Welcome to the Q&A Forum

For now, I will have to stick to my over-optimization theory, in part because I have seen it too many times and have nothing else to go on short of a full audit. Even natural links can cause it. It is not fair, to an extent, but it happens a lot.

Hi Purple Indigo, If I can, I'll try and actually telephone the person I want the link from - this way they can't bin my enquiry out-of-hand without reading it! It is much, much easier to get the link you want if you can speak to the person (if the person runs a business local to me, I'll try and meet them for coffee to ask!) If I can't speak to a link prospect, I will email them. These have a lower success rate than the ones initiated by phone. We haven't created any link bait for our sites. This is mostly down to a lack of resource. I can't ask for a designer/writer's time for something that may not work. But, having said that, we do create a ton of regular advice articles (I work for a mortgage broker specialising in landlord mortgages) and these get linked to naturally (but there is no control over these links, but they are still very nice to have!!!) What are your preferred methods? Amelia

Hey Chris and Kurt, Please do be aware that we've noindexed the majority of those pages, even around 100 that have unique content on. Our aim is to concentrate the site to a handful of select pages to see if that works first (as it should in theory). We've certainly paid a lot of attention to our content, which isn't a new thing for us. We've included videos of people unlocking the handset where we can - I've created some myself to broaden our reputation on Youtube, which also make their way onto our site. We have instructions for a large number of handsets on the pages, along with unique images and descriptions. I've even worked on numerous other "big" pieces for publication on our news pages, which have got links from the Washington Post, Huffington Post, TUAW, IntoMobile, etc and even phone networks. To manage it all, we noindex the pages with "thin" content and previously blocked Googlebot from going on them in the first place. Having unique content on all pages shouldn't be, and I don't believe is necessary (there are various examples to support that). We've even stuck close to the rules by incorporating noindex like a boss for content we don't think should be included. However, one of the kickers is that I've been reviewing our industry and our competitors, noticing time and time again that a lot of the ranking sites have even less unique content than we do. They stick solidly to a script, never creating a hint of unique content, even posting unlocking videos for unrelated phones on certain pages. Yet, they rank. They focus no attention to robots.txt or noindexing crap content and yet away they go blissfully into the SERPs sunset. These competitors certainly don't have the same links as us or comparably useful content. I'd consider myself pretty knowledgeable at SEO, yet this makes no sense. It's difficult to include all the same information on what we've done in these posts without making them stupidly long but a lot of the "standard" stuff, we've done. We've been working on getting this right for over a year, even tossing aside an extremely powerful previous domain (with some success). If Google were a person, I'd put a bag over their head and see how they like it.

Facebook Page Likes are not the same as the Facebook Like number that OSE shows.  The Facebook Like number that OSE shows is for "Likes" for that specific URL. For example, if you put a Facebook Like button on your site - it would increment the number of likes for that URL, not the number of likes for your Facebook Page. If your Facebook Page is set up with the correct URL, search engines will associate the two with one another.

Hey Purple Indigo, Sounds to me like you are one of the few thought leaders in your niche which is why you're struggling to find others, and perhaps "others" are "competitors", where your not going to get a mention/link from in a million years. If you're still struggling with this, my suggestion would be slightly different and approach thought leaders of CLOSELY RELATED niches, and introduce yourself as the thought leader in your niche. You'll need to put a spin on the introduction and how phone unlocking is linked to their niche. Think niches like... gadgets/tech mobile/app developers PC repairs/over-clockers etc Money saving tips I'm sure you could find some middle ground with thought leaders in these niches? You just need to get creative and be prepared to share their content first. Hope this helps Woody

Purple Indigo, Robert's right on most accounts.  Something that you might also want to think about is the "Google Rel=author" tag.  If you're going to be using any kind of blog on this site, using the "Rel=author" tag that's tied into Google+ can help you rank higher in the search results and also give your brand some identity.  I know you've mentioned that you don't consider this a product that you would want to use to connect with your audience, however the push in the search rankings might be something of interest.

Definitely agreed. There are lots of clues pointing to the existence of a penalty, but I can't figure out what the penalty would be.