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It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit. Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.

If you have users register for anything (like comments for example) then I would use https, or any kind of ecommerce. Other than that, I don't think you pick up an advantage.

I dont think you would have an issue with page speed, just by adding a few links. Think about it from a consumer point of view. If your users want to see your social profiles, they will have to search for them manually, which they probably won't, or worse case scenario, they could find a competitors social profile instead. I would add the links or icons towards the bottom of the page, depending upon how your page renders. Once you have added them, minify your CSS and code to decrease page load time.

you're much more of a recluse than I thought! Yes!

"What else can I do to improve on its position in the SERPS?" Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Validation, validation, validation. There are a ton of citation sources available, and I would submit to as many of them (that are reputable) as you can. One thing to remember is: don't only link to the homepage if you want the subpages to get some good ol' Google love. "Would a hyphenated domain make any difference at all?" If you already have a good domain in place, I would not go changing that. The existing domain name probably has domain age and history, along with backlinks in place. Only if the existing domain had a spam or penalty issue would I change the domain. Be patient. The changes will not come fast. Google has to validate your new information from each source, and that can take a while. To speed it up a bit, link out to your social and ciation sites (using a nofollow or not, up to you) as they will link back. Once you have the new links in place, submit the URL with the outgoing links in GWT using fetch as Google. If it is a legit business, submit to major data providers such as Axiom, since Google uses them for data validation. You will need a tax ID and some other information tho.

I'm in agreement Robert.  Hitesh, it does feel like we're missing some part of the story.  I have reviewed hundreds if not thousands of sites that were dealt unnatural links penalties and I have yet to see one that was given unfairly.  I have seen the occasional example unnatural link given that truly was natural, but I've never seen a site get a penalty when all they had were natural links. Again, if you'd like to share the url I'll take a look and give you my thoughts.  But other than that I think any answer that you'll get here is going to just be speculation.

Yup i just checked again and its definitely been hit. I also have some clients who are ranking very well and they are on this directory, however we are not seeing a negative effect.

Look at how a lot of squidoo lenses operate, they may have 0 or only a couple paragraphs of unique content, but by pulling in feeds from other sources suddenly you have maps, blog posts, images, videos, etc and are a somewhat unique source.  Another thing to consider might be to pull in the scraped content with an iframe and make sure you have enough unique on the page to still be able to rank.

Jane, You have been awesome!  I almost done going through all of the bad items that Moz generated and am getting ready to run the crawl again!  Then once I am done with that I will submit to Google again.  First time in years I have some confidence I can make a difference. Nick

Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.

Hi Raymond, Either canonicalisation to page 1 or noindexing would do the trick here if the content has been duplicated. If you noindex, use noindex, follow so links in and out of that page benefit the website. Cheers, Jane

There's no official time frame offered by Moz?

Hi, About your keyword pages, they don't have to sit on a main page of your website. For example you could include a link with something like "find out more information on XXX" then the link redirects them to the keyword page. This way you get to keep all the SEO benefits, but remove them from immediate viewing on your website. Hope this helps a little I too am trying to discover more about links so thanks for your post. Jason

I don't think it is bad. Majority of my client websites uses it in footer only. We haven't seen any issues.