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Honestly, I have looked at every tool out there but most tools look at patterns and collect data over time. If you go and start using these tools, they will take the more obvious ones out but using the disavow with manual will be a better and reliable option

Thanks guys, very interesting stuff and something we expect to see a lot more of throughout 2014, and perhaps implemented on SearchBuzz at a later date. Regards

Hey Ashley, I am really sorry that your report isn't completing. Unfortunately, there are some sites that have such large link profiles that our system is not able to export the data for these site and it looks like this is the case with your competitor site. Basically, our system has to call the full link profile and then collate the data for the report, which causes a timeout in the system. Our engineers are working on a solution for this issue, but I'm afraid that we currently don't have an ETA for this issue. In the meantime, you can run an Advanced report, using the filters to narrow down the results we need to pull to create the report. For example, I set the minimum DA for 75 and I was able to export an Advanced report for your competitor's site. I apologize for the inconvenience this causes. Please let me know if you need any further assistance. Chiaryn

Hey Ashley I want to just clarify - do you mean to say people were spamming links to your site in order to receive automatic trackbacks from your site? Otherwise, having comment/trackback spam on your site is a separate issue from having incoming spammy links. So, if your automatic trackbacks were like a magnet attracting poor links, and you have now shut off this function, in theory the bad links should spot coming in, which they seem to have stopped. So your next step as Chris suggests is to disavow all the bad domains. But aside from that, in general I would think you would want comments and maybe even trackbacks to be active on your site, in which case I would enable them but require moderator approval on all first-time comments/trackbacks - this should deter spammers etc. Then what you also want to do in order to activate comments is go through all of your old posts and completely delete all comment and trackback spam and leave only the real ones. -Dan

Ashley Chris has got the right idea - what you want to do is check the source code (HTML) of the page as it's loaded in the mobile device. I believe you could also use the user agent switcher in a desktop browser to see how it would render on a variety of mobile devices. Essentially, if you can find the source code for that ad in the HTML, even when loading on a mobile device, the ad is present but hidden. This is where my knowledge drops off a little - as I am not 100% of the mechanism that triggers an ad to count as an impression. It must fire off a javascript code - which in theory will happen if it's present but hidden in the HTML. Hopefully that helps you determine how it's displaying / not displaying. But the other thing is - people are using mobile sites all the time that have ads but are responsive - there must be a standard way for the ad provider to understand this is happening? Maybe talk to them too and see if you'll get a negative mark from it. They may do something to compensate for this.

Thanks, I will check that out. I have been good with the links I have created myself. Some backlinks are spam, and we are working hard to break the link with those, but its tricky when it comes to Wordpress sites. I have actually checked out the recent links on high domain authority wordpress sites and they are having the same issue, but due to healthy amounts of good backlinks, it does not seem to be causing them an issue.

I've done a little more research on this I was intrigued... My site uses a custom blog, not a public platform, if you visit it (the blog area) it looks alike wordpress but it isn't. We also use NetDNA to serve images, which is the parent company of maxcdn. My image search in Google returns to my posts, not the images (but there are 2 differences with your site: custom URLs on NetDNA (also possible with maxcdn) and not a Wordpress site). Then I checked for a small blog I write about SEO, works with wordpress but without NetDNA (CloudFlare instead as the CDN) and the images in google search also link to my posts. So that leaves with only one option, custom domains. You are serving images using a third party domain, which can be seen as a hotlink by Google and therefore they may link to the domain hosting the image, as it is probably the image owner. This are just guesses, but it looks like a nice/possible theory. Why don't you start using custom domains with maxcdn and see what happens?

I figured as much. Its a shame that it has come down to that. Its amazing how my website still gets about 3000 comments a day, all of which are in a spam queue. People seem to think they are still counting for something. What would you say is your favourite way for building links now then? (without spilling your secret sauce of course)

Hmmm, for this question: I am wondering how I can go ahead and use sub folders and have a seperate site, for example using Wordpress Multisite, at domain.com/technology, and it not cause any issues should there be a news piece on the main site that has technology in the title, which could happen. What are your recommendations for overcoming that? Let us take an example: domain.com/technology.html and domain.com/technology. In a scenario like this, the target term is, 'technology' that would be in the titles on both the pages (on the technology.html page and on the homepage of domain.com/technology/ ). So we have a keyword cannibalism here, two pages competing for the same keyword. In cases like this, we should decide which page from our website should rank for the term and put rel=canonical on the other page pointing to the preferred one. And yes, you can definitely port all the mini sites to their respective folders on the main domain without a second thought. Once you move them, just make sure to go for page-to-page 301 and you should be good. Would like to share a personal experience here. I had a client few years back that wanted to with a mushroom websites approach and many of them targeting the same set of keywords/phrases and with an intention to occupy multiple positions in search results. Despite me making them aware of the possible consequences, they insisted to go with the strategy. First few months were very fruitful but after that disaster struck. Many of those websites were thrown out of index overnight. We took down all of those websites and moved the content from them to the sub-folders of the flagship website. It took 6 weeks for us to see anything good happening and after that, there was no turning back. The flagship website literally ruled the niche and became an authority in the niche. Here is thread here on Moz regarding the sub-domain strategy. Please go through it and it would be of some help to you. It talks about sub-domains vs sub-folders. http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-subdomains-my-worst-seo-mistake-now-what-should-i-do And here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/subdomains-vs-subfolders Best regards, Devanur Rafi