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Hey Chris, If your domain is onedirection.net and people are linking to your images on cdn.onedirection.net you are seeing some benefit, just not as much as if they were on onedirection.net root domain. If that's the case that's why they are coming up in your Just Discovered links. If however cdn.onedirection.net is your CDN completely irrespective of your domain and your site is on another domain like justinbieber.com then nope you won't get any link equity from that. -Mike

Further to my previous update, it now seems that Penguin 2.1 positively affected our site. So there's still the chance that the disavowed links have not been taken into account yet. Either way, rankings have remained strong, but we still think there is further to go. We're continuing to contact sites directly, asking them to remove or nofollow our links.

Hey Chris, I agree that your current implementation, while not ideal, is perfectly adequate for the purposes of ensuring you don't have duplicate content or cannibalisation problems - but still allows Google to index the UCG images. You're also preventing Googlebot from seeing the user profile pages, which is a good idea, since many of them are very thin and mostly duplicate. So, from a pure SEO perspective, I think you've done a good job. However... I think you should also consider the ethical implications of potentially blocking the image googlebot as well. By preventing Google from indexing all those images of young girls fawning over the vacuous runners up of a televised talent show, you would undoubtedly be doing the world a great service.

Thanks for raising this question Chris!  I would also wanted to know this, as the competition of the apps in Play is much high. I guess, number of referrals/traffic to a particular app page may also count. but not sure. Lets wait for any positive proven record/answer.

"the US rankings are still very strong, so for any Penguin penalisation wouldnt it be applied equally across all indexes?" I'm not sure - I think the updates are usually language based as Google phrases it along the lines of "1% of English language queries will be affected" - but tapshop321 is UK-based so who knows... "With the explosion of the band, again if this was a a major factor, wouldnt we have dropped equally on Google.com ?" It's just a hunch but I'd say no, perhaps based on the above, quality of links from either country and potentially hundreds of other factors. If I was you I'd write occasional guest articles, with a link back to onedirection.net, for other related UK websites - fansites or official sites of similar bands perhaps. I wouldn't bother too much with getting exact match anchor text - if you use your URL you have the match anyway and you don't want your link profile to be too heavily waited towards one phrase, just in case (even though you should naturally get 'one direction' matches). Mix it up a bit if you go ahead, with URL links and phrases like 'one direction fansite'. Even just a mention of One Direction in these articles could help. Have you interviewed One Direction or similar UK bands? If you could, they're likely to link to the interview on your site. If you haven't already, perhaps setting up Google+ Authorship would help too.