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Looking at the site it has been cached on the 1st February and is in english, have you recently changed it over to German?

It seems possibly that Google hasn't cahced the updated version of your site recently, you may just need to wait for it to be re-crawled.

Just to add a discussion into here.

People say paying for the link is against Google guidelines etc... But how does Google know the difference between a paid and unpaid link? they both look the same in the eyes of Google surely?

How can an algorithm know if you've sent some money to someone over Paypal for example? Surely its only differentiating between poor links and good quality links?

All I can say is welcome to the world of Short Term / Payday / Logbook Loans.

It's been a messed up SERP for a while and Google doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop it. Seen plenty of hacked sites up there for terms relating to these niches.

Comments from William and Darin show the two different types of blog commenting. Let me expand:

Type 1:

Commenting on any blog you can get your hands on linking back to your site (those that will let you): This is the kind of blog commenting that you should avoid like the plague. It will do you no good and will simply be a waste of time these days.

Type 2:

Commenting on blogs that mean something in your industry and commenting with content people want to read: Like with any kind of content, if it is content people want to read it can be valuable. If you are selling running shoes and you build your authority on an athletics blog and your comment is contributing to a conversation and a link to your site is relevant and valuable to the users then by all means this is the kind of blog commenting you want to involve yourself in and can be very beneficial in the long run.

Hope that helps.

If you have clear indications of what back links are spammy I would suggest going through the disavow tool. The obvious ones you mention that stick out are the article submission links and broken links on shoddy websites.

You always have to be very careful with the disavow tool though. But if you are seeing clear spammy links get rid.

In terms of a penalty, what do your keyword rankings look like? a penalty will more than likely come parallel to a rankings drop. Did you see big dips in ranking drops? Are you link building properly for the new site?

You may be finding that pagerank just isn't being passed over as well as you would have expected from the .co.uk. Doing some good quality content marketing and link building on the .com site will more than probably help.

If they haven't affected you this far, i'd say just leave them alone, they don't seem to be doing any harm.

It's possible but it's a lot of work and you would technically be competing against yourself. Just focus on getting a good website up and on the first page and in that top 3 position.

I work at a development company and we have our own bespoke CMS system. We just want a star feature really, so we can hook up rich snippets.

If there is a plugin that doesnt cost much that would be great, getting one of our developers to do it here would cost the client more than they are currently willing to pay.

Hi Mozzers!

Let me give you a bit of background for my question. I currently look after two eCommerce sites and naturally I want to get them using reviews for products for customer interaction / content and rich snippets.

I am basically looking for a cost effective plugin that can plugin to our CMS system that can give us review functionality and will be compatible with rich snippets.

At the moment we use Disqus for the blog commenting system and i've heard this can be used for product reviews.

Any ideas would be great. At the moment our client is holding back due to 'lack of funds' so the most cost effective measures would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Hi Prime85,

The reason you won't see increases past those pages is simply because you have very little outbound links coming to your site. You can do all the work on-site but if your keywords are semi-competitive links are important and procuring those high quality links are what will drive you up the rankings.

Thanks,

Hello,

I think the issue you have here is that  you are taking lightly the amount of work SEO involves, especially if you are aiming to rank for keywords that bring in over 10,000 in a day.

A new website is going to need a lot of work to get to that point and if your uncle wants to make money he would be better looking to invest into a professional SEO agency / consultant who can provide him with the right tools and experience to get him to where he wants to be.

I'd very much go this way. Use a broader term for your homepage. Then on your separate service pages you can target more specific long tail keywords specific to the service and possibly the area you work in.

You need to see it as community building. Don't see social signals as "if I put our link on twitter and get people to RT it it will help rankings"

The idea is to put up quality tweets, interact with your followers and give them information on your company, help them when they have problems and build as sustainable and regularly updated twitter account. Create high quality blogs, put them on facebook / google+ and twitter, If you do this right your followers will talk about you, influencers will retweet / like / +1 and this is how social signals work.

It's fair to say at the moment Google pays more attention to their own social network, Google+, but it isn't as popular as the others at the moment.

The summary is just to be active, put good quality content up on your social networks and interact. Your social signals will follow

If they have access to the domains they will, if they are that kind of company, delete them. If they are on blogs where they have outreached to webmasters etc.. I think they will probably leave them be, as it would be a lot of work to get rid.

Another big problem, which some 'snake oil' SEO's use is to build links to a URL that redirects to your site. That means if you cancel, they just remove the redirect and you lose all your links.

By the sounds of it they have done outreach and i'd be leaning more to say you would probably be safe if you cancelled, but again I wouldn't be 100% certain without being able to have a look.

Have a chat with your SEO consultant and maybe just ask how they build their links.

Outreach. Post to your social media accounts. Try and get re-tweets, maybe areas such as social bookmarking and reaching out to other bloggers who might mention your article (if it is worth it to them)

You can't always expect people to come your way, sometimes you have to go after them and be pro-active.

If you are targetting seperate anchor texts and titles and totally different content it shouldnt be a problem. The only issue sometimes is that with the huge influx of links you get in a short space of time, it might give Google an indication that something 'unnatural' is going on. If you space them out I don't see why there would be an issue.

Yeah Google only works with 1:1 so maybe if you setup a Google account shared by both users and markup using that profile is the only work around I could think of, but could be messy.

The directories you mentioned are regularly updated and are a real 'source' of information that people want to use. With the changes it hasn't killed directories, its gotten rid of spammy directories that are just there for links.

With the likes of Yell and Thompson these are big companies and websites and their directories both online and offline and great resources and so they should have good rankings as customers would go to them if they needed a directory based website.

Google described it as "turning down" how much EMDs matter. So although they probably do have a LITTLE bit of bearing, its nothing huge, if you have a brand name use that, if your brand name is close to the EMD then that should be fine. Just don't expect an EMD to help you massively when it comes to ranking like they used to do.

I agree with the comments above put if it is a reputable and good quality site, would Google know if you were paying for if it's in your niche and good quality? I don't think so personally.

It's all about diversifying your anchor text and making sure sites you get good links on have your link within high quality and readable content that people would want to read.

Google can't see whether something is bought for or not, it can only tell what link is bad and gaming the system and which aren't.