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You and I both, Ted!

It's very annoying I know, but I think we can be a bit optimistic over the matter.  If those links are just a one-off and are not replicated en masse, then I'd be pretty confident that Google wouldn't penalise you for it.  I'm of the opinion that it would treat the links like an anomaly in the data - an exception to the rule and not indicative of the actual website.  It's quite a sophisticated algorithm after all and, despite the flak that they get (definitely from me), Google site reviewers are pretty reasonable folk.

Hi Ted

Myself and a few others here are of the mind set that you should only use the disavow tool when prompted by Google.  This is when Google sends you an unnatural links warning to your website and asks you to remove these links.

Colour me sceptical, but I feel that if you can avoid opening up to Google on the issue, then you should.  Not that you should have anything to hide, but I think there's nothing to be gained by doing so unless you have been requested by Google themselves, and you could potentially be putting yourself on their radar.

If you're traffic and rankings have not severely decreased and there's no visible penalty on your site, then I would leave the links alone. I'd certainly keep a note of them and mention that you cannot contact them because there is no email or contact form (incidentally, have you tried looking at the registrar's data on who.is?). Should anything happen in the future (touch wood it won't) you're ready to rock straight away.  There's also a chance that Google has already devalued these links - we've seen evidence that Google is moving towards monthly refreshes in its algorithm to devalue links on the fly (which is a much better solution then a dramatic fall because of a penalty).

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has had success in being proactive with the disavow tool (disavowing bad links before a penalty has come, rankings improve), but so far I don't think I've met anyone on the forums that has done so. Would love to be proven wrong, but until then my advice would be to make a note on the domains, but don't disavow.  Concentrate instead with the good inbound marketing strategies you've been using so far - I think this is a much better use of your time.

If you're just changing the title tags, then no, you do not need to setup a 301 redirect. You can leave that URL as it is.

As for hops, I would say that anything more than 3 hops and the search engine is not likely to follow it any further.  Here's an article on the topic, complete with a Matt Cutts video on redirects, as well as specifically addressing the hop issue (it's at the bottom of the article).

I've not come across them before, nor really heard of them, so can't offer much insight there.  I believe that this may be the URL? (Not linking directly, just in case):

http://bit.ly/16p7aBc

First glance is that the site doesn't look too professional - for instance some of the text in the boxes is way out. Similarly, I can't see a meta description or XML sitemap. These are things that I'd expect any digital marketing agency to have implemented, if I'm honest.

I also like to look at testimonials and look at the link profiles of those sites, as they're pretty much an example of the company's work, but I'm drawing a blank on this too. Their own link profile looks pretty clean, nothing extraordinary however.

My gut says to stay clear, as there's not a lot of information on them that I can find. But by all means give them a call - could just be that they're only getting their site together very recently, and so it's not really fair to judge them solely on that.  See what they say on the phone and try to go LinkedIn stalking from some people that work there - have a look at their previous experience.

Good grief no. No, no, a thousand times no.

Linking on low quality link farms such as that is a one-way ticket to getting penalised by the search engines.

That's a pretty solid method, but I think you need to look at a few more things at the same time. I don't think it's completely safe to look at just 1 metric.

PA and DA is a good one - but look at how many outbound links are on the homepage, particularly if they have a blogroll.  If I see a blog that looks like it's selling text links in the blog roll or footer, I don't want to post there because the blog could find itself deindexed.  If you have a link from a deindexed site, it could harm your rankings.

I'd also look at social media metrics and comment count. Whenever I guest blog, I want to make sure I'm posting for an active, engaged audience - links are secondary to this. Maybe look at the first 5 blog posts and count how many comments they all have. Maybe look for blogs with at least 3 comments in the first 5 posts.

There are a number of other things to consider as well, such as checking if the site is in a bad neighbourhood, but for a quick check of a lot of potential blogs, I think PA, Outbound links and comments are a good place to start.  Before posting, however, I'd always check the rest of the metrics.

That's a little disconcerning, but having said that it has got some stellar reviews.

Furthermore, people in January this year have been saying the plugin is still working a-ok:

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/html-on-pages

That's encouraging if it still works well for WP 3.5.

If you've got the time, I'd maybe a run a test on this - see if you can set up a dummy site, or use an old site you may have, and see if it works for you. Best way to test and debug any problems is always to do it yourself.

That's the one that slipped my mind. I've heard good things about SpyFu.

Hi there

Now, I've not used that plugin before, but I have helped to successfully migrate a legion of 8 sites to a new CMS, in the process going from .HTML to .asp keeping the rankings in tact (actually improving a little with fresh content), so hopefully I can help.

We ended up 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new ones, which worked for us.  It was made a hell of a lot easier by keeping the same link structure, which I see you're planning on doing.  I can't stress this enough, it helps so much if you can do this and replicate the structure.

We ended up dropping a few pages in the migration. We asked two questions of these pages - a no to both resulted in letting it return a 404, which is OK (don't be afraid of returning a few).  If the page was either a) bringing in traffic at the first point of entry or b) carrying some link "juice" from external links, the page was 301 redirected to the nearest equivalent page in the new structure.

Now, none of this involves that plugin - I'd be curious to see if anyone has used it.  I like the idea of it if it effectively means your URLs stay exactly the same.  However, I'm just here to say that 301 redirecting has worked for me in the past.  We've read recently that a 301 will pass all the previous strength of the link, which is also some comfort.

As I said before, it was made infinitely easier by keeping a consistent URL structure.  If you can do that, which you're aiming to do, minus the new extensions, it can be a quick and fairly painless process.  If you want some advice on how to quickly get the 301 lists ready, let me know (hope you like excel!).

Hope my input helps, but I'm definitely joining you in wondering if anyone's used that plugin.  Failing that, 301s can help preserve rankings.

Hi Dan

I believe that both SEMRush and KeywordSpy would be able to do this for you.  They are both paid services, but KeywordSpy does come with a free trial, so it's worth checking out to see if it can give you the data you're looking for.

Hope this helps!

Presuming that you're going to be linking to your website in the comment, I'd probably keep it limited to your own niche, but there's definitely room for a few comments from other industries.

If your comments are engaging, provide value to that blog's community and are not on blogs that are spammed to death, then you won't be doing any harm.  The key is to comment something of worth and to integrate yourself into the community.

I always think of blog commenting as a way of establishing a community presence and to raise unaided brand awareness.  Any subsequent link of page strength is an after-thought for me.

Generally, I'd say as original as you can make it.

But I'd definitely take on Doug's advice as well and see if you can incorporate your content into an article that directly serves each blog.  If you can accommodate it to their target audience, that would be fantastic.

Invariably, I often find it easier to write something completely new rather than rewrite something multiple times, so I think if you can take the general meat of your content and serve it specifically for each blog, I think you're going to see more than just SEO strength, but genuine, positive user engagement and probably traffic.

A dofollow link will pass the SEO strength, or "PageRank" of the page to the site that it links to. A nofollow link, in theory, will not do this.  That's the main difference between the two.

By that logic, you may assume that a nofollow link will not help you rank for a keyword, but I don't think this is completely the case.  Having a link to your site in any capacity may improve the "authoritativeness" of your site.  SEOMoz uses Page Authority and Domain Authority to measure this and, while not an official Google metric, it stands to say that if you have 2 identical sites, one has 5 nofollow links from newspapers and the other has none, Google may well think that the site with the links has more authority or trust and may treat it more favourably.  We all know how much Google loves to promote real brands.

As for seeing if a link is dofollow or nofollow, you can either inspect the element in the source code, or a convenient and hassle-free way to test is with the SEOMoz toolbar. That toolbar contains an option to highlight the links on the page - green links are dofollow and pink links are nofollow.  If you check previous posts on any website, you should be able to see a pattern of whether they allow for dofollow or nofollow links - but in the end, this is at the discretion of the webmaster.

Hope this helps!

Hi there

It will take a bit more time, but rewriting the content to be unique would be so, so worth it.

If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site. It won't think that you're offering as much worth to the other blog and subsequent referrals if you're regurgitating what has been said.

Now, the obvious exception to this rule are Press Releases through sites like PRWeb. This is a well-known anomaly in the industry (some say it passes juice, Matt Cutts tries to say it doesn't), but it's so far down the line now that it seems unlikely that Google is going to penalise your site for it.  The worse that would happen would be not passing any SEO value.

It is not safe to assume that this would be the case for sending your articles to these other blogs - it may very well penalise you.

By rewriting the content, you negate any risk of this and also ensure that the uniqueness will most likely pass the SEO benefits from the separate blogs.

To me, it's a matter of risk management, and all signs seem to point towards rewriting the content.  It's a bit of an annoyance, but a small price to pay considering the benefits.  It's also a great compliment to what you've written before, which has obviously proven to be very valuable, so congratulations on that!

There's no magic number/ratio/percentage for nofollow links.  You shouldn't aim to replicate another website's number of nofollow links specifically, as there'd just be no benefit in doing this.

Focus on earning links in the proper way - by producing quality content and offering a first class service.  You're not going to be seen any more or less trustworthy by Google if you have 1%, 5% or 10% nofollow - it won't make a lick of difference to them.

With the greatest respect, I don't think you should be taking SEO advice from an article directory that has been deindexed from Google.

By all means, you shouldn't stuff your content with a lot of links, but there is no golden rule that says "1 link per X words".  I can think of a ton of examples where having a lot of links together in a short space of time is natural and nigh on a necessity.

I'd worry less about what you can and cannot link and think about what kind of content you're producing and where you're publishing it instead.  Article directories have passed very little to no value for a long time now, since the big Google updates.  In fact, having links from a deindexed site can be very harmful to your own site.  If you have links on ArticleSlash I would actually remove your articles ASAP.

Look to publish your content on your own blog or reputable blogs that are related to your industry.  MyBlogGuest is a great place to find some of these blogs, you can visit it here: http://myblogguest.com

Focus less on building links when you're blogging and more about writing for your target audience.  If you manage this and offer quality content, then the links will come as a result.

Taking an educated guess at this, I imagine that those links are coming from a site-wide anchor that is in the blogroll of footer of the website, and not so much contextual links linked from within relevant content. (I could be wrong, but over 30k makes me think it's on every page of the site).

Regardless of the anchor text, this is a very unnatural link profile. If the links are passing PageRank (that is to say, they are follow links and not marked with "nofollow"), then it is giving Google every reason to assume that the links are only there to pass PageRank and manipulate your site's search visibility.

If this is the case, I'd get in touch with the other site and ask the link to be removed or made "nofollow" ASAP. Should you get no response, you should do a site-wide disavow.

As you may have deduced, if the links are "nofollow", which you can check by viewing the source code or with the Mozbar extension for Chrome or Firefox, then they shouldn't be a problem.  Similarly, if they contextual links that point to relevant pages on your website and are designed to help the user, again there shouldn't be much of a problem, unless the anchor text is very targeted.

If they're all passing PageRank, however, it could be seen as a very unnatural signal by Google and they may well penalise you for it.

Hope this helps.

Why, pick my own agency of course!

No, but in all seriousness I think a good place to start is with the SEOMoz recommended company list. I'd take the time, however, to look at some of the case studies that those sites may list and review their backlinks for themselves.  Just because an agency talks the talk does not mean they walk the walk.

If the sites are niche/industry specific, it's worth searching for companies that may offer specific services for those in the industry - ie a finance industry SEO company for finance websites.

I think we need to be realistic about how enforceable this is and why Interflora got caught.

It would be extremely difficult for an automatic review/algorithm to be able to detect a review/blog post that may have involved a giveaway or a payment (ie a paid guest post).

The only reason why this was flagged and made an example of was because, after conducting a manual review likely triggered by the advertorial/thousands of exact match anchor texts on crappy link-farms, the Googler reviewing determined that they looked unnatural.

And they looked unnatural because each blogger's review linked to the site with targeted anchor text.

It's explicitly in Google's TOS, yes, but I'm willing to bet the house in saying that there's no way this would have been detected if it wasn't for a manual review, which was also triggered by something else.

Not saying we should all be doing it, by any means. But we should be realistic about how Google is going to be able to detect these paid reviews/guest posts en masse.

The issue here might be because of how your site is seen by Google.  After visiting the site, you can see that the www. part of the URL is removed across the site, so you're only left with sourcedental.create etc etc.

That's fine, but the example you gave above said that the canonical URL, what is defined as the original URL and the one that Google should rank, contains a www.  This is inconsistent with that is happening with your site.  Your canonical should match the site and not include the www.

Having said that, this shouldn't cause a major issue because, even if Google tried to index the www. version as per the canonical's directive, it 301 redirects to the non www. version anyway.

What's also confusing is that, having looked at your source code, your canonical URL is denominated as http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/, so it's actually set up properly.

If your canonical URL is set up to be http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/ in the Yoast plugin, then I'd say the problem lies more with the SEOMoz tool rather than your site.  In which case, just ignore it as everything seems to be working as intended, from what I can see.