Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am trying to create a valid list of backlink domain to disavow after a 50% traffic cut by Penguin......problem is I have now pulled lists from 4 tool and the lists are all different.  I find a toxic domain from the tool run on LinkResearchTools and look on Google and Site Explorer and the toxic link does not even show.  I look at the page and sure enough the link from year ago on a link farm is there.

Is there really a rue definitive tool that will give me a list of all links?  Better yet is there a tool that will help me evaluate which domain to disavow ?  I want to follow Dr. Pete's advice and go slow but I am also anxious to cut ties with SEO work done by someone else in the hay day of link farm SEO and frankly looking at resent links some Bad SEO by competitors.

The traffic was cut in 1/2 with Penguin.  The link profile sucks but I am working on it.  I guess I will start by disavowing the obviously bad site and give it a few weeks.  The thing that is puzzling is the few good links we have will be exact match anchor becuse the name of the site is an exact match.  This is the EMD delima.

Lets say you have an legitimate EMD for a domain that is a ecommerce site with reasonable content.  The site traffic was cut in half by Penguin.  You think one of the main reasons that you were hit is old SEO black hat link building with Anchor that is exact match.....The catch 22 an exact match achor is the EMD.  I want to disavow some of these old black hat backlinks and obviously I will nuke the ones from the spammy sites first and see what happens.

What about the backlinks that have achor of emd.com (the company name and as it so happens a valid EMD) or just EMD.  If the hit is coming from every single link becuase they are all exact match becuase that is the proper legit match and not some attempt to game the system......What the heck do you do?

I get the War on spammy EMDs but I hope the legit ones are not hit even more.  For one thing google should just have this ironic creteria for excluding EMDs....if they are running AdWords....they are 95% spam sites.....I love the irony of that one.  I am betting lots of these mange to still get listed.

Our rankings are still fluctuating wildly.  Up and down 10 to 35 places from Moz campaign crawl to the next crawl.   This has been going on for months.  It makes little sense.  A keyword that is up 10 one crawl might be down 35 the next and the same keyword might then be up 45 in the next crawl.  It is just non sense.

Are others experiencing this crazy swing up and down ?

Thank for clearing that up Rand.  As I said we are seeing wild gyrations in rankings.   In the 3 years I have been doing SEO for a few sites I have never seen anything like it. Hence my rant about Google the almighty machine and their continued march away from the little guy.  The little guy does not pay the bills or create more billions... I get that. I realize that is a different topic.

Thanks for the details on the ranking.

Yes I use some of the other tools here on Moz.  I am just trying to understand what the ranking interval was and based on what I saw I thought it was much older.

I use to use Advanced Web Rankings but my subscription ran out and did not really want to pay for it again but I guess if I want rankings that are at all current I will need to use some program.  Only now as I understand it you have to be careful or you will get penalized for that.  You can bet Target, REI, Amazon, Bizrate (a total useless piece of crap), all do just as they please and do not get penalized because they spend million on PPC.

In the last 3 years every move made is more of a move to kick the little guy to the curb.  This will only accelerate in the comping years.  In 3 to 5 year page one will be 100% paid.....mark my words....it is coming.

Actually for me is seems to be about 2 months old.  We were hit hard by penguin and it seems I am just now seeing that April debacal hit the rankings page.

Anyway.... perhaps it is ok when things are running smooth but in trying to monitor rankings more closely it seems quite useless.....

I know some people will want to jump on here and tell me I can't monitor rankings that closely that it is a fools game.  Please don't bother ....I am tired of being preached to about big picture....yea there is that but anyone that had traffic cut in half needs to look at rankings weekly for a while.

Our rankings are fluctuation wildly from week to week.  On page one for days and then no were and then back to page one and then to page 5 and then no where and back to page one.  Google sucks and is penalizing white hats and still rewarding total spam.

Take any comparisons shopping site.  That is not a site.  It is a site that lists sites.  That is spam.

Just how lagged are the rankings on SEOMoz Campaigns?  They seems to be weeks behind what  I actaully see.

Have you ever known anyone to do linkbuilding (or SEO for that matter) on a revenue share/commission basis.  I have not heard of this being done but it seem that a good Link Builder would not be afraid of having more upside rather than a fixed amount of money with no skin in the game.

The one downside to this is how is this measured.  Does the client decided?  Does the client show the books and averages the last years revenue and anything over that average is share profit at say 80/20 .

My focus is strictly e-commerce sites.

At the heart of every algo change is revenue not fairness.  To believe otherwise is to be naive.

John Pring hit the nail square on the head.  If you don't increase sales who really cares if you increased rankings.  Many SEO companies use Rankings as a measure of success.  While it is one factor if that is how they want to be paid......run!  An hide!

We have very little back-link profile and most of these links are from silly sites that back-link to sites trying to build Directories to game the system.  So it sounds like your advice is look at them and if not suspect and not back anchor text then recover them otherwise leave them 404

https://www.vbulletin.com/

Most point to the home page but some to category or product pages.

We are working on onpage but wondering what if anything to do with this old stale back-links

Try http://www.liquidweb.com/ they have all manner of hosting packages.  My dedicated server is there and I host a number of wordpress sites with no issues.  Their service is top notch and 24X7.  You will not be disappointed.

Thanks for the thoughts.  I get it.  Anyone doing SEO on a site can only read and react with what is deemed appropriate and prudent changes.

I resubmitted a few key pages and was seeing if there was a quick reaction.  I have never done this before and just thought it was strange and wondered if anyone had an explanation.  I will go back to waiting for Moz to crawl and send me my campaigns reports.

Thanks to you both for the input.   I am just very frustrated.  We never received any warning from Google about link farms.  Have really not done any back-linking in 5 or 6 years, have never been hit by any algorithmic change till now.  While I figured one day it might happen it does not make it any less frustrating.

I realize I am too far down in the details those that say on here to just wait are nuts. Obviously some action is required or we would not have been knocked down.

Ah...ok I see that point and did not obviously look at the link profile.

I am afraid I am quite cynical about the penguin update.  While I appreciate that it would be difficult to create an algorithm that does a 100% good job based on what you are seeing the algorithm is quite flawed.

There were a number of things written about EDMs and how they were being punished but perhaps the fact that it is an EDM in this case helped.

For keyword cowboy tickets ?

For that term that site looks very similar to the other sites on page one?  In fact for my money it is more relevant than all the national sites that are above it.

Hard to judge without knowing more details.

I would say they went up because:

1. some site above you were unjustly removed.  It is happening. Yes this is my opinion.

2.  Some really crappy sites were removed.  What people say penguin was suppose to do and I support if in fact they get it sorted out to the point were the stop doing #1.

I will take a look.  I have never monitored rankings this closely before but we are making on-page changes and resubmitting in webmaster to try in help with the huge hit from Penguin.

So many opinions on things to do / change out there it is hard to know what to do but I figured a complete re-visit of key page on-page for all the product category pages was the first step.

So much is written about SEO but so little of it covers the unique issue that you have if you are doing e-commerce seo....for example if I have a category page and display 50 products per page on that category and 40 of the product have the keyword of the page in the product name.  There is no way to really reduce the stuffing.  The irony is I could reduce the stuffing but it would make the site less effective/ appropriate for the end user of the site.

If the on-page changed do not help I guess we will turn attention to getting more good backlinks to offset the non-sense site that have backlink to us for no good reason.

Back-links - I could rail for hours about this topic.