large number of ecommerce sites), your old product URLs got virtually zero Direct or Referring traffic, and had virtually zero deep links, then letting the URLs go 404 is just fine.  I think I remember a link churn report in the early days of LinkScape when they reported that something on the order of 80% of the URLs they had discovered would be 404 within a year.  URL churn is a part of the web. If you decide not to 301 those old URLs, then you simply want to serve a really consistent signal to engines that they're gone, and not coming back.  Recently, JohnMu from Google suggested recently that there's a tiny difference in how Google treats 404 versus 410 response codes - 404s are often re-crawled (which leads to those 404 error reports in GWT), whereas 410 is treated as a more "permanent" indicator that the URL is gone for good, so 410s are removed from the index a tiny bit faster.  Read more: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-content-removal-16851.html Hope that helps!

Its sucks, but they will get caught out eventually (as Christina says it happening already). Its a temping trick to try and copy, but they have such a head start it would be hard to beat them at there own game.  Best concentrate on white hat backlinks, then when the reckoning comes, you will have the head start on them

Do those pages help the user ? Are they being used/browsed by your users ? Or are they just like an Archive. Are they limited to 10 pages ? If I were you, I'd also look at other areas, both on-page and off-page and do a competitive analysis to see what is it that your competition is doing that you are not that is outranking you.

I would say yes it does, simply because displaying outliers on the map is difficult.

I checked analytics, backlinks, everything but it doesn't benefit us in any way. Not even the links point to my site. So upset! What should I do? Contact Google and report the site or should I contact the company? Thanks

Hi Bob, Why not start simple and leverage the questions your clients are already asking you? There must be lots of common issues they face during a printing process. We seem to talk at least 3-4 times with the printers while we are getting anything printed. This could be spun out initially as a faq type page, but I would think that some of those questions would naturally lead to posts that could expand on more details, the theory behind practices etc. Just a thought!

I'd also add, if it's providing (relevant) direct traffic then you might want to keep it too. It can be a good indicator of niche directories that benefit your business...

Best practice is great starting point, but you need to work out what works for your audience, your offerings and your business. For instance, having a call to action in your title can make a positive difference ("find" is a bit generic, but things like save, download the guide, buy now, etc can work, if it connects with the searchers intent.) Luckily page titles are pretty easy to test - you'll need to keep an eye on your rankings and traffic and measure click-throughs for a suitable period depending on the search volume and taking into account any seasonality etc. As well as the traffic you receive, also look at the conversion rate too - especially important if you're testing for intent. You can always tried a couple of variations in Adwords to see how they perform, especially for you more important keywords / pages. The approach you take regarding your titles also depends on the type of page, the nature of the business, your specific business goals, the strength of your brand etc. Take a good look at the other sites appearing in the SERPS and the titles/descriptions they're using. Put yourself in the place of your audience and try to see what's going to work and what isn't and how you might be able to differentiate your page from the rest. Also remember that titles have to work in conjunction with the description. While the description isn't used for ranking, it can take some of the load of the title when it comes to supporting click-throughs. Another point to consider is that Titles aren't just used in search engine results, but also when the page is shared / linked to etc. Depending on your site, you may want to adopt a slightly different strategy for your blog content than you use on a product catalogue for instance.

Thanks Ross!

I would go to an attorney and talk about trademarks.