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Hi Kevin,

I don't think you read my question as it does not address the answer in any way. But thanks for your response.

I have already decided on WP.

Trying to find a plugin for a WP site that does eCommerce with physical products. I am hoping to get an "Amazon" type user review look. Also hoping the schema can help in the SERPs with rich snippets. It would be nice if there was a plugin that could handle both. I did find a review plugin that I though I could use with the Raven schema plugin to average the review ratings but it would be a manual process. That's OK although not sure if Google thinks it is spammy. I don't want to anger the Google animals.

I came across this one that looks amazing, but am concerned I see no mention of it here!   http://wpsocial.com/product/social-review-engine  
They also had this "SEO Booster" plugin that while the name sounds scary, it looks pretty well done and handles schema. http://wpsocial.com/product/wp-social-seo-booster-pro/
The nice thing about them is they tie the reviews to a social network via reviewer login and this "legitimizes" them. There are some very comprehensive videos on the site explaining both plugins.

Hoping someone here can advise if these are OK. Anyone heard of these?

You might contact the firm that placed the links and see if they can remove them. If they were done in profiles or by creating accounts with passwords, hopefully they can remove them. It can be very difficult to get links removed and time consuming if you must do it by contacting the webmasters. And most of them will not respond. But Google does state they want you to attempt to clean up the links. Have you checked GWMT for warnings? Even without warnings you can be penalized by algorithms. A lot of info on that here on Moz worth reading.

I am sure you will get great advice here, but those links are not doing you any good and should be removed and disavowed. You are correct that the nofollows won't hurt, but I would want all the spammy links gone if it were my site. It is not so much that links on sites unrelated to your business are necessarily bad, but those that are clearly manipulative (like anchor text) are pretty obvious to Google. Nuke 'em all.

Also seeing hits from these guys. 9 so far today from Viet Nam, Brazil, India, Turkey and Colombia.

Very annoying. I sent a note to Alex@Semalt.com requesting they remove me from their crawlers. I guess the consensus is they are harmless from what I have read on the web, but it messes up your analytics.

I have noticed the same thing. Original Disavow file was acknowledged with an email. I updated that file and no message was received. Although the file was displayed clearly in GWMT. Updated it again about a month later and received a message acknowledging.

So what I have observed, Peter seems to be correct on their inconsistent messaging on this.

I think Jen gave a great response and you should read it twice!.

A couple of things you might consider if you want to do this on your own, RMOOV.com is an amazing tool for contacting webmasters and asking/tracking link removal. Link Detox is another great affordable tool to evaluate links. If you still have a relationship with the firm you used to buy links, you might see if they can remove those links for you. The reality is that most webmasters won't respond to your requests to remove links. So if you can get the ones who created them to remove them, you will have more success.

I don't see why it would be bad to build good, real links in the mean time or at any time! Hard to believe that would be the advice a MOZ  recommended firm gave you. Maybe they were trying to explain that great content is what matters?

Good luck!

Paying for link removal is a conundrum since as you state the site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you. I have chosen to pay a couple that had been de-indexed from Google and even so, one did remove the links and the other has not.

As to your other question on removing sites from your disavow list that have been cooperative and removed the links, from what I have read there is no harm in disavowing them anyway. The risk is that some site owners may not have properly removed the link and it may come back. They may have temporarily redirected it to hide it or they don't know how to remove it possibly due to an older platform. I would be interested to hear from experts such as Marie on this point.

From what I have seen here, Ryan is expert at this and should be considered if you are serious.

I have used Link Detox and RMOOV which are good tools but in my case it was very easy to identify the bad links as they all came from one bad SEO with anchor text. RMOOV is great for contacting webmasters and continuing to pursue them but I would expect a pretty low response rate. If you can get links removed for $97 in 3 weeks, jump on it. BUT not likely. You will probably need to disavow those you cannot remove.

As Ryan says, you get what you pay for.

Best!

Also a fan of Link Detox as I just used it and agree it found links OSE did not. After determining the links I wanted to target for removal, I used RMOOV for an email campaign and Disavow list. RMOOV is a really slick tool to contact webmasters and create a record in the form of a Google Docs spreadsheet of your efforts. This could be sent to the Google Web Spam team for support in a reconsideration request. Both tools make this process much simpler than some of the manual methods I've seen described here. Now I'm waiting to be forgiven!

David,

I am in a similar situation and considering using the Disavow tool, although there seems to be some folks here who are fearful of it.

Wondering what you ended up doing?

If client requests a receipt, we must go into QBO and generate a "sales receipt."

Not sure why you would need to create a sales receipt since you have already created an invoice. Once you "receive payment" the invoice will be marked as "Paid" by QB and you can simply email that to the client.

Intuit does have a payment link for online payments as well. Not sure if it works with QBO but does with premiere. When you send the invoice the link is included. You might want to check out the QB support forums for more info.

Good luck!

Some really thoughtful responses here that I agree with.

I noted your average sale is $125, so I would call this a high-ticket item and your customer is probably buying because they seek the quality of the product, not the discounted price. It is reasonable to assume the retailers are the ones who have been recommending the product and if you start a war with them, they will recommend something else.

I think the first commandment of wholesale manufacturing is "Thou shalt not compete with Thy Retailers". They are your most valuable partners.

Also understanding the demo of the client might help as Dana points out, some products just don't make sense on-line and you may have one here. Also if the customer skews older, they may not be comfortable buying on-line. You might even decide to launch the product in a new look and name just for on-line sales.

So I think Lesley has given great advice and insight. Seek out new customers and don't worry about those the stores already have, rather, be grateful for them as they will finance your pursuit of new markets.

Best!

Why would you stick with the platform?

You seem to already clearly understand it is not future proof for your client. Cut bait now and move to a better platform that will give you all the SEO advantages. IMHO that would be Wordpress.

Best,

Penguin 2.0 rolled out on May 22 and if that is when you started having problems, and I'd guess it is, you need to look at your anchor text ratio. Penguin 2.0 hates too much keyword rich anchor text as it is clearly unnatural in most cases.

Take a look at this post for some insight. http://moz.com/community/q/penguine-2-0-confusion

Best

Thanks Dan,

I will be moving to the new url structure, probably post name as I don't have a lot of "juice" to pass anyway. Thanks to Dana for bringing this up in her answer.

In fairness to Synthesis, I believe my question was not clear and on a follow up they gave a very comprehensive response to my question and actually recommended this forum!

As to the htaccess issue, I may not understand this but I believe there is no htaccess file since they don't use apache. Quite a bit on them here <a>http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/</a>

I think htaccess is relative to apache and the Synthesis servers don't use apache.

Synthesis is a Copyblogger company, the folks who make Genesis, so I hope they have this figured out. I am not concerned about support tickets as there support is very responsive.

Leaning toward the 301.

Thanks

Thanks Dana and Mihai,

I asked Synthesis support and just got the response that they do not like "re-direct plug-ins" as they can cause issues.

So this makes me wonder if the .html plug-ins are actually redirects in disguise?

Moving my site to WP and the old url structure pages end in ".html".

I have seen there are plugins that allow you to add .html to the WP pages to preserve links.

I am hosting on Synthesis and they do not support htaccess, although you can submit 301 re-directs through the help ticket system. My question is what is the best way to proceed? I have read that 301s "leak" some link juice, but I sure do like those pretty urls.

Advice appreciated!

If the drop coincides with May 22, you were probably hit by the Google roll out of "Penguin 2.0" Supposed to be much tougher on spammy links.

I am in a similar situation although for some keywords, I have just dropped a few slots. I am pretty new to this so I am sure you will get an answer from one of the very helpful experts here, but you might want to take a look at you link profile using OSE. It seems you have quite a few "cialis" links and that can't be good. Also see if you have gotten any warnings in GWMT. If you did, then it is what they call a "manual" action meaning a human at Google assessed a penalty. There is a process for reconsideration if this is the case. It could however just be the algorithm change.

Either way you should seriously look at getting rid of those links. I will be interested in the community responses here.

Best of luck, I know it is a bad feeling!