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If these are all coming from one site, and you're worried about them, this is actually a good case for the disavow tool. You can disavow an entire domain in a single line: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en As Michael said, getting Google to actually recrawl/recache all of those pages can take quite a while. With the ad gone, it's probably a non-issue and they'll eventually clear out, but disavow would remove any lingering doubt. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell if you've been penalized without knowing more about the site, traffic, etc. I'd say its unlikely for a paid link from a single site, especially if that link was subsequently removed. Googles isn't usually that aggressive about it, especially if your site generally has solid authority/reputation.

I think many of the commenters have good points here. It's really tough to make a call like this without a deep knowledge of the situation, and for any of us to tell you what to do would probably be irresponsible. Generally, I don't think Google transfers penalties across IPs like they used to occasionally do. With IPv4 space running out, sharing IPs is just a lot more common than it used to be. Google also has other cues, like domain ownership (they're technically a registrar, so they have access to a lot of data) to go by. To be safe, you could isolate it and get a new IP. I'm not sure it's necessary, but if you're going to go so far as to start over, you might as well do it as cleanly as possible. The question is whether starting over with a new domain will solve the problem. If you want to avoid the penalty transferring, you can't 301-redirect the old site, which means that you'll lose all of your link equity and leave past visitors stranded. That's a huge loss to take, and it's going to take time to rebuild (as Michael B. said). Will the content be the same? There may be other aspects of the site that caused you problems, and if they're related to the content or site structure, they could just come back.

Hi Jason, Thanks for writing in. Without going into a full site audit (which could take hours-days) a few areas I might take a closer look at: As others have mentioned, the site design does have an outdated feel. Beyond user experience it looks like a site that might be vulnerable to Panda updates. Relentlessly improving user experience will likely lead to an increase in rankings. Is the new site a copy of the old? Just wondering if any duplicate content exist out there from the old site. If you, you probably want to make sure to remove all old content from Google's index. I'd give the site a full link audit. You can do this by hand using Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer. Lately, I've been using Link Detox with good results. Disavow any dodgy links you can't remove. Overall your link profile looks decent for your vertical, nothing too penalty worthy but some of the directory-style links may be suspect (or at least lower in value) in Google's eyes. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Are you sure that they are ranking well because of these pr sites or another cause? My gut is telling me it's because of other factor(s). However, the scenario David presented is indeed possible.

Sorry - do you mean sites we have banner/buttons on? i.e. posabilitymagazine.co.uk

What is your google webmaster tools data showing you. which keywords among your list of researched kws are getting the best stats (clicks, bounce rate and CTR) this can give you a good insight as to what is that users are searching for and clicking you for. Furthermore, after doing this and seeing what kws are actually bringing any impressions/traffic to site, I would revisit my keyword research using all the tools and tactics suggested in this guide When dealing with adwords kw tool, i would ensure I get the google "search trends" of my list too in the export (enabled this from columns drop down - you do not need to have an adwords campaign). often times, targeting larger numbers of right keywords (longer tail, less popular, less competitive) is a sure way of gaining a good ranking faster while it can also bring the needed traffic as you wait for your major kws to rank in the longer run. you can also definitely utilize google trends tool for "forecasts" of future trends. for example if you are aiming to rank high for 20 kws that are each getting 100-300 queries a month via adwords data, it is much better often than attempting to rank high for 2 very competitive and popular kws with thousands of searches per month. your competition is a huge factor in how fast and how well you rank. Especially if you are set against big dawgs (big corps, govts sites, authority sites, wikipedia, etc), it could even be impossible to rank higher than them if they know what they are doing SEO wise- not to mention big dawg DA is always naturally high. btw have you checked your top competitors for your desired keywords, have you ran a on-page grading for their top ranking pages? have you seen those ranking pages "equity" backlink profile? social shares? all of these count and all it takes for you not to rank is others doing as much of it as possible through approved and organic methods and you may not even be aware of half of them!!!! this is very common for those new and experienced in SEO, that is how vast this thing is and even with a couple of years of experience under your belt you can still find yourself uneducated, outdated or out of the know in a lot of circumstances. one last note: i would also exclusively use the rank checker tool to analyze rankings for keywords with entire subdomain selected. avoid doing regular searches or incognito ones via the browser as that will actually still take into account your locality regardless of being signed in our out of google.

well your site is definitely being indexed by google... without doing a full seo profile on your site regarding competitors, keywords, competition in keywords, etc I couldn't really tell you the scope of the endeavor you are undertaking. All I can say is continue your link building efforts and popularize that site. Your rankings are not being slowed or delayed by Google, only by other sites beating you out. So keep working at it! Unfortunately, there simply isn't any amount of time that will guarantee page 1 results. It's all up to you and your SEO tactics and will definitely take some time to accomplish. Good luck!

Thank you for your comments. Did you find once the old links disappeared ranking improved?

Very difficult to contact/remove these links - I starting to think it would be easier to start again...

already doing FB, just looking for more opportunities.

Hi Jason, What you have right now is a continous loop.  With the canonical tag you are telling Google that the old page is the preferred page you want to show; however, then you have 301 redirecting to the new site.  It will only confuse the Google bot and won't help you website at all. Solution: Remove Canonical Tags from the new pages.

thanks. We have reduce the links but google is still showing in Web Master - does it take a long time for google to drop the links?

Sep 28 was the date of the EMD update but I'm wondering if your drop was actually Sep 27.  There was a big Panda update on that day.  The biggest culprit for Panda is content that is duplicated on other sites on the web or pages with thin content.  But, Panda has nothing to do with overuse of keywords. If you feel that this was because of overuse of keyword anchor text and the drop was not on October 5 then have a look at your webmaster tools to see if you've got an unnatural links penalty.

You can block them as of 16th of October (In google atleast), i see you might have wanted the same for Bing search?): http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

You can also read what Google suggest on how to tackle this problem here Basically, you can add a rel=canonical tag to both a PDF and HTML documents to help overcome this issue. Andy

Hi We had top listings for the main anchor text used, these are the terms which we have dropped out all together for.... The drop happened on the 28th Sept...

Ok thank you.

thanks

I have found that most webmasters have a really hard time objectively deciding which links are spam. If you have received an unnatural links message than an unnatural link is any link that you, or your SEO created. You don't need to worry about any nofollowed links. Almost all keyword anchor texted links are unnatural.  I also call the following unnatural: -links from article sites -followed blog comments using anchor text -most directory links (think - would I make this link if search engines didn't exist?) -followed forum sigs or links from forum posts -followed bookmarks -most blogroll links The only truly natural links are ones where the other webmaster was the one who decided to link to you.