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You should also use Copyscape and Siteliner

Hi Luke, Generally I wouldn't worry too much about that - the main thing is that you avoid users landing on these 404 pages which it sounds like you are. For reference, here is a helpful article from Google regarding their stance on 404s. Ideally, if there is a relevant page that you can 301 redirect to, you could do this with certain pages. But it sounds like this may not be possible as the URLs that Google has now crawled never existed in the first place. So I'd recommend that you 301 redirect to another relevant page if possible (but don't mass redirect them all to a single page or your home page) but if there are no relevant pages, leave them as 404s - it is unlikely that they will hurt your rankings. Cheers. Paddy

when you say the local keywords you mean horse riding costa rica or horse trek monteverde? The company name is Horse Trek Monteverde There are other companies with more general names such as horseback riding costa rica and costa rica horseback riding,

Tom is spot on here. You cannot target only the fans of a miscellaneous Facebook page that you are not in control of, like a competitor.

Hi Luke, I think I'm going to need a little more information to fully understand your question. Could you give us the URL in question? Best, Kristina

Woops! Keri's right - I read that response "Thanks for the reply, customer services." and thought that you meant you received an answer via email. I made an assumption there. Sorry! Anyways, can you please send us an email by going here and following the instructions under the search bars? http://moz.com/help/contact. It sounds like there's enough issues here that we should look into each one one-by-one. Again, I'm sorry for misreading your post earlier.

Are you looking to remove every single video snippet? Or just the snippets from some pages? It seems fairly drastic to remove every one, so I'd suggest you  delve a bit deeper and work out exactly which pages you don't want the snippet on any more. That way, you can submit a sitemap with some URLs, but not all. Additionally, note that it's much easier to get the thumbnail changed than the snippet removed entirely, could you try split testing thumbnails to see if it's just suboptimal pictures that are causing you problems here, rather than the snippets as a whole? If you can't take the videos down, I honestly think you'll struggle to get the snippets removed. Google are not on your side here unfortunately.

Thanks, I will check that out. I have been good with the links I have created myself. Some backlinks are spam, and we are working hard to break the link with those, but its tricky when it comes to Wordpress sites. I have actually checked out the recent links on high domain authority wordpress sites and they are having the same issue, but due to healthy amounts of good backlinks, it does not seem to be causing them an issue.

Hi Niall, Thanks for reaching out! I think I have an answer for you! OSE only displays 25 links for each root domain. So if you you have 2,951 links but 300 of them are from one domain, it will only show 25 of them. That should help explain the discrepancy you're seeing. I hope this helps! If you have any more specific questions about a particular campaign, please don't hesitate to email help@moz.com! Cheers, Erin

Thanks heaps Dan, really appreciate it! Made most of the fixes you've prescribed and will do the others. Content is unique on each page, however thin and lacking substantive value... certainly requires some more work. The Onpage Grader also eventually seems to have caught up and no longer displays non-problems as problems as it did initially. Looks like I just needed to give it some time upon making a remedy. A few quick questions if I could trouble you to answer them. You've been extremely helpful already though and gone well above your call of duty so don't worry if you're too busy. What do you think is the best way to approach a location-based campaign that targets different localities? Is it a good idea to create a different location page for each location targeted? You've suggested to make the title tag - Dental Care in Cairnlea - Family Dental Care. However, how detrimental would that be for targeted keywords like "Orthodontist Cairnlea" or "Fillings Cairnlea" if it were to be targeted on that page? Is Google smart enough to know that Dental care covers the wide array of dental services like fillings braces, orthodontist etc. and so a broad descriptive title tag is most effective? Specific targeted keywords like "Orthodonist Cairnlea" are then considered highly related or a subset and therefore, are not extensively affected, so long as the keyword (eg Orthodonist Cairnlea) is appropriately prevalent in body content? Do you think the Moz Onpage Grader places too much value on keywords appearing a number of times in body content, when some thought leaders claim that Google is moving away from this as a key metric? Just answer if you have the time. Thanks abundantly.

Also, you can try changing the user-agent of your web browser to "googlebot" so you can see if the site is doing anything sneeky when Google comes crawling.

Ok Thank you so much for your help!

The Beginner's guide to SEO has a chapter on links at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links that can be helpful, too. Above all, consider the value that you are adding to a site when you contribute content, not just "is this a place that will allow me to leave a link".

I just checked and mine has gone up by 4, so we must be doing something right. Its the first time I've seen it change since I have been a member.

Hi Jeff, Thanks for your answer. Please take a look to the reply above on Fredrico

Thanks for the question. Just to add to what the other guys have said, here is a helpful article from Google which explains a bit more about their stance on 404s. In general, you should try to 301 redirect 404 errors to other pages if it makes sense for the user. For example, if a 404 page is an article about belgian beers, you could redirect that to another article about belgian beers so that the user lands on a relevant page. You should definitely try to avoid mass redirecting links to your homepage because Google can treat these as 404s - there is a video here on the topic: http://www.davidsottimano.com/internal-301-homepage-treated-404-google/ If a page 404s and can't be redirected to a relevant page, then it's best to leave it as a 404 and let Google keep crawling it. I also agree with the other guys on creating a custom 404 page which will provide a good user experience if they happen to land on it.

Fair enough. If you believe there is a benefit to your users then proceed. Sounds like they are seasonal navigational links and that they could be good for users. But because this tactic could be used to manipulate search, it might still raise flags. If you are automating these links and they all appear on the same day at the same time with the "Exact same fantastically keyword stuffed anchor text" then it will look suspicious. If these are links pointing to a uniquely titled event, "November SEO Evangelist Raleigh" and the news is published casually in content over a few days after the original announcement then it will look less suspicious. Especially if the each publication adds in some additional commentary about the event that makes it useful for each site's distinctive audience. As with everything SEO, test it out. You should know fairly quickly if you get an algo penalty. You should also know fairly quickly if users are finding the links useful. I would certainly "NoFollow" the links.

You are looking at site structure. You want it to make sense and you want to link from the broad subject down to the specifics. Example:  Shoes > Women's Shoes > High Heels > Brand Name High Heel Shoe The reciprocal linking in the content of each page can become confusing if your Shoes page is linking anchor text "High Heel shoes" to the High Heels page, while the High Heels page is linking to anchor text "shoes" back to the  shoes page. I believe that the best way to establish your pyramid is through breadcrumb links, and URL structure. Folders can be useful for defining hierarchy. The pages you cross link must make sense to users. Dropping in a "Children's Toy" link on a High Heels page doesn't usually make sense. Whenever you consider doing something for "keyword optimization" or "ranking" you need to consider how does this benefit a user.