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Agree with Andy. Unfortunately, this is all part of Google's apparent master plan to force the pay-to-play scenario. Given that rumor has it that we will  also see a paid ad in one of the 3-pack spots at some point, the writing is on the wall.

Competition does matter, and the landscape does change based on different keywords. Most head terms don't have significant amounts of competition because they are too vague. Something like Wedding Cakes is not a good PPC term when you are looking to make money on your money as fast as you can. It's always best to try bidding on the term (especially on Broad Match Modified) to see how it performs for you, but it is highly likely you will receive a low QS and a low CTR and higher CPCs which make it not as important of a term when you are looking at everything from a returns or profits perspective. As far as low v high volumes for keywords, it's not something that I take into significant consideration unless my client is trying to get close to a specific number or is very concerned about a specific keyword. PPC is about throwing out a wide net for low, mid and high volume keywords, bidding on all of them, and learning over time what creates good return for your particular niche. What works for my business might be a horrible strategy for your business.

Erica, Thanks for your opinion and I agree. we will go for the plain old www.TownNameBID.co.uk . All the best

Miriam, Love the answer, some great info hidden in those links , Cheers. Also I love the "Happy thanksgiving" message. Being in the UK it obviously means very little to us apart from for some strange reason we have decided to adopt your "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" . All we do over here is have a few fireworks on the 5th November to remember some chap who tried to blow up the houses of parliament ages ago, no Turkey till Christmas for us Brits I hope that you had a great Thanksgiving anyway

Mhhh, to google these three domains are totally different entities, so if you have the same content on each page for sure it would be counted as duplicate content. But I can see you do have a 301 redirect to the canonical www, so you should not face that problem. But you are talking about duplicate title only... In the report, when you see a duplicate title, it should also tell you (in a different column) which other pages are sharing the same title, what is it listing? I would check the redirect for those specific pages.

Thanks for the responses. Looks like bit of a tough road ahead, but long term will be much for the better in cleaning up the (off)site. The disavow exercise has been interesting in getting to review links in placed. There have been some strange links placed and very difficult to contact some websites to get them removed, but will try. All the very best

I was doing a search for a similar topic for a site we manage that has gained 50k links in the past 4 months, and I came across this article. I was a bit shocked at the answers I saw, and some of the ones that were voted as good. It's an old article, but I felt compelled to answer since this is still a relevant topic. The link structure you showed is completely normal, and I would highly doubt you would see any negative impact from a strategy such as this. New sites and updated sites over time always receive new links. It's not about "how many" but more about "from where". I will address them one by one: 100 directory submissions Great, as long as you have tested the directories that you are being submitted to. If they have high spam scores and low domain authority, could be a risk. You should ask what directories you were submitted to and research them to see if they have a blacklist history or are penalized. If not, I see no issue here at all. When we launch a site, we submit it to up to 450+ trusted directories, depending on the SEO plan level selected. All directories have been tested via Moz tools and other providers, to ensure the link health. 80 bookmarks Not sure when you mean by this, but as long as the places you are being added are trustworthy and somewhat related to what you provide, I wouldn't worry. Even non-related links can be beneficial, coming from the right source. Granted, everyone wants the perfect anchor text link such as "awesome product in CITY", but a "visit website" followed anchor link will not do you any harm coming from the right source. 16 search engine submissions If this is a page or URL submission through Bing or Google webmaster tools, it's a total non-issue. People submit hundreds of URLs per day, or even thousands for larger sites. 15 Article submissions "Submitted to where?" would be a better question than how many is good or bad. If these are legitimate articles through a legitimate source such as PrWeb or the like, you should have no issues. Just depends on where they are placing your articles, the article quality, and the linking domain. 46 forum links Could be good, could be bad, depends on how you were linked to, and the trust factor of the linking site. See above. You may also want to see if the linked is followed because if not, it holds little value unless it was posted on a relevant forum as helpful advice, that has good visibility. 10 local classified searches Not sure what this is indicating, but again, it depends on how the linking was done, and where the links are coming from. As to the people stating that having a lot of new, varied links is a great way to get banned/penalized, just NO. That is not true. You want link diversity and many places linking to you, and in the business world, you can't always keep posting great blogs/posts/pages/articles hoping and waiting for the links to come to you. I have also never seen a link campaign that got someone penalized unless it was just blatant disregard for link quality or lack of knowledge. Hope this helps...years later lol. Or at best, it will help someone that comes across this article in the future.