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Lets say that all this happened to you...   I would give you the same advice that we have give two new clients this past week that have come to us with this problem after the Penguin update.  They had also used LinkVine and other article systems.

We also have two clients it has happened to - where the links were not through Blog / Splog networks but genuine natural links that happened due to a book launch. many of them were low quality and may ahve looked spammy - but we know for certain she never did anything BH or even GH.

Anyway, our advice would be to attack from both sides.

I would say not to continue your link building though - at least not in the way you were doing it before.

If you are going to do ANY link building it needs to be done with a new perspective. They need to be real links that you acquire through means of networking or blogging or writing your own articles.

Yup - a lot of work... but it will pay off.

If you are going to any paid link building (which I wouldnt advise) I would ask for nofollows on them.

Even though some high trafficked websites in the SEO community still SELL links (such as SER) - it is not enough to rely on webmasters to tell you you have to have a nofollow on the paid links.  You should ask for them.

If you were to engage in paid link building without nofollows you need to change your entire strayegy and make sure they have a diverse range of anchor texts. Put your URL in some, put your company name in some. DO NOT just go after a money keyword.  I want to be clear though - I am in no way advising this.

My advice though would be to not do paid link building unless doing nofollows.
Certainly stay away from those Blog networks such as those you mentioned.

Some on other forums are also advising clients that it is a waste of time trying to attack the bad links.

I disagree - and although it may take a lot of time and resources....  you have to ask yourself what your domain is worth to you. If you have spent a lot of time on the website and had it for some years - but just made some mistakes in your eagerness to get ahead... then hold your hands up (which it sounds like you are doing), turn a corner and attack vigorously to try to get it all corrected.

Get a list of all the domains linking to you, and all their pages for each individual domain.

Input the domain list into some software (PM ME) that will quickly get you as many of the contact details (from whois records). Within a  few minutes you could have a database of emails for a 1000 domains that  you will need to contact.  Come up with a standard email format.... or with a little programming you could make your own script to do all this.  That is what we have done for the clients above.  We got through this task for hundreds of domains within a few days.

Now, I must admit - even though our email is nicely worded and effective (as it reads) - I would say, just based on the following two points - the success rate of this will be very low...

• The webmasters of these offending websites that have links to you have NOTHING to gain by spending time to delink you...

• The WHOIS information isnt always the best contact information

BUT - at least you are doing something.

Your success rate may be 2-5% with this - but even if you manage to get 20 or 30 of these sites to delink your website...it is still something you can document and send to Google as aproactive steps you have taken to rectify the situation.

Depending on the amount of links to your website - it may only change the percentage of good links to bad links slightly....  That's why you need to do what you can on acquiring natural links.

It might not be a quick process. It will $%##$ you off doing it. There is no guarantee they will lift a penalty - EVER - but one thing is for sure - if you dont do anything and show some proactive action to remedy the problems - they are 100% sure to never lift it.

I know one website that had a penalty 18 months ago... the owner did not want to do any reconsideration request - since they thought it would result in a manual review.

The only thing his actions (or lack of ) did was ensure his website never allowed back into the index.  A 10,000 page website that was top in their industry. He did stuff wrong - but didn't want to admit it.  Doing a SITE:domain.com  search to this day (18 months on) doesn't find any of his pages.

So, it all depends on what the domain means to you and if you are prepared to do SOME action on the bad stuff - because you will have to in my opinion.

Hope this helps - and if you need the name of that software that I recommend for the WHOIS records - just PM me.  I don't like putting links in posts since it looks like advertising / promoting.  It isn't our software but one we use.

Any other questions - just let us know.

Carlos

Here's some old posts that might help you further...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rules-of-domain-name-selection http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-weight-does-google-give-to-exact-match-domains

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exact-match-domains-are-far-too-powerful-is-their-time-limited You can see in the last post by Rand (2010) compared to the first link (2005) how things may have changed.

I am not sure what other views are on it now in 2012  - but again - I would always look at it as if I was creating a business first and not just a website. Go for the brandable non-hyphenated non spammy option.

There is currently no way unless you are running an active campaign to track the DA / PA.

There is no function (or at least none I know of ) to see past DA / PA values.

That might very well be on a number of wish lists and something in the offing....  but for now - no dice.  I think the costs for rolling this out and the infrastructure needed has in the past made it not possible.

On a separate note, there is a historical page rank checker here:  http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank

For anyone wondering what PA (Page Authority) and DA (Domain Authority are, here is a good article:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

I forgot to ask you...   were the links to specific page or to your domain ?

One things seems sure - the penalties do seem to be PAGE and KEYWORD specific.

They do not affect the entire domain - or at least I have not seen evidence of that on these latest round of penalizations.

Unlike the example I gave above where his entire domain was toast.  These latest warnings and penalties seem quite different.

So, if it is to a page...  and not your domain - then you have a road to salvation

Google introduced a new algorithm change a few months back that looks at your page layout and if the ads above the fold are excessive, your site can be penalized and downgraded in the search results.

I have never heard of anything that would indicate this also applies to contact forms.

I would have said that normally it would always be best to put the content higher - and you would not want to push that content down (for similar reasons to the banner ads pushing content down).  You want a good user experience.  however - your form is integrated in a very thin bar and does not compromise the user experience in my opinion.

I would say you have nothing to worry about with that form and its placement.

I have put the relevant part of the GOOGLE release though below as it pertains to page layout and placement of content.

Quote:
We've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don't have much content "above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

You are right that the first port of call should be a link audit and a full analysis of what sites are linking to you and how.

Even though the message above is an automated one and may well have been triggered by "red flag" signals (an algorithmic penalty as opposed to a manual penalty) - you should (in my opinion) - still make a concerted effort to rectify the situation before responding to that message.

There are various tools you can use to analyze back links. If you are a member here I am sure you are familiar on using the tools on this site.

One of the first things I would look at also is what Google is saying about the links to you as detailed in GWT.

The links and anchor information in there are very helpful although the data lags quite a bit.

Still it will give you a good appreciation as to what sites are linking to you and how.

To access this, go into GWT for your site and then click on the menu option on the left that says

"Your Site On the Web"  >> "Links to Your Site"

You will get a feel for what sites Google is recognizing as linking to you - which sites have sitewide links to you and the diversity of the anchor text (the text within the links).

This last point (anchor text diversity) is now a bigger point to emphasize than before.

eg: If you see 90% of your inbound links all pointing to one page on the site and all having one term for anchor text (that is not your brand name) - then you can probably guess that this is going to lead to some kind of red flag being raised.

I am not agreeing with that in terms of a methodology..... I think they have really made some miscalculations here in terms of this update.... but I am just pointing out that this may have caused some red flags in their automated unintelligent algo.

Post back and let us know what you find and I will try to assist further if possible.

yup... if it was page that is the problem and not your homepage... then what I would do is recreate that page - but when recreating it - take a close look at the on-page seo attributes.

See if there are any other close variations of the money keywords. Look at variations you could make the page name instead of what it used to be. I would stay away from an exact match between your page title tag, H1 and page url too on this new page. I would also try and change the content up if you can. Reword it to the best you can and check it on a duplicate content checker.

Again - previously when I gave some advice to you I (maybe wrongly) assumed it was home page you linked to..  If it was a page that was heavily optimized around the keyword and you linked to that - you maybe in luck.

This doesn't mean to forget what I said above - I would still try to get some delinking action done - IF ONLY just so you can post to G about your proactive measures taken.  I know a lot will disagree with me here...   but it is worth doing.

I have witnessed three websites having penalties revoked in the past 8 weeks. All three sent reconsideration requests  with some evidence of proactive delinking measures.

So - although you can and should republish a new page - still try to do the other stuff I mentioned.

You have done the obvious SITE CHANGE OF ADDRESS in GWT ?  Correct?

Just checking to make sure what you have done.

Also as far as I can tell you have not setup the 301 redirect correctly.

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I posted some of this elsewhere but would like feedback from some of SEOMoz community.

1. An author. Lets say she has a book out on Relationship Advice.
   Lets say her book was even called Relationship Help, Advice and Tips.

She promotes it for years on her website and implements an affiliate program to get wider reach. Affiliates link to it by the name of the book. One day she even gets a mention or two on a few Yahoo editorial type pages that reviewed said book. A few other very big name websites also link to her and even link to her (without her asking) to her domain no less and make the link say simply Relationship Advice. The links were in the body of the pages. Again, these were unsolicited reviews that she did not even ask for.

In the old world - that was ok - in as much as unharmful to her site. In the new world she's toast.

She has taken down the book pages she worked 7 years to build up. I don't even think that will help. People linked to her website and put "relationship Advice" in the links because that's what she gave and was an expert at. She didn't ask for those links.
2) A large well known web directory that many have heard of - choose to charge for inclusion into their directory. BUT - you can get a free link if you include some code on your website. A reciprocation that is well known.

I have read many many articles and posts by many people over the years on this - and as far as I can tell that reciprocation model for free submission was OK.

As long as directories didn't have search functions that served search results that were biased to paid link submissions they seemed to be ok. In terms of the free submission - I read a post way back by Matt that said as long as the directory wasn't asking for the reciprocal link in addition to charging for the submission - that was OK.

So, scoot forward to 2012. Said directory has hundreds of thousands of links to it - due tot he reciprocal code that was on many of the free links.

The code on the websites that got free links obviously promotes the directory by putting the main keyword in the link. ie "Web Directory".

In this new world - is this OK ?

That's what they do. They are after all a web directory?

The company in scenario 2 with hundreds of thousands of links all saying virtually the same phrase - with the vast majority of the backlinks being from generated reciprocal links for free advertisers in its directory - they are doing FINE. Not hurt at all.

The small business owner / author in scenario 1 - who had unsolicited natural links coming to her with anchor text detailing something she did and was an expert at - has gone from the SERPS.

Should the company in Scenario 2 - that COULD DO something about the anchor text in the reciprocal links back to their website - now change the recip code so that it just says their brand name instead of "web directory" ?

Should the author - if she ever regains from this hell - now have some kind of policy clearly stated on her website - that if any person is ever to link to her website ever again - they MUST only link to it with her name in the anchor text - and never link up words she is an authority on? How can she prevent that?

3. So now is it up to the advertiser or the publisher to ensure we are all safe?

If small business person Billy Bob inquires about a paid link on a website and the publisher dosn't tell him that the link may hurt his site and he does not not request a NOFOLLOW on it (because he is just a clueless business owner) - are they (the publishing website) liable for Billy Bob's site tanking if it does?

Or is it the advertiser's job to be aware of all said issues - because I know the vast majority of Billy Bob's wouldn't be.

How long has everyone got to "get in line"?

There are many in the search community offering paid links on their websites in "Sponsored Links" sections - without the use of NOFOLLOWS and i don't see any devaluing of their advertisers websites.

If rules are rules let everyone play them. Getting sick of the hypocrisy. I aim to get to Journeyman though just so I can get a DOFOLLOW link on this site

Incentives eh!

Carlos

Great question.

My feeling is that the tools and indicators were based on the playing field pre-Penguin  and pre the ground opening up and swallowing a ton of websites (ie all the 1 million plus warnings that were sent out for unnatural links).

They lag - again in my opinion.  A dog chasing its tail.

Google has changed the game for many and what was once was not penalized is now being penalized.

No matter how anyone sugar coats it and talks about always focusing on content (all good stuff mind) - this was a significant change to the algo in the area that computes link value and relationships.

My feeling is that noone (in terms of the engineers of these tools) saw it coming and now the calculations that may go into these parameters may need to be also tweaked.

I can name many websites that had good MozRank that have been axed fromt he SERPs.

That's not criticism of SEOMoz. These websites also had good PageRank

To answer your question though - from the analysis that I have been carrying out there is NO CORRELATION between MozTrust and the websites that suffered. again - I have seen websites that have had high MozTrust go just as low ones have.

I must also note though - that these seems to be NOT domain related - but more page related.

ie   most of the websites I have looked at - seem as if they are doing poorly all around - but it seems to be that the domain itself has not been effected - but more the page  (unless Google has penalized the home page).

We have a client (an Author) who was ranking #1 on Google for one of her books.  All natural links from people linking to her book.  That page was up in the rankings for 4 years. Now it is not in the SERPs at all.  Her other pages are fine and her domain name is fine - but Google seems to think the links to that book page where she sells the book were unnatural.  So, in some rare cases it may be the entire domain - but in most cases it seems to me that it just appears that way - since webmasters affected were over optimizing or doing bad SEO  - and now all the pages that used to rank for the keywords they went after so aggressively now don't rank.

This doesn't mean their domain is toast though - unless they did this to their main home page on the domain.

I'll stop rambling now

Carlos

Based on our experience I would I would stay away from keyword stuff over hyphenated domains.  We have had better results going with brandable types names and just concentrating on content and other elements of SEO. If you are talking about a website with a UK audience I would stick to   .co.uk   unless of course it is some kind of org or charity etc.

If you do want to get keywords in the domain - then go for it - just don't go over the top to make it so spammy that you get penalized for it and you also don't need the hyphens. The keywords can get parsed in the domain without the separators.

Keywords in domains might have weight this year....  (again) - but next year after the herds have milked it to death (again) - they may not be given much weight...  and on and on.  I am sure I saw some study on SEOMoz some years back on this though (in terms of keyword rich domains versus no-keyword rich domains).

I think if it were me I would always lean on the side of creating a brand first - a business.... one that wasn't reliant on the swings and rollercoaster ride of the Search Engine algo's.

Do that, think about what the content is going to be - and your audience and your traffic will work itself out in spades no matter what your domain is.

Carlos

Have you added the separate subdomain as it's own website?

You'll need to go through the authorization process for that separate subdomain....  and authorize it separately and set it's preferred location separately.

Hope this helps.

Carlos

I'm assuming you are referring to link that you did via some networks....  where it is a little harder to remove the links since there is no direct connection between you and the link host?

Assuming that to be the case - (since otherwise the course of action would be pretty straight forward) - then I would do as I stated here.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-low-quality-links-be-removed

Sorry to post a link to a previous one of my answers - but it was quite a long one.

Did you get the notice regarding unnatural links in GWT ?

Let me know if I can help further.

Carlos