Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Totally agree with everyone here. I wouldn't, under any circumstance, pay for a link to be removed. I was reading a blog post written by Google the other day about it. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html

Matt Cutts says in the post "In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves."

Google are good at spotting these types of links and not counting them especially if there is a strong backlink profile. I'd just disavow at domain level.

As Tim said, if you are comfortable at looking at links and deciding whether they are good or not, then use opensitexplorer and see what links are pointing to your website. I think asking him for links is good to test whether he is keeping track of them or just building 000's of spammy links.

can you post an example of the links that webmaster tools is showing?

Have you checked in the source code of the website? It might be in white text or something. If you have a well built, well optimised website with a range of good links, negative SEO doesn't normally work. Google is very good at knowing when to not count a link and I'd just concentrate on building more good links because this will negate any effect that negative SEO would have on your website.

Hi Nicholas,

This does seem to be strange and it looks like he is conducting some black hat SEO (dark grey at best!) on your website. Ask him for all the links that he has built to the website, if he says "that's impossible" then stop using him immediately because that is normally the reaction a black hat SEO-er will give.

If he does give you a list of links then have a look at them and ask yourself whether they match the content of the website they are on. If you are unsure, copy and paste 10/15 onto this post and I'll have a look at them for you. How old is the website?

You're not using a geo redirect are you?

If not, then it does seem like you have had an algorithm penalty (assuming there isn't a manual notice) on WMT.

Hi Egol,

do you think it would help if we took down the US website?

Thanks EGOL,

I've asked them to remove all those types of links and asked how they were being created. So, just to confirm in my mind, the rel=alternative hreflang tag is implemented correctly?

Thanks EGOL,

Really appreciate the advice. Those pages then, should I 301 them to the proper product page?

I've mentioned the link at the bottom but, surprise surprise, they seem to ignore that one!

Thanks for the reply Egol,

The problem is, there are a few ways that a user can get to the same product. There is a canonical tag on each page that points to the most authoritative version of the page.

The web company has put a geo-target redirect in place so that people from the US see the US site and people from the UK see the UK website. This isn't causing a problem is it?

In addition, do you think if we took down the US website, our UK rankings would come back quicker? Or is the damage already done and we need to wait it out.

Thanks again!

Hi Jane and Egol,

Still no luck in the recovery of our UK rankings

The websites in question are www.teapigs.co.uk and www.teapigs.com. I think the tags have been implemented properly but I was wondering if you would be so kind enough to have a look for me?

Thanks in advance,

Karl

Hi Jane,

The tags have been implemented about a week ago but nothing has really improved yet. The UK website has been up for about 7 years and had quite a lot of authority so I'm surprised I haven't seen anything notable yet

That doesn't fill me with confidence! I'm hoping in the next week or 2 we'll see things improve. We've had to ramp up our email, PPC and social over the last week but it's obviously hampered organic as we ranked on the first page for 30/40 keywords and they've all gone. I think the Panda refresh hasn't helped either and it couldn't have happened at a worse time! I guess it's just a case of keeping an eye on things and praying that Google see the tags sooner rather than later.

I'll let you know when (please God let it be when and not if!!) our rankings return, might be a good YouMoz post!

Hi all,

I had a client that recently released a US version of their UK website and put it live without informing me first! Once I saw it (about 3/4 days later) I immediately asked them to include the rel=alternate tag onto both websites. However, in the meantime our UK rankings have all gone and it seems as if Google has just kicked the UK website. How long will it take for our rankings to return to normal?

Thanks for the advice,

Karl

Just a quick question, the client in question, in their wisdom, decided to put the US website live without telling me and our UK rankings have dropped significantly, do you think the tag will start to fix this?

We are going through the same thing at the moment and have opted to use the rel= alternate hreflang=x tag. There is more info on it on this Google page for you https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hi Gary,

thanks for the help, as a UK website, we primarily want to rank in the UK but we obviously want to rank in the US. By making the .com website (which is brand new) is this likely to affect our UK rankings or should they be unaffected?

Thanks again,

Karl

Ok, thanks for the help. I'll have a look into it and see what it says. The .com website is up now and they are hell bent on it staying! I did recommend having a /US but they preferred the .com!

Anyway thanks for the advice!

Thanks Chris,

So would you implement the rel=alternative href=x tag then?

hi mozzers

I have a client that has just released a .com version of their .co.uk website. They have basically re-skinned the .co.uk version with some US amends so all the content and title tags are the same. What you do recommend? Canonical tag to the .co.uk version? rewrite titles?

The thing is not to worry because it can be hard to grasp at first but once you start to hear the same terms mentioned then you'll start to understand it better. Moz did this some time ago that's worth a read http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

Concentrate on making your title tags unique, descriptive whilst containing 1/2 of your keywords you want to rank for. There is a plugin called SEO for Wordpress that is ideal. You can edit your meta descriptions there too. Make sure you have a page for each service/product you are offering and ensure the content for these are descriptive and unique.