Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you, Irving From my initial look at things,  there is one particular term that links to one particular old URL across numerous directories that all seem to be connected, which I never sanctioned at all. I'm starting to suspect part of this problem is related to someone purposefully trying to hinder our rankings, and I'm having the 404 for the affected page (old URL) implemented. Is having the 404 something legitimate to include in the reconsideration request?

It could definitely be a response from Panda/Penguin, as Irving pointed out the best thing for you to do is use a backlinks tool such as Open Site Explorer and take a look at who is linking to your website. Are these websites spammy or could they be blacklisted by Google?

No.  You have to avoid redirecting to the new domain.  If you do, the bad link juice will follow you. I know for sure that's the case with the "unnatural link warnings" that Google has been sending out.  I have no evidence its the same with Penugin, but it is very likely to be so. Some people suggest using multiple redirects with multiple hops, but I have no experience with that.

You are definitely on the right track. I would continue to work on quality/quantity of the content/freshness depending upon the niche. At the same time, do an audit of your link profile and compare it to a couple of the competing URLs who are outranking you and see what you notice as the brand links vs anchor text links and so on. Also, make sure you are not doing too many links of any one kind.

I agree with Marie somewhat, although we have seen sporadic results from well targeted domain names for some clients.  The truth is there are probably better things to do with your time and money.

Hi Bill, This tactic used to be a favorite one for the SEO guys but now it has faded. Matt Cutts, in one of the Google Webmaster Central videos said that doing such arrangement has no problem with Google but doing it on a very large scale may attract the attention of his team who continuously fight with spam. I personally suggest that it should be done only: if you are big business house and believe that name squatting could pose danger to your business. Buying and redirecting the different generic TLD of your main domain is fine. E.g. I own mysite.com then it's okay for me to buy mysite.org also and redirect it to the .com version. Simply buying number of business related domains and redirecting them to the main domain does not helps. Regards, Shailendra Sial

Well this site just made searchengineland.com.  I hope their "100 directories" don't get de-indexed.

I asked a similar question to this here http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-wide-footer-links-or-single-website-credits-page and it has possibly useful answers. I'd be interested to hear your views on whether to: A) create site-wide footer links on all pages of my client sites (varying anchor) B) just create a "Website Credits" page and include this inthe sitemap C) create site wide footer links to the website credits page, and link from this back to my site I look forward to hearing your views...

I'm new to SEO Moz so bear with me. When I look in the Campaign section, the only duplicate content errors I get are related to our privacy policy (www.lipozene.com/privacy-policy) and terms and conditions (www.lipozene.com/terms-and-conditions-of-sale). Is there another report I should be looking at?

Or if the website has notes saying to contact them to advertise or buy links, or if they're part of a network with a footprint that's easy to detect (do a search for 'build my rank'), etc. Any number of ways.

Thank you i ll have a look

I have seen a number of personal blogs, ones that clearly state that they get some sort of monetary benefit for reviews, that have dofollow html links to some large retailers. I was actually surprised to see this, given the recent Penguin update.

The site with the most authority will have the advantage.  If google finds the duplicates and recognizes them, one site could be filtered from the SERPs for some queries... or as in the Panda update, there could be a sitewide reduction in rankings.

This URL contains some advanced tricks to specifically prevent prefetching by Firefox. I've only tried to the htaccess mod_rewrite technique. However, I modified that technique to send prefetch attempts to an empty file instead of the normal 404 page (saving resources): http://www.petefreitag.com/item/312.cfm I would avoid only showing tags to Googlebot. It does look a little spammy and like cloaking but more than that, adjusting content for Google can be an involved coding process that comes with risks (accidentally showing something else to Google, etc.).

Where are the 30 visits a day coming from? Also make a sitemap and submit and if the old site had a bunch of pages that do not exist then I would 301 all that you are aware of. But also if its a new site why not a domain that is actually branded to you and your company and not some dropped thing?

Glad to be of help, Alice, and good luck! Miriam

I agree with Joseph and Robert, in saying that the title of your company sounds a bit spammy to begin with.  Maybe it's best if you use something along the lines of "ChicagoDentist.com" or even "ChicagoCosmeticDentistry.com" these allow you to use a keyword and sound more relavent to your audience. I would also suggest starting  fresh and making an update to work on "local signals" such as Merchant Circle, Google Local, LocalEze.  These signals will help the page crawl up in local search and also allow other customers to review the company, which we all know in this day and age is a good thing. As others have mentioned you do have the option of using a disavoy tool, but only Bing has such a tool right now and Bing only accounts for 38% of the search market, so you're going to be missing out on the other 70% and there's no way telling when Google will come out with such a tool.