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Hi Kristi, I would definitely recommend watching the Webmaster video by Matt Cutts where he explains a bit how Google determines who is the original source. The video could be found here. In summary he explains that there are several ways to determine for Google who's been the first writer of the article. Hope this helps shine a little light on this!

Hi Kristi, Thanks for reaching out with your questions. I'm assuming you meant to write www.abc.com since eg.www.abc.com isn't a website. I ran a report for that and it did have a redirect: Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to abc.go.com/. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? The only time you see a message like that is if the URL you enter redirects to a different page. If there's no redirect it will just display the information you requested. As for Google, if there's a redirect on a page, it can definitely impact a sites rankings as a 301 will pass link juice to the target URL. That's generally intentional though. I hope that helps. Cheers, Joel.

My last unnatural links client had a backlink profile that was riddled with directory links....definitely not natural. When you get hit with an unnatural links penalty Google wants to see that you have made a huge effort to remove every single link that was made by your own hand (or by your SEO).  You definitely need to try to get rid of those directory links. You also need to thoroughly document your attempts to remove the links - emails, emails to whois email address, contact forms, etc. Don't fool yourself into thinking that the high PR links are probably ok.  I have seen that many webmasters fail their reconsideration request because they try to keep too many links.