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I've got a new client who made the mistake of spending $5 on a sack load of dodgy links some time ago.

I'm redoing his site, not set up analtics or WMT or anything yet, just starting on it but I had a look at his backlink profile and it's pretty shocking.  Riddled with porn and money scams etc, but I'm concerned by the nature of one of the links....to the url is disturbing and I'm tempted to report them to the police. :(.

If I use the disavow tool will it remove the links from my backlink profile altogether or just block the dodgy site?  I want to disaccociate the site altogether.

What do you mean by a commercial theme?

I run an ecommerce site and definitely agree about the giveaways.

I notice that you are in the UK - me too.  On the site I run monthly competitions - easy question stuff and the prize value is worth upto £20 per month max.  I run an 'answer this question' in the blog comments and a winner will be chosen at random.  Also, if you think you can get away with it, get them to like, share, tweet or whatever. I then publish that on various competiton sites such as loquax, uk competition sites - there are quite a few.  A good one is HotUK deals, but you cant add your own.  Somebody has to innocently add it for you.  Once these professional compers get hold of it, they'll tweet and like it like crazy.  Make sure the offer is attached to a page on your site so it gets all the social signals.

It depends on your product, but you could hire a good PR person to see if they can tap into some contacts and get you some press about any events. A contact of mine occasionally manages a couple of celebrity endorsements on twitter, but to be honest I find them a bit embarrassing and I doubt they've done any good!

Do you use wordpress?

There are many, many ways that SEOmoz can help improve your sites performance in SERPS but none of those are direct.  Having a pro subscription to SEOMoz, or any service will never affect your rankings.

SEOmoz is really just a set of measurement tools to show you how well your optimisation efforts are working.

So, if you are optimising one particular webpage for one particular keyword you can set that up as a campaign and watch how you are progressing, allowing you to monitor against your competitors.

All of the SEO tools help you to conduct research and analysis to enable you to make decisions when doing onpage and offpage optimisation.  The purpose of the tools is to help you make the best decisions based on insight so you can improve your sites performance.

Use all the tools available in the Research tools section and learn how to use each one.  Also there's a lot of help in the beginners guide.

You can use the tools to show you any errors on your site, duplicate content warnings, keyword analysis etc.  All of this will help you go back and make your site a better place.

The report card tool is exceptionally helpful.

Well you certainly make a compelling case

In general I agree.  I suspect there will be a handful of clever ones tapping into the goldmines, not yet understood by the idiots

I think it depends on the nature and the quality of the sites.  For example, say I got a link from the Guardian and I was so chuffed I posted a link back to the article on the guardian on my blog, I'm pretty certain I would still reap the link juice benefits.

Edit - I just want to add that I do have direct experience of this on a new clients site. As a UK jounalist for a british new site he has dozens  of backlinks to his site.  They;re his only backlinks, his site isn't optimised at all and hasn't been updated in years, yet he has amazing rankings for highly competitive keywords.

All my campaigns (different sites) are crawled weekly.  As far as I understand you can;t control this.

pdfs are indexed just as html pages, so you should avoid duplicating what is on the pdf, as it will look like two duplicate pages on your site.

You can add, summarise or make sensible and good use of the html page and add unique content and that would help.

Re changing the title tags, no you don't need to add any redirection.  Yo only need to do this if you also change the url and the existing url has already been indexed.

I've done quite a bit of redirection on some sites when optimising and so far suffered no issues, but I'm going to go away and view that video!

When I do an incognito search you are number 3.

As a previous poster says, make sure your page is A+ in the analyser.

Beyond that, continue building some high quality backlinks to that page, but also some social signals might help give it a boost.  That page has no plus ones, likes or anything like that.  Tweet the page, get it retweeted, get it all over google plus.

When you use the keyword research tool on SEOMoz you can opt to run off a csv, very detailed breakdown of the stats for the top ten results for that keyword (I think you get 50 per month).  Not sure if you have done that already but I find that very helpful.  Gives all the social signals  backlinks, page authority, domain authority etc.

Hi.  Everything Tom said and I also wanted to add another extension to this - If you use Firefox this is for checking nofollow and dofollow links.  When you add the extension, if you right click and select the nodofollow it hghlights nofollows in red and dofollows in blue.  I use it all the time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nodofollow/

Yes, me too.

There is one that i know of that looks brilliant but I haven't got round to using it yet.

https://ifttt.com/

It's called 'If this, then that'.  It looks really useful.

I use buffer, mainly for twitter (when I remember) and it's great for spreading out the content you are sharing.  Sometimes I might be in meetings all day yet I want to be able to tweet stuff, so its fantastic for that.

Sometimes I've seen twitter feeds that look like they just churn out content, which I don;t think is wise, but as a supplement to what I'm already doing it is great and helpful.

I hope you're right Tom!  I'd hate to have to go and start de-optimising

One of mine does that for a particular search term...I haven't manipulated anything just followed the best practises of SEO across each piece of content.  If I had done any sort of dodgy manipulation, I would have been picked up by panda and penguin.

I hope they are not mistrusted because of it. If it were me experiencing it, I'd definitely remember them and probably look.

Let's face it, all SEO is manipulation of search results!  Anybody who follows the best practises is hoping that their competitor is not and will therefore rank below them.

Ah, sorry I wasn't thinking at all about the non campaign ones...

I honestly don't know, sorry  I expect its the same, but hopefully an SEOmoz person can answer.  Have you been through all the research tools?  I've worked through most of them but I rarely run off reports except for campaigns.

I quite often pull off the keyword analysis reports in csv format.  as a pro i think you get 50 indepth keyword reports a month.  It gives you a top ten site comparison of lots of different potential ranking factors.  That's very useful and as it's csv you can brand it as you wish.

The reports you can run are whatever you can see on your dashboard and you can set these up as scheduled and add or remove as much information as you like.

For example, lets just say you had 5 campaigns.  You could set up a weekly report for each campaign that covered your link anaylsis, increase or decrease in ranking, authority.

Basically, whatever you can report within SEOmoz, you can run off a a PDF, except you can really scale up or down what you want to see.

You could do a weekly detailed report on one campaign, a monthly slightly more high level and a quarterly even more high level, depending on who the audience is.

The reports are just a pdf version of everything you have as part of your pro package.

So I understand.  Happy to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable!

it's the same with the non branded reports - you can run off as many as you have set up but you just get to add your logo and info instead of the seomoz one.