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Hi Justin, thanks for the feedback.

I'm not sure I would have been concerned had it just been a couple of links from the sites.

The sites linking are credible well established blogs, with great content. And the response on the sites are genuine unique responses in the comments section to articles created.

It seems to be the nature of the comment form and the set up of the blog plugin that makes this look suspicious.

I believe I will see if its possible to keep the comment and just remove the link.

Irving, thanks for the feedback, in answer to your questions:

A)The 2 blogs are not shady in the slightest, both are long standing technical blogs created by respected individuals in their field.

The comments are technical response's to articles created by the individuals.

B) Our site has an extensive link profile with a domain age of 5+ years.

C) Yes, easy to remove the links. Agreed, 80 pages linking to 1 does not look natural. I will see if the comment can remain, its a good response.

Howdy fellow Mozzers....

Since Googles Penguin Update I am overly cautious when reviewing our link profile. I spotted 2 domains linking to us yesterday, 80+ links from each domain to our homepage. This looked superstitious, site wide links effectively.

At first inspection I couldn't spot the links....they turned out to be two individual comments, but as the site had a plugin with "most recent comments", 1 link became 80. The link is an exact match of the individuals name who made the comment. And is a result of filling out the comment form.

Name:

Website:

Comment:

By filling out the name and website the name becomes the anchor text for the link to the website.

Long story short...do you think this is penguin esq. link spam? Is it not? Or is it just not worth the risk and remove them anyway???

Thanks Matt,

Some very helpful feed back, this is exactly what we want to do as we know some of these search terms will be there for the long haul as they are related to some major products which we know will be popular until the eventual update/replacement.

Jeff,

Thanks for the response. Both articles are exceptionally helpful.

Reading between the lines the decay is natural, especially when related to new terms being launched.

My challenge is to slow/prevent this decay from rankings, most of the terms I want to maintain are for new products which will be around for a while much like the releated terms. Ideally I would plant the flag early and defend my SERPS to the very last slot above the fold.

I like your strategy however, continued postings every week when a new product comes out to ensure we can maintain position.

Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals.

So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light.

So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings?

We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace.

Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.

I'm not using it, but my spammy spidey sense is tingling....

Banner Ads (which aren't ads because they are free?) on your blog linking to other peoples blogs and vice versa. Sounds risky.

Imagine one of those Ad spots is on the Blog Roll - 500 links from 1 domain to 1 page. Red flag.....

We are trying to restructure our onpage SEO and want to make sure we have our URLs correct.  The problem is we did the URLs incorrectly in the first place and the ones we currently have are several years olds.

We have some URLs such as: http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/management/prince2.asp and 
http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/cisco/ccna_2007.asp which are not ideal but user experience aside does it make sense for us to change the URLs and use 301 redirects to the new ones or is the damage done to our natural rankings simply not worth making the change?

I have read different articles saying different things, some say that URL structure has little weight (if any weight at all) on rankings while other people seem to say it is quite important.

In addition we have heard that changing the URLs with a 301 redirect will cause a large drop in ranking which will take months to recover from and contrarily that 301s are now considered "ok" by Google and we shouldn't see too much change at all in our rankings.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Are mechanical turks easy to use?

Any comments?