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So you removed a bunch of sitewide (anchor-text rich ? ) links and you recovered. That's pretty much how everybody understands it.
And yes, there was a Penguin refresh on October 5th. More credibility to the notion that you can only recover from Penguin during a refresh or update. And If you recovered at any other time, then you probably weren't hit by Penguin in the first place.
You're not gonna get any message in WMT.
My honest advice ? The content is poor, bare minimum if you will. You made a poor choice in selecting a prefixed exact match domain. Your backlinks don't help matters much either.
The domain is done. Cut your losses, use the money you made while it lasted to start a website that truly offers value. Hint: real value doesn't mean 'copyscape passed'.
Yeah it does matter a bit.
Figure out which version has the most (or best) incoming links to it and use that one. Yes you can just set it in Wordpress. I believe Wordpess will automatically 301 redirect the unused version to the one you've chosen. If not, you can do it manually.
The new index was live for a couple hours yesterday, then they went down, and back up again, and then went down again ..and now they're back, but with the old index. They'll probably try the new index again.
OSE data hasn't been reliable for the last couple of months. It's getting quite annoying now.
I don't think that single link to the 10,000 profiles is the problem. Even if you nofollow it, the link juice is still being spent, but not given to the link.
You didn't say how the 700+ guides are structured ? How does a visitor get from the homepage to these pages? Are they organised into categories ? Are they interlinked ?
Wow ...this is bad.
From your profile, I'd say you had about 75 to 100 root linking domains before the attack.
I'd fill a preemptive reconsideration request now, detailing all this. You'll probably get a "no manual actions found" message, but it will be on record. Second, I'd also post it on the Google Webmaster Forums as employees sometimes answer cases like this with assurances that these links aren't going to you.
Post penguin i focus building trust and authority in the domain as a whole, rather than trying to build backlinks to each individual page with targeted anchor text. That's not to say that getting links to your internal pages isn't important. Having a good internal structure and linking will take the load off requiring alot of external links to rank.
In short, I get links to the homepage and categories using branded anchor text ..and let the internal pages attract links on their own.
That's what I'm saying. Other than traffic, there's little or no SEO value in the links on these press release sites. No sense trying to put keywords in there that have the potential to get your caught up in a Penguin filter. The real SEO value comes when the press releases are picked up and written about.
Anchor Text usage seems to be a strong factor in the first version of Penguin. If you're using too many and the press releases get widely picked up, then yes, I'd say you are vulnerable to be being caught up with Penguin.
When I do press releases, I tend to link with Domain.com, www.domain.com or just "domain" ..when referencing the homepage. For internal pages i use naked urls ..which are just links that use the URL as anchor text -> http://www.domain.com/internal-page.
I would do no targeted anchor text, period. Stick with naked urls and branded terms.
Press releases really should be saved for content that is really newsworthy. Does that happen for you every week?
I believe links that come directly from press release sites (such as PRWeb) and the sites that immediately republish them (such as news.yahoo.com) offer very little or no seo value. The real value comes when a journalist, publisher or blogger notices your release decides to write about you or your product.
Also ...If you must do them weekly, I'd avoid including any targeted anchor text in the releases.
Google doesn't usually take individual action on those spam reports. They prefer to let their algo take care of it.
So you need to stop worrying about them, and concentrate on you.
You don't have to worry about the emanuel update just yet. It's just one notice.
If you filled the counter form, then no, you don't have to do anything else. There's no need to file a reconsideration request.
I'd avoid trying to score links on profiles (including on seomoz) just for the sake of it.
What I would absolutely take is if Rand or any of the writers were to mention any of my sites in passing while discussing a related topic or making a recommendation on something that isn't necessarily SEO.
They do that all the time, and it's the type of links Google loves.
They also often praise sites which are doing content marketing well, like OKCupid for example or those which have a great design or other features.
That's a not so light topic, to put into a visual. If you pursue it, I don't think you should use the exact copy. Re-work it (but still give attribution) to make it more digestible, fun, and relatable; add examples, references, etc. That will increases the chances of it being popular.
Here's an example of a "What is" type of content. It's a video, but it could have easily been an infographic.
If your site comes up for a reconsideration request, I feel they will count against you. Just because they are nofollow, doesn't decrease the fact that they are manipulative.
Likewise, nofollow doesn't stop spammers from spamming blogs. Why should it stop google from determining who's spamming or not.
It's black hat in my book. But I feel most will agree it's some shade of grey.
Something tells me those ninjas are no match for a Penguin.
My experience, has been a few days usually. It really depends on how deep the categories are.
I wouldn't expect a large boost immediately after them being indexed or cached.
Yep, looks like a big problem.
The good thing though is Google has gotten better at picking up structure problems like this ...those extra pages haven't impacted moz adversely. If you do a title search, they don't show the cdn version.
But still, it's a simple fix. They probably have got loads of WMT alerts about Duplicate Titles under HTML improvements.