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When you say "clean up" do you mean removing the links or disavowing them?

You will never be able to get them all removed, so in the end you will need to a Disavow anyways. If your time frame is short, you may want to make Priority One be doing a Disavow for each of the 50+ sites you are working with. Then you can proceed with attempting to get the links removed. I have not heard that there is any downside to having a link removed that already appears on your disavow file...

As for the order of the Priorities, you may want to shuffle them a bit depending on the different situations on the different websites. I suggest you read this Moz Blog article called It's Penguin-Hunting Season: How to Be the Predator and Not the Prey

...and then test a few of your sub-pages that used to rank well at the program used in this article which is called the Penguin Analysis Tool.  I say sub-page because it needs a single keyword phrase you want rank that particular page for so it do the anchor text analysis. And that works better on focused sub-pages than on general homepages. $10 per website will let you fully evaluate two typical pages on each and see which facet of the link profile is most valuable to attack first.

Hi Mark,

I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...

PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.

Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.

For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.

When you are on a member's Profile Page and click the "Private Message this User" button it does not auto-fill their username into the Recipient blank. "username" is what the form says to enter, but that is not a word used on someone's profile info.

This is a problem because a member's screen name rarely match their "username", and the Profile lists a "Display Name" but how are people to know that is the same as "username"?

I think the best fix would be to have the Recipient blank auto-filled when clicking the "Private Message this User" button AND change the word "username" to "Display Name".

I have a suggestion, but please do your own research to verify this...

My understanding is that you can set up a block of text on your site that is not visible until a visitor does something like clicks a tab or does a mouseover, and if you use the CSS command display:none; to make it invisible, that text will not be read by the major search  engines. That text can get displayed when the visitor clicks the tab or does a mouseover by having the CSS command switch to display:block; (or some other version of display). I think this is because a spider can't activate the tab or mouseover function.

I've read this a few places and avoid doing display:none; on valuable content for this reason (better safe than sorry). But I have not read about someone using it to purposely hide content to prevent duplication issues or dilution of keyword density.

It could verified with a pretty easy test. Just add some gibberish content to an existing page,  but hide it using display:none;  Then use GWT to ask for a recrawl, wait a few days, and do a search for the gibberish content. If it doesn't show up in the results, that is a good sign it worked. Let us know if you test it....

Hi Christopher,

I'm not going to touch question #1 - that's a big can of worms that everybody has different opinions on. The big factor seems to be "Did you get a manual penalty?" If yes, there is a fairly standard set of steps to follow that wraps up with a Disavow. If no, you may or may not get any good out of doing a Disavow.

But question # 2 is easier. I used the Link Detox tool at linkdetox.com to check my backlinks and really liked the way it clarified and classified each link. There is a trial package hidden way down at the bottom of this page: http://www.linkdetox.com/plans-pricing/   that lets you buy two opportunities to run your site through the program for 100euros ($130). That's what I used.

You could also first check out the Penguin Analysis tool at penguinanalysis.com and invest $10 to run a few of your primary pages through it to see how likely it is that you have a algorithmic penalty from Google. If you don't, then chasing after a Disavow project may not be worthwhile. There was a Moz blog about it here: http://moz.com/blog/its-penguin-hunting-season-how-to-be-the-predator-not-the-prey

Good luck!

Since most customers will be typing on a phone, I suggest not using the "a".

But if a really cool phone number is part of the marketing plan, maybe you could use it as part of the URL. Something like Taxi1515.co.uk or BirminghamTaxi1515.co.uk  -  doing something like that would let you get a good URL for just the minimal cost of a registration...

Hi Fedrico. I agree with you when the need is for ongoing SEO work. But the original poster said:

_..._hire an SEO specialist technician to take a look at a few things under the hood that I can't seem to figure out...

Which I understand to mean he has a couple of puzzling technical issues he needs help with. Those can sometimes be straightened out quickly.

Hi Gary. I use CopyScape at copyscape.com

The free version only reads from a webpage, so you would need to create a temporary page, publish all or parts of the article you are curious about, check it, then delete the temporary page.

Hi Ron.  If the keywords and phrases for your niche are REALLY LOW volume (like some of mine are), then I suggest using Google Adwords by running a few short PPC campaigns.

A two week run with your keywords set as a Broad match will gather enough data to activate an interesting Adwords report. This report is found on the "Keywords" screen of an individual campaign. Click the "Details" button then select "Search Terms / All" on the dropdown. This will list exactly what phrase people typed in the search box, how many times it was searched (Impressions), how many Clicks those phrases got, etc.

Just peeked at one of my campaigns and for the last 30 days it only had 2400 impressions. That's pretty low volume and those small volumes do not show up well in any free tool that I know of. Though they used to in the old Adwords Keyword Tool. I miss it...

Too bad that "Boost" didn't work for you. It is an interesting concept...

I wonder how they "force Google to crawl your bad links"?  Does Google provide some sort of form that URL's can be submitted to for spidering? Or is there some other way to quickly bring individual URL's to their attention?

I asked this also a couple month ago and got a good answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/when-googling-site-mydomain-com-what-does-listing-order-tell-us

There is also a good "Copywriting" group on Google+ (called a community there). It gives you a chance to see how different copywriters communicate interpersonally (with eachother and outsiders who ask questions)

If it is a landing page ONLY for PPC, and regular organic searchers should not be going there, then you could just noindex that page. I think that will make it's bounce and other stats not count towards the rest of the site...

Hi Colin,

For sure Disavow the bad domains that are linking to you (whole domains, not just pages). If you are comfortable working with your htaccess file you can follow the guidelines in this article to get those bad domains to automatically prune links to your site (assuming they are automated sites) by 404'ing incoming visits from those bad domains. This tricks the site's bots into assuming your site is gone and so they delete the links to your site. Works for some spa,,y sites, but not all.   http://www.boxaid.com/word/simple-alternative-google-disavow-tool/

The sad truth though is that for awhile the bad links were probably boosting your ranking, and there removal (by Disavow, by Google's algorythm, and maybe by 404ing domains) will cause your rank to fall. You will have to build good links to replace the seething mass of bad ones...

Sam wrote: "Each site is unique in their own way and are already ranking well on their own."

Another possibility is to leave the sites where they are (since they already rank well) but let them all share one single Shopping Cart / Checkout system. I know of a few e-commerce system that allow this. UltraCart and AmeriCommerce are two. You can put the "Buy Now" and "View Cart" buttons on any site and some social media sites (you don't even have to own the sites, which opens interesting possibilities for guest blogging with a shopping capability)

Then you could just re-style the three sites appearance so that they blend well together yet stay distinct. Like three old neighboring houses that were all built in the same era. And freely offer navigation between all three so it pretty much acts like one big website. Maybe put a logo in the header of page saying something like "Part of the Gizmo Group of fine stores". Many people would barely notice that they are moving from one domain to another.

The upside would be safety. If one of the three sites gets a penalty, the other two can continue to pull in customers while you repair the penalized site.

Just tossing around ideas. I've considered doing this with some unused domains we own. Hope it helps you...

My experience has been Yes, for some things...

Doing it for internal page links should make your SEO better by eliminating the chance the search engines will misunderstand those links. And if a page of yours gets scraped, the internal links on that page will at least count towards your site

Doing it for IMPORTANT images will insure that the search engines can correctly index those images. Also it makes it possible for social media like Pinterest to use those images, and for others like Facebook to display an image from your page when that page is Shared.

I usually don't bother with absolute URLs for things like CSS files. Or for images which do not need to be indexed or shared, like buttons and icons and such.

Hi Dean. It will help your repair efforts to strongly separate the On-site and the Off-site issues. They live in two very different worlds.

The On-site stuff, like the rel=canonical issues you mention, are fairly easy to fix. Internal links (from one page of your website to another page of your website) are harmless. You can use whatever anchor text makes sense for them, and they should NOT be nofollow.

The Off-site stuff is really hard. This is usually about links pointing to your site from OTHER websites. That's where issues like sitewides, footer links, anchor text profiles, and follow vs nofollow comes into play. Unless you want to spend a ton of time reading and learning about these issues, I suggest hiring a pro to look through your link profile and suggest a repair plan. If you want to be really comfortable with the plan, also secretly hire a different pro to do the same job and see if they both come up with similar plans...

Unless I missed it, the current site doesn't have Buy buttons or a Shopping Cart. So it's more of a portfolio site than an ecommerce site.

If you're not planning to add Buy buttons and a Cart, you could use almost any CMS. With the small number of pages there, you could even use hand-coded pages (I do that for my sites which have around 80 pages)

If you want a fast and inexpensive solution, there are probably a lot of themes for Wordpress and other CMS that are much nicer portfolio designs than the current site.

Are you converting a site to responsive, or just trying to hack a few things on a fixed with site?

If you are really making the page responsive, then I suggest using one of the pre-designed responsive site systems. I use Twitter Bootstrap. It's free and very easy to learn, even for a non-programmer. With Bootstrap your problem would be solved either by using a single title and changing the font-size for different device widths, or by presenting different versions of the title on different device widths. Like this...

Brand New Xbox One 500 GB Black Console

Xbox One 500 GB Black Console

In Bootstrap the class "hidden-desktop" actually means it is only visible on devices that are NOT desktops - which are tablets and phones. They tell you which screen width ranges are considered to be which device type. You can go to my site on a PC and pull the screen width across from wide to narrow to see how a Bootstrap site reacts to varying screen widths.

If you are just trying to hack a few repairs, you will need to do it in the CSS file with "media queries". Not too hard, but takes a little learning and experimentation to figure out. Your page HTML will need to have a "class" or "id" added to any element you want to adjust with the CSS.

Logging out, clearing my cache, and logging back in seems to have fixed it.