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Alan,

I think you misunderstand the situation, they don't seem to be stealing content, but actual products.

You could try the approach you suggested, but be ready to be 'ripped apart' by a mostly malicious community on this kind of pages. They usually do not take lightly to outsiders.

If you want to stop piracy, I assume contacting the admins for removal and filing DMCA claims would be the way to go.

The -1 probably means that you don't have any yet. Wait until the next Linkscape update some time in August and see then again. Give it some time.

Another vote for vBulletin. Overall much more refined with the possibility of adding many plug-ins and customisations.

Sit tight for a few days. If it still stays bad, compare your linking profile to competitors, maybe there is something shady in there (not accusing you of anything) that Google caught outside of a major update. They adjust their algorithm about 500 times a year according to a recent video, so chances are there are daily minor changes. Could be a fluke, too. We had rankings drop down from 5/6  to 10 for a week, and promptly bounce back up again without any interference.

Benefiting or not, make sure users have the ability to turn this off to avoid privacy problems.

It might create a mess though if they link back and forth.

If they are of no value to anybody, I'd just block them.

If they are very technical, just write down the specs or steps that you are discussing at the side, kind of like a guide you can follow while seeing the video.

Hey,

Wordpress has a huge list of pinging services available:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

I would think that one of those will do what you need.

The way I handled it is to have the brand in the root domain and wherever it fit at the end. Otherwise, I used non-branded keywords primarily as organic links generally will give you branded anchor text rather than keywords. You don't want to completely neglect the brand name, but it tends to build itself much more than other keywords.