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We've got a manual penalty, not sitewide, that we've been trying to remove and keep getting our reconsideration request denied.  We also do not have the manpower to manually check backlinks, contact domain owners, etc anymore.  Does anyone have recommendations on a company to use?

We're located in South Dakota, and I'm having a hard time getting qualified job applicants for an advanced SEO position.  The ad has been placed on local job sites as well as careerbuilder.com and  indeed.com.  What other places do you recommend?

Thank you very much for the response!

Do you believe that Google is able to distinguish them as "Paid Links" due to the similar IP addresses?

If we're talking ten thousdand to twenty thousand links of this nature, is it true that having -THAT- many "nofollows" can also hurt us?  I read that Google looks at an over-abundance of "nofollow" links as a bad thing, as well...

Thank you for your input!

Greetings All,

I have a question regarding "Paid Links."

My company creates custom websites for other small businesses across the country.  We always have backlinks to our primary website from our "Dealer Sites."  Would Google and other search engines consider links from our "dealer sites" to be "paid links?"

Example:
http://www.atlanticautoinc.com/ is the "dealer site."

Would Google consider the links  from Atlantic Auto to be a "paid link," and therefor have less of an impact for page rankings, due to it not being organic?

Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!!!

In the upcoming months, or even now, do you think responsive websites will rank higher?

We've been disavowing links found in G Webmaster Tools and Link Detox.  It took my resource 4.5 months to do 80k links.

Our business websites used our domain name to link to us.  As in 'powered by domainname.com'.  I can only assume that is why Google showed those examples in the latest denied reconsideration request.  Because we're linking from each site back to our site and they're all on the same C class IP.

Should we still link using our domain name, or remove those links?

Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale.  We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory.  We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text.

Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google

"Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. "

We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc.  We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign.  We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links.

The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses.  "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com.  We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _

So here's the issue I need your advice on.  We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name.  We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines.  **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has?  **

1. Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link?
2. Can we nofollow all those links?
3. Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section?
4. Should we just remove the links and cry?

Greetings,

I was reading the a recent case study pertaining to Penguin 2.1.  (My website was hit hard)

It stated:  "While classifying the website’s anchor texts (sorted by count), the first thing that strikes you is that the vast majority of the anchors are straight money keywords, which could be a possible reason for the penalty." My website suffers from a similar situation.

Is there any advantage to replacing the links to my website on my affiliate sites with images instead of using Anchor Text?  My manager is concerned with losing so many backlinks.

Thanks!

I'm worried the search engines are not indexing all the item detail pages due to too many links at the top of the inventory pages.  There are so many options of itemA that there are 50 links about different types of itemA at the top of the page, then 50 items are shown with a link to the item detail page and a link to the 'shop' of that seller.  Along with a search box on the page.  And there could be hundreds of these items but default of 50 shown on a page.  So there's well over 100 links on a page, and I'm worried the bots aren't finding all the item detail pages.

The problem we have is that we have lots of inventory pages.  These inventory pages have a bunch of links at the top linking to different styles of the item, up to 56 links in some cases.  Then each item listed has a link to the item's detail page and a link to the item's shop owner's page.  So if a page has 50 items shown, there are really 100 links just for the inventory.  This is not taking into account the header links, footer links, sidebar links to other sections on the site.

We have all these links to help consumers move through the site.  The problem is that every item detail page on the site is not getting indexed and actually I think it's more like over 50% of the item detail pages are not indexed because the search engines are too busy following all these other links.

Should we nofollow, index the links to the different styles of the item, the shop owner page?  Or what should we do to get the search engine bots to index our item detail pages?

In the Moz Beginners Checklist for Small Business SEO, it's recommended to "Add your client's website to industry specific directories"

That's not recommended anymore, right?

Thank very much, Mr. Lunn.

I read on an SEO "checklist" that it is best to avoid deep link structures.  If possible, try not to go past two levels

i.e.

Option A)
MYSITE.com/level-one/level-two/level-three/level-four/level-five

Option B)
MYSITE.com/level-one/level-two.aspx

Does that still hold true today?  Anyone have any good reference material slightly more recent?

Thank you very much!

Dear Moz Community,

I have a quick question regarding my internal link structure.

Which route would be the best way to design my website?

Option A)
MYSITE.com/category/make/model/state/city

Option B)
MYSITE.com/category-make-model-state-city.aspx

I've been reading a lot of articles regarding link structure by Matt Cutts (or at least referencing him), but I'm not sure what the best practice is for today.  Any information or references would be great.

Thank you very much!

Where do you find the link profile?

Can you give some insight on creating content for a classified site (site with classified ads)?

I'm interested in answers to this as well since we've used PRWeb for about 8 months this year submitting press releases for the websites we build.  We had keyword links to the sites we built in the press releases though, and I'm wondering if I should disavow all those press releases now.

I think my site got hit by a negative SEO campaign.  We got nailed by the latest Google update and our traffic dropped significantly.  We don't buy links, ask for links, do link exchanges, etc.  Since the last update was all about spammy backlinks, I downloaded backlinks from Google Webmaster Tools just to see if there was any info in there.

There are tons, hundreds, thousands of backlinks from spammy sites to us.  Sites that are spammy as heck and sell backlinks on the footer.  I can only assume someone went after us with a negative SEO campaign.  We're the #3 site in a hot market.

Is the only way to combat this to disavow all those spammy backlinks with the Google disavow tool?  We also have a manual penalty on our site as well.  I've asked for a reconsideration request and have heard nothing.  Please advise.

Spammy footer is owner's idea and won't change it!  We'll fix the title tag, thanks.

What coding changes do you see that need to be changed?

I've been reading that Google will sometimes change the home page title, and I have finally seen this in action.

Search for  and on the second page you'll find  but the title says Academy Dog Training.  Which is not what's in the title tag for this page.

Did Google change the title tag on us and if so why?  How can we get them to use our title?

The issue: text on a page available only  by pushing a button or clicking Read More and the text slides up via AJAX.

Will Google penalize a site doing that via hand edit?  I think that according to Matt Cutts, as long as the text is available to the user then it's ok.   I want to double check on this.