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lol...  if you really want a grin, I should forward some of the crap people send to me.   I have decided that most people who send me infographics are doing that because they can't write articles.... and they can't create infographics either.   So I have blocked their entire domains from my inbox.  PTL that gmail allows an unlimited number of filters.

I don't think anyone will be able to give you a concrete answer to this question. If you had a sitewide penalty and it was revoked, then you will likely find yourself returning to good rankings for brand terms.  If you had a partial match penalty then how you do after the penalty is lifted depends on why you were penalized.  If it was for a particular keyword, you can see some improvements. For example if you produced a widget that linked back with a keyword rich phrase and now you have removed or disavowed all of those, AND you have good links that could support natural rankings for this keyword, then, once the penalty is removed you could see a good improvement in that keyword.  I have seen some sites bounce back to top 3 in cases like this. But, what I have found is that many sites who have a partial match issue do not see much improvement in rankings.  The reason for this is that the previous rankings were almost completely based on the power of unnatural links.  So, removing those links is not going to make a difference. You may find that you see a further boost the next time Penguin updates as well.

Hi Avi, thanks for your question! Did any of these responses answer it? If so, please mark one or more as a "good answer". If not, please let us know how we can help. Christy

We were hit with an unnatural links penalty on 23rd of July 2012. (full story here) The effects of the Penguin algorithm lead to the unnatural links penalty. Google claims to ignore all bad links but when you reach a certain point they want to make you aware of it and accountable. That's when you get the manual penalty. Without a warning there are tons of websites out there who are about to trigger a manual penalty because the website owners have no clue about this stuff. The disavow file can be used to protect you from the penguin algorithm triggering a manual penalty. The fact your site can also be affected by the links with no warning is so counter productive to good search results. If Google says they ignore them already then your site should simply lose the benefit of those links not also receive negative effects as a result. I am going to reconfirm this point with John at the next hangout.

Thanks for the responses guys. We'd considered no-following a bare URL our brand name anchor (in fact, many PR agencies make no-following a requirement now since Google yelled at them), but were concerned about other web publications reposting it without no-follow. We're still dealing with past spammy URLs the previous "SEO team" supplied, so I'd rather not risk it. I think we'll go with Yelp, especially since we generate many leads through them anyway.

Hello Josh, thanks for the heads up! our engineering team is aware of this inconvenience and we plan on addressing this in our next updates. I completely agree and also find this frustrating. A lot of members have expressed this and we are confident that this will be fixed soon.

Not a problem, please mark the question as answered. It keeps the forums neater. If you have already done so, thank you. The site appears to be experiencing some problems today.

Of course they aren't seeing a drop in traffic to comparable pages. Those pages are fighting under their own steam. If you send a customer/prospect to the right page, the first time, they'll likely see an increase in traffic. It sounds like they're talking about 'what is' rather than 'what could be', which in our opinion is likely better. So I guess you could make the business case that incoming referrals are bouncing when they could be buying. Hopefully there's tracking code of some sort on the faux 404 page.

How often do you guys use the search operator "link:"?  Not very Often How accurate is the data? Its accurate, but it only shows a small percentage of the links Why the numbers of links when we use the parameter is way lower than the number on Google webmaster Tool or open site explorer? It is lower because in the past people used this search operator to find links pointing to competitors to help with their own link building plan It only show the most powerful links? No it shows a random selection most of the time.

You should be able to crawl the entire site without increasing the RAM, once you buy the paid version.

Yes, subdomains linking to your main domain do flow link juice. However, having the exact same content could be an issue unless you noindex it, which will result in no juice being passed to the root domain. I would take a different approach tho, as you said, it could take far more coding, but the results would be much better. Make the root domain accept canadians a free customers (don't know how you are going to pull this, ips, sources, etc), but this approach will get the link juice directly in your root domain instead of passing it through the subdomain and probably getting a penalty for duplicate content. Also, take into consideration that if Canadians get the service for free just from accessing from Canada, other users from other countries may just use a VPN (like HMA) to access the site and look like Canadian visitors... Hope that helps!

I tried to sign up with them, but they scoffed at me when I showed them my traffic report. "We don't provide support for clients your size. You can use our service but you'll need more traffic to see any results." It was a total turn off.