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Hi, a website I know of, let's call it Americanizedwine.com, is undergoing development. It includes a detailed map of hundreds wine growers right across the Americas, with all the map grower icons / names pointing to unique pages within Americanizedwine.com (info pages with online retail functionality where wine grower wants to sell direct through this website).

This website is teaming up with wine magazines / food blogs etc., offering them subdomains of Americanzedwine.com - e.g. [magazinename].americanizedwine.com - to carry within their own websites > duplicating the map and all the wine grower/retail pages from Americanwizedwine.com website, including meta data, etc (hmmmm!).

Could you simply use some method to simply tell Google that the mother website is elsewhere, and this subdomain information is simply duplicate copy? Would that suffice I’m wondering? Or will the solution here require deeper exploration?

Thanks for your responses everyone. Really helpful and much appreciated, Luke

Hi Robert and thanks for your feedback there - 4 out of 24 pages are of some concern here. SERPs and enquiries from these internal pages is, good so they did get some ROI from their linkbuilding work. That said, not sure leaving things as they stand is worth the risk. This is locally-focused SEO, in an area without huge competition.

Regarding these 4 pages, I'm seeing a mix of article submission / social bookmarketing going on and use of poor quality directories (in the main using same directory description text over and over again, and the same article submission text) - though I haven't found any gambling or other such website nasties backlinking to the website in question.

Of these 4 pages, I'm seeing between 100 and 250 backlinks per page (Homepage has around 800 backlinks - generally OK and all looks very natural) - and no other internal pages, other than these 4 pages, have more than 5 backlinks each.

Hi all,

I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages.

These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.

I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs.

Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it?

Thanks in advance, Luke

I agree Mat, but it's difficult to tell who is who. Client worked with a big name in the world of digital marketing. They checked references, put in place a carefully worded contract (phew!) and (thankfully) I had the knowledge to identify a well-hidden blog network, and secure link takedown. The SEO industry needs an aggressively policed quality standard, in my opinion.

Hi, an incredibly popular website, with several thousand pages, has offered me a site-wide footer logo link.

The site this popular website would backlink to has 50 high quality backlinks (and low volumes of traffic - it's a new site).

I am tempted to say no, because of the risk of penalty, but then I started wondering whether a logo link posed the same penalty risk as a text link.

Exactly the reason I don't use (or trust) SEO agencies. I've seen this, I've seen blog networks. You name it...

Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there.

It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.

Hi,

I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website.

I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site.

That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.

What would you advise?

Thanks Marie, Irving, EGOL, Andy - excellent advice as ever!

Hi, was just wondering about suppliers linking to website - copywriters, web developers, etc. - could these be seen as purchased links by Google. Is it best to specify that suppliers shouldn't link through?

Thanks Donnie and Oleg - good advice there! Couldn't believe how many dodgy sites were hitting this particular site. Around 15% of links (out of not many links - around 300) from dodgy outfits all doing more or less the same kind of stuff.

Some great feedback here - firstly, thanks EGOL - I'm focusing 100% on content on a new site. Should be interesting - and that's a good point re: vandalism. I am concerned with the consequences of negative SEO / scrapers, clones, etc., though. Would be so good to be able to cut nasty incoming links in some way (I can but dream...) Love that saying too Donnie!

Good points there Marie - yes I get plagued by that stuff too - I'm beginning to wonder whether many of these comments are more about hoping some lunatic will click on the link than about manipulating SEO though.

To be totally honest, I wouldn't mind if Google laid down specific rules for linkbuilding. We advise that site owners should only proactively build no more than 10 links/page from relevant sites. The rest should be generated naturally. Something far more specific than we have at the moment.

And thanks Arpeggio. A very good point indeed. I agree.

There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason.

I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there?

I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it.  I'm sure most of us on here could do the same.

Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?

Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names).

To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed.

Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.

I will have another go I think

http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/business/2b-n5hzA9EU/discussion - hope that helps > I posted it before and someone got wrong end of stick, so tried again.

The person answering here suggests it is fine, and having just looked back at SEOMoz forum notes, I've been given same advice from someone on these forums before.

That said, it might be logical in some way to have both, but it might land you in trouble as you've suggested. Would be so good to clarify this point.

A good many people will be getting this wrong.

Thanks Miriam. I haven't had an answer, so not holding up much hope. Is there anyone on the SEO Moz team who may have stumbled across such a specific ssue before? Do you have better access to Google? L