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yes screen readers use them but why not incorporate them in the site with css? It will help their rankings!

Rather than trying to get them to remove them, argue the seo case for them to show them.

This is a 100% NO NO. Its black hat.

This site is selling links in articles to try to game Google, this will be flagged as a paid link by Google bot and possibly have a negative effect on your site.

Don;t do link building like this unless you want to end up in a Penguin penalty, it takes years to get out of a penalty. you have to fix your problems, then submit a request to Google once they release you. You then need to wait for the next refresh, so far its been just over 1 year since the last refresh!

If you are looking to do some link building I would look at outreach, Google it and learn how it would work for you there are some great guides around.

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.

Ok so John Mueller at Google has said not to worry about sites like this, Google bot is clever enough to figure these types of sites out. To add to that this site links to all external sites with a nofollow link, so disavowing would do nothing anyway.

However there instances where it might be worthwhile adding it to a disavow list and that would be if you believe this site might changes those links to dofollow at a later stage for some reason (highly unlikely).

Also if it were a similar site but links were dofollow, it would not hurt to add it considering you have found it and deem it to be of no value.

However as John has said in the past, if you did not create it don't worry about it unless you really need to disassociate yourself from it.

Well spotted on that link Ramus

You are making the right move for the future. You can always remove something from the disavow later and it will simply be treated as a dofollow link again once the disavow file has been re-crawled and the page re-indexed. So no big deal, that process is fast if its not a crappy deep link.

There will be a Penguin update in the next few weeks according to John Mueller at Google. So any disavow effort now will be fruitless for the next update but still worth doing for the futire as the latest data sample for it has already been taken as reported by Gary Illyes here http://www.thesempost.com/penguin-possibly-next-week-late-disavow-links-next-update/

In addition to everyone's comments, I would just like to add that Google's latest algorithm updates are taking a hard line on dofollow links from both those sites and many other PR sites. Penalties are being issued as a result even on naked  dofollow url links.

If you are going to use them, be very wary of this and do your press releases without links in them or find another method of link building.

Q1: Google is very bad at dealing with stuff like this, they really don't care to much in my experience. I have seen otehrs try and flood the front page with things like twitter facebook and linkedin to push down negative content. Try to use these strong networks to boost his name. Also might as well give it a shot and report it to Google.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

Q2: Every day Googlebot gets smarter and more nosy! It crawls javascript it does al;l sorts of things. Crappy sites go up and down and have index issues eventually Google will get to them and index them. This is likely what you are seeing.

If they are pretty bad then get them in the disavow file ASAP. A Penguin update is not that far away and you need to be ready a month in advance.

This has been a very common practice for years, link out to authority websites in the same post to give the page more credibility. If their websites is mentioned in the same breath then it may encourage higher click through.

Will it increase the power of that link specifically, No, but if click through rates are higher then that is a signal.

Content marketers got caught out a long time back only linking to one website in an article (THEIRS), in order to make it look more natural they decided to add sites like wikipedia and other news sources etc... To make it look like a well researched article. However the flaw is that in many cases its still a biased article. A better signal of quality is content that links out to yourself AND your competitors. That is something that would be considered to be less spammy, but people never do it because they obviously don't want to help their competitors.

There are a lot of factors that could be contributing to their rankings, not just the links they have. Links are becoming less and less of a factor in the last year.

200+ factors
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

I don't have an example off the top of my head but what I will say is that the way software sites do comparisons of packages is great like avg or something like that.

3 columns, Gold, Silver, Bronze

Then down the left a list of all services you offer and then under each column a tick if it is included in that package.

Does that make sense?

It gives people a very clear understanding in one page what the differences are, rather than having to scroll up and down or flick between pages and scanning sentences.

It will likely help people choose a higher package and spend more money with you.

A bit like McDonalds asking if you would like fries with that for the small additional cost of X

Very simple,

Your old site http://www.instantissuance.com uses a 301 redirect which can be seen here
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/
It then redirects to http://www.datacard.com/instant-issuance-solutions which is the exact page you mentioned above.

In tools like Majestic and MOZ you can see that the most common term used in backlinks to the site apart from the domain name is "dynamic card solution".

When you perform a 301 redirect all the positive signals that a site has are passed to its new home. This is a clear indication of that happening.

I hope that makes sense!

You have done the right thing using the canonical tag, I presume if a mobile user goes to one of your pages they will be redirected to a mobile page?

If so I see little advantage in having the page indexed. For the safety of your site with regards to Panda I would noindex those pages.

Google have said there is no penalty for internal duplicate content but it is what they don't say that is the problem. There is an algorithmic devaluation and you don't want the hassle.

Does Google just devalue spammy links, or does it devalue the links and penalize your site on top of it?

It will Devalue the links but also penalize your site if you have been a big abuser of unnatural links

Does it hit specific keywords, or does it have effects site wide?

It will do either of those depending on the severity and you will be able to see this in webmaster tools sometimes.

Does penguin run constantly, or only on specific days?

Penguin runs roughly twice a year currently, but is always in effect, you can get an unnatural links penalty at any time. Some have said it runs in some way with Panda

If spammy links are removed, how long does it take to recover?

If you have a Manual penalty you will need to file for a reconsideration request. Once your penalty has been revoked you will need to wait for the next Penguin refresh (My estimate is April/May)

If its an algorithmic issue, you can see changes happen once a month but you will need to wait for Google bot to crawl those changes. For example if you remove a link you will still need to wait for Google to crawl that site and see those links have been removed. And in some cases wait for a Algo update.

Does this site below belong to you? It is a replica of your page

http://systemfarmer-web.gopagoda.com/uzemeltetes/

When i take a snippet of text and put it in quotes in Google, that site shows up as the authority for that content. If you own that site I would look at canonicalizing it (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en) or at least noindex it.

Panda has run recently, does the the drop coincide with that date? Normally there is a shake up in the week leading up to it.

I suspect that someone may have made changes before you go there and they have not given you the full picture.

Was there any issue with the server during that time and the pages speeds were slow or not loading. WMT should give you some indication of the decline, even how dramatic the drops were and what kind of pages were dropped.

FYI you are better to remove the meta descriptions from the pages that have duplication than keep them there, but the best course of action is of course to re-write them.

If you care to share the URL we can all take a look and see if we can spot anything.

I have used them ALL over the years.

It all depends on what you are trying to achieve? What do you want as an end result by doing this?

You might be better of spending your money/efforts on brand marketing or an actual PR agency, nobody in the press is interesting in Press Releases from most PR sites. You want to get a few good pieces of news out to some great sites that target your key market.

Also be careful with PR sites, Google recently unleashed and attack on them and anyone using them, if you do a press release don't put a link on it. NOT even a url or a text url that has no link, many syndicated sites turn text url's in to actual url's. (its a ridiculous situation) and you could get a penalty on your site for it.

Do you have a Manual Penalty? How have you confirmed you have the penalty? Is there an option to send a reconsideration request in Web Master Tools?

Removing those links is always the best thing to do. However I would start by putting them all in a disavow file first so that Google can start to ignore them as dofollow links. Meanwhile you can start to remove them.

However if you have a Manual penalty, you will have a lot more work to do. Let me know and I will guide you.

There is a great article on this site about it

http://moz.com/blog/keyword-volume-tools

OK I think I found out some of your issues!

There are a few major ones. I hope you don't mind but I did some detective work and found out what your site was by the code screen grabs you posted on another reply below.

OK so the first MAJOR ISSUE is that you have TWO BODY tags in your HTML! You need to check your code on all pages / templates and get it fixed ASAP. Archive.com shows that this has been a problem on your site since you did a redesign in OCT 2013. Google is looking at signals like this a lot more now and is not being favourable to them

My concern when you do a site: query in google is that your homepage does not show, it should be the first result. I see that you have 15,100 pages indexed.

When I search for your website "sitename.com.ar" I see in Google there is no title, description even the quick links are broken, just showing just one and saying untitled.

NEXT, All your pages have the same description and keyword tags! Whats going on there? I you cant make them unique then get rid of them, they are doing more damage and Google hates that stuff, I have had pages not show in SERPS because they have duplicate description tags. This happen to five of my pages recently that I somehow missed. But this is on every product Page of yours if not every page on the site.

Also I would remove the keywords meta tag, its pointless and will do you more harm than good.

The paths to your javascript and css files have two slashes (//) should only be one.

I would start with those changes and do a fetch in Google WMT and give it a few days, the homepage should reindex in a very short time frame maybe minutes.

After that we can take another look at the site. These are very basic issues that a large brand site like this should never be doing wrong, as you can see the damage it has caused. Lucky for you that you have only just started there and can be the knight in shining armour to sort it all out

I mostly use companies in the UK and Canada so I would suggest you look here for a great list of trusted companies

http://moz.com/community/recommended

Find a good PR company and let them do the hard work. They have the contacts and the experience, letting you get on with creating a great service and website.

I remember speaking to a great one but will have to dig through some email but they are on that link above.