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Sounds like a tough situation. Once your site gets back online, visit your Google Webmaster tools to see what they are saying in there. You might be able to reply with a message telling them what happened.

As long as you can get your site back online, you might only see a drop (if any) for a few days.

Good luck!

I should have been more specific. While the social icon buttons should be present, you should also include the open graph protocol on the site.

I had three show up for one of our test sites. All came on 3/29. All said the same thing.

Funny thing is, while it said that we had to request re-inclusion into the index, the site remains well ranked on other terms.

This makes us think that the infractions are for getting exact match anchor text links (they were the ones that got the messages). Compared to the other organic links we earned (variations of the anchor text in the links).

So, this latest wave of penalties applies to keywords, not the site, which is a step in the right direction.

We are already anticipating what the next penalized type of link will be, and we are already actively testing.

The thing about "White Hat" is all up to how you define it. When any person looks at the page in question, it clearly looks like a spammy technique. Unfortunately, this method does work - otherwise people wouldn't do it.

I doubt this would pass any human review as being a quality page, and there are many legit ways to take the idea of the product/city page to make it provide a quality experience for the user.

I don't know if this will solve your problems, but could you program the site using breadcrumb navigation? That will go a long way in your seo efforts.

Like Anthony said - create great content, and you'll never have to worry about linking penalties. Here's another item to consider - links are always going to be pointed to your site, and not all are going to be of high quality sites today. But, you never know that one blog that stays online and in 5 years from now has grown into an authority site.

People are way over-reacting to this latest Google "penalty". If it was that easy to lose your rankings to just a few blog networks, why wouldn't I go out and get thousands of "bad" links pointed to my competitor to de-rank them?

Look deeper at what Google is trying to accomplish.

For now,  I don't see any changes needed to traditional linking methods. Most people who are not marketers probably are going to be slow to use Google Plus, since they've already invested their time into Facebook.

You should always be building links to your site as if search engines didn't exist anyways - that's just a good practice for link building. You should be getting links on topical sites where your target audience already is.

Even if Google Plus does somehow get anywhere near the amount of users as Facebook, I just think the privacy issues and monopoly issues will surface. That will force Google to ease up on the forced exposure of their own products in order to make it look like they are being fair in the eyes of the Government.

But, stranger things have happened!

Are the 301's for old urls on the existing domain that now point to a new one? Or are they from an old (or expired) domain that you are looking to pass along that value?

If it's an old or expired domain, you should be able to remove the 301 after 90 days.

If everything is still on the same server, you should keep them intact. 500 re-directs isn't a tremendous amount.

I work with some enterprise level clients that have millions of 301's in place.

Hope this helps!

Google knows that there are high quality directories out there, and BOTW is one of them. Since Google knows that real humans are reviewing the sites that are submitted and allowed to appear on the site, it's a quality service that benefits the web.

While the list of high quality directories is small, they are certainly worth getting for any link building campaign.

I run 2 wordpress blog sites - 1 where the home page is static, and the other has a home page that is updated with at least one new post per day.

Both sites rank very well, and on the day a post is made live, typically about 4 hours later, I can find that post on the first page in Google. Of course, both sites have been online over 4 years each, so there is some trust that has been earned.

You should do what makes the most sense for your readers. If the site is about content that changes frequently, then it might make sense to use those posts as the home page.

Good luck!

The only experience I've had is a client who was heavily involved in Social media (youtube/twitter/fb) decided to create a new brand under a new domain.

We did so, and 301'd all the social "link juice" to the new domain. We were able to keep most of the traffic that was arriving for about three weeks, then it started to fade away. Keep in mind we actively told readers about the new social profiles to follow, and convinced about 75% of the audience to follow the new profiles.

As to the link juice getting passed along, The new site only needed about 3 months to get ranked, so my take is that yes, using a 301 will send the signals along.

good luck!

It all depends on what you want to achieve with the blog. I run 2 sites that get lots of comments. For one site, the comments become part of the content of the site (it essentially sets a scenario for people to debate over) so for that example, it adds to the uniqueness f the site.

For another site that I run, I have to spend a lot of time monitoring the comments since many people are there to just drop a link. Like everything on the web, you need to decide what's going to make your site stand out from the rest.

Allowing "junk" comments won't add any value.

Most people like to use a blend of linking to your pages that include your brand name plus keyword, a certain percentage of just your brand, and then the smallest amount using the anchor text you want to get ranked for.

Also be sure  to so the same on the social networks too.

Google knows it's a parked domain and will discount that link in time - don't sweat about it.

I had to deal with this exact issue for a new client. Our solution - we compiled a list of all the parked domains (over 500!) and sent that to Google with a detailed account of why we felt those links should be discounted.

It took about 2 weeks from start to finish, and although those links still appear in OSE, the rankings have returned for the client.

Hope this helps - Good luck!

The one constant you should always use as a guide is will this action benefit the reader? Anytime that answer is yes, then you should have nothing to worry about.

If you are using strategies with the intention of building links only, then you have to figure at some point in time, Google will adjust the value of those links.

Like Cornell said, there are much better ways to invest that monthly budget. You should look for a company that will work with your goals and create a strategy around getting your terms ranked.

There are many ways to earn links that will get quality traffic to your site.

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This is something we can help you with, if you're interested, send me a message!