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Keep in mind that Matt Cutts has said people should usually be taking a machete to their backlinks rather than a scalpel. Don't try and remove just enough to make a difference, remove everything you think could possibly hurt you. And remove anything Google's likely to crack down on in the future. In my experience with Link Deotx, usually over 75% of backlinks marked as suspicious warrant removal.

The brand name coming first is generally seen with big brands - Amazon, Walmart, etc. The reasoning I've heard is that it lets the consumer easily know they're shopping there and generates trusts. And obviously brands like that don't really have to worry about trying to rank for a particular keyword.

Unless you're super well known, I'd keep it Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.

The positions Moz reports aren't always accurate. I've had it report a drop of 30+ positions for a keyword but we were still on the first page for it, and that's happened multiple times.

I'm having the same issues as well. I've disconnected and whatnot, contact customer service and followed their suggestions, but traffic still isn't working correctly.

I'm not surprised, OSE routinely misses many of our links. But none of the backlink checkers will be 100% accurate. Your best bet is to use a variety of sources - OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, etc. - and compile and remove duplicates to get a true picture of your backlinks.

I've used Rmoov extensively and would recommend it. It keeps track of everything it does via Google docs and has a pretty straightforward interface once you get it figured out. It definitely makes managing big link removal campaigns easier.

We have 2 ecommerce sites. Both have been hit by Penguin (no warnings in WMT) and we're in the process of cleaning up backlinks.

We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites.

What's the best approach here? Do we leave it alone, delete the whole thing, or manually review and keep highly relevant links but get rid of the rest?

There's no telling. I'd say wait at least a month after submitting a thorough disavow to see any changes.

I've used Link Detox for a while. I've found that all Toxic links are classified appropriately, but that's not always the case for suspicious and healthy. Links marked as moderate, low risk, or very low risk can still be coming from spammy directories, link lists, massive resource pages, etc. And on the opposite side, sometimes links from BlogSpot blogs will be marked as suspicious even though it's a legit blog that linked naturally to you. They're just flagged because they have few backlinks or low trust. It's best to do a manual review of each link to see what's really worth keeping.

I've used Link Detox with Rmoov in the past and had good results with it. Rmoov is easy to use and keeps track of everything for you in a Google Doc.

301 is not the correct way to do this. A 301 will pass the penalty from the old domain to the new one.

Not sure about starting a new website that's a copy of the old one. I'd imagine Google would be smart enough to see the 2 domains were owned by the same person and have the same content so they may still hold you down in search results. And yes, putting a blank page saying you've moved without automatically redirecting visitors is a bad user experience.

I did a raw export from AHREFs yesterday and one of our sites has 18,000 backlinks coming from the same site. But they're all the same link, just with a different session ID. The structure of the URL is:

[website].com/resources.php?UserID=10031529

And we have 18,000 of these with a different ID.

Does Google read each of these as a unique backlink or does it realize there's just one link and the session ID is throwing it off? I read different opinions when researching this so I'm hoping the Moz community can give some concrete answers.

Not sure what causes this, but for our sites, it's been common to see some discrepancies in Moz's keyword ranking tool. It's not 100% right, but I'd say it's at least 90%. I see some that are off by one position but I've occasionally seen rankings off by 30+ positions.

Virtually all our big keywords/category names took hits in rankings on the day of and day after this recent Penguin update so that makes it seem like it's Penguin. On average they lost about 5 positions, but some lost as few as 1 and some lost 15+. But it clearly affected our whole site. Our idea was to test out removing the links on one subcategory and if it worked to do it for the rest of the site.

The guy they had building links for years did all the typical stuff - directories, spam sites, reciprocal linking, links with non-relevant sites, etc. We sell outdoor products and I've found backlinks on penis enlargement sites, anchor text for products we've never sold, etc. The backlink profile is very, very bad. Even if Penguin wasn't the culprit, these backlinks have to be hurting our rankings.

Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site?

We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site.

Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.

We've about to relaunch one of our ecommerce sites and have a question regarding H1 & H2 tags. We use our primary keyword for each category in that category page's H1. We also include a block of text at the bottom of the page explaining the benefits of the products, the various styles we offer, personalization options, gift packaging, etc. We were planning on having an H2 at the beginning of that text that read 'About [keyword:]', but the question of duplicate H1 & H2 tags has come up.

Is penalization possible for having them almost the same? It's not like they're not relevant - the H1 is referring to the category itself and the H2 references our explanation of the category. Just curious what the best way to approach this would be.