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Yes, agreed - will ask for nofollows on backlinks as not doing this for SEO benefit anyway.

It's all been corrected now. In link above, it gives you an exact example of how travel sites have been typically using footer links, and how they have been hit. I'd say my client was a carbon copy. A travel site with keyword rich footers - a few of which pointed externally - most of which pointed at internal pages.

Thanks - it sure is confusing. I mean my background is in PR - and, for example, when I'm running a travel PR campaign I offer free accommodation in return for a review (and do not ask for links!). Of course that could be seen as linkbuilding too, though of course that's not the main focus or benefit (if the reviews are good, that is...).

Site appears to have been hit like other sites mentioned here (the site I refer to above is a travel site): http://moz.com/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

Hiya Mozzers,

My client is about to offer discounts (to a few large multinationals... for staff) and there's every possibility these will appear on the web, with a backlink to my client's website (perhaps direct via websitest / via online newsletters and so on).

I am thinking of telling client to restrict the number of companies they interact with while I monitor backlinks in case there's some kind of problem with backlinks generated. I am also telling them on no account to ask for backlinks or encourage keyword rich links.

Any thoughts on this, anybody? Is there a risk of penalty or am I just being paranoid?

Thanks Oleg - very good of you - will see how I get on...

Thanks Oleg - really helpful to know. Do I correct that and then delete the 10s of thousands of URLs in the infinite loop? What is the best solution?

Hello -just fed website into Screaming Frog and ended up crashing computer as these img/img/img urls went into the 10s of thousands (and the numbers of img/img/img/ in each URL ended up going into the dozens and probably hundreds and more per URL). Never seen anything like it! Any idea what might be going on with this website and why it's generating so many of these URLs - it is anything to worry about?

Here's example of shorter URL...

www.company.com/discover/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/photo-competition-winners

Hi Kurt - very true - they should be taking the time for sure. I think part of problem is legacy of duplicate content - glad I'm not in their shoes!

Yup - rewriting is what I'm doing for those guys - inc new ideas for engaging content. Will let you know how it goes - an interesting project for me as never worked with a directory before!

Thanks for your wise feedback EGOL - appreciated.

Hi Kurt and thanks for your great feedback there - funnily enough have just been writing unique content for these TPIs this week - so they have something different to work if they don't want to grapple with duplicate content issues - I've noticed the clever guys are now employing their own copywriters to produce unique content, yet many do not.

Just been looking at stats for a certain directory site and they've progressively lost traffic since panda struck - there's absolutely nothing wrong with their website (just completed site audit) beyond heavy duplication issues (as they've been copying and pasting property descriptions through to own site).

Can you use rel=canonical effectively if the duplication of a page is extensive yet only partial? in this instance I'm sometimes seeing say 3 paragraph room descriptions - e.g. 1st para carbon copy, yet para 2 and 3 include duplicate content and some new content.

Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites.

I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money.

Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?

yes, sitemap.txt is blocked for some strange reason. I know SEOs do this sometimes for various reasons, but in this case it just doesn't make sense - not to me, anyway.

Thanks for the useful feedback Chris - much appreciated - Is it good practice to use both - I guess it's a good idea if onsite version only includes top-level pages? PS. Just checking nature of block!

Hi, I've just found two sitemaps - one of them is .php and represents part of the site structure on the website. The second is a .txt file which lists every page on the website. The .txt file is blocked via robots exclusion protocol (which doesn't appear to be very logical as it's the only full sitemap). Any ideas why a developer might have done that?

Hi Yiannis - yes, I suspect the footer links pointing to external sites were the issue here - the footer links had been in place for a number of years, apparently. This was definitely a penalty - the traffic fell off a cliff, and then climbed a cliff on removal.

Some agencies I work with tell me internal footers are not a problem but then the very same SEO people said the same about their optimized title tags in the not too distant past. Keyword targetted footer tags, put there for Googlebot rather than humans, are a no no in my book.

I tend to work in Britain and Ireland and use Google+, Facebook, Twitter.

Then additional tools depending on site.

I see same probs with Google+ but even if engagement isn't so good (yet!) there are plenty of other benefits - some are mentioned here: http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1600736

Social signals are important: http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013

I've just been playing with one of my own new sites. Level of social media engagement appears to make the difference between a top of first page ranking and second page ranking re: a competitive keyphrase I'm tracking. I am going to widen my testing to additional keyphrases in due course.

Btw, you might find this interesting: http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013

Just seen my first rather dramatic sitewide footer links penalty. Virtually all organic search traffic fell off site for 3 months. The footer links were a mix of keyphrases targeted at internal pages and keyphrases targeted at a handful of other associated companies (a group of enterprises owned by same businessman, with websites hosted in the same place). The website developers felt they were improving search engine visibility.

Anyway, as soon as I started work with this client I requested immediate removal of the footer links and traffic immediately recovered to pre-penalty levels (within a couple of days).

Have any of you experienced anything similar?