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Thanks for your thoughtful response.  As you point out, there are many different business models, and what might be best "general" practice, might not quite fit every model. Moz Q&A is great for this type of discussion.

Hey Jeff, thank you for your input. So you just globally changed the permalink structure, put global redirects in place and you didn't see permanent loss in trafic? And you did that on multiple sites? If so I'll most probably follow your path. Thanks again, Julien

I would probably move forward based on the following two assessments: A) by a site's traffic figures, content quality, and backlink profile (assessing this within reason). If they receive a lot of traffic, produce great content, and seem to have an appreciable amount of good quality links, then the site in question is very likely "good" and "trustworthy" B) by the the types of links that are being provided to the site in question. If a certain instance of a link is not promotional, unlike in the case of a sponsored review, then this criterion checks out If both check out, then I would say it's safe to remove the "nofollow" tag for that particular link. Now, thinking about things holistically, I would say that if the site does not link out to a degree that seems above-average or high, then I wouldn't worry about potentially "following" nearly all of your links again. You received the penalty because of the the nature of the linking, the specific links that you linked out to, and/or the volume of external linking.

Just speaking from personal experience on this as a consumer rather than as a marketer - some jingles are annoying in actual sound, but regardless of that, I can remember word-for-word, note-for-note, jingles I heard 30 years ago, some for businesses that are no longer even in business. And, in chatting with peers, you start singing one of those jingles and everyone joins in, laughing, because they have these burned into their brains as well. In fact, if someone mentions the name of a business, I find it's very common for someone else to chime in with the jingle, just because they associate the brand with the tune and find it amusing that they do so. Now, I was too young to be a consumer of anything more than dolls and Kit-Kat candy bars 30 years ago, but these days, my family listens to the radio at least once a week to hear football games. One jingle we hear over and over again is a really simple one for an auto parts store. It says, "Oh, Oh, Oh, O'Reilly - Auto Parts!". We've noticed where the local O'Reilly auto parts store is, we sometimes can't keep ourselves from singing the jingle if we notice the sign while driving by and if we need to replace our windshield wipers this winter, you can bet that's the first auto parts store that will come into our heads. We don't have a similar jingle in our heads for Joe's Auto Parts or Bob's Auto Parts because they're not on the radio. Songs are really magical. Listen to how simple this jingle is, but how the repetition of the word 'Oh' makes it feel energetic and fun to mimic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkSDGk67IWI So, again, speaking purely from personal experience, I do hear jingles, I do remember them if I hear them frequently enough, and they do make me feel sort of amused about businesses ... and, while feeling amused, I've given space in my brain over to the business to be recalled when I need their product, because their advertising has put a tune to a spot in the local business landscape where I live.

Hi Cole, Yeah well that change in script is in close proximity to what you would normally do with adding event tracking to real interactions on a page and in this case you 'fake' an interaction after 15 or X seconds. I still wouldn't prefer using it this way though as you don't know for sure that the user is actually in the browser window or at all looking at the page, so I would at least check for that with some additional JS but in the end you'll get the same result.

I especially like #1. I didn't even think to do specific remarketing like that to one individual or group. Do you have to get a certain number of visitors in your remarketing list before you can start serving ads or can you just have that handful of visitors? We were planning on using Facebook custom audiences like you mentioned but I didn't know you could do that with Twitter as well, that's good to know. Thanks SamuelScott. To go one step further than this we have been looking at physically mailing something to these decision makers along with serving them ads. Not just post cards or mailers with similar branding but also something that's a little out of the box and fun.