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This has happened to me in the past, make sure when you are setting your filter you have everything set correctly to get your full link profile. Make sure you have the inbound links tab selected and your filter is set like this:

Show "all" links from "only external" pages to "pages on this root domain" and "show links ungrouped".

The biggest issue is making sure you have it set to root domain, if not you will only be pulling the backlink profile to your homepage. Let me know if that did the trick, if not i would submit a help ticket to help@semoz.org. They are normally really responsive!

Regards - Kyle

I just finished going through this process with a client and i assure you 100% of your effort should be in disavowing and removing links BEFORE adding new backlinks to your site.

When Google reviews you for reconsideration they do not look at how many new links you gained but instead if you removed the bad ones that got you there in the first place. I would suggest talking to Marie Haynes on the topic - she is a great asset!

Cheers - Kyle

Redundancy is bound to happen for websites that are very targerted for an individual product or service. Without knowing the specifics i would suggest to target the short tail or more difficult terms to higher level pages like a home page or top level page. While creating longer tail or easier to rank for terms for the deeper pages.

For instance if you are selling Ski Jackets on your website. There is a very good chance that the keyword "ski jacket" is going to show up on every page whether you like it or not. However if you target longer tailed keywords the deeper you get the better, like "womens ski jackets" or "thermal ski jackets" etc.

Keep in mind these are all guidelines not rules.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Wow, thank you so much for all your guys help!

I just spent all day digging through the full link profile (combined from GWT and OSE) and i have more than doubled my domains in my disavow list. I have been surprised by the amount of domains that have simply expired over the course of this project.

Also, thank you for the pointer on hosting the process files on Google docs for the reconsideration, i was wondering where i would keep that!

I'll keep you all up-to-date as well as contribute to a blog post if you guys would like too.

Thanks again - Kyle

Hey Marie - thanks for the details, i will let you know what else i find!

Do you think this type of microblogging URL would be considered spam:

http://olcine.com/index.php/steffcolbere

Should i disavow these sites as well?

Marie, thanks for the tip on the total disavowed, i am currently in the process of downloading my link profiles from OSE and GWT to look over it again.

As for communicating i haven't submitted a document saying who i have contacted, how would you suggest documenting that? Do you have an example document to share?

Nick, what did your request look like when you got approved? An specifics you can share?

Thanks for the pointers on # of links in GWT, I will dig in deeper and see the trends over the last few months. As for the reconsideration request, do you have an examples of what people submitted that got approved?

Highland, yes we have utilized it quite heavily with submitting over 40 different FULL domains not just urls.

I just don't think that is the right move, we still hold rankings for other pages, it just seems to be keyword/page specific some how

I have been in the process of trying to get past a "link scheme" penalty for just over a year. I took on the client in April 2012, they had received their penalty in February of 2012 before i started.

Since then we have been trying to manually remove links, contact webmasters for link removal, blocking over 40 different domains via the disavow tool and requesting reconsideration multiple times. All i get in return "Site violates Google's quality guidelines."

So we regrouped and did some more research to find that about 90% of the offending spam links pointed to only 3 pages of the website so we decided to just delete the pages, display a 404 error in their place and create new pages with new URLs. At first everything was looking good, the new pages were ranking and receiving page authority and the old pages were gone from the indexes. So we resubmitted for reconsideration for the third time and we got the same exact response!

I don't know what else to do? I did everything i could think of with the exception of deleting the whole site.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards - Kyle

Hey Rand - any chance you guys are still going to note the changes that happened?

Rand your response is exactly what i am seeing across all of my campaigns in SEOmoz. #1 listings maintained, listings in the top 5 grew a bit, listings in the top 10 maintained, but anything beyond that REALLY dropped.

Would someone on your team be able to release a post explaining this so we can share it with our customers? It is really hard to explain this rather complex situation.

Thank you in advance!

• Kyle

Rand It looks like across all of my accounts since you guys made your updates that my ranking results have fluctuated quite a bit. Not to the point that i would think that i am being penalized or an algorithm update but to the point that they now match other rank tracking software that i was hesitant to move toward?

So my question is, did you guys change how you get ranking results? Is it now more accurate than your old model (taking the top 10 and top 50, combine them, then de-duping the results)? This would be something very important to let your customer base know since it would effect how we explain the changes to superiors or clients.

Thank you in advance - Kyle

Rand just ran a few tests and they seem to be working! Thank you for continuing to follow up on the progress!

• Kyle

Hey Rand, just checking in. It looks like as of yesterday morning (11/29) all of my new ranking data has finally populated!! Still seems like the keyword difficulty tool isn't responding? Any word on the status?

Thank you in advance - Kyle

Thank you for your reply and hard work over the holidays, Rand! Hope you still had some time for food and family!

I agree, i demoed all of them and none compared to what SEOMoz has to offer IF they could get back to being reliable.

Rand thank you for the long detailed reply. It is great to know you guys are working hard on the problems. It is just a rough call paying $200/month for a tool set that just isn't cutting it. I rely on your software's data to run the SEO portion of my company.

I logged on this morning and campaigns that i setup a week ago STILL do not have ranking results and the keyword difficulty tool STILL gives me an "unavailable" error. I guess the saying stuck between a rock and a hard place really hits home. I need the data you guys provide yet you can provide it.