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Would putting nofollow and noindex on the FAQ itself make a difference? That should make it obvious to Google that we don't want any of the link juice. I think that is a good idea.  That should eliminate risk with google and ease concerns of affiliates who think like me.

Trademarks can be registered in some countries, but not worldwide. Will it be any difference in selected country search if trademark is not valid there? As i see in some results, google just hides the result if that page had official trademark violation, but does not penalize the website.

Hi Matthew, Thanks for your reply. Would you be so kind as to read my previous question which will answer your questions. I would appreacate you advise on this. Thanks Chris Here is a copy: Hi, I will try to explain my situation as clearly as I can, and any positive advise would be greatly appreciated. Obviously please let me know if you have any questions but I'm sorry the domains are private. I started by business 4 years ago and launched a website (site A) and worked hard to promote it in the best way I knew how. It brought in a good income for around 3 years but then was hit with some sort of google penalty/filter! Knowing then what I know now would probably of avoided the problem altogether but that's another story... So I brought another domain (site B) and started again with a new design and completely re-branded the company, and again have been working hard to promote it. It has been preforming well and there has been steady progress However since then I have been steadily promoting the penalised site (site A) and keeping an eye on it to see if the penalty/filter may be lifted. It had initially lost around 75% of traffic, but recently has been doing much better in SERPS and is again on the increase. My problem is that with my company now being completely re branded I want to keep consistency but (site A) looks old and dated compared the new one (site B) and I don’t want to be confusing users etc... So I need a cost efficient and “safe” solution to this in terms of SEO and budget. 301 Redirect to site B I thought of a 301 redirect “BUT” I'm concerned about the penalty/filter being passed onto the new site (site B) and have read this dose happen ? Complete Redesign/brand for site A This would probably be the best option except I'm limited on funds. I would need “another” full commerce site as its just way to much money at the moment. Remove site A completely Funds are tight and I'm still feeling the affects of the penalty so really can't afford to loose any traffic at all! Use site A as a micro-site I thought a micro site with just the main product landing pages being used. I would use the same design as site B, then re-write the text and then link everything to the new site. “BUT” I'm concerned about getting another penalty (duplicate) as all the anchor text links going to site B site would be identical! EG. To use the same design as site B I would need to use the same layout etc including navbars, anchor text links in the footer etc.. and I'm worried this may trigger a duplicate content penalty ? I hope there are some suggestion for my situation and thanks in advance for your help. Thanks Chris.

Hi Luis, If I understand you correctly you would like to find what keywords your competitors are targeting simply by naming them? See George's response.. here are some tips. Read their Title Tag, most optimized sites will have their keywords in the title tag Read their keywords tag, older sites may still have keywords tag, if so they are basically telling you what they are targeting, careful though this can also be used as a red herring to throw off snoopers. Read their H1-H4 tags, this is the optimal place to put keywords Use a Keyword Density tool, a keyword appearing more then the rest, is likely the one(s) being targeted Finally, do keyword research for your own site, the keywords that make sense for you to use, probably also make sense for your competitors to use. Once you have your keyword list just run them to see where your competitors are ranking. Hope this was helpful

something like this is very difficult to determine without the URL and being able to look at the sites. you sound like you know what you're doing so I assume you made sure your robots.txt wasn't accidentally updated to block your site or that you have noindex tags on the pages by mistake.

Ok great. Thank you.

I try to stay away from these paid submission infographic sites. There are plenty that publish your infographics for free. I agree that it is better to target sites that are relevant to your industry. If someone has published a similar infographic in the past, use Google image search to find out where it was published. These sites may also be interested in publishing your infographic.

I agree with Shane 100% but I would just like to point out something. I have read a few articles about applying the rel=author tag to websites / service / product pages (instead of just articles). From what I gathered it seems most people actually found drops in visits to their website after the Google plus picture started showing up with their SERP snippet. It seemed users may have been skipping them because it looked like an article or blog because of the portrait image. You may want to do some more reading on this subject or if you go this route, track your visits closely.

I tried reporting a competitor for paid links, and even included the email I received which contained a partial list of the sites where the paid links were being placed. Tried to report it twice, over the summer and nothing has happened so far.

I would have them under one domain, pref something that is branded and not specific to any of your services... Lets call it "www.totalservices.co.uk" (probably taken I know...) I would then structure the main pages like this: **www.totalservices.co.uk/driveways ** **www.totalservices.co.uk/driveway-cleaning ** **www.totalservices.co.uk/patios ** www.totalservices.co.uk/artificial-grass (etc etc) As the guys have already mentioned, any links you earn or build to your site will count towards your domain authority... Also link juice will flow through your site "helping" you rank. By splitting the sites into 3 you are going to be increasing your work load by 3. Plus by having a branded domain name you will likely get a higher click through rate from the google search results - keyword heavy domains look spammy and "typically" are trusted far less IME. Hope that helps... Keith

Thanks very much Matt.

The links you posted are 404'ing, the entire gorillamikes.com site is 404'ing and there are only 4 pages currently indexed which will soon go away if it continues to 404. I see no competition threat at the moment

Hi Ehren, You're exactly right - under most circumstances, you have no obligation to remove links. Exceptions may exist for copyright infringement - courts are still working on settling that. You should almost always nofollow UGC, unless you're editing all comments manually to make sure each link adds value. If you add nofollow, you can basically have a canned response telling webmasters that these are not the links they're looking for.

Hi Ruth, I guess you are right after reading what I have been focusing on. I am making of mountain out of a mole hill and please understand I don't mean to waste your time l I do agree there are many other things considering putting your address on your website will probably get you more than what I'm inquiring about but I thought I would find out. Thank you for taking the time to respond to me and my question. The main reason I kept asking was I did not want to ever give somebody the wrong information so in the future I will not list this as good or bad for SEO until I know better. Thank you again and I want to say what wonderful job everyone here at SEOmoz has done. Respectfully, Thomas Zickell

Exactly. We were using what amounted to computer generated mad-libs to turn out a high volume of content. Panda came along and killed 1/3 of our traffic. We were also sent us a warning that we would be delisted.

That's a really tough spot to be in, Valery - I can sense the frustration! As far as your last question is concerned, Matt Cutts, in the blog post clarifying the new link warnings, specifically states that you should inform them if a network is charging to remove links: In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves. Have you tried asking for this same kind of help in the Google Webmaster Forum? Wouldn't hurt to double your possibilities - I've heard of some folks getting direct responses there. It's possible that there was more than just dirty links going on that added to the penalty - assume you've looked for and cleaned up all the other Black Hat techniques that might have been in use? Sorry, no experience with the link removal services so no help there. The folks at  Link Research Tools have just recently released a nearly free Link Detox tool to look at link quality - might be worth running to see if it flags anything substantial you missed. I'm sure your patience has just about run out, but I'd stick with it a little longer, especially if the site is otherwise high-value. Good luck, and let us know how it goes... Paul

For me, Davinia hits the perfect resource for determining what is appropriate or inappropriate. But, I think then you have to ask the question of intent. So, a small family business that is short on resources picks the junior son to do SEO because he knows more about computers. He buys some links, etc. Was he engaging in "black hat SEO?" I think not. As to a large SEO firm doing the same... Well my opinion is different. So ask the question to the SEO firm this way:  How long have you been doing SEO? Have you had a professional on our account or is the person you have new to the industry? If I wanted to buy some links or establish a link wheel, etc. will you help me with that? If they answer all of those questions as they should if they are proclaiming light derby status (got tired of the black hat), and they did what you say, you then ask this question: So, there are (your examples here) on the site. Given that, was it because you really do not know SEO or is it that you lied about doing things outside of GWT guidelines? At that point, you have at least made them look in the mirror. Unfortunately, we spend too much time on good guys vs bad guys. (Yes, I am guilty of it). I think this is driven from two areas: First, many of us look for the easy answer in our endeavors before we look for the best answer. The easy answer in SEO is, frankly, often manipulation of the tools, etc. The other area that drives this back and forth is that we all are stakeholders in various sites. All of a sudden we realize someone is ahead of us for the keyword we love and we are incredulous; we then look to find out how they cheated to get there. Again, I am guilty too. Good question,

Just to follow up on this, today the competitor's site has disappeared from Google. Again one up for decency! Glad to see things like this being punished.