If it helps, my links are showing up again on GWMT as of mid morning.  Looks like the fix is in place.

Hi Karl,

Check out this thread here to start with.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-my-good-links-disappeared-from-gwmt

It appears that GWT is having an issue currently with reporting all links going to the homepage of your site.  According to Google it shouldn't be affecting your rankings or traffic, just the reporting - but they are checking into it.

That might be a good part of your issue.

There's an updated response from Googles John Mueller:

"Thanks for the report, Anne (and thanks for escalating, Stevie!). This looks like an issue with how the data is displayed in Webmaster Tools, it shouldn't affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking. I don't have any specifics at the moment, but the team is looking into the details to see what we can do here. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the confusion!"

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-homepage-bug-16322.html

It looks like when this happened back in August of 2011 it took up to two weeks to fix.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-bug-13886.html

I have to imagine that it's just a temporary hiccup because my site lost links from major media institutions like Bloomberg and Forbes.  I can't image those links would have been "devalued".  Give it some time and watch your traffic.  Mine is normal today and I imagine that it would have cratered if all my links had actually disappeared.

Good Luck,

Jason

My corporate site went from 140K+ links on Webmasters tools to 133 overnight.  I lost links from Forbes, Bloomberg, and some universities so they were good links.  It has to be an error.  My brand new site is down from several hundred links to showing no data at all.

I'll wait it out but traffic doesn't seem to be affected one way or the other.

It's probably just an issue of time with Google.  Depending on your site it can take a while to get re-crawled and have the new changes indexed.

Best,

Jason

I don't understand how it would interfere with on-site SEO.  We use the Quantcast scripts and haven't seen any issues with it.  Our rankings have been increasing steadily and we haven't received any notifications of crawler errors.

Quantcast is generally pretty on-the-ball with things like this and I think if Google had issues with their script then they would fix it fast.

Best,

Jason

Keep in mind that Mozscape only updates once every 30 days or so.  If you just put out the link you won't see it on OSE for a  while.  http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

However, I can see the link redirection and I'm not certain that you'll get the most benefit from that.  Perhaps someone can answer that a bit more competently than I can.

Also, press release sites are passing very little value these days so I wouldn't get your hopes up overall.

Best,

Jason

I think you should probably figure out what's setting off the red flags and fix it.  They like to give warnings first if it's not a huge issues.. but they could drop the hammer on you at any time.

Best,

-Jason

I'm still too new here.  What did the Term Extractor tool do?

-Jason

It's very unlikely that Google would hit you with a manual penalty for press releases, especially if the content isn't spammy.

Whether or not they give much or any value to links coming from PR sites is another question.  Press releases are a normal part of an established business and aren't really considered link manipulation in most cases.

My company puts out several press releases on PRWeb every week and while we haven't seen any great SEO advantage, we haven't seen any sort of penalty either.

We do get some referral traffic and every so often a larger site will pick up one of the releases for their own content.  On top of that we often get scrapers snagging and spinning our content but they generally don't keep the links pointed at us.

Best,

Jason

Nice example Bede

Consider using mechanical turk to crowd source writing new product descriptions if you have a lot of them.

I've never found any spinning software that works anywhere near well enough that I would want to show the results to customers and it can even hurt you with the search engines.

That sounds strange. I have hundreds of pages with titles where only the city name is different and they aren't being flagged as duplicate.

I thought that any actual change different from any other page would count as a unique page title without duplication penalties.  I know that actual content on-page is a different story however.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken here.

Are you certain that there isn't a different issue here?

Best,

-Jason

Thanks for the answers guys.  I really appreciate it.

I understand now and yah, that seems like an unnecessarily confusing way to go about it for Facebook.

This is a pretty stupid question sorry, but hopefully it is easy to resolve:

Both OSE and Woorank list our site as having 17 Facebook likes.

The Facebook icon on the page shows 92 likes.

Our Facebook Page shows 560 likes.

Where is the 17 number coming from??

our page is: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com/

Thanks,

Jason

Perhaps an article or infographic discussing the most environmentally responsible pest control methods?  I was sold by a company recently who made a big deal about how environmentally "green" their pest sprays were compared to the competition.  You could talk about the consequences of some of the older and more damaging pest control chemicals.

Maybe an infographic showing the different kinds of pests and the consequences of an infestation?

A bunch of scary close-up photos of insects, their swarms and the damage they can do in an infographic may get a few clicks.

Also check out Todays blog: "

The Guide to Developing a Content Strategy for "Boring" Industries"

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

Good luck!

-Jason

Hi Oleksiy,

Check out:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/

Miriam Ellis linked this a few days ago and it seems to have a lot of good answers.

Bottom line is that they are rolling out a program to merge business Google+ pages with the Google+ Local pages that were created from the recent transition.

Regarding your email question here is a quote from the linked article: "Be sure that you upgrade your Google account to a Google+ personal account. Life will be much easier if it has the same email as your dashboard account as it will make the coming merge go more smoothly. If your Google+ Business page is created under a different account than your Places listing, then add the email for the Places Dashboard as an additional manager of the G+Business Page."

Best of luck,

Jason

Hi Jennifer,

I know I might catch some flak for even talking about this, but I have to keep a close watch on our competitors because they are constantly rocketing up in the SERPs from paid/spam links.  For some reason it seems to take Google a while to catch them even with the new Penguin update.

I have no problems with using tricks of the trade to get advantageous results in rankings, but it irritates me to get outranked by competitors who are blatantly just buying thousands of junk links.

In each situation I use OSE to get several examples and then use:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport  to report them.  It seems to take a week or so but each time I've reported I've seen the spammers URL tank about 50 positions.

In many situations however Google will just remove value from the junk links without penalty and you can still lose your position to the competitor if overall they have more good links than you do.  Also take into consideration your onsite SEO, content quality and social signals.

Best of luck,

Jason

I track a couple hundred keywords and rank tracker varies a bit from week to week.  Seeing your rank move one position over a short period of time isn't cause for much concern.

Did your organic traffic decrease significantly recently?

Use Google Chrome Incognito and check your position manually for each keyword.

Check out what the competitor that replaced you in the second position is doing.  I have seen several competing site that will rocket up in rankings for a short time because they purchased or spammed 300K links quickly but they eventually fall.

You may also have to give it some time.  I made a bunch of changes all at once before and I dropped 4 to 5 position on a lot of my keywords for about a week or so, and then I went right back up.