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How long ago did you add the sites to get indexed? I would suggest you check in Bing webmaster tools that the site has actually been indexed first.

From there you will need to allow some time before you can see real ranking results

In our case we don't usually stock the reseller, we rely on a number of wholesalers to distribute our products. This is why we need the leverage, because the normal methods aren't available to us.

I'm also not convinced by the assumption that we're really aiming to suck linkjuice and get clickthroughs. Firstly, we would have pointed it to a more important page, and secondly we would have pointed it to a page that converted into sales for us. And thirdly, if the reseller even suspected that we tried to that, they would stop selling our products. That's just not something we would risk doing. The combined sales of our resellers easily beats our own sales.

Despite that, if you think that our resellers are going lose ranking because they've put up sitewide links, then that's worrying and that's something we need to address.

Yes, in hindsight we probably should have made the link nofollow.

Would putting nofollow and noindex on the FAQ itself make a difference? That should make it obvious to Google that we don't want any of the link juice.

Thanks,
James

Hi SEObd,

To manually submit a sitemap,

1. Crawl your site with Xenu (https://moz.com/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder)
2. Create a Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account for your site and verify it.
3. Submit sitemap manually via GWT (https://support.google.com/sites/answer/100283?hl=en)

Hope that helps,

Emeka.

Press releases are a good way of getting quality links to your site from authoritative domains. Like Rebecca said, first start by identifying if you have anything news worthy to promote then you can plan to reach out to journalists (there are many looking for news to sell).

A good way to start might be to identify if you offer a service or goods that are seasonal, look up trends and find something that can make you stand out based on those trends and try to make a story out of it