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You can if you upgrade... check the memberships that allow branding on here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-seomoz-pricing-plans-more-keywords-for-everyone

If it's algorithmic then they just need to fix it fast, if it's manual... they still need to fix it fast and then do a reconsideration request.

I would guess that as long as you don't have other bad signals it won't really affect your site, but maybe remove the links temporarily just to be on the safe side.

SEL just did this, which may be of interest: http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463

Note that part where it states "In particular, pointing bad links at a good site with many other good signals seems to be like trying to infect it with a disease that it has antibodies to. The good stuff outweighs the bad."

Hmm, iffy. I think you're probably doing the right thing looking elsewhere (in my opinion). If you have low traffic (not saying you have) then a 50% increase isn't a lot, plus, how much of an increase in conversions are you getting would be the more important question.

All I mean is, if you're in a field that's not competitive, you started off low with no rankings, and they got you a few low value links which bumped you up to having a couple of okay ranks, which are driving some "not-so qualified" traffic, then that's not worth $50 per link. You could have done that yourself pretty easily, or employed someone at $10 per link.

But...

If you've got some good rankings out of it which are driving good, targeted traffic due to those links then great

Edit Also, how many other links are there on these blogs going to other sites, are the blogs spammy? Care to share one?

No it's fine... you can't help who links to you. If you had thousands of them all within a limited space of time, all with similar anchor text, etc... then yes. But I wouldn't worry at all otherwise

If you use automatic submission you're faced with a problem. Duplicate content. If you want to get around the duplicate content problem then you're faced with another problem, you have to use article spinning. Both of which are not good. Aside from that, the majority of the sites the auto software's submit to won't end up giving you any links and your article will still read with visibile, non-working html code in it, of the ones that do give you a link it will be either nofollow, or pass zero of anything to you because it's spammed to hell with millions of articles for being one of the few article sites that allow follow links.

Now, there might be a few sites that pass juice, but that will be because of quality levels in what they publish. So submitting to them would have to be manual only, as there's no way any auto software would get your article into a site like that.

Yeah your first solution, that's what always gets recommended, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do (on here especially) if it wasn't above board... there's been a whole bunch of articles that I've seen on here though saying to go for it, which I do... and stuff on SEMPO, and a loads of other places all saying the same. I'm sure it would be all over the SEO blogs and forums by now if there were any change to that

That's not a penalty, it's just losing rankings... happens all the time. And yes Google can put permanent punishment on do but they don't tend to, in fact my understanding is it would be extremely rare... and if they did do that, it wouldn't be just for one keyword. If they penalize you, you fix the issue causing it and ask for re-inclusion. But that's not what's happened to your client. It could be the Panda/Farmer update or any number of things.

They're all listed in the campaign. Just go to crawl issues, pick an error type and then download as CSV. It will give you every page (upto 10,000) crawled... then you can just find and replace "false" with nothing (so leave the replace with box empty) so you can see everything properly.

I do... and I think most people do it it's something really great. Here you go though... haha

lol, well... there's about a million and one reasons that could be

But I'd hazard a guess as the main reasons being the same keyword phrase spread though-out the site including in title tags, and the whacking great ad banner at the top of every page as soon as it loads

Get rid of the ad or move it, and focus on different keywords for different pages

You could get around that easily by having the homepage's content (the content that is duplicated) show up in the same place by using an iframe which displays the content on the actual page, on the homepage. Search engines don't treat iframe content as dupe content, they know it comes from a separate source. However, are you using keywords from that content for your homepage's SEO? Because you would effectively lose that as homepage content.

If you're using that content for the SEO on your homepage and not the other page, you could just use the robots.txt file to noindex, nofollow the other page... then problem solved

I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out).

I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this?

Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?

Nobody can live without Open Site Explorer, it's as simple as that.

Also, if you're an SEO you basically have to stay, every decent SEO has to be a member here.... if we were hiring it would be a prerequisite!

Well there is, but you want to only use it for reference as one of the biggest issues with it being successful is how personal it is (so never stick to a generic template). There's tonnes of tips out there, this URL should do the trick

http://www.seobook.com/art-pitching-email

Link placement is pretty much the whole point in block level analysis so it's definitely important. But all I know is that links from within the body content surrounded by relevant text wins against footer, side bar, and links page links. I "think" but could be wrong, the only link worth more is a link from the main nav... but I assume that would only be for internal links anyway?

No worries... you can give me a thumbs up and a "this answered my question" if you like... I want that SEOmoz t-shirt lol.

lol no it's okay it's me and my paranoia... I can't resist with the jokes sometimes and then I panic in case my sense of humour is a bit dark and might offend people.

But on that, there's no way I'd get into a who is the cutest competition with EGOL. I pick my battles carefully so that I can win

(Wouldn't fist fight him either, had my ass kicked before and it wasn't pleasant)

Thanks Doc

Yeah I think I have a problem accepting any kind of reward for anything to be honest. Even when I get paid by a client I feel bad for taking the money, even though we've done a good job for them. I don't know what that's about lol.

But anyway thank you very much. It's good to hear someone had the same worries and paranoia before. I'll stop worrying about it now

That's what Social Media is for Use Digg, StumbleUpon, etc... to promote the contest. As long as it's done well you'll get some traffic and submissions... there's bound to be some well targeted platforms for it too.

Raven Tools is great for that