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Send me a private message so I can take a look.

1. You could simply use it as a Vanity URL

2. You could look at using it to expand in other geographical locations and apply the hreflang attribute to it which will use the power of the original domain to rank it almost immediately

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en.

Are the words competitive keywords or are they unique to your brand? If they are competitive its possible you don't have the power to rank for them or Google thinks you have an EMD or are link building those keywords excessively. Without seeing the site its hard to answer otherwise.

I actually just asked Google's John Mueller the very same thing and additionally a question about finding pages that do the same thing that may have been missed.

Check out the video clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew&feature=player_detailpage#t=2343

watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew&feature=player_detailpage#t=2343

Google have their own internal metrics about what they feel to be natural or not. It is very popular for sites these days to have an article on it go viral and seem to be an unusual pattern. They are prepared for that, if the pattern looks unnatural then it will be easy for a robot to detect. If that pattern is then replicated multiple times for multiple pieces it becomes very suspect.

If you do not have a shady past, ie, recovered penguin site, or lots of dodgy links already then its highly unlikely to trigger anything even if the links were in the tens of thousands. If its natural it will be easy to observe even by a robot.

There is no upper limit to something going viral.

Worst case scenario if it points to an internal page, Google's John Mueller says you can simply 404 the page and all links pointing to that page will simply not count any more. Although if affected by a penalty as a result will still be a long painful task for recovery as you will need to wait for the algorithm to refresh to be re-included. But its more likely that the single page of content would be hit by penguin rather than the whole site anyway.

Marie is bang on here.

The only thing discussed earlier that was not addressed by Marie and answer incorrectly by a few people in my view and various discussions with John Mueller is:

"Regarding the disavow, are you saying that if Google does not refresh Penguin for another 6 months I will not receive the benefit of the disavow until then?"

If you have a manual penalty then you will have to wait for a refresh of penguin. HOWEVER, if you are affected simply by the algorithm then it will simple be a case of Google looking at your disavow file max 48hrs, then visiting each and every link one by one and applying the nofollow to it, when the hourly/daily/weekly algorithms update you will see changes happen, not have to wait for 6 months etc..

Many people are pinging those old links to get googlbot to visit the pages quicker as it can take a long time. Also you do not need to wait for those pages to be cached just crawled, sometimes google may never update the cache on old crappy pages.

If you need help then you need someone with experience and contact with people that have most of the answers. Marie Haynes above is probably the best you will find with a proven track record. Dont waste your money on SEO companies that have only gone through this a few times and charge through the nose for it, every day wasted is a day of revenue lost. Think of that lost revenue as an addion to what you are paying the SEO

please also be aware you can only do a fetch 10 times a month so make them count! Only do it when you must.

Thanks I just emailed the guy who created the one from the Google play store.

I know others have managed to do what I am asking and as a result are selling a service doing it.

So i just need to figure it out. It is pretty safe to say that if googlebot crawls a 301 link that it will crawl the page it 301's too? Indexing of that page is something I am not concerned with.

John Mueller at Google has said many times before that if it is not easy to find contact details don't waste your time, disavow and move on.

The web spam team want to see a good faith effort, not a miracle. Create an excel spreadsheet of all the links and mark next to each link if you were able to find contact info or a form and what action was taken. A word in each column as a reference is enough. Upload it as a google doc with your reconsideration request.

If they can see you really worked hard at going through all the links even if you have little removal success you stand a high chance of getting the manual penalty removed if you have disavowed all the bad stuff.

Does anyone know if there are any URL shortners that track when googlebot visits them?

I want to know when googlebot visits a shortened link that does NOT got to a URL I control.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

In this case it might be best to share the link. if you are not inclined ot do this, you can message me privately and I can take a look.

Your question is a bit to open ended, what do you want to achieve by knowing this information.

Does a site rank better than you?
Are they doing negative seo to other people?
Do they steal content from people?Are they building links as dofollow from places they should not?

Too many questions to ask before answering such a vague answer.

What are you trying to achieve?

It is possible you may be reading to deep into this?

"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"

This means that you might have:

widget-miami.htmlwidget-New york.html
widget-Chicago.html

All these pages have teh same content but with the location swapped out. Just to try and rank for those pages without having any real content for them.

It is not a problem if you have good content and something unique to offer.

Ranking in local results has many factors.

The first thing you need to know is that the results are a mixture of natural rankings and local

Here is one way to see where sites rank naturally without the local listings
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=solicitor+london&num=10&start=1 This link will exclude the very first result (whoever ranks #1), I have not found another way to do this.

Once you have determined who ranks naturally and who ranks for local, you can start to figure out what is going on.
It all comes down to optimization  of your local page and citations from various places and a trust level from your domain including quality score.

There are some great people in here that can explain in depth about how to optimize your local business page so that you get a top 7 position

Interesting question!

I had to do some research on this, there is not much out there. One place I was sure to find and answer was the depths of the underworld in blackhat forums. I found a whole discussion on it from 6 months back. (Not going to link to a black hat site, sorry)

However what they said and had tried and tested was that the site must be de-indexed and the same for all pages so that it did not trip the duplicate content.

However lets back things up a little. Why are you doing this? Does the original have a penalty?

Why not keep the original live and put a canonical link in your page pointing to the new site stating that is the original content owner? this way you will get traffic right away and not have to start ranking from scratch.

Need to know more about your reasons please.

Building links in high quality directories is not natural and should be nofollowed as you are building them yourself.

Having a great news story and lots of people picking it up and linking to you as a result will not end in a penalty even if it is millions of links.

But batches of links that Google already deems as average quality or maybe even low quality will trigger an alert rather quickly.

If you are going to go down the route you are going, then the only way you will get away with it is with a large diversity of  themes. If they are all directories and articles the pattern will be very clear even for a robot and will trip a filter or even a penalty.

John Mueller from Google has stated many times that the algorithm must first detect that those links are now either removed or disavowed. then you would need to wait for a Penguin refresh, which is probably going to be in the next 2 weeks and only runs every 6 months.

The fact that it is just one site makes me question if the one site was an old penalized version of the site that they tried to 301 their way out of?

Otherwise bad domains normally would not pass the bad links on to the domain. this was talked about in great detail many times in the past as a negative seo tactic where people would buy bad domains and point them at their competitors. Google put a stop to that very quickly.

So I do wonder if there are more than just that issue. Are some of the other links bad but you don't believe they are?

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.

The next Penguin update is just 3-4 weeks away now if consistency is anything to go by.

They may get what is coming to them in a short time frame! This would be very sad indeed and recovery time on large domains can be a long process taking over a year in many cases.

Remember that Google says that buying links is a NO NO, that includes all kinds of buying, such as I will give you a gift in exchange etc.. Those are hard to detect but the others are so obvious that a computer can detect them with a simple algorithm. Those are the ones you will get hit by and it wont be long before someone else in your niche reports them.

Its just a matter of time. Every update scrapes deeper into the barrel until all are affected by it. One thing is for sure they will have suppression from the Penguin Algorithm, those bad links act like minus points, eventually it will out weigh the good ones and they will drop in rankings. Removing bad ones can actually increase rankings!

its not that it is impossible but the results you see may not reflect what others see.

With cookies set on your computer and with IP and language playing such a strong role it will difficult to see accurate results without forcing it with things like gl=US or something like that.

Do you have a local listing for your address? That will help a lot as well as marking your site up with rich snippets like schema.org