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If they are #1, i would suspect that among all the links are a few good ones that are giving them rankings, this has been my experience in many cases when it's not clear why a page is ranking. I also have some links on sites I have built, but I no longer bother as if the site is not relevant and your have a link in the footer, then they will be of limited value

90% of your answers were discovered through SEOMOZ's On-page Analysis tool Correction for Title Optimization: 1. The visible portion of the page title in the search results extends to 66 characters, after which the engines will often truncate with an ellipsis. In order to optimize for the best possible title (and provide the most compelling call to action for searchers) keeping the title tag under 66 characters in length is recommended. Correction for Meta Description: 2. Since the meta description isn't used for rankings, and the snippet cuts off after 156 characters (in most instances), it's unwise to have a longer meta description tag. Words beyond this count won't be seen by anyone. Correction for Keywords: 3. Search engines have, for years, ignored the meta keywords tag as a ranking signal. Although it technically does not harm rankings, it can be used by competitors as a method to extract your targeted terms and thus, we recommend against its use. H1-H6 Tags: 4. a. H1 tag above the fold is a bonus b. Use your Main keyword in H1 tag preferably towards the front. c. H2 tags is used break down the main topic and is effective d. H3-H6 should be used as sub topics only if it going to be natural otherwise it may come off as spam. Bold & Italics text: 5. In testing, search engines appeared to have a preference (albeit slight) for pages that employed a targeted keyphrase with one of these elements than those missing it. This may also be valuable to users who can more easily find references to their search query thanks to this highlighting. Image Alt Attributes: 6. Keyword usage in the alt attribute of an image employed on a page is surprisingly positively correlated with good rankings. It also helps considerably with image search, a popular and oft-employed vertical/universal search system. Body Text of Competitor: 7. Body Text:  I wouldn't worry about competitors, work on your own strategy

You need to remove all the offending links ASAP. Its seems PR blog networks are causing it. Dont worry, your not the only one going through this, over 700,000 people got the message http://searchengineland.com/google-sent-over-700000-messages-via-webmaster-tools-in-past-two-months-113807

I'm not saying that a keyword matched domain should receive a penalty, I'm saying that it should be a more neutral ground when it comes to ranking factors. If your site happens to have a keyword matched domain but has great content and value for a visitor then it should rightly rank higher for relevant queries - and if they changed the weighting on the matched domains then it should(in theory) weed out the thinner value sites. Matt Cutts did mention in that interview the phrase 'level playing field' - not that I personally believe this could ever be achieved with an algorithm

Thanks for the advice.  All responses were very helpful.

I understand. Good reminder.

Yeah never set a folder's permissions to 777, as that would allow any script in that folder to be run and that is never good! Definitely avoid these instructions. You were right to consult the SEO Moz Q+A before doing anything.

actually, on second thoughts I think the view-all page solution with rel=canonical (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html) might be the smarter choice.

We've seen a pattern with this stuff - it works temporarily, then gets cut in value. TLA is the one I tested last year - rankings went way up, but as soon as we dropped the links they fell (indicating that TLA stock did work). However, when we observed and talked to folks who'd turned it on and kept it on, they reported that rankings, then dropped (within ~90 days with TLA). Recently, we've seen Google start banning many private blog networks (warning, links below contain a LOT of black hat stuff and some none-too-friendly posters as well, unfortunately): http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/559454-google-banning-paid-blog-networks-afraid-3.html http://www.internetmarketingtoolsupdate.com/internet-marketing-tips/seo-link-monster-warning/ http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/418104-panda-isnt-killing-blog-networks-scrapebox.html Those are all in just the past week. Google's not stupid, but I do think their webspam team has been swamped. Recently though, it feels like they're making a bit more progress, and I wouldn't be surprised if they continue kicking some tail in the link spam/black hat world.

As EGOL says, it isn't black hat. It may be duplicate If you think google cares about duplicate content on different domains, find an Associated Press story, then search for that headline. You will find it on 100 sites. If google cared about duplicate content on multiple sites, none of those would show up in the serps. However, and there is always a however... if they don't like your site for some other reason, they may bury your site in the results if you have duplicate content that appears on other sites.

You guys are amazing. Thanks for the quick and thorough feedback!

First, a disclaimer. I'm not an expert on SORBS-SPAM, so take my advice with a grain of salt. That said, with millions and millions of IPs on the list, including IPs that host big and powerful sites, it's doubtful that being on the blacklist alone will hurt your SEO much. The bigger problem is any email you send may get blocked. Regardless, it's a good idea to try to get yourself de-indexed. Apparently, this is a fairly common procedure and you can find information on that here http://www.sorbs.net/faq/retest.shtml Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

It's there larger effort towards updating their algorithm based on sematic search - http://searchengineland.com/wsj-says-big-google-search-changes-coming-reality-check-time-115227 Next gen of search will arrive within a year.

Hi Mate, OK that's good news then! Yea our dealer site is near enough an exact copy but it isn't indexed in google so it shouldn't cause a problem... Cheers, Scott

Hi Guido, I want to tell you that SeoMoz provide us information about link building & directory submission that will help us to gather information by SEO experts & Webmasters.these are below: 1. SEO Guide to Beginners. 2. Professional Guide to Link Building 3.Directories by SEOMoz I hope that you will like the above links.

At SMX West last month, Duane Forrester from Bing was talking about social signals and Bing, and saying that they look at who you follow as a signal, just like they look at who you link to. You don't want to link to a bunch of spammy sites, and you don't want to follow a bunch of spammy profiles. I realize that you asked about people following you. Some of the twitter services (though it doesn't look like this is the model of Twiends) for gaining followers follow a bunch of people in hopes of getting people to follow back, then unfollow those who do not follow back. I'm pointing this out here for people in the future reading this and considering other ways to get followers. Followers don't necessarily read your tweets, much less go to your site. I occasionally tweet from the SEOmoz Twitter account when Jen is unavailable, and there were a couple of times I inserted a bad link into the tweet about that day's blog post. I was amazed at the number of people that I got that immediately retweeted the SEOmoz tweet -- they obviously were not going to the site, but just trying to look like a "real" account by retweeting things from a known and trusted account.