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Bob,

Just because some sites may be doing bad things does not mean it's a good idea to replicate their methods.  Not only is Google getting more aggressive and finding such tactics more, unless a comprehensive audit is performed on any single site, it's a blind guess as to why any particular site is truly ranking for a given phrase.  They could be doing five crappy things and yet they could be ranking because of five other things they're doing right or better.

Or they could be ranking due to the crappy tactics, yet could just as easily crash next week or next month if they're just "getting away with it" for now.

It's great to hear you've had your penalty lifted, yet that also fits with the notion that you now have to earn your rankings based on more sound, long term methods.  Anyone who just wants to find new ways to cheat the system is setting themselves up for a bigger fall down the road.

First of all, that web address is not working so there's no way for anyone here who might have guidance, to be able to review anything.

Beyond that, if you're in a worst case situation, and you absolutely believe a new domain name is called for, yes, you can migrate the content of the old site over.  However if you perform "301" redirects from the old site to the new site, some people have made anecdotal claims that doing so carries the bad link signals.

In that scenario, when the new site launches, the old site needs to be blocked from indexation to prevent duplicate content issues.

The other major issue I have found is sites are more likely to take a major hit for any high level flawed SEO if other aspects of SEO are also severely flawed.  So for example, if the site was already weak on-site or over-optimized up to the edge of acceptability on-site, that site is more likely to have been nailed in a Penguin type update.

So that then begs the question - is the content you want to retain truly high quality and strong enough outside of the off-site signals? From topical focus to topical depth to internal linking methods and so on...

In an ideal situation, the method where you just code the variable into the canonical tag string can work, however it can also lead to problems if the coding framework is not properly planned out or if an upgrade to the system has a bug in it.  I've seen situations where page_uri doesn't function after a system upgrade.

Best practices dictate that you need to ensure the full non-appended absolute URI show up at the source level on a live page so testing is critical if you're going with that option, and be aware of potential unanticipated breakdowns. It's all about what is seen on a view-source or seen the way Googlebot sees it.

Marshall,

Yes, this is moving into the "too much" realm.  So for example, I would suggest that the URLs and Breadcrumb navigation be refined like this:

http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair/

http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair/laptop/

http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair/laptop/screen/

Then in the Page titles, I might go with

Computer Repair | PC Medics On Call

Laptop Repair | Laptop Computer Repair | PC Medics On Call

Laptop Screen Repair | PC Medics On Call

Or depending on keyword research alternately:

Computer Repair Services | PC Medics On Call

(this one above covers "Computer Repair", "Computer Repair Services" and to a lesser degree "PC Repair", "PC Repair Services" and even "PC Computer Repair Services")

Laptop Repair Services | PC Medics On Call

Laptop Screen Repair Services | PC Medics On Call

(of course your actual seeding should be based on keyword research and your particular goals)...

Exactly.  Because they take this stuff quite seriously.  And they're not just going to do a 10 second review if you've got 50,000 links, let alone take your word for it.

And since we're now in the age of "Google needs to teach people a lesson and create an atmosphere of deterrence", they no longer hesitate to take action when they believe it will be a better motivator.

And I've got a new client who had not received a manual penalty notice, yet they lost rankings from Penguin 1, so they did a disavow, then a  reconsideration request after only cleaning up a fraction of the mess first.  A week later, they were manually penalized and got the dreaded notice.

This is why its so important to be wiling to do a real clean-up, and personally I just don't see the overwhelming majority of sites being trusted enough as a brand (from brand-like signals) to do things half-ass or in reverse order.

DA and PA are generalized metrics to provide some insight into overall ranking signals.  for any given site, or any given page on any given site, since there are hundreds of high level factors, it's quite realistic to often see rankings that don't directly reflect the DA or PA of all the sites in the mix.

Travis,

Please don't use this system to go on a political rant.  If you personally have not to this point had any positive results from something it does not automatically mean that "solution" is invalid, fake, or provided purely for conspiracy reasons.

Sitelinks are "earned" with a high quality site that communicates brand trust and where Google determines "these pages are the most visited pages".  Having proper information architecture and navigational breadcrumbs (RDFa or Schema) can sometimes help because they reinforce content relationships, however they're not required to obtain sitelinks.

< sigh > and Travis is also not quite accurate.  Disavow and Resubmit requests DO work when they're done properly.

Actually that first recommendation you got in this answer thread is both backward and flawed and does not follow best practices. No offense to Brad but it's just outright wrong.

The first step should be to clean up all the link mess - documenting the process - noting which sites were contacted, how they were contacted.  Only after that is done should a disavow be submitted with all the links you couldn't get cleaned up.

And a resubmission request should only be made if a manual penalty was assessed, not if it was an algorithm penalty.  So unless you got a manual penalty notice in Google Webmaster Tools, resubmission requests are not going to help.

You have a meta tag in your header "noindex, nofollow"  which tells search engines, don't index this home page, and don't crawl the site.

have you resubmitted to them asking if they are still penalizing you? A 2nd request explaining your situation can't hurt.  I have seen clients do this, although they were told "there is no longer a penalty on the site". At least they communicated.

There is no such thing as a legitimate link wheel.  I don't care how high the quality of a site is someone acquires. If they buy it then work on a large scale to back-fill links into old content, that is absolutely against Google's concept of legitimate efforts.

Any site that does this on a big enough scale if caught, will go down. Period. No question.

The question instead is - can they get away with it?  Yeah probably. Up until a certain point.  I've seen many go down over the past year and a half.

Just like every other shiny object hack, it all comes down to willingness to risk the entire operation.

I've seen sites bounce back to one degree or another within a couple weeks.  HOWEVER - if a site was manually penalized, and the clean-up process involved having links removed or disavowed, it's quite likely that the site now needs to re-earn rankings that had been "falsely"  propped up from those links.

It's critical to understand that major hits from manual or algorithmic based updates now essentially "reset" a site to "what should have been its rightful ranking value".

While it may be a case where you'll see the site return at least somewhat, I would not count on that happening magically.  Instead, I would work on building sustainable trust signals on and off-site moving forward, with consistency over time.

And even if it does begin to bounce back, I would still work on the long term sustainable effort.

NO. Matt Cutts said links from press release sites have no positive impact on rankings. Read my article where I discuss that concept and where SEO is a factor.

with a "nofollow" attribute in the link code, yes, you can use it on the whole site. However, doing so can be seen as "tacky" / "less than truly professional".  That's why its suggested to be only on the home page footer.

Actually, press release web sites and their submissions carry much less influence than you might think you're seeing. At least in the overwhelming majority of situations in most markets.  You can read about press releases and how they influence SEO (and how they don't) in an article I wrote on this subject over on SearchEngineJournal.

Any time you have links pointing to sites that are not directly relevant to your product or service offerings, it's a weak link at best.

When it's a link in a footer, it carries even less value.

When that link appears on the footer of every page on the site, it's problematic.

Worst of all would be if you were to have keywords and not your company domain as the anchor, so that's just about the only positive thing you've shown.

SO - what is the reason for the link? To let visitors to that site know who created the site? If so, then IF you're going to include a link for that reason only, the only proper solution is to ensure the link has a "nofollow" attribute. This disconnects any perceived SEO manipulation and both your site and theirs will be safe from harm.

Also, best practices suggest only having that link on the home page footer, or on the "about" page with a reference to the fact you created the site, but not site-wide.  However if you "nofollow" it, you're good to go.