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All, Thank you for the quality information. I was not aware that 'out of country - bad influences' would not affect your UK site performance. I agree with your logic that untold ip addresses would slow down site speed thus affect Google rankings. Thanks Mark

I'm going to disagree a bit with the other commenters (respectfully) and say that - it depends. First off, you said it's an algorithmic penalty, and that can really follow a wide range of timelines. Let's say you got hit by a Penguin update - you'd have to wait until the next data update, even if you do everything right, which can take months. I think "weeks" is very situational and may be optimistic. The other big factor to consider - what does your link profile look like outside of this? If you have 1,500 toxic links from a handful of domains, and they're part of a profile with 150,000 natural links from thousands of decent-to-good domains, then definitely don't write this domain off. You've got a ton of assets to lose, and you can't just 301-redirect your way out of this (you'd have to start over). You'd also be losing social, direct traffic, and potentially a lot of other things. On the other hand, let's say you have 1,550 links, and 1,500 of them are toxic. At this point, Google's view of your site may be so dim that, at best, you'll take weeks to get the disavow processed and then effectively be left at zero (or possibly -1). If that's the case, then I think starting over is a much different equation and possibly even faster. It also depends a lot on the strength of your domain and your other branding efforts. Changing names isn't something to take lightly, if you've built a name. On the other hand, if you've slapped up a partial-match domain (no offense intended) and part of your problem is that you've built keyword-loaded anchor text around that PMD, then cutting the domain loose could actually help you. This isn't a decision any of us can or should make for you in Q&A, honestly.

Hi Andy, Thank you for your response. I was also thinking the same but the business directions page it currently driving a a lot of traffic to the site. I am worried that if I noindex or nofollow this page that i may lose a ton of traffic. I was looking at Yelps infrastructure as well to see if they use either of these but there I cannot see that they have it unless of course they are blocking it using the robots.txt. Would you say that these options are the only options? Thanks, Neil

you can set up a CNAME record to be used with CloudFront on copyfaxes.com. It could be something like images.copyfaxes.com if you are only using cloudFront to serve images. I serve all my media content and scripts via WPEngine's CDN and use a CNAME to suggest all the content resides on my subdomain eg: cdn.bestpremiumthemes.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Input-Form-Designs-100x65.png

Great job, Mark! I can see from this end that nearly all of those unwanted URLs have already dropped out of the results. That's far quicker than even I expected! And the ones that aren't gone are leading to a 403 Forbidden page, which is great. One last thing you can do if you want. Because you are on HostGator, they are displaying their custom 403 error page, which has their branding all over it (nasty, kinda ugly) You could create your own simple 403 error page, add your own basic branding to it, and for instance add a line that says something like "You don't have permission to view this page or it is blocked for security reasons. Drop by the home page [link to home page] to find what you're looking for, or to conduct a search." This basic page can be used to replace the one that HostGator provides by default so any visitors that hit it by accident will still feel like they are on your site, and will have a suggestion for what to do next. Your hosting control panel will have instructions for how & where to provide your own custom error pages. Hope that last little tweak's useful. Paul

If you have it setup in WMT that the .CA site is for Canada and .com is for US, then it should be fine

Hi AJ, I would compile a list of the stuff they made I would then take a look at the sites. Odds are, some are actually good sites with good traffic. You should be able to get a few good ones at least.  You can opt to change the content. Keep those and remove the links on the rest. IF they had unlinked brand mentions, just remove those mentions as well. No need to take down the whole thing If you want, you can actually replace the links and point it to one of your employees blogs, a social property or somethin' that isn't really ranking or has nothing to lose - Just being honest here because simply repurposing it instead of scrapping a whole year's worth of your "investment" is always better in my eyes.

Id probably go this route for a simple solve. I believe you would want to remove or disable the current handicapped markup.

This, in my opinion, is the BIGGEST flaw with Google's algorithm right now. In order to beat back spam, Google gives heavy preference to high authority domains. That's why you see the SERPs dominated by brands right now. If you Google "brown boots", you'll notice each of the top results has little to NO links pointing to that page, but a HUGE overall domain authority. SEOs are taking advantage of this loophole right now. Because properties like Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, SlideShare, etc have so much trust and equity built up with Google, you can spam the HELL out of them and not get penalized. And even if you do get penalized, it's really no skin off your back because it's just a social profile. No one was finding it through Google before so it doesn't matter if they can't find it in the future. I rank a ton of YouTube videos and SlideShare documents with really crappy gigs on Fiverr. Low quality social bookmarks, cheap web 2.0s and old school spam link wheels work really well. All the garbage is essentially filtered out by the high authority of the domain. P.S. You can't find the links with OSE because the link index is only updated once a month, and even at that, OSE's link indexer is pretty sub par. This response was written by Ryan Stewart.

Howdy! We now have local rank tracking. Check out our blog post at http://moz.com/blog/local-rankings-in-moz-analytics for all the cool details.

Hi Michael, I see that you posted this question around mid-morning (our time). During that time, we were experiencing some problems with new authentications to Google Analytics and Google+ accounts. I posted some additional information in this Moz Community thread, but the short version is the issue should now be resolved, so you may wish to give it another try. If you're still having trouble authenticating to GA or G+, I encourage you to contact our Help team for further assistance. Cheers!

You can do this on a mass scale so that you can extract all outbound links, just did it yesterday

Language and country targeting are two different things. There are tons of people across multiple countries that speak English. People in Turkey speak a few languages as well I would assume. It seems like you want to take the content on your site focused to users in Turkey, but offer it in English. If you put the English content on your Turkey ccTLD, it can still rank for people searching across the world for those English terms, but it's harder depending on the topic especially if there are sites/companies in their own country targeting the same topic. Check out this tool I made to determine what international expansion strategy is best for your company. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

Come to think of it, the only thing we did do was fire the SEO company that we had working for us, and started doing SEO in house, but this doesn't make sense in terms of rapid shifts in duplicate content.

Hi David, Sorry for such a delayed response but I keep wondering about your point on the meganav.  Its known that Google is able to figure out menus and wont count those toward duplicate content?  I just would like to be sure since my menus are fairly substantial when dropdowns are included.

Hi Andy, Thank you very much for the great advice. Thanks Mark

No problem at all -Andy