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Thank you, Peter. I will analyze sites 3-6 and try to figure out what happened. I appreciated all of the help.

If you can submit a ticket now from that URL with your actual question, that would be great. I'll look for it and make sure it comes through. Thanks!

Yes, thank you Egol and Peter!

Your data sources are correct (AHREFs, Bing, Ose & Majestic) but I recommend including Bing as well. The data is free and you will find at least some links not shown in other sources. The link prioritization you shared is absolutely incorrect. "Priority 1: Clean up site-wide links with money-words; if possible keep a single-page link" While it is true site-wide links are commonly manipulative, removing the site wide link and keeping a single one does not necessarily make it less manipulative. You have only removed one of the elements which are often used to identify manipulative links. "Priority 2: Clean up or rename all money keyword links for money keywords in the top 10 anchor link name distribution" A manipulative link is still manipulative regardless of the anchor text used. Based in April 2012, Google used anchor text as a means to identify manipulative links. That was over 18 months ago and Google's link identification process has evolved substantially since that time. "Priority 3: Clean up no-brand sitewide links; if possible keep a single-page link" Same response as #1 & 2 "Priority 4: Clean up low-quality links (other niche or no link juice)" See below "Priority 5: Clean up multiple links from same IP C class" The IP address should not be given any consideration whatsoever. You are using a concept that had validity years ago and is completely outdated. bonegear.net  IP address 66.7.211.83 vitopian.com  IP address 64.37.49.163 There are no commonalities between the above two IP addresses, be it C block or otherwise, yet they are both hosted on the same server. You have identified the issue affecting your site (Step 1) and collected a solid list of your backlinks using multiple sources (Step 2). The backlink report is an excellent step which places you well above most site owners and SEOs in your situation. Step 3 - Identify links from every linking domain. a. Have an experienced, knowledgeable human visit each and every linking domain. Yes, that is a lot of work but it is what's necessary if you are going to accurately identify all of the manipulative links. Prior to beginning this step, be absolutely sure the person can accurately identify manipulative links with AT LEAST 95% accuracy, although 100% is strongly desired. b. Document the effort. I have had 3 clients who approached me with a Penguin issue, we confirmed there was not any manual action in place at the time we began the clean up process, but before we finished the sites incurred a manual penalty. Solid documentation of the clean up effort is required by Google in case the Penguin issue morphs into a manual penalty. Also, it just makes sense. You mentioned 50+ web properties so clearly others will be performing these tasks. c. Audit the effort. A wise former boss once stated "You must inspect what you expect". Unless you carefully audit the work, the process will fail. Evaluators will mis-identify links. You will lose some quality links and manipulative links will be missed as well. d. While you are on the site, capture manipulative site's e-mail address and contact forum URL (if any). This information is helpful to contact site owners to request link removal. Step 4 - Conduct a Webmaster Outreach Campaign. Each manipulative domain needs to be contacted in a comprehensive manner. In my experience, most SEOs and site owners do not put in the required level of effort. a. Send a professional request to the site's WHOIS e-mail address. b. After 3 business days if no response is received, send the same letter to the site's e-mail address found on the website. c. After another 3 business days, if no response is received submit the e-mail via the site's contact form. Take a screenshot of the submission on the site (not required for Penguin as no documentation is, but it is helpful for the process). All of the manipulative link penalties (Penguin and manual) I have worked with have been cleaned up manually. With that said, we use Rmoov to manage the Webmaster Outreach process. It sends and maintains a copy of every e-mail sent. It even has a place to add the Contact Form URL. A big time saver. If a site owner responds and removes the link, that's great. CHECK IT! If there are only a few links, manually confirm link removal. If there are many URLs, use Screaming Frog or another tool to confirm link removal. If a site owner refuses or requests money, you can often achieve link removal by having further respectful conversations. If a site owner does not respond, you can use "extra measures". Call the phone number listed in WHOIS. Send a physical letter to the WHOIS address. Reach out to them on social media sites. Is it a .com domain with missing WHOIS information? You can report them on INTERNIC. Is it a spammy wordpress.com or blogspot site? You can report that as well. When Matt Cutts introduced the Disavow Tool, he clearly said "...at the point where you have written to as many people as you can, multiple times, you have really tried hard to get in touch and you have only been able to get a fraction of those links down and there is still a small fraction of those links left, that's where you can use our Disavow Tool". The above process satisfies that requirement. In my experience, not much less than the above process meets that need. The overwhelming majority of those tackling these penalties try to perform the minimal amount of work possible, which is why forums are flooded with complaints about numerous attempts to remove manipulative link penalties and failing. Upon completion of the above, THEN upload a Disavow list of the links you could not remove after every reasonable human effort. In my experience you should have removed at least 20% of the linking DOMAINS (with rare exceptions). It can take up to 60 days thereafter, but if you truly cleaned up the links in a quality manner, then the Penguin issues should be fully resolved. The top factors in determining whether you succeed or fail are: 1. Your determination to follow the above process thoroughly 2. The experience, training and focus of your team You can resolve the issue in one round of effort and have the Penguin issue resolved within a few months....or you can be one of those site owners who thinks it is impossible and be struggling with the same issue a year later. If you are not 100% committed, RUN AWAY. By that I mean change domain names and start over. Good Luck. TLDR - Don't try to fool Google. Anchor text and site wide links are part of the MECHANISM used to identify manipulative links. Don't confuse the mechanism with the message. Google's clear message: EARN links, don't "build" links. Polishing up the old manipulative links is a complete waste of your time. AT BEST, you will enjoy limited success for a period of time until Google catches up. Many site owners and SEOs have already been there, and it is a painful process.

Glad to hear it's been sorted William. Peter

You're most welcome Kevin! I like Kurt's response too and it makes sense. Best of luck and let me know if you ever need anything else or have other questions!

Wow - thanks for the answer EGOL!  This makes good sense to me and helps me firm up in my mind that this is a good direction to keep going on.  Thanks again!!  Kevin

If you have been in biz for any amount of time you get returned items.  REI has a separate store for their returned items (extremely interesting article here).  So do lots of other very high end businesses.  But they frequently sell them in dedicated stores or in outlet shops. When I have an item that was purchased and returned.  I check it out to see if it is still good, then list it on ebay as "used" - and they sell immediately.  I also just took a lot of stuff to my local Goodwill store.  It was not selling and I just wanted to "get it out of here". I do have a "clearance" page on one of my sites, just to give deep discount on some items that I want to move - but if I get impatient they go to Goodwill.

We decided to list replacement parts for some of the products that we sell.  The response has been fantastic.  About 1/3 of our transactions now include at least one replacement part.    Many people who buy replacement parts, also purchase other items.  Replacement parts are willing us new customers - mainly because competitors do not mess with them. It was labor intensive to photograph these parts and and write descriptions for each of them with measurements and sometimes diagrams.  But looking back was well worth it.  If your competitors are not selling these parts and they are something that a typical owner might purchase once or twice during the lifetime of his item then you might get a fantastic amount of sales.   One of our manufacturers said... "We can't believe how many parts you are selling!"

Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description... If this information is all you got on a single page - and you have a lot of these pages - then you need to fix this or you will be hit by a Panda problem. Since about two years ago Google has been demoting the entire site in the rankings if you have a lot of these pages.  I have pages with short content and they have been noindexed.  I am slowly writing substantive content for these (250 words to 500 words) and when that goes live I start getting long tail traffic and rank much higher than they were originally. This is long boring work.  I have these pages prioritized by potential income and plug away at writing them a few each week.

I can not help your suspicion. But let me tell you there are tons of apps ranking for related keywords(which they DO NOT OWN) in the app store btw I have changed the app title to Guru99 (SAP, Java, Testing)

Thank you very much Peter! I believe you are right totally about the links opening in the new window. I always thought that it can't be good to have so many links opening in new window. Thank you very much! All the best Iris

Thank you very much Peter! All the best Iris

Thank you very much Matt!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s.html above is some of the ways to fix soft 404s. But the easiest might be to deindex and not have Google Webmasters crawl the members area. Unless its important for you Hope this helps

Hi Fabio If the content is gone when you visit your old URLs do you get a 404 code? You can plug the old URLs into urivalet.com to see what code is returned. If you do, then you're all set. If you don't, see if you can just upload a robots.txt file to that subdomain and block all search engines. Here's info on how to do that http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html -Dan

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