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Let's say for a second that you are able to manipulate this one ranking signal. Keep in mind there are well over 200 ranking signals. What would one do for the other factors ? There's too many items to manipulate. And if you have naturally been able to achieve 140 of those signals, would you really want to risk all your good and hard work and try to manipulate it ? I wouldn't. I hope this helps.

I don't think this is a problem with related articles (there are plenty of sites that do this and rank well), but just in case, can you give me some examples?

Hmmm maybe some further reading is required. Here's potentially some helpful info for you on hardening WP, and other experiences with .htaccess hacks that might point you in a helpful direction. http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress https://www.google.com/search?q=htaccess+hack+wordpress http://wordpress.org/support/topic/htaccess-hacked-redirects-to-russion-site http://wordpress.org/support/topic/recurring-htaccess-hijack?replies=30 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/my-sites-htaccess-file-hacked-how

Thank you for your feedback John!

When Google released the disavow tool they made it pretty clear that it was really only meant to be used for sites that had received a manual penalty.  You were to get as many links manually removed as possible and then use the disavow tool for the rest of your unnatural links. In the statement about the disavow tool Google said that if you felt you had been affected and you thought the disavow tool might help then go ahead and use it.  That's pretty vague though. Before you do anything else you need to figure out why you have declining ranks.  Otherwise removing links is likely doing more harm than good.  Even though links from shady sources are not as good as good links, if you haven't been affected by Penguin or an unnatural links penalty then these links can actually help a website.  I'm not saying to go out and get more, but I'm saying that you shouldn't go removing links unless you are certain that it will help.  Disavowing more links could put you even further in the hole. If you've got a Panda issue then it has nothing to do with your links.  Panda is about on page quality and often has to do with duplicate and thin content issues. Your first task is to be certain about whether or not you have a linking issue.  While Penguin first hit on April 24, there were Panda refreshes on either side of that date. There are several people in the SEO industry that are now saying that removing and disavowing links is not likely necessary for Penguin.  I have a close contact who has done a lot of research on Penguin hit sites and he feels that Penguin doesn't penalize a site but simply disavows/nofollows all of your bad links.  So if you used to rank for "green widgets" because you had hundreds of anchor texted links, once those links were nofollowed by Penguin then you would no longer rank.  If he is right, then you can regain rankings by getting good natural links, but that's no easy task. I am still on the fence about whether Penguin is a penalty or simply a disavowal of bad links.  I have seen sites that really should be ranking for certain phrases but are not to be seen on the first 10 pages.  To me this really seems like there is a penalty or some kind of flag put on the site, but I have no proof. The point?  The point is that even those of us who are COMPLETELY obsessed with understanding Penguin don't fully know how the algorithm works.  If you do find that your issue is a Penguin one then waiting until more info gets published may be an option.  But there are other options such as creating new pages to rank for the terms that the old ones failed to rank for.  Or, for some sites, starting over may be an option. But again...you really need to know what hit you before removing more links.  Who knows, it may not even be an algorithm change.  It could be that you have site issues, or that your competitors are doing better than you are.

Hi, First of all you need to assess your link profile and if you do have a large amount of spammy and over optimized anchor text links then you are a candidate for Penguin. If not, you need to look elsewhere. You first need to check your Google Analytics (organic traffic) and a organic visibility graph for your site ("general ranking graphic" using a tool like sistrix or search metrics). if you don't have access to sistrix or search metrics or any other visibility tool just post the url he rte and me or someone else will run the url for you. In google analytics and in any of the visibility tools you need to look for a sudden drop in and short after the bellow dates (when Penguin was released): October 5, 2012 May 25, 2012 April 24, 2012 If you have a spammy link profile and your organic traffic dropped and is corelated with loss of rankings in the same day then chances are high that you are under this Penguin filter. Hope it helps. Cheers.

Maestrosonrisas, I took a look at what is going on and it is quite interesting. Do note that not all of what shows for that search is the result of hijacking, some are the actual urls, some are urls rendering false title tags in organic, some are urls landing on other pages not associated with you. It would appear that whatever plug-ins (protections) you are using for protection from spam are not the best or have been turned down way too much so that someone is able to get through. (Trying to keep explanation simple here.) I have sent you a PM where it is easier to communicate and provided my email address. Unfortunately, without looking at your dashboard in WP and being able to see how they are hijacking the title tags, etc. it is too time consuming for this forum. I would be happy to take a look though. Aqui (en Houston), tenemos una maestro de SEO con Espanoles fluidas. Tenemos una empleado pero no por SEO en Barcelona. Ayudemos ti gratis si el proyecto no es demasiado grande. Hasta que oigo de ti, Robert

I would download an OSE report set to external links only, to entire root domain. Use an advanced report if you have the credits. Then I would check the anchor text usage to each of the key pages. Try to do quality link work - linkbait rather than link 'building' - Yer, I know, everyone says that - but really! Write some decent articles that people will WANT to read - if they want to read them, they will want to share/link to them. If you do end up 'building' links though, do so by really high quality methods. Manually reach out for guest posts on decent blogs - tie this in with Google+ author profile links to the sites G+ account (the authors), and in terms of anchors, be natural! Go for what the blogger thinks should be used - usually this will be either www.domain.com/ or 'Brand Name'. In short - don't try to manipulate your anchor text in order to gain organic Google rankings - this kind of practise is now more out of date than ever, won't likely work very well anymore, and could in fact be counter productive. Hope that helps! Stick with it, do lots of research, start to identify and engage with a site's audience both on-page and off, and you will be fine

Hi Melanie, If your competitor is doing Negative SEO to your site, I believe the only option is to use the Disavow Link Tool.  Pointing low-quality links to competitor's site is the most common method of Negative SEO and i believe that is one of the reason why Google rolled out the Disavow Tool. If you are having trouble determining which links are low-quality, Matt Cutts recommends two ways: Use the Webmaster Tool to sort the links by date and compare it to when you received the Unnatural Link Email from Google.  This help you determine which few links are unnatural comparing the date and time. In the email that Google sends you, sometimes they try to include samples to give you an idea what is unnatural. My 2 cents.

I am running a small test on this theory at the moment. One site was hit around 14th Jan. I have secured some high authority links to the page affected which would more than replace those that could have been devalued. The results so far is that the rankings have nose-dived further. At the moment it is a test and has only been running for 2 weeks and I will continue to run it for at least 2 more weeks but so far it is very odd.

I am not 100% sure on boosting domain authority but it does boost page authority. This is just my guess but maybe you did too much internal linking and the link juice was spread out. Interior pages pointing to your main page will only boost your "Page Authority".

We have someone with a shady link profile ranking above us too. Don't worry; as was already said, it's only a matter of time before they're gone. Just keep working on your long-term #RCS strategies, and they will pay off in the long run--probably sooner rather than later.

I'm going to try this as the current option is sitting. Thanks for the response!

That looks like a great site...I've bookmarked it. Have a Thumbs Up!

Did they offer you hard cash for the chance to post an article with links or did they just ask for the chance to put a guest post on the site? The first is not permitted but the second is legitimate outreaching and is how to world functions. That said I don't think there is a way you can easily report someone for doing the first method.

Text on the page doesn't necessarily mean it'll get indexed...but it might. You can always just 404 the page, wait a week or so, and see if the page shows up in Google's index (just copy and paste the URL into Google). If it shows up you can simple block SE spiders from indexing it using your htaccess and/or GWT.

Hi Cyrus - that's really helpful, and interesting - thanks so much. I think you're dead right RE: sticking to newsworthy releases! Look forward to your blog post on the subject Best wishes, Luke

Hi again. I am just touching base to see what the current status is of this ranking drop. Did it recover? If not, I am curious to know if you moved the site to a new IP address when you purchased it? If so, was the new IP located in the same country as where it was originally, or was it different? It could be that you did none of the above. I'm just trying to see if we can rule this out as a potential cause for the drop.

If some of those pages have some good external links pointing at them, I'd take the time to redirect those.  If they don't have much in the way of links, then I probably wouldn't bother.  Also, do you need to link them to specific new pages?  If they're mostly similar, and are generated in some consistent way, you could mass redirect them to one or more of your newer pages?