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I think it's a very pertinent question and I think you need to be realistic about the time it would take to outreach to the webmasters about your comments and then how likely they are to be removed.

The answer to me would be "a long time" and "not very likely" - which would essentially be a waste of time considering that you could be building better links during that period.

It might make you feel a bit uncomfortable, but I'd ignore them until you get an unnatural links message - at which point, I'd outreach and get ready to disavow (so you could make a note of which comments you think might trigger this, those on unrelated sites with a lot of outbound links for instance).  Until then, I'd spend your time more wisely by optimising your site and building better links.  There is also evidence to suggest that Google might be going down the route of devaluing links on the fly, which may happen to you in the future (or may have already happens).  Should it occur and you see a rankings drop (but nothing too serious and no link warning message), it's important to have a number of high quality links built or ready to be built to replace those links devalued.

That's where I'd spend my time.

I'd consider changing or removing those links ASAP.

Footer links have emerged as one of the primary reasons behind a Penguin penalty.  If you have a whole host of site-wide do-follow exact-match external links, then you're running a pretty high risk of triggering a penalty.

So what can you do?  You could change the anchor text, as you've mentioned, although I don't think that removes the risk all that much.  In Google's eyes (not necessarily yours), it could still view external links that are do-follow and sitting in the footer to be trying to manipulate SEO performance and pass PageRank.

If you're doing it solely for advertising purposes, then I'd consider changing the text of the links and making all of them no-follow.  I'd even consider removing the link but keeping the text.  However nofollowing the links should be a clear enough indication to Google that you're doing it for advertising and not to manipulate organic search results.

Can't see anything wrong with this at all.

It's a page designed with the user at heart.  The first view keeps this concise and lets the user select the style they want, after which they can click for more information if necessary, rather than having an information overload.

Just because text is being hidden to begin with doesn't make it a bad thing.  I find this very similar to the FAQ pages that you get with the sort of accordion style (click the + sign, expand for more information).  I think it works well for a product page and I'm surprised it hasn't been done more.

Completely "white-hat" in my view - the only grey area would be if those descriptions are being lifted from the original page, might be a weeny bit of duplicate content in that case.

Hi Jason

Google will ignore the comma when you type it into a search term - you can check this out yourself (you might have already done so) and you should see the same results.

Matt Cutts also addresses the question in this video, looking at if Google treats the comma as a separator.

In my personal view, I'd maybe use a hyphen in my title tag "Web Design - Manchester | Brand" for example, or perhaps even "Web Design in Manchester", but you run the risk of encountering Google Local results in those SERPs.  You shouldn't have too many problems with a comma in 2013, I wouldn't think, judging from that video.

There's a bit of a problem going on with Google WMT at the moment - might have something to do with the PageRank update.  Here's a link to the thread going on in the Google Products Forum.

Looks as though Google is aware of the problem.  Give it a few days and things should calm down.

I'm a fan of http://www.seo-browser.com/ - use their simple search and it's totally free.

I'm not surprised Moz is flagging those pages as duplicate content and I wouldn't be totally surprised if Google did in the future.

Put it this way, the pages are identical bar for a single sentence title description, a price and roughly a 20 word section describing the product.  Everything else is identical. It's duplicate.

Look at it another through Google's eyes.  Here's how the two pages look when crawled by Google:

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.1010direct.com%2FDGV-DD1165-970-53%2Fdetails.aspx&button0.x=51&button0.y=12&button0=Simple

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.1010direct.com%2FTDV-019-GOLD-50%2Fdetails.aspx&button0.x=58&button0.y=16&button0=Simple

(If that doesn't work, try yourself at http://www.seo-browser.com/)

Just look at how much text and HTML is shared between the two pages.  Yes, there are key differences on the pages (namely the product), but the Google bot nor the Mozbot is going to recognise those elements when it crawls it.

Presuming Google ignores the site nav, it still has a bunch of text and crawlable elements that are shared - pretty much everything under the product description.  It doesn't see the individual images and the flavour text is frankly too small to make any sort of dent in the duplicate content %.

I'd seriously recommend at revising how your product pages look - there's far too much repeated content per page (you can still promote these things on each page but in a much, much smaller way) and the individual descriptions for the products, in my eyes, are not substantial enough.

Dave, this is a very funny coincidence. I've sent you a private message about a few more details. Hope to hear back from you!

January 22nd would coincide with the Google Panda update. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Has he received any messages in his webmaster tools? I'd advise to check straight away. Duplicate content is often a problem with ecommerce sites.

Well sounds like whatever you're doing is working well and looks as though all those authority links will have been considered, so not much to worry about I don't think. My guess would be that the bug is linked to the PR update we've seen.

If the traffic itself has not increased since you've reached page 1, then it's likely to be a matter concerning search volume and SERP positioning.

Now, if we take one of your keywords and say it's 250 searches per month - what sort of traffic can you expect from page 1? Well, it can be a wide range.  A combination of this case study and this case study shows that even if you rank on page 1, people in position 5 may only get between 4-15% of the click through rate. Even at the top estimate, that would mean an increase of roughly 37 extra clicks and visitors per month. I have no idea what your industry is, but even a very high conversion rate would struggle to show any significant increase in conversions there.

Then there's the whole matter of local search.  As you'll know doubt be aware, an increasing amount of local search terms start to list Google Map/Local listings above the fold, of which there could be up to 8-10 listings.  This could affect click-through rate even further.

I feel for you because in many ways local campaigns are even tougher than national ones.  If you still don't see any marked improvements in your traffic and conversions, I'd start keyword research again and look at some other product related terms.  When doing this, however, I would Google the search term itself and see what the SERPs look like - is there a lot of PPC competition for the term? Are there Google+ listings? A lack of PPC competition might open up an opportunity there, while no Google map listings would probably mean a higher click-through rate for getting on page 1 (and perhaps an opportunity to get your company listed there yourself).

Hope this helps in some way, might not be exactly what you want to hear, but hopefully provides you with a decent point of view.

Totally feel your pain, Marisa. It's frustrating to see the decline because of someone else's shoddy work. However, it's probably a better fate then a full-blown penguin penalty, plus it shows that your other links must be great if the page has only dropped to #11.  What a great feeling it will be too when you hit back to #1 - knowing that everything you've done, Google loves.

And plus, just checked your rank again and you've bopped back to #10 on my SERP, so the comeback is underway!

IIRC, you can still use Twitter as a trigger, but you can't read what's going on in Twitter to start something off.  Basically, you can do the "that" part, but not the "this"!

Well, just as a heads up, it looks as though the Google WMT is having a few problems at the moment.  Here's a link to the Google Products forum discussing the problem. Looks as though Google is aware of it and is working on it.

I'd wait a few days, maybe a week until things all calm down and then have another look and compare.

My first thought too, but unfortunately IFTTT removed its Twitter integration awhile back.

You can still pull twitter RSS feeds and set up IFTTT alerts, but it wouldn't help with the automation part, as it can't access the Twitter platform any more.  Furthermore, I think Topsy provides a clean way of showing who has been mentioning your handle.

Hi Marisa

Unless you've received a notification in your WMT saying you've received a penalty, then I wouldn't use the disavow tool. Google has been quite insistent that it should only be used as a last resort at trying to remove links as part of a reconsideration request. I don't believe it should be used a precautionary measure, nor would it have any effect unless your site is under a penalty.

I'd actually be quite optimistic about this. What I think we've seen over the last month is Google getting a lot better at discounting links as the algorithm updates.  This post put over on Inbound explains it quite well - it looks as though Google is aiming towards continuous devaluation of links.  I'm wondering whether this is the case for your site.

What could have happened is that the algorithm has looked at some of the links pointing towards your homepage (as that's the page ranking for that term) and seen a few links and thought "nah, these are crap. Gonna remove their value". With it being a homepage link, this might be a fair old few of older, spammier links the previous SEO put in place.  This is consistent with what I've seen with a few sites in the UK - a quite sharp (but not huge) drop, all for keywords ranking for a particular page (usually the homepage).

Now, if this is the case, then I'd say it's a great leap forward by Google  Devaluing links on the fly could lead to less dramatic drops and clean ups in the future.  I'm fairly sure you wouldn't have had a penalty, so therefore removing those few bad links you have would probably have been futile anyway - but especially so now if Google has devalued them.

All I'd recommend Marisa is continuing with the quality links you've been putting in place already.  You may have lost the value of a certain few recently, but all in all it's a good thing as they were probably a bit spammy anyway.  I certainly wouldn't waste time disavowing if you haven't experienced a penalty.

Just my 2 copper, but I hope it helps!

Hi John

Quite simply, an on-page link is a link that is on the webpage. It can be split up into two categories: Internal and external.

Internal on-page links point to webpages sitting on the same domain. So links that are in your site navigation and your footer, for example, those would be internal on-page links.

External on-page links are those that point to different websites.  Why this is probably of interest to you is that it is generally recommended that you should only have external on-page links on your website that point to trustworthy and authoritative sites.  If you have links pointing to webpages that are spammy, low-quality and/or have been hacked, it could negatively effect how Google sees and ranks your site.

If I've misinterpreted your question, just let me know and I'll try to answer it better!

Hi Andries

I'm a big fan of the LinkDetox tool. You can pay with a single tweet and it will run a backlink analysis on your website.

It will then bring up which links are toxic (links from sites that have been deindexed), which links are healthy and which are "suspicious". It categorises suspicious links in 10 different ways to varying degrees, so it's important to read through their explanations, as there might be a perfectly healthy link in there flagged as suspicious.

Overall, as a starting point, I think it's a great free tool.  Hope this helps.

For point 1 - you should use your personal G+ account if for rel=author.  You will not get the benefits of rel=author, such as the rich snippets in SERPs, if you use your company G+ page.  Google has been quite insistent in saying that rel=author should be for people, so link it to you personal page.

As for point 2 - One would argue that whichever account of yours has the most followers/engagement levels, that would be the best channel to use.  I'd probably experiment with using both, with an inkling towards using the business page. A theory being thrown around is that if your business page has a decent following count and engagement and you link it to your website via the rel=publisher schema tag, Google may associated the strong social profile with the website, take it as a social signal and then reward your website. Of course, to get a stronger business page, you would start by sharing the content actively on the business page as a preference.  Hey, you could always do both (post on one, share on the other), provided it's not overkill.

Hope this helps!

Abdul is right, looks as though WMT is having a bit of a hiccup today.  Here's a link to (one of) the discussions going on in the products forum.  Looks as though Google is aware of the problem.  My guess is that it might have something to do with the Google PageRank update.

Furthermore, as far as I am aware, Google does not remove any disavowed links from your WMT report. Source A, Source B.  Think the link has to be physically removed from the site in order for WMT to stop reporting it, even then it may take a long time.