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Its all about relevancy IMO. The closer you can get to the niche with that particular page the better. Remember the entire site does not necessarily need to be related to your niche (of course it does help if it is) as much as the individual pages do. The reason I say that is I have a hard time finding full site related niches who are not my competitors. Of course I am not going to be able to get a link on their sites, so I have to find those 1 pagers (usually news, blog and such) that happen to be perfect for my niche. So if you are going to place that link on a particular page, try and make sure the relevancy is a perfect match (The higher the relevancy, the higher the impact). I have learned that when links are placed at the end of content they tend to not have as much of an impact (especially in forums, blog comments, etc...) the only reason I say this about the end of content is because I no longer will place links at the end of anything, only in the middle of text. Of course make sure that its relevant and helpful to the readers and make sense. You don't want to place links just to place them. Also remember that Google still loves anchor text (yes even post penguin :)), but you really have to evaluate how you are placing that text in the link. Try and take yourself out of the SEO mode (I know I have too) and really think how you would link to that page and with what anchor text. Be as natural as possible when writing and make sure it makes sense. I tend to write my content first then I pick the most relevant text to highlight and place my links there. Many times people make the mistake of thinking about the link before the content. Write your content whether its a blog comment, forum post or whatever and make sure the comments relates to the question. Then after you have answered the question ask yourself if a link is really necessary. If not, then don't place a link. Which I know is hard to do sometimes, but honestly that's what spam is all about. If anything most profiles have the ability to place a link to your homepage to them. Just make sure that's in place and leave well enough as it is. I personally don't place percentages to my anchor text to my brand name. I just write the content and look at the best place to place my link and do that. Naturally it tends to be my brand term, but sometimes it's text like this article about this site check this link out freakin awesome tool Yes even misspelled words, because naturally I will write them like that and I know that Google understands that too. If I learned anything its that because of the amount of SEO I know I tend to gravitate to keywords and subconsciously tend to use them too much OR it causes me to write content that can be somewhat un-natural. I don't mean to do, but it just seems to happen. What I started doing was asking friends of mine to write my content for me. I tell them the subject of the page, verbally tell them the keyword without letting them know that's the keyword and let them write something for me. 99.9% of the time, it will be extremely natural flowing content

Would you buy a bunch of spammy links and point them at your own site just so you could disavow them and try to fool your competitors?  Not likely because it's hard to fool anyone who's knowledgeable about links about the quality of the links they're looking at when they actually visit the linking site/page and a strong competitor isn't going to chance a penalty on a technique such as that.

Sara Copyscape is your best hope .... They offer a free and premium service and its relatively inexpensive. http://www.copyscape.com/ Regards John

You cannot get a site out of a penalty from redirecting the banned or penalized site to a new domain. If you're only looking to link images to the unpenalized site you're probably fine if you nofollow them since image links don't push rank. Keep the alt tag off of them so you're not suggesting any semantics. To be really safe if done properly you could javascript them.

I do not think you would get much benefit from this. Your link profile would probably get all kinds of messy. And what if a bunch of poor quality sites start using that plugin and you end up having links on malicious, porn, poker, or other bad sites? Plugin links and template footer links should be avoided now in my opinion

I am thinking that maybe my best action is to take the first 65 (that are very untrusted sites/malware) and see if get anywhere with http://www.removeem.com/ The thing is .. SOMETHING must be preventing me from getting my raking back (as I have made such a huge effort with content, social media etc etc)

Here's a pretty comprehensive ideas of various link building tactics you can try: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Your DA and PA are weak so if I were you I would be selective on what your target. Do some research on keywords you would like to rank for and see what the competition is like for that keyword in the serps and if you have a hope to rank ( you might want to start on mid-long term keywords). You can also see what pages your currently rank for (page 2 or 3) and if a little improvement with the PA would it get to the front page, then you will know if it worth having a site wide link (via the Nav) to get the max PA to that page from your own site. But don't for get the people have to use the site so it might not be possible to have every link on the nav to be a landing page.

Ditching your domain is a little drastic. The question is really how bad are these links linking to you. You don't have you answer this but did you buy links at some point? If you did, start by checking those. "I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow." - that's the right path. Keep at it and submit yourself for reconsideration requests if you received anything in Webmaster Tools. To get back on the path to growth try checking into Broken Link Building. It's an easy way to get a few links and considered a White Hat technique. You'll be able to increase your links a bit here to help boost your organic growth and get back on track.

I have a client where we put the specific local listing page url (example.com/locations/phoenix/location1) in the Google Places URL field. It works out really well as we get the home page ranking organically (depending on the query) and the specific places result locally. Sometimes they are combined and other times they are not, but we are in the mix somewhere almost always.

Sounds like an a-ha moment to me, Jeff! Good find, and keep digging. It's amazing how many times a piece of data can be duplicated on the web. Citation cleanup is not a favorite job of mine, but it is worth the effort.

If that site is representative of the rest of the sites, then I'd say you might have a problem. This is going to involve a judgement call on your part, because as you say, Google has no hard and fast recommendations for these situations. Looking at that site, the "Name" links are do-follow. Yours is one of 965 comments on the page. My guess is the site recently got itself added to someone's "do-follow comment sections to spam" list (yes there really are such lists) as all the crap links are from the last 4 months. So to Google, this will absolutely look like the crap it is trying to hammer down with Penguin. As for "not worrying about it until penalized" - just read through the miserable (and often futile) experiences all over the Q&A section here of site owners who have spent a year trying to dig out from under a Penguin penalty. And as for these links helping you at the moment - not bloody likely. Crappy internal pages with a PA of 1 and 965 links sure aren't passing you any ranking value. So... how to decide what to do? How strong is the rest of your backlink profile and what percentage are these crappy backlinks? What's your link velocity for quality links compared these crap ones? (i.e. how frequently do you earn quality links compared to how often these new crap links are showing up?) how many of the crap links are actually do-follow? If your own backlink profile is overwhelmingly strong, there may well be less to worry about, especially if the majority of the crap links are no-follow.The problem of course is that there are also plenty of reports of people running into issues after using the disavow tool too. So that's where the judgement call comes in. If it were my site and I depended on it for income, the crap links were coming quickly and many were do-follow, I would collect the crap links as they come in, and once every 6 or 8 weeks, or when the links really start to mount up, I'd submit a disavow request. I'd also keep excellent records of the crap links and the quality links I'd been earning so I could respond quickly to a manual penalty should one come up. Like I say - judgement call. Interested to know what others would do. Paul

Add a benefit, make your titles compelling and give people a reason to click on them - don't make them harder to read!

That is encouraging for me, thanks Vanja.  Ill get busy on the content end of things even with the hit I still seem to be getting some inquiries, all the best Silas

Hi, Yes you are right, that's not the best link you can hope for but what you did is good and enough. You don't have to worry about it anymore. The disavow file will only inform Google that you want that link to be disregarded (as far as sending Page Rank) and they will do that once you submitted the disavow file so no worries there. You will still see the link in other tools as a dofollow as, again, what you did is only informing google about it. So you can still get referral traffic from those links, you don't care how many are there as there are all nofollow basically so no danger for you as far as algorithmic or manual penalties. Cheers.

Using Open Site Explorer, it looks like the keywords "Car Insurance" and "Compare Car Insurance" were heavily used as anchor texts. You might want to get a more versatile backlink profile (I'd do that). Analyzing your backlinks revealed that many of then come from press releases. You can also try to mix things better.

You're right

Hi Micheal, I am going to have to throw my theory/observation out in this case! Just had a quick look at ahrefs and looks like these guys have been doing some major link building in the last couple of weeks (with main keyphrase brisbane seo). https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Ftotaldigitalsolutions.com.au Just too soon to show up in the moz metrics. You wouldn't think this kind of thing would keep them in the top spot for too long, but there you go. **Note to self to check out a couple of the other cases I had seen for very recent funny stuff!

Hola Natan, Thanks for your reply. Site speed and responsive design seem to be very important changes I can make. Thanks. Plus I need to look more into Rich snippets. Thanks for the advice brother!

We saw no positive or negative impact from Penguin 1.0. interestingly enough.