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Very interesting question.  No one really knows whether Google takes into account links from your own sites via the Penguin algorithm.  If you have an obvious network for links then I've seen that penalized via MANUAL review, but can Penguin get that?

Bill Slawski writes here about a patent that Google may use to detect paid links.  Part of the patent describes ways that Google could determine which sites are owned by you and devalue links between those sites.

Are sponsorship links unnatural?  It really depends on the nature of the sponsorship.  There are pages where you can donate $5 to sponsor some software and in return you get listed on a PR5 page along with other sponsors who have names like "cheap payday loans" and "online casino".  Those are unnatural sponsors.

Technically, according to the quality guidelines all sponsored links should be nofollowed.  However, if you have links from places that you have sponsored and you legitimately would have sponsored these businesses even if there was no followed link in it for you, then IMO it's very unlikely that you'll get in trouble.  With that being said, if you had hundreds of these links then a manual reviewer could probably pick up quite easily that something unnatural is going on.  The other factor to help you with making your decision is whether the other links on the page make sense.  Again, if they have a link to you and then other links that are obviously there so that people can get a link (and not because they make sense as sponsors) then I'd get the link nofollowed.

Your personal sites kind of follow the same rules.  If the links are ones that you would have placed even if they were nofollowed then they're probably ok.  Are they keyword anchored?  If so, then this can be seen as an attempt to manipulate Google so that's not good.

It's hard to give an exact answer, but in each case if you ask yourself whether the link was made with the intention of helping your Google rankings then you know that you probably should be nofollowing it.

Adwords really don't have any effect on your site's rankings at all.  The links that come from the ads are nofollowed.

I just wanted to add that I've had a few minor issues with the site and customer service dealt with them EXTREMELY quickly and to my satisfaction.

I find that the first few weeks after an update the SEO world is awash with dangerous speculation.  I'm excited to see some real data on sites that have recovered.  Until then I'm going to try to avoid speculating.

That's a pretty broad question!

If you haven't done so, go through everything in the beginner's guide to SEO.

On quick view, I see that you've got your business name as the first part of your title on each page.  I usually like to put it near the end, and reserve the beginning for my most important keyword.

It certainly is possible that bad links are affecting the site's ability to rank well.  If you disavowed, then there's a good chance that you won't see the benefit of that disavow until the next Penguin refresh and in some cases, two refreshes need to happen.  You're right - you would expect to see a drop that coincides with the date of a Penguin refresh if Penguin were the sole culprit but there's still a lot we don't know about Penguin.  Hopefully it will refresh soon and you'll see some improvement.

You may want to assess the site for Panda issues as well.  Google has 735 pages indexed.  If a good number of these are ones that don't add significant value on their own then this can cause Google to lose some trust in the quality of your site.  Here are some pages that are indexed that probably shouldn't be:

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/ifrBlank.aspx

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/ifrLogin.aspx

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/ifrComprar.aspx

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/NoResultados.aspx

I'd go through the site and either noindex or remove pages like this.  If there is a Panda issue then Panda tends to refresh about once a month but Google doesn't announce the dates of refreshes anymore.  Again it can sometimes take a couple of refreshes to notice a difference.

Here are a couple of other things to consider:

-There is very little text above the fold of your home page.  This could trigger the above the fold page layout algorithm.

-The page might be keyword stuffed.  I don't speak Spanish, but when I translate the page the word "parts" appears 22 times.  If keyword stuffing is an issue, then removing they keyword stuffing can often produce good results quite quickly.

Ah!  I just did Google translate and realized that "refacciones bmw" for which you want to rank is "BMW parts".  It certainly is possible that you are being demoted for keyword stuffing.

I have found Alexa to be insanely unpredictable.  One of my sites was sitting at about 250,000 at one point.  It was getting about 1000 visitors per day.  It now gets 4000-5000 visitors per day and has an Alexa ranking of 330,000.  It makes no sense.

I have heard that the stats are relatively accurate if you are within the top 100,000 but I don't know that for sure.

Alexa stats are driven by people visiting your site who have the Alexa toolbar installed.  So, I think in my case, when my site was at 250,000, I had posted some questions in some SEO forums and a bunch of SEOs (who had the toolbar installed) visited my site.  But, given that my site is not related at all to SEO, my average visitor these days is not likely to have the toolbar.

Really, IMHO the Alexa number only means something if you are trying to sell your site or get advertisers.

To expand on EGOL's answer, if you are taking someone else's content (even with their permission) and wanting Google to index it then Google can see that you have a large amount of copied content on your site.  This can trigger the Panda filter and can cause Google to consider your whole site as low quality.

You can add a noindex tag as EGOL suggested or you could use a canonical tag to show Google who the originator of the content is, but probably the noindex tag is easiest.

There is one other option as well.  If you think it is possible that you can add significant value to the content that is being provided then you can still keep it indexed.  If you can combine the recall information with other valuable information then that might be ok to index.  But, you have to truly be providing value, not just padding the page with words to make it look unique.

Mystery solved.  Two major changes happened today:

1. Payday loans algo update - affects very spammy queries: http://searchengineland.com/official-google-payday-loan-algorithm-2-0-launched-targets-spammy-queries-192027 - This is what looked like Penguin but it wasn't Penguin.

2. A big Panda update - https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985.  Google doesn't usually announce Panda updates but I suppose if they affect enough queries it's worthy of announcing.

I run a Q&A site that does quite well.  There can be issues to watch out for.  You have to monitor all user generated content.  If users are allowed to create links I would make them all nofollowed links otherwise you'll end up getting people spamming the site just to create a link for themselves.

The biggest  challenge is making sure that you don't have thin pages that get indexed.  Let's say you have a site where 10 pages are your important business pages and then you've got 2000 Q&A pages.  Of those 2000 Q&A pages let's say that the majority of them are pages that contain short or unhelpful answers.  All of a sudden a huge percentage of your site can be deemed low quality by Google and your entire site, not just the Q&A section can be severely affected by Panda.

There are ways to make sure that this doesn't happen.  The easiest is monitoring all of the questions and applying a noindex tag or deleting ones that are unlikely to be helpful to someone who is doing a Google search.  But, if you have a lot of user generated content another possible solution is to programatically apply a noindex tag to any content that is short or that has a higher bounce rate than a certain number.  I'm not saying that bounce rate is necessarily a Panda factor, but if your bounce rate is normally 30% and a particular page is consistently having 90% of users bounce away then that can be a sign that that page is not a high quality one.

m.biz links pretty widely across the web.  I think that Google probably ignores these links. However, no one knows that for sure.  So, I usually recommend disavowing them just to be safe.

Here's more: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2364322/Whats-the-Deal-With-Links-From-M.Biz-Should-You-Disavow

You've gotten some good responses so far. I'll add a couple of my thoughts.

There are still LOTS of sites that can get away with spam and not get caught by Penguin. I haven't investigated this site, but it's possible that the links are on a private blog network that Penguin was not able to recognize as a link scheme.

And who knows...perhaps they've got their bad links disavowed. It's also possible that Google is ranking this site because users tend to engage with it.

Hi John,

You can certainly redirect these to the main site, but they're not likely to add value beyond capturing type in traffic unless the domains have links pointing to them. I think it's a good idea to buy these for competitive reasons. If I were you, I'd likely 301 redirect them to the main site and then ignore them.

If your site is selling the same products that many other sites are, then the only way you can expect to rank well is if you are adding significant value that isn't available anywhere else.

It's not enough to say that your added value is the fact that users can find everything in one convenient place.

Let's say that I had an ecommerce store that sold camping equipment. But, everything in my store was also available on many other websites. If someone was searching for a particular type of sleeping bag, for example, why would Google want to show them my store rather than the original merchant?

But, let's say that my page that sells that sleeping bag also offers information such as the following:

-A guide to choosing the sleeping bag

-Unique customer reviews

-A video showing how to roll the bag up

and so on.

Now that I've got some good, helpful content, users may decide that rather than buying the product from the manufacturer they'd like to browse my site and get good helpful information and possibly buy from me.

In the past, you could get away with having a site that simply carried product feeds and you could rank that site well if you built enough links. But, self made links are less and less effective as Google is getting better at figuring out what is legitimate. So now, if you want to rank well, you have to truly have a site that is extremely helpful and unique...not just unique in the words on the page, but unique in the type of value you are offering to others, which is not always an easy task.

According to Google, all TLDs including the new ones are treated the same when it comes to ranking.

Personally I think that the .com is still the better choice for most sites because users recognize this as a "normal" thing. If I was presented with either brandname.com to click on or brandname.shoes to click on, I'd like prefer the .com.

The times where I think a new TLD might be good are for those where the .com is taken but not being used. There is still a bit of an exact match boost and I think if you can get the exact match with one of the new extensions this could give you a very slight ranking boost.

But really, given the choice I'd still want the .com.

Personally, I'd only take this if the link was nofollowed (i.e. for traffic purposes).  I might consider a followed link using my url as an anchor, but would definitely not do it with a keyword as anchor text.

When considering links like this I would suggest considering the part of the quality guidelines that says, "Would you still do this if search engines didn't exist?"  Ask yourself that objectively.  If the idea is to get the footer link so it helps your SEO, then it has a high chance of looking manipulative to Google and could invoke a penalty/Penguin issue.  But if the idea of the footer link is that it is truly one that drives traffic to your site then it may be ok.

What I find though is that it is hard for webmasters to evaluate these kinds of links objectively.  We often fool ourselves into thinking it is for the traffic when really deep down we know that the purpose is to improve the pagerank of our own site.

If this site owner was willing to give you a footer link, I wonder, if instead, they would give you a mention in a blog post or article?  That may appear more natural in the eyes of Google.

Check out this article here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCz5ELUKGBk&NR=1

In it, Rand says that if you have quality fans (or followers in Twitter) who are sharing your stuff then this is helpful:

• Quantity of Friends/Followers - like links, it's likely the case that more is better, though there will likely be caveats; low quality bots and inauthentic accounts are likely to be filtered (and may be much easier to spot than spammy links, due to the challenge they find in getting any "legitimate" friends/followers).
• Importance of Friends/Followers - the friends/followers you have, like the link sources you have, are also probably playing a role. Earn high "authority" followers and you yourself must be a high authority person.
• Analysis of Friends/Followers Ratios - Much like the engines' analysis of the editorial nature of links, consideration of whether a social user is engaging in following/follower behavior purely out of reciprocity vs. true interest and engagement may be part of authority scoring. If you have 100K followers and follow 99K of them, but the engagement between you and your followers is slim, you're likely not as authoritative as an account with 100K followers + 5K following, but those followers are constantly engaged, retweeting, liking, sharing, etc.

In my opinion, the most valuable thing you can get from facebook is when people click the like button on your website to share your stuff with their facebook friends.  I think having fans is good - but mostly for social interaction with you and your brand.  I think it helps when someone clicks "like" on a facebook post but I don't think it has a huge impact in the serps.

A quick look at your backlink profile shows that you've got a lot of followed footer links containing the anchor text "web design".  This type of tactic used to work at one time but no longer works and in some cases can get you penalized.

The best thing you can do is analyze your Analytics and see when you started to lose traffic for keyword phrases containing "web design".  There's a good chance it happened Apr 24, May 25 or Oct 5 which were Penguin dates.

It's also not a bad idea to check WMT for a manual unnatural links warning just in case.

If this is Penguin, then some people who have had Penguin issues because of footer links like this have been able to recover.  Recovery in general would involve having each of these sites nofollow the link (or potentially change it to something like your url, but this is debatable).

Then, when there is another Penguin refresh you should see some type of recovery.  BUT, if this type of link was your only type of link and you don't have much of a natural link profile then you may not rank after all.  You may need to start doing some things to earn natural links.

If you do have the footer links nofollowed/changed, you won't see any improvement until Google refreshes Penguin again which could be anywhere from today to months from now.

Thanks Rand!  This really makes sense to me.

I've always considered H1 tags a non-entity when it comes to SEO.  I write my H1 tags to add a headline to help the user understand what the page is about.  But my title is really written primarily for search engines (with the idea that it needs to make sense for the reader as well.)

First off...thank you EGOL for mentioning me as someone who understands penalties.  The crazy thing is that even though that's all that I do these days, I can sometimes spend several hours digging in to a site's analytics, backlinks and the site itself and still not be completely sure what is causing the traffic drop.  It seems that the important point that most are trying to get across in this thread is that you're not likely to be able to solve your problem in this Q&A.

With that being said, here are a few things that you can look at that might give you some clues:

-Have you checked in Webmaster Tools for any manual actions?  Go to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions

-Have you run a check for malware?  Run the site through sucuri.net.

-Take a look at just the organic non-branded traffic in Google Analytics.  To do that look at click Acquisition --> Keywords --> Organic.  Then near the right hand side click on "advanced".  Set it to exclude your brand name.

Once you've done that can you see a distinct day where the traffic starts to drop?  This might give you a clue as to which algorithm you were likely affected by.  With that being said, although Panda officially rolled out May 20, many sites that had Panda changes started seeing changes as early as May 17 and Payday loans was live either May 17 or 18.  Still, if your drop happened on a day other than May 17-20 then you could be looking at something else.  I personally think there have been some minor Panda refreshes in June, but sites that were affected were the ones who saw a big change around May 20.

If there was no obvious change on that date then here's a list of other things you can look at that might be reasons for a traffic drop that are NOT algorithmic:

http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/reasons-for-traffic-to-drop-other-than-penalty/

But, I want to repeat that it's often not a simple diagnosis.

Just to clarify your original post, there was no Penguin update recently.  The last one was October of 2013.