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I agree with Martijn and based on what I see from your examples you should do with this one: **/Immigration/Permanent-Residence/Work-Permit-South-**Africa

In regards to your questions:
Is it worth it? - yes it does
Will google read my parented URL with all the keywords, or only the page's keywords? - Google will take into higher consideration the folder that is closer to your domain name. With your new structure I suspect you would promote the page with the "Immigration" keywords which includes "permanent residence" as one of the many services your "immigration" page includes. Same goes for your work permit. This is how google will see it while at the moment it sees one authoritative page which includes the whole keyword. As Martjin said it really depends in how many pages/services you got.
What should I expect to see from google? - I have witness slight improvement in rankings (+2-3 positions) after I Implemented url re-structuring and schema but I have mainly worked in property related web sites so not sure if this an exception or rule. Someone with an e-commerce web site (where there url structure is a must) could give us his insights in terms of improvements as in every single e-commerce site I have worked, I always made sure the url was structured properly from scratch so I do not have an insight in terms of "improving" rankings.
Will my SERPs be all messed up?  - Not messed up but you might end up with lots of 404. Make sure you set redirects from the old URLs to the new Ones. Again it depends the web site. From my experience I changed 4 in the past and only one popped loads of 404s but that was mainly due to a plug in that was displaying search results based on unique criteria, something I could not control.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for taking the time to reply Michael, much appreciated!

That happens for 3 reasons

1. It is a low competitive keyword where EMD is very strong. Low profit (around £0,50-0,90 CPC)

2. He is using automated software like No Hands SEO or GSA which automatically generate relevant blog comments and split the links to follow and no follow so that they seem natural to Google. He will get penalised in the end as both of these tools are ok to use for web 2 properties but people dont know and use it on their web sites (penalty inc)

3. He is probably purchasing good follow links from a high DA and PA blog/PR network, there are plenty around for 100-200 a month.

All this make me conclude that your competitor has a money site or a Micro Niche Site meaning he wants to make a cash and dont care for long term goals (check for adsense and amazon affiliate links within the pages).  If that is not the case then his SEO guy clearly needs to move forward!

Pure 2010 black hat practise.

Hi Luke,

I have used footer links a lot and I have never ever experienced a penalty. However there are a couple of things you need to be aware which might resulted in your ranking drops / re-recover.

1) footer links are bad for SEO when linking to other sites or when other sites link to you. There is no harm if you link to your internal pages/landing pages and besides search engines tend to ignore footer links 
2) Your main page is the page with most domain authority. The more footer links you add the more link juice you pass to those pages. If you added too many you might  over-dilute the home page link juice meaning an overall drop in rankings.
3) You have to remember that only the first link on the page to a specific URL is counted. So if for example you have on the main menu or content a link to product X as "product X" anchor and then you have on the footer a link "best product X 2013" with both links to the same product x page then google will ignore completely the latter as it's worthless.

In your case it is possible that you had many footers and passed all the juice to lets say 10 pages meaning no juice thus downrank vs pages with higher authority.

Just a guess, hope it helps!

Hello,

Do not fall to the trap of reporting your competitor, spend your time in being productive by focusing on your online brand building instead, find out what are people's concerns when looking for activation codes and create beautiful content that will make you differentiate in the market. Thats how you should be spending your time. Black hat SEO refers to money making sites. Its how much you spend VS how much you make till you get caught as most people said above. This is why most of the high PR links they have are rented and not permanent and they pay $100-$200 for them to be there. He can rank temporarily (yes temporarily, he will get hammered soon - SAPE links were finished last week and took all the web sites with them) but he will be gone/sandboxerd sooner or later while you will always be there. Sustaining your ranks and reputation will benefit your business much more than a rank one on google and if your boss cant see that, maybe he should join a quick marketing course

I have used Yoast plug in as well as All in one seo and both are extremely useful. If I had to recommend one that would be Yoast's as it is great for on page optimisation

why would you want to use that? Directories are pretty much dead and wont pass any link value to your site, not to mention that paid directories are against Google's quality guidelines!

Hello dear MoZ community,

I have already communicated this problem before but now it reaches to a level I have to make some hard decisions and would like your help.

One of our new accounts (1 month old) got a manual penalty notification few weeks ago from Google for unnatural link building. I went through the whole process, did link detox and analysis and indeed there were lots of blog networks existing purely for cross linking. I removed these and the links got decreased dramatically. The company had around 250,000 links and truth be told if I go by the book only 700-800 of them are really worth and provide value. They will end up with roughly 15000 -20000 left which I acknowledge are a lot but some are coming from web 2 properties such as blogger, wordpress etc.

Because the penalty was in some of the pages and not the whole web site I removed the ones that I identified were harming the web site, brought the anchor text down to normal levels and filed a very detailed reconsideration request and disavow file.

I do not have a response so far by webmasters but here is where my concerns begin:

1. Should I go for a new domain? losing 230.000 links ? How can there even be a "reconsideration" request for a web site with 85% of its link profile being cross linking to self owned directories and web 2 properties?
2. If I go for a new domain should I redirect?
3. Should I keep the domain, keep cleaning and adding new quality links so I take it with a fresh new approach?

Thanks everyone in advance!

Hi Christopher,

I think the answer is pretty obvious,the rule applies to anchor texts of specific keyphrases that are non branded. Google allows a higher threshold of brand name anchor texts because that's how people would naturally link to you. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice (way before Penguin release).

In the case of our friend here we have an EMD and 80-90% of his overal link profile with exact and contextual anchor text links. Also the exact key phrase he down-ranked is around 10% of the profile. I am pretty sure that there is not a rule set in stone with % for NON-branded keyphrases but **from my experience (thus not necessarily a  rule) **in the sector I work at when I had to deal with penalised sites this was one of the common features I dealt with.

Again, the answers are within his data!

Regards

I recently had to deal with an identical case but I would never be able to tell you for sure unless I have a look at your google webamsters and google analytics data. Go and have a look at your site impressions, visits per and avg.position drops. Make sure that you have comparison on so you can see how your pages and keywords respond to last months.

Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much (have seen web sites with more not being penalised so this is not a rule) and it would be good to keep it a bit lower around 5-6%. That goes for your contextual anchor text links which in your case seems to be 80-90% of your profile.

All these ofcourse are guesses and speculation based on my experience, only your data will tell what happens but what Jonathan suggests above wont harm you, quiet the contrary it will improve your link profile.

It all depends on what your web site title is. I will make an assumption here and assume this is a money site with adsense code or amazon affiliates? If that is the case (and I apologise if it isnt) then your brand name is something like (tophairremoval.com).

ranking for that keyword will require a lot of good authoritive backlinks and in particular from similar to your niche web sites and blogs even if google keyword tool told you (800+ searches a month) and "low competitive".

Hello Pendara,

We are a digital marketing agency based in the UK, would be more than happy to have a chat with you

Kind Regards

You are welcome

Hello,

i hate to sound pessimistic but I want to save you time. Buy a Wordpress template or so a bespoke design and move away from Joomla.

I had the exact same problem, 10-15 links a day exactly like yours. I did everything in my powers to fix it. Bough the plug in the community recommended, did redirects, I just ended up with hundreds of links every montH.

If someone else has a solution go for it but again your best bet is to move away Joomlart

Hello,

First of all and as an advise I would use 301 only to good/high traffic pages and not to every single page. I suspect you run an ecommerce site and I have  bad experience by changing url structures to similar sites, specially the ones that uses widgets for products so the less the better (if ofcourse that is the case).

Shortening your URL length will definitely help you and I see no harm in it. Matt Cutts in particular said that if there are more than 5 words "[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

In regards to the depth, the closer your keyword is to the domain name the more weight and important it will be considered by google. So for example if you are selling running shoes and right now your url is

www.website.com/catalog/ID/running-shoes then you should make it
www.website.com/running-shoes

I am not an expert with ID though so maybe someone else can jump in and give us insights but I think the example above will be a good change.

Hope this helps

very well said...even in the micro niche area now affiliate marketers say "BUILD CONTENT" and treat your money site like a business. Industry is changing, google ban web sites with lots of amazon affilaite links etc. Content is king, period.

btw i assume he is not an affiliate marketer either. i have no idea if thats the case. I just put on my newbie glasses on and remember back in 2000 how I was trying to find a good software to rank me high after my onpage SEO was done lol

Hello adulter,

A small clarification here. As Ted said in general software link building techniques must be a no-no for anyone who is building his/her brand on-line. you need to follow the build-content root and stick to it and high quality links will come your way. If however you decide to submit links allow me to suggest you do this manually and not via a software.

Now in regards to seomaximus I will disagree with Ted to a slight extend as the web page you visited is showing as an example a "money web site". Money web sites are normally affiliate web sites, MNS (micro niche web sites) with 1000 searches per month and low competition or sites that are built with a purpose to rank for 2-3 months (for example a xmas shop), get some cash in and then get abandoned. This is their target audience, it is stated on their advert (for those who know about affiliate sites its pretty obvious) and it works really well. If your profile belongs to one of the categories I just mentioned then sure software will do the work. If you are going for a long building strategy as Ted already mentioned NO and STAY AWAY. You will get banned sooner or later and then all your efforts will be abandoned.

When it comes to online marketing people think it must be cheap due to internet's free nature. This is a mistake and a no no. you get what you pay for, same with offline marketing. The more you spend the bigger audience you reach, the more results you bring etc.

Hope this helps

Dont put me on the same line with this guy cause I mentioned I have seen examples. You can find my blog by googling my name and find posts proving bad techniques that rank on page one (with screenshots etc) for more than a month, its not that hard. Also I did not say that I CAN SHOW YOU THOUSANDS of examples of successful business rankings. I said in pure copy paste " But that does not cancel million cases where there is simply not a reason for someone to rank". I also say And yes I know google will ban them/penalise them one day, someday, so again your "long-haul" claim (which you claim, i didnt) does not put me to a different direction to what I truly believe or what most people say in this post. Thanks

In regards to branding, ofcourse black hat will never work. To me black hat is a popular practised to micro niche small web sites that makes revenue from adsense and amazon for keywords that are low competitive and the owner is lucky enough to own an EMD or do good SEO because he actually cares. But even in this case in the long-haul as you say I am pretty sure they will be beaten.

Hope you find these clarifications useful.

"If you answer a query in the meta description and then you give the person who clicked on it exactly what they wanted, you are going to do just fine with ranking at some point and probably some point soon."

Plus one and thumbs up!

Hello there,

These are forum links, 99,9% sure from article spinning as I am on a soft penalty case for a new client as we speak and came up with the exact same links. The first one in an online gaming community for world of warcraft, totally irrelevant with your product and I highly doubt organic as you mention. Same goes for the 3rd one.

In regards to the yahoo forum, even if it was placed there organically, it is a nofollow link (<a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="</a>http://www.visualwatermark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.visualwatermark.com/ ) so whether they remove it or not it doesnt really matter as it passes 0 link juice.

Hope this helps!

edit: I do not want to panic you by saying I am on a "soft penalty" case. The reason for the penalty was site wide links and in particular one domain pointing to one single page 250,000 times and not the links mentioned above. I see only good in removing these links.