Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks nathan yes I kinda doubt the disavow tool is of much use, hence why I am now looking at moving to a new url lessons learned

Yes, i can not find all those links From that site. I see it on my Webmaster tools as Main linking site

I've thought about this idea to get rid of bad links from specific referrers. I agree with the comments Ian has made but when it is the homepage it's not always possible to follow those steps.  Has anyone else had any experience/information?

Thank you, I understand what you are saying, currently the site will be undergoing a revamp etc and I juust wanted to tidy it up somewhat to may engage the customer more towards our products rather than a big lump of text. Definateley going to consider a shorter more keyword rich paragraph thanks for your help

What he said!  So far for us we've seen some great wins and a diabolic loss with our projects.  im still holding out for a few days before i panic too much.

Where should I go to hire an all star SEO person? Everyone on this forum is so knowledgeable and I would really like to hire some good, professional, proactive, SEO manager.

I see what you are saying, I was referring to total links. Not domains

No problem.. I'm sure you can get a ton of help around here this community is awesome. I'm going to write a rushed response because I'm hurrying to wrap up for a 4 day weekend (woot woot!) so --- Start by getting a list of all referring domains. Use multiple tools. Open Site Explorer, ahrefs.com, Google Webmaster Tools. Check all you can and get this list. Maybe into Excel. (there are some great articles on parsing this data and how to setup excel sheets to help determine Domain Authority and Page Rank value, but I'm not able to grab links at the moment check around these forums and seomoz blogs..) What you'll be looking for is low DA and irrelevant domains. If you have a bunch of links coming from autism-savior.com/forums/ it probably is spam. Some of them will jump right out at you. If these links don't look like they would help somebody to learn more then they are poison... etc. I'm assuming somebody along the way used a link building service. Something like $75 for 1,000 links, etc... If so maybe you can contact the company that did this and ask for a full report with logins/passwords. I did this with some success. Removed about 1/5th of paid links once... Wasn't great but at least got me closer. These are just a few ideas. Hope they helped. Keep asking questions, maybe start another thread (since this one is marked answered it might get less clicks.)

Not sure - i actually didn't see any comments on that post.  But I agree it is a gray area and I too would love to hear if anyone else has any thoughts.

Thanks Tom - thanks for nudging me in the right direction and Somerset is just brilliant. Haven't actually been there before but... wow. Drinking a nice glass of organic Somerset Cider as I type (slurp!).

Is Dublox a category of products or just a single product? If it's a single product I would use http://hoodamath.com/dublox.html If it's a category I would use http://hoodamath.com/dublox/index.html

Thanks everyone. Well this is an example http://www.hotmarketable4you.com/SpecialReports/PRE30141.html I had checked lots of these links maybe 2 weeks ago and then had (poor) content on them - but now all seem to be broken so i suspect was a link farm. And Mike - was more irrelevant rather than "bad" content Think I'll build links over next few weeks and then evaluate where we are then - hopefully rankings will start to improve

Thanks so much for the feedback. I haven't done a thorough check for duplicate content so I'll do that now and test out what happens. Thanks again, Amanda

301 the additional domains to the one you want to focus on - except the domain that has the penalty, if you're certain it does.

Anywhere proactively advertising that they will help your SEO profile if you pay to "advertise" with them is in my opinion a place to steer clear off ... (in their FAQ section) Their goal as an "honest product review portal" as they claim should be that, not championing selling you links. That for what its worth is my opinion

Considering your Q/A request for help was coherent, I think that you'll be fine writing the reconsideration request yourself.  The spam team deal with non-native English speakers all the time.  I would just make sure that you explain what you've done to your site to make it comply with Google guidelines (removing unnatural links, etc.) Admit any mistakes made. What has been done to fix these mistakes. Be as detailed as possible From Google reconsideration tool:  "Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reconsideration requests." Here is a great article on the whole process: http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume96/google-reconsideration-request.htm I hope that helps!

I didn't attribute the thumbs down to any specific person and did see that you gave the "good answer" award. Lots of people think that their attribution links are good as gold.  I thought it was one of them giving the thumbs down. If you click thumbs up, I think that the thumbs down will disappear.  

Google doesn't always send out messages for penalties. They're getting better, but they still have a ways to go. If the site is experience large drops in traffic (vs. slow declines) it's almost definitely a penalty of some sort. Steep declines are unlikely to be caused by navigation and architecture unless pages are completely unreachable or something large is altered. If there are large drops, try to line those up with the algorithm change history.

Hi Lewis No, you will be fine if you amend the anchor text, I would just make sure that you change the anchor text to a more 'long-tail' phrase. For example, instead of 'roller banners' you could change to something like 'for cheap roller banners in the UK' - main thing is, you get keyword in there padded by generic text. Hope this helps

Thank you Carson. I will check those pages to see if they contain and UGC on the product review sections - and will follow your other recommendation also.