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Can you provide the URL of the article and your Google+ profile URL so I can check it?

It's certainly possible, if the 404's messed up link juice flow within your site, or caused pages to not get indexed, or something like that.

Could you give us your website URL?

When did you see the drop in traffic?

There are a couple tactics you could try:

1. See if http://archive.org/web/web.php has a cache of the page.

2. Use OSE, Majestic, etc to find backlinks to the page. Maybe one of the backlinks will include a description of what was on the page.

Nofollowing some of the links would not help. Google changed the algorithm awhile back, so the PageRank allotted to nofollow links simply disappears, instead of being allocated to other links on the page.

OK, so you don't want your linkbait page to displace your sales pages in the rankings.

Personally, I would just try to adjust the optimization of the linkbait page so it ranks for keywords other than my primary money keywords. But I suppose noindex,follow would work as well.

Well, the link juice is distributed according to the number of links on the page. So if you want link juice flowing to all those pages, you're good. If some of those pages don't really need link juice, you would do better to remove the links to them (from an SEO perspective). If you remove links to some of the pages, more link juice will flow to the other pages.

Should be fine. Google won't penalize you for going over 100 links.

Why would you want to noindex your linkbait?

Thanks, just shot you an email.

It sounds like the meta noindex,follow tag is what you want.

robots.txt will block googlebot from crawling your search pages, but Google can still keep the search pages in its index.

Majestic shows 220+ linking domains, and Majestic's index is still much smaller than Google.

SEOmoz only indexes a small portion of the web, so they likely have more than 9 linking sites. And yes, a PR5 link would definitely contribute to their PR4.

PageRank is calculated based on backlinks. The link from this PR5 page probably helps a lot: http://www.netshinehosting.com/

It's OK for a page to specify itself as the canonical URL.

Sounds like you may have been hit by the EMD update. The update didn't hurt all exact domain sites - only those that Google deemed low quality.

I looked at your backlink profile and found multiple footer links that look like they might be paid links or doorway sites. It's possible that these links played a factor in why your site's ranking was reduced.

I decided to sign up for it again. Feel free to message me in a week or two if you want to hear how it's going for me!

"Are these types of sites bad to submit a link to? http://www.mompack.com/mom2mom/"

That looks like a catch all links directory to me. I would avoid it.

"If I submit my product for another blog to review (in turn they write a post for me with links to my website), is this GOOD?"

That's a good tactic to use, just make sure you target high quality blogs. I would let the blogger link to you however they see fit, to keep things looking natural.

Based on the info you've shared, I would avoid them both. Sounds like a service that is very likely to get your site penalized - if not now, in the future.

I used it years ago. I think it's effectiveness may depend on the niche you're in. I may try it again for one of my sites.