Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If site A is penalized by Google, then there is a very very slim chance that site B will also get a similar penalty. Google takes into account the overall site links and not just 1 link. If there is only 1 backlink from A to B then it is possible that site B can also take a hit.

I think that its an issue. Although the link juice passed is not that high, it makes complete sense to get the images on the same server as the website.

As an immediate step, you can add a nofollow tag to the links just to make sure that no link juice is passed.

A link farm is one that gives any website a link for free. Its also called a FFA or free for all. No creteris is needed to list a website in such websites.

Link farms are considered a black hat technique in terms of Google.

Yes, facebook pages do get indexed due to the social integration and real time index at Google. There is no guarantee of ranking, but yes, it does get indexed.

Its already there on any linux server. You just need to download that flie and open it on notepad and upload it back to the server with the updated code as Barry pointed.

You would need to put a 301 redirect using your htaccess. This is a duplicate page issue and just not a duplicate title issue.

I dont think that you should have a problem if you place the links in a

container, you should not have a problem. You can fight it out with your colleague on this. Its not a banned technique on Google.

Totally agree to Barry's reply here. Its totally on Google whether to show up sitelinks or not.

facebook ads dont always work. Thats what I have found out with my experiment. facebook ads are not meant for revenue (atleast as the 1st target). If you want to promote something thats engagng, you would have a good chance of success, but on the other hand, if you are trying to drive ecommerce through facebook ads, it may not work that well.

Exactly, Google is known to have a hard time figuring out what a spammy link would look like.They cannot distinguish what is the difference between an affiliate link and a SEO link unless you have campaign IDs in the URL or some nofollow attribute. Sad, but true. Google doesnt have a problem of relevance, there are a billion other websites to show for a particular query.

Its not an excuse my friend. Its a black hat technique and I am against it. Big time. But this is what happens in 60% of big websites. They have crazy amount of revisions and stuff and they themselves dont know 100% what all is already there.

Google already has a filter called the Baynesian filter (used in a customized version by Google) to target such websites. The potential problem is how to recognize such websites. I think that its time Google built the functionality.

Increased devaluation is the only way.

Shailendra,

Its a common thing when a bad link causes a devaluation. But, Google doesnt penalize for just 1 bad link, its a bad neighbourhood that it mostly targets. There is very little that you can do at this point of time. It maybe a good idea to keep a lookout for your GWT messages.

I dont think there is a tool which can crawl the whole wbe for such linking practices. If there was, the company that investigated jcpenney's case for NYT would have a very simple task at hand.

But, this is something that someone must build.

If you see these websites, they have a legacy. They have been around for 4+ years and whoever is incharge of SEO there at the point of time did something shady. Now, big websites like jcpenney have people leaving and joining them. So, its a huge exercise to clean up the mess for the guy who replaces the old guy. And yes, there are decision and process bottlenecks that come into play.

As a result, we see that websites like jcpenney have such links. Its not because they maybe actively doing it right now, but it has been done by some shady guy who did it when the website was not that popular and the whole management was breathing down his neck for traffic acceleration.

Of course, this would be a very different opinion that I have, but I think that Matt Cutts and team must build something to detect such practices in an algorithm. With caffeine, its very possible to detect such issues in quick time.

Well, A strict No No there on that practice. Your competitor would have issues in the long run. It seems quite easy to get folks to comment and it is aimed at "gaming" the google ranking algorithms. That practice would surely fall prey to Google webspam team one day. Its best not to tread that path at all. (by the way, Mattcutts- head of Google webspam, is one of seomoz's users...hope he gets to read this post and suggest algorithmic changes)

Its worth checking this thread as well:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-rank-checking-solution-do-people-use

Well, havent used Aaron wall's keyword tracking tool. Maybe should try that as well. I am reasonably happy with webCEO though although it hogs a lot of internet resources.

I got an interesting post from one of the bloggers: SEJ shared this on facebook.

http://explicitly.me/manipulating-google-suggest-results-–-an-alternative-theory. Worth a read

You can try a mod_rewrite on apache or if its not a big website URL based redierction on .htaccess.

Therefore, you can actually layer the architecture in such a way to actually write something like a vanity URL.

That would solve your URL problem.

SEOMOZ rank tracker,

Web CEO

Google webmaster tools (this gives you an average rank and not an accurate rank)

Nichebot is also a ok kinda tool.

add a mobile sitemap to your GWT.

Here is a link that will help you.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648