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Google selects the location for SERPs based on the IP address of the searcher. The only detriment to having your site hosted in another country would be if they are in what could be considered spammy locations. For example, my company is in Wisconsin, my server is hosted in California. No harm no foul. If my server were hosted out of India, it would be considered unnatural and spammy. I think UK to Belgium is reasonable and wouldn't be considered unnatural.

Spot on that worked a dream... went from 82 to 92 on google page speed test

At some point the site will either get reported and it will be manually looked at, or the Panda algo will catch up with them. Making changes are hard to do when a site ranks well. So its really your call on that, but if you want to have a middle road, you could suggest building new pages and have them ready to go just in case they get hit by panda. Google does not mind internal duplication and unless it is really extreme they will not penalise you for it, I have spoken to Google's John Mueller about it multiple times, including just this Friday. Google will choose the page it thinks is the best fit and show that. There are no tools that I would recommend other than your own eyes. Look at the site from a customers point of view, if it does not make sense get rid of it. For the most part Google is better today than it ever was at ranking sites based on actually quality rather than making sure you have all 200 SEO signals ticked off and the site looks like garbage to a user. Which was only 2 years ago really. I would be very surprised if they rank higher for a keyword stuffed list. Google does not pay attention to them it is more interested in content with links embedded in that content. I would look at other reasons, maybe better internal linking through content. External Links are still a huge factor, maybe they have better links or better content overall across their site. But going back to your client, i would let them make the decision but I would make it clear to them what the risks are, if they make the choice then it cant come back on you either way.

opps, I had a total misunderstanding about it, sorry about that.

Thank you for this, it answers the question. I am going to get the sites which shouldn't of been cleaned out back into the mix.

The Google quality guidelines say that "excessive" creation of partner pages for the purpose of cross linking is against the guidelines.  But, they don't tell us what constitutes excessive. This is not always a bad idea.  Here are some criteria I would use to make this decision: -Would having a page like this actually be good for your readers/clients to use?  Or does it just exist for search engines.  For example, if you are a realtor, having a resource page to list local home inspectors, mortgage brokers, etc. is a good idea and being listed on their resource pages is probably ok. But, if that page contained mostly links to realtors in other cities and unrelated businesses like local casinos or payday loans companies or car insurance businesses then you'd start to think that this page was created just for links. -What is the quality like on the pages that are linking to you?  Do they look like they were set up just for links? -Avoid using exact match anchor text.  If your resource page contains links to Realtor in Seattle and Best Home Inspector in New York then that's a sign that it's set up for SEO purposes.

As Silkstream says, the practice itself isn't spammy but it has been thoroughly abused by "SEOs" in the past to the extent that it should be done with care and for non-SEO purposes only. Firstly, it's not really likely to help your SEO anymore. Most of the links you will gain will be nofollowed, and while there is some reason to believe that a LOT of high quality nofollow activity (like you might get from a very successful viral campaign) is a good signal, it's not technically an important metric for SEO and shouldn't be treated as such. You should be bookmarking where it would make sense to share / save content for other marketing purposes, with SEO taking a very far back seat as a reason why.

Hi Tom Yes that makes sense, think the robot  content noindex,nofollow would be the best solution.

Thanks for all the comments. Its made it a lot clearer.  Strategic seems to be the best fit. I have been letting one or two random posts on my site. This will now stop.

ah so you want regular expressions ? im confused - if regular expressions its not really mass writing - that would be as i described

Hi there, Bing is all about good, original contents, authoritative inbound links and well structured webpages. If you want to be optimized in Bing, you may want to focus on those. Here are some useful information on Bing optimization. Search engine optimization on Bing How to build quality contents Hope that helps!

Better Design I suggest upgrading the design of your blog so it's more custom. A sharp, custom design gives your blog a visual brand and helps you stand out. Also, make it more personal - use author bios, profile pictures, contact info, etc. Better Content For us little guys, having phenomenal content is of the utmost importance important. Since you don't have a large following, you need to publish content that is completely unique and/or significantly better than any other content available on the topic. Example: I publish an article on 301 redirects. If my article article doesn't present important new information, and it's not better than the articles on 301s already on SEOmoz, SEJ, etc - very few people will bother to read, share, or link to my article. Why should they? There is an equally good or better article on a blog they already know and trust. If you want to see significant success on social media, your content needs to be exceptional. Epic. Head and shoulders above the rest. Groundbreaking. Marketing To answer your question more directly, my suggestion for bloggers is to focus on social media and SEO.  Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Inbound.org can be great traffic sources for exceptional content.  If you want to do paid advertising, Outbrain can provide good traffic at 0.03 per click. Twitter ads can also be effective. I think that the design and content of your blog need to be improved before your marketing efforts will fully pay off, though. It's not that your blog is bad (it's not) but it's not yet exceptionally good. Hope that helps. (All criticism was offered with the friendliest, most constructive attitude possible!)

It sounds like links to your site goes to the homepage hence it has PR. This will trickle down to the pages the homepage links to. If you have 50 pages linked off the homepage each will get 1/50th fraction of the PR your homepage can possibly pass. Technically if your blog was the ONLY link from your homepage all the PR your homepage could pass would be passed to the blog and then from the blog to the pages the blog links to and on and on.... So yes to get PR3 on your blog you need to get people to link to it directly but also look how how you can design your website to make the blog page more the focus and channel the homepage PR if that is your goal. ps. I don't recommend the blog page being the only page linked from your homepage in 99.999999% of websites!

Yup, Don't mass delete.  If you don't have a lot of links, check each link and see if it is a good site that links to you.  It is possible that the site that linked to you may not have high PR but that site is a niche related to your site.  Those can be good to generate quality traffic.

Wow, yea... 85,000 incoming footer links would be a problem Do let us know in a followup if you see a difference. Good luck! P. P.S. And thanks for the 'good answer' vote <object id="plugin0" style="position: absolute; z-index: 1000;" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-dgnria"><param name="tabId" value="undefined"> <param name="counter" value="144"></object>

Google has said that the disavow tool should be the last step, after you've tried all other methods to get the link removed, rather than the first step. I'd do as Irving suggested for links that you do want to remove.

Thanks everyone, ok I understand fully now thanks for the replies.

Thanks Dr Peter this is all making good sense to me,.