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I would just go with the no follow if the issue is that you are concerned about bleeding page rank. I don't think it is a big issue either way though.

Are you logged in doing the search or are you searching through an incognito window?

Just curious if you have any Empirical evidence on that thought of it should be used as a last resort? I know that google cautions usage of it, but my hunch is that they are afraid of two situations. The person who disavows all links and hurts their positive link profile and the strategy of someone purposely building suspect links knowing he can remove them.

I'd love your thoughts if you've seen harmful results of using the tool.

No there was no response from Google. From what I've gathered from research on the issue, if the issue is an algorithmic penalty there is never a response. You are just altering your site's profile and when the search engine choses to use that information it affects your health in the index. If you receive a manual penalty with an email to your webmaster tools, it's more severe and you need to also send a reconsideration request through the web master tools.

We just went through this with a site that got penalized with the Penguin update because a previous SEO company had used a comment spinner that built a spammy profile across numerous porn sites. We uploaded as many as we could find. to the disavow tool.

We experienced about a five week period where none of the pages were ranking in the top 100 for the keywords that we had been tracking. It was only this week that across the board the majority of the keywords have bounced back to page 3. So we have a little more work to do.

Along with the disavow tool we also started a campaign of Authority building links over the last month. If the trigger of Penguin is ratios of spammy links to appropriate ones, we felt this would be a beneficial strategy.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last line. I would do it just for the social share pulling up the snippet that you have crafted versus some random part of the page getting ripped out of it.

Does anyone know of a tool that has similar capacity to Raven's Reports? I'm doing some white labeling of reports for another Agency that is used to sending their clients a monthly Raven report that is basicly pulling out all the Google Analytic Data of top referrers, keywords, landing pages ect and putting them into a nice format. I've used the Moz reporting and at times just combined it with a pdf of the actual GA equivalent. That's always seemed a bit clunky but I don't want to have to take on a Raven subscription just for that. Anyone have any good alternatives or know if when the new dashboard launches if it will also up its game when it comes to the generated reports?

Hey Baldea,

I wasn't asking What black hat is, I was asking for specific urls that have onsite examples to show the class.

So I need a little help. I'm guest lecturing this week for a local college class on web design. We are going to be talking about Black Hat design for a little bit and things to avoid. I'd like to share some examples in the wild of old school tactics, keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text. Anyone have any good examples? If you don't want to share them publicly feel free to sent me a private message. I would like to give the students some interesting examples so they can visualize it. Thanks!

A display ad targeting that landing page might be useful if you are targeting people to learn about the brand outside direct searches.

Thanks for your thoughts Miriam. That's kind of where I am with it. It just got rolled out in my area and one of my clients got pitched by the photographer. It's pretty steeply priced at a grand to shoot a small space. It definitely doesn't have the ROI on its own. What was interesting is I looked through the photographer's client list and I noticed one of the clients is ranked in the local search #1 for a very competitive keyword in our area. I know the mantra of correlation and causality, but it made me wonder a little bit.

I'm working in a market where the Google Trusted photographer is rolling out. The question came up if providing this data would boost your rankings in the local map pack. I've been asking a few fellow SEO peeps but I thought I would throw it out here for your opinion.

Later this month I am guest teaching a class on best SEO practices for web designers at a local College. I wanted to see what topics others would include if you were doing an overview.

That's pretty awesome