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I expect some won't agree Donna. Trouble is, we're all guessing.. and we're guessing based on today's ideas. We've seen over the last 2-3 years just how quickly and radically the rules can change. Google has made it clear (I think) what they value. Links from real people writing content about you.

My 2c; I'm deleting all mine on BOTW now, even though I originally paid for a lifetime listing. It seemed such a good idea at the time.

Why am I deleting? Because Link Detox (for one) is now classifying BOTW as 'highly toxic'. I've come to agree with them. They are, at the end of the day, paid links.

Remember we were all told (and believed) that EzineArticles was the jewel in the crown of Article Directories. It hurt having to remove thousands of $$$ of articles from there last year. My tolerance for SEO BS has lowered in recent years - and I no longer do anything that isn't 'real' (and by that I mean a real person on the other end of the link)

My 2c; I'm deleting all mine now, even though I originally paid for a lifetime listing.

Why? because Link Detox (for one) is now classifying BOTW as 'highly toxic'. I've come to agree with them. They are, at the end of the day, paid links.

Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.

As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.

We're getting there  Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.

Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend

Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012.  Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.

But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems.  One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.

We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?

More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight.  This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.

Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..

"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."

We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.

Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account?  Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?

What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?

Any other tips/tricks?

I have an e-commerce site that sells around 1,500 SKU's.. but there are some huge categories that we really never sell anything in.

I'm thinking of deleting a lot of underselling products. When I put it like that of course, you'll probably agree - but I'm hesitant because I have to wonder what Google will think of my site going from (say) 1,000 products and unique URL's to 500.. or lower. Removing that many URL's, products and product categories worries me that we may be viewed as a smaller store and have a negative impact.

What effect would you expect from removing a lot of products? Who has done this?

Perhaps they mean the keywords coming from those geographic regions? They are different after all.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

My instinct says that (if you are .com) they would be far less useful because they are not from your country - unless you really are targeting international search which I have no experience in.  Of course if your TLD matches, you're golden..

It would depend on whether the sites are related to your subject. If you were linking to whoever would return the link, no matter the subject - penalty. If you were linking to other sites related to your niche, benefit.  Think of it from SE's point of view - they want to see sites that are experts on a topic, and that real people link to.  So, given these two scenarios the focus is important.

Of course, focusing on getting real people to link to you is FAR more important, so I wouldn't do either. Guest blogging for example is a far better use of your time.

Yes, you should have a real 404 page.

• You'll help the people that follow their links - you should have a list of links that they might be looking for - and a search box.  Remember, you want these visitors to stay on your site, not bounce.
• Google wants you to have one. In fact many bots will test your site has a 404 page that returns the correct status (404 of course). Make sure you test yours. Many incorrectly return 200 (ok) status.

If you want to keep (some of) the linkjuice, and you know where they want to go, you would 301 redirect to the correct destination.

A because it's easier to read - use the rel=canonical tag to "redirect" index.html to /

or do a real 301 redirect. the key here is to only have one of these indexed, or you will get duplicate content.

more linking root domains is almost always the answer, especially since you cannot "age" your domain (they may be older than you and benefiting from that). Just focus on quality links, not quantity (e.g. guest blogging)

Sounds like you need to send this question into customer service (open a ticket). Unless you suspect it's a problem with your site, in which case we'll need more information from you (domain for example)

I have raised this to the seomoz team a few times - it's a work in progress still. they are getting better, but my site still shows the same issues - duplicate content errors that even the semoz support team agree aren't really an issue because of canonical tags.

I suggest just ignoring that for now and waiting for an update.