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Thanks for the suggestions!! I'll keep you updated.

If you did not receive a manual action you cannot submit a reconsideration request. If you properly submitted your disavow file all you can do now is wait. And the consensus is it is as you stated related to the next refresh of Google's algo. Hang on to the Google doc though just in case you get a manual penalty in the meantime. It sounds like you have done a good job removing links but one of the biggest mistakes is not to remove all the spam links. It is a good practice to use multiple sources to review your back link profile. In addition to GWT there is OSE, ahrefs and majestic. Some like Link Detox and I had good luck with their tool. You didn't mention how they got there to begin with but hopefully you have fixed that as well. Now just focus on building good natural links going forward and wait for the refresh. You might search "disavow" here as there is a great deal of info. Good Luck!

Hello Bruce, It was about promoting our ecommerce services - and all the different areas of that really... Thanks William

Well, after submitting multiple temporary sitemaps and having Google index them, our duplicate counts dropped back to pre-event levels. However, our rankings haven't improved at all. Actually, if anything, they dropped even further. At this point it's really starting to look like this is a hit from Panda 4.1 and that we had our URLs change was merely a coincidence. From the looks of it, Google is now marking our site as a low quality site. Now that we know about such a thing, we definitely experienced a 'sinister surge' prior to disaster striking. Since we've never engaged in any bad behavior on the site and we've always followed google's best practice advice, we're currently at a loss of what could be the reason that we're hit that way. Our content is fresh and high quality (arguably the highest quality in our domain), we have a very decent link profile according to MajesticSEO, so for now, no clue about what's going on really. Attached is the site's impressions and clicks graph from Webmaster Tools. PAgd8q6.png

No problem! Affiliate marketing is a space that could really use something that shakes the current landscape up. I'd say nearly all affiliate marketers are great, and very helpful (and affiliates are too valuable a lead source to ignore either way), but some elements of the way the space works attracts less-than-aboveboard players. I've seen great value from affiliates, even when we were constantly fighting the coupon skimmers. One last thing that may or not be applicable - not all companies that use affiliates even offer a coupon, but affiliates will still advertise {{company}} coupons. My current company does this. This makes it a bit easier to keep an eye on the skimmers, since I just added a line to our policy stating that affiliates may not advertise coupons, whereas the only thing you can really do about skimmers when you do have a coupon is make sure they aren't bidding on branded search terms or using your trademark in their root or subdomain name.

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. I appologize that it's taken us so long to get back to you, things have been a little hectic around here! There are a few things going on here. For starters, it looks like you just created your campaign on 9/15/2014. We can only track historical data back to the date you created your campaign, which means we don't have a year's worth of data to report on. We'd need a time machine to retrieve your data for the past year, and while I keep asking for a DeLorean, our engineers have yet to reproduce the Doc's technology. Additionally, we don't actually have a yearly reporting option. You can set up Custom Reports to run weekly and monthly, but not for the entire year. We love love love feedback though, so I'll definitely note this for our Product Team! You can also chime in on our Feature Request Forum. Our Product Team keeps pretty close tabs on this forum, and they will let you know if your idea is something we could bake in down the road! I hope this helps, and have a great rest of your week! Cheers, Erin

You pretty much nailed it. Google would say its bad, but results say otherwise. I'd be willing to bet that manually writing up unique content that is more relevant to the target keywords would bring better results. When you consider cost vs ranking results though, having a template where you mix and match keywords is a smart move for lots of websites.

Thanks Ryan and Chris, I appreciate the feedback!

Thanks EGOL, I didn't think about using rel=canonical on htaccess. Great idea

Hi there, As has been pointed out, the rel=canonical tag is just a suggestion to Google that you don't want a page to be indexed or to rank. They can choose to ignore the tag if they want to. If you want to keep pages out of the index, there are a few options: The rel=canonical tag as you've tried Adding a noindex tag as pointed out above Use the URL parameters configuration option in Google Webmaster Tools Give that you've tried the first one, I'd recommend giving the second two options a try and seeing what happens. I hope that helps! Paddy

Am I missing something? From the why you described it, I really don't see how this can be considered "buying a link" at all. If you told University X, we will do a scholarship specifically for your students, onliy if you link to it, then, sure, that makes sense. However, if the scholarship isn't directly tied to a particular school, then I don't see the problem. If this is considered buying links and can be penalized, then wouldn't that mean any contests, give-a-ways or sponsorships that a site creates, and then that someone else links to would be violating google's guidelines? Ruben

No problem, Moz can highlight duplicate content for you. Run a crawl diagnostic and review the report.

Duplicate content isn't that big of a deal for ecommerce sites, especially the kind you're talking about. Backlinks are likely why the pages rank so poorly.

That isn't one I have come across before, but is powered by BT... "Smile Local is one of over 150 business directories managed by BT Customerstreet" It is something I would need to look at in more detail, but the links out are no-follow so in theory, shouldn't be a problem - quite ad-heavy pages with 3 all close to the top though. -Andy

I'm having the same problem. In fact, my host has decided to BLOCK the rogerbot from crawling my site at all! When I asked them if they could limit rogerbot instead of blocking him, they said.... "They don't respect this, that is the problem, so we have no choice, basically. It is their job to configure their crawler properly." That sucks! Because I want rogerbot to crawl my site!!!

Understood.  Thank you so much Andy.  This info is invaluable to use as a small company. Isaac.

Hi Mohammed, You just did Seriously though If you are a Moz Analytics subscriber then yes you can post and respond to Q&A questions. Another way is to earn over 500 MozPoints (pending staff approval) then you can also post and respond to Q&A questions.

Hi Chris, I'm looking at expired domains, narrowing them down to only those with good quality link profiles, those with .edu, .gov links, genuine .org links and links coming in from otherwise quality sites. Because it is only the domain, and there are no pages to actually to go and look at, I am wondering if in this situation it matters whether the PA is higher than the DA. Based on what you said, my guess is it just means that when the site was operating there was an internal page that had higher Authority than the home page, which is fine, but as long as the link profile overall looks good, the higher PA than DA doesn't really matter. Would you go along with that? That's a good idea to see, on the OSE report, whether there are a lot of links going to one page in particular. I will doing that from here on.