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Thanks for the responses, a 410 is a lot of work for probably little gain, so i think i'll run with just leaving the 404. I have done an analytic's check on the url's in question and 10 had a tiny bit of traffic, so for these only i'll 301 to one relevant page. Thanks again.

Hey Joseph, You are absolutely right. Our main aim is always to get registrations to the site and build our database and we try and do this by advertising good jobs that make people want to sign-up! Thanks for all your help on the matter, if you think of anything else, don't hesitate to let me know. Cheers.

Hi Mnkpso, In order to determine the exact cause of your particular experience, you need to have someone be able to audit your website and local listings. As I mentioned above, you could either share the details of your business here in the forum and get community feedback, or, if privacy is an issue, hire a Local SEO to consult with you in private. There are many things that can contribute to ranking changes. You need to find out what is causing what you, specifically, are experiencing, as it isn't possible to diagnose something like this without a proper investigation of your business. There are too many variables to give a one-size-fits-all-answer, and for the health of your business, you should be sure you are getting a proper diagnosis of your issues. It's very important.

All links consume link juice even nofollow links. What happens to the link juice is the question, does href="#" just flow back to the same page, first thoughts are yes, but then if that is the case, you would be able to manipulate how much link juice flows out of other links but adding more. so I think they may waste link juice. JavaScript links use link juice and there is no guarantee that Google is able to pass that link juice on. A lot of CMS use this type of links href="#" on a A tag then use the A tag for some other reason, such as a button to fire JavaScript. I believe that if you want a button use a button, if you want a JavaScript link then attach the event to a SPAN or DIV, use A tags only for real links and be sure you know what is happening to your link juice.

The best approach would be to download the links from your WMT (Web Master Tools). You can then assess what links could be causing any issues. Google specifically states that in WMT they will only show you some of the backlinks to your website, but they will show you a selection of both good and bad. Therefore any bad links will be visible, you just need to identify then and disavow

First of all Author Rank is not existing as a ranking factor (yet), so it would be better talking about Authorship. When it comes to Knowledge Graph, the specific case you are referring to is all about Google Plus Local, hence if you want to appear in box on the right you should have your Google Plus Local page well configured. in the case of being in the knowledge graph for your own name, be aware that you should be a node in the knowledge graph for really appearing there in a not personalized search. If not, you will appear in the Knowledge box only in personalized searches and to those users who had circled you on Google+. Hence, if you want to appear there - in a personalized environment - the best is being very active on G+, becoming relevant there so that you have a lot of people circling you. Related to the carousel "Users also searched....", that is build by Google using its own Knowledge Base. Somehow it is a sort of "related searches". For instance, if you search for Danny Sullivan, in that carousel you will find Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox and others search marketers or people related to search marketing. So, if you are not seeing yourself in the carrousel, that means that Google does not have such a significant search volume metric for you so to justify you appearing there. But if you are able to do branding so that users start using your name/brand name to search you/your brand, then there's a chance for you to appear also there.

Forums that have this kind of spam, either don't have it very long (forum mods remove it), or the forum has been abandoned and so is full of spam, so therefore google knows not to take anything seriously from the forum. It would be a bigger problem if this type of spam was on a page with some authority, (but they why waste a good backlink to your own site, to instead spam 1 of your competitors) As long as you have some decent authority, I don't think these methods will ever do any real damage, (and if they do it will be short lived) That's my 2 cents anyway

You can always report them : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en I guess you already know what the right answer is. play nice and hope that these guys sooner or later will be dealt with.

Thanks a lot for the answers guys. By the way, do you know if there is a practical solution to get rid of those back links from robot.txt?

I'd tend to agree - it's really tough to say without knowing more about the site, but a bit of bad behavior across hundreds of thousands of profiles shouldn't impact you that much. Of course, just having hundreds of thousands of indexed profile pages can have its own hazards, so it depends a lot on the site, authority, etc. The other option would be to just NOINDEX any questionable profile pages - that should sever the offending links. Of course, it also means those pages won't be able to rank, which could irritate the people building the links to them, so I'm not sure how lightly you want to tread. If you 404 and change the URL, you're sort of doing the same thing - they'll still have to rebuild and won't be happy about it.

Francisco, OSE won't always show all of your lowest quality links and what it does show may fluxuate.  In addition to OSE, take a look at links showing at majesticseo and ahrefs.com, and even your google webmaster tools to get a fuller picture of your back links and which you may want to disavow.

These pages or their domains should be disavowed to remove them from the Google index. The disavow tool can't affect whether or not your site is indexed (or I could disavow all my competitors). Disavow is a hint to Google that tells Google "Please don't count this link towards page rank". In other words, disavow, more or less, lets you reach into another person's site and nofollow the link to you. So, should you use it? Unless you have WMT messages telling you you have a manual penalty, don't touch it. Most likely the links in question are already devalued. If you use it, you could disavow links actually helping you and thus do yourself harm. MALWARE!!!! Unless there's malware on your site, links from sites that have malware on them won't hurt you (simply because they have malware)

Hi Mnkpso, Marcus has done an awesome job responding to you. I will add just a few things here. When I have clients who are completely new to Local SEO, I have them read these 2 pieces I wrote to describe both the technical and mental basics of Local SEO: The Zen of Local SEO The Rudiments of Local SEO For the most complete description of the factors that make up local rankings, I point to: Local Search Ranking Factors 2012 *Note that this last survey was conducted a year ago and that significant changes have taken place since then, but the basic factors are pretty much the same. And, because a major key to success in Local is keeping on top of the news, I would recommend these blogs and fora in addition to the two mentioned by Marcus: http://www.blumenthals.com/blog http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/ http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/ There are other super Local SEO bloggers out there, too. Hope these tips are helpful!

First of all, very sorry to hear about your drop in rankings, MNK.  I'm sure that's been pretty stressful.  It's difficult to say what's going on without getting a few more details, so could you provide a few please, such as a link to your Google+ Local page and what keywords you have dropped in rankings for?

Hi Andy, I would not waste your time trying to get them removed. In our experience it doesn't hurt to have these releases syndicated. I think google knows there a distinct difference between press release syndication and article syndication which is much worse. Press releases are meant to be distributed so I think there is more tolerance by big G. I would just be sure to not be too aggressive with anchor text links in the release.

Dana, Thanks so much for your reply. Yes, it did drop out of place recently. Just this week I believe it dropped. Also, it hit page one just 2-3 weeks ago, then boom gone. Across the board, our rankings for other relevant keywords are pretty solid (I say relevant because management does want to monitor our rankings for super broad keywords that have low chance of ranking). I haven't seen any major drops in traffic or ranking as I've been monitoring. Over the past few months, in fact, I've seen natural search traffic increase as the ranking for the term I'm asking about actually went up in ranks In regards to the conversion question - that's a great way to look at it. In fact I did that and noticed that conversion using that keyword actually increased 4 fold this past month. We went from conversions beginning with that keyword in January from about 1-2% of total non-branded conversions (that we can track i.e. no "not provided" conversions), to about 9% of total non-branded conversions in the month of May. So clearly it holds some weight That article does provide some useful insight. Upon brief scan, it's certainly useful. I'm bookmarking and reading in detail later! Thanks Anyone else have any input/suggestions? Dana if you have anything else to add, please do!

Moz has getListed.org  ( https://getlisted.org/ ). If you input your business name and zip code you can see where and how you are listed and claim your site/make corrections as needed.

The worst, in my opinion, are the unethical ones. Case in point, a web developer scored a job to create a website for a popular government owned (.gov) attraction. They added a, SEO Services page (TOTALLY irrelevant) to the site, and linked back to their site with it.

I just looked at my organic traffic since 2009 (ugh, not the trend you like to see). The biggest drop was in April 2011 (Panda 2.0 (#2)) There was a small drop but immediate recovery in December 2011 (Panda 3.1 (#9)) Another drop in June 2012 (Penquin 1.1 (#2)) Another drop in September 2012 (Don't really know - Panda updates 3.9.1 and 3.9.2) It's been steady/slowly increasing since then. The comment (and other) spam links are in the hundreds or thousands (By my best estimation) What do you think? Obviously, I need more good and less bad, but do you have any advice on what/where to focus?