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Disavow the links in Google, then send a DCMA take down request to both the host and to the site owner. If you can link to the internet archives showing how old your material is. If that fails, hire a lawyer in the jurisdiction of where the host is and have them send a letter. Also it might be helpful to have it pointed out in the letter that they are in the same jurisdiction too.
Generally it is against Google's guidelines if you are buying a do follow link. So in doing something like this you need to weigh the SEO vs Marketing value. I personally do it with a lot of my clients, but not for SEO purposes, it is for marketing / sales purposes. My clients are generally e-commerce sites for a little insight. See some markets have blogs that people read every time it is posted. Kind of like a Rand Fishkin article in our market. If Rand came out tomorrow witha whiteboard friday and said this product is great, it boosted Moz's organic SEO by 100% think how many people would flock to buy it. Most of the time since paid links should be no follow, there is no SEO benefit, but at the end of the day if it puts more money in yours or your clients pocket than was spent, then it is worth it. I will say that I buy links, I make sure they are not followed and I buy them when I think they can create sales for my clients. As far as I know that model fits in the Google guidelines because buy making sure they are not followed I am not buying them for SEO purposes.
I fall into the category of creating good content and links will come. Not to say that I don't out reach, I do both. I write a blog on an e-commerce package, and when I have a post that mentions another company I send them an email asking for a facebook post or retweet.
I think people try to churn out "good content" too often and it doesn't work. On my blog I get about 1k uniques a day. Which for my niche, I would estimate I am in the top 80%. I write a new article about every 2 weeks or so, they are technical articles. But at the same time, they are generally good articles. A few months back I had an article retweeted by hosting company, picked up by hn, and posted on reddit. It got 50k unique views in just a couple of days. Good content gets passed around, bad content gets skimmed and forgotten about.
I am going to tell you what you don't want to hear. Drop Frontpage, drop Dreamweaver and go with a platform such as Wordpress, Joomla, or whatever. The reason being is that they will most likely never go out of date. Front page was discontinued around 10 years ago and websites have changed so much since then.
Also a point I would like to make is to use your assets to fullest. I am just off the hip shooting here, but your website could possibly be redone for the 3-5k range, if it is just a standard service website. Your wanting to do it yourself has cost you 150k. I would hire someone that can knock it out in a week or two and focus my time on my company. I know when you own a small business you wear a lot of hats, but you have to pick and choose which hats fit.
Were you signed into any google services? I am not aware of it, but google might be caching profiles to ip addresses. Then that could taint the results that Moz brings back. It is really a tough area, google tries to stop people like Moz and Moz tries to get around google.
Please don't be offended by this.
Honestly looking at the site I see no effort put into onsite SEO.
It honestly looks like a spammy site to me. You have a lot of text included after the copyright, which I am assuming you are using for ranking. Which in my mind amounts to no more than just putting a big list of keywords at the end of the page.
I am a firm believer in onsite first and off site next. You have a lot of on site work to do.
I wouldn't for the cart and checkout, I would actually no-index them. The reason being is depending on what measure you are using for cart abandonment, having people land on those pages will skew your results. Also at the same time there is no good reason for them to enter on those pages so it will increase the overall bounce rate if people are entering on them.
Privacy policy, shipping, and return policy, I would not specifically no-index them, but I would not try to optimize them for anything other business name - page name. That being said, if you are like Costco and offer some amazing return policy that someone can return a product after 10 years for a full refund and it is a popular product; I might consider optimizing the return policy for that as well. Or if you are the only person that offers free international shipping on a large item like a baby grand piano or something. But if you fall in line with the rest of the industry I would just leave them as is and only optimize them for your business name - policy type. So then if people search for your business and return policy those pages will more than likely come up.
My first step would be to start disavowing all of the links in Google before you get a penalty. It is a pain, but it is worth it compared to getting dropped out of the SERP's.
From my understanding and how I do things as well, guest blogging is not dead. Low to no value guest blogging is dead. The issue with guest blogging is people were over using it just to get a link, so sites would have hundreds of guest bloggers and really offer no value. They were basically like a link scheme. I still think high value guest blogging is still alive and well. I write blog posts for high value sites sporadically and the exposure and links help.
In your situation, I would advise the lawyers not to turn down high value sites. For example if the state bar association wanted a guest post about a case, I would do it. If some other local law blogger wanted a guest post, I more than likely would advise not to do it. One thing to keep in mind is that the high value sites rarely have guest bloggers, that is one thing that makes them valuable.
These are my main points.
If my links are taking me tweeting them to get added (some are over a year old with good PA) then my competitors need to tweet their backlinks as well. But if they do not know to do that, then the Mozscape that I am looking at for my competitors is seriously out of date as well. If I start noticing positive changes in their sites, I cannot do any kind of research with Mozscape, since the index is outdated.
About your first crawl statement. What you are saying is there are two indexes, correct? One index that has pages with PA and DA assigned. Then another index of pages that have actually been crawled. Then you merge those indexes to make the Mozscape index and pages with PS and DA that have not been crawled are just orphaned and used for the toolbar.
What factors decide whether a page is crawled or just assigned a rank?
And how can Mozscape be deemed accurate without actually using referral url information?
This is one of the best things I have come across, http://moz.com/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday I have used this way to outreach to loads of people with great results.
The issue is not claiming originality to Google if you file a DMCA request, it is getting it removed from the host. I personally would try to get it removed from the sites article by article and see how that works out. I would craft a letter and copy both the host and the email address you can find for the website on the same email. Then with each one see what happens. I think you will get a good number of them removed.
Change all of your passwords is the first thing you should do. Then you need to examine the server logs to see how they got in. I would check the ftp access logs first. Hopefully you have logging turned on. Then with those logs I would search for lines that are not your ip address. If you are on a static ip and you have had the same ip for a while it should be a lot easier. You will be looking for the other ip address. If you cannot find that the server was accessed from another ip address through ftp, then the next option is to look at the code. There might be an exploit in your site that will allow for it. One thing I would do is look at the files that were added via ftp, they will hold a time stamp on them. You can try to cross reference that time and day with the ftp log. If there is at those times (remember your server might not be set to your time zone) then start looking through the site for a "connector" file. It would have been the first that they created, it is basically a bot file that can create files on your server. If you can find that, check that time stamp against the log.
If you have a restorable version of the site, I would consider doing it. I would also see if your site is label as having malware on it. You can use GWT and sucurri to do that.
As for possibility hurting your rankings, yes, definitely. I would get the issue cleaned up, see if there is a pattern for the files that you can redirect to a 404 page and also the robots.txt file as well. I would also check GWT and see if you have a penalty as well. But I would do all of this ASAP if I were you.
Good that the site is clean. What scurri and programs like that do is analyze the site (your real site, not the made up pages) for malicious code. That means all the public facing files should be intact. Also GWT is google webmaster tools, if you passed the scurri check you should be fine there.
Since it sounds like you are on shared or managed hosting I would send a support email to your host and let them know the issue. They might be able to see where someone got in and when it happened, it is worth a shot at least.
What platform are you running on your site? Is it a cms or a custom platform?
More than likely the reason that Moz never detected the pages is because it is a crawler. It starts with your home page and follows every linking page on your site, if the pages were "orphaned" as it sounds like, the crawler would never have picked them up.
I personally think there is a lack of them and would be interested. I do not know if you are familiar with ecommerce fuel, but they have a forum where everyone is screened and pays $25 a month to be a member. I would be interested in something like that, because it keeps the knowledge level high in my opinion.
You do realize that bought traffic 99% of the time is bot traffic by farms in SE Asia that never actually look at your site, correct?
More than likely it was one 3 things, a DNS issue, a peering issue, or a temp ban.
If you were currently ftp'ing into the site and had too many threads open, usually above 4 or 5 but all depends on the server setting. They can issue a temporary ban on your ip address for the site. Depending on how the server is set up, you can either get an explicit message, which is bad. Or you can just get an error like you, which is good and it means the server is shedding the load.
A DNS issue could be that a name server is down somewhere or having other problems. You generally cannot do anything about this and they are generally fixed quickly because of the amount of sites / information hosted on them is vital.
A peering problem, like a DNS issue is usually spotty. More than likely that is what was happening. A peering issue means you cannot access the "chunk" of internet that the peer directs traffic through. So say you can access 99.9% of everything you want, because it is not going through the peer with the issues.
The best tools you can use to diagnose these problems are TOR, it is a socks proxy that routes your traffic so essentially you will be accessing the site through another isp, who could not be having peering or DNS issues with the hosting isp. Also you can use http://www.whatsmydns.net/ which will let you know what different dns servers around the world are returning. It will let you know if a major DNS server is having an issue. For general checking you can use this as well, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Try taking these two lines out
http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript" />
http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
And moving this line to where they were
href="http://www.myfairytalebooks.com/templates/__custom/Styles/styles.css" media="all" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
I don't know if you have checked it out, but here is a great guide for getting started with Moz, http://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started Also like Malcom mentioned, the forum is a great place to ask questions that you have as well.
I think if it was me and my client, what I would recommend is getting a HIPPA compliant email hosting account and making a submission email with it. Then setting an auto responder to the email account telling them that it is not checked. Also I might try to put a disclaimer some where in the listing as well not to email medical issues.
You can only hurt your business so much by being compliant to peoples stupidities.