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Hi, 
I'll keep this one short and sweet! We've noticed just recently that a number of competitors are bidding on our company name, clearly with the intention of being listed above our organic result. I'm certain that Google used to allow us to bid on our own company name for a negligible amount but now it looks like we're going to have to chase £1 odd per click to  obtain customers who are actively searching for us. Can anything be done about this or is it now nature of the beast that we're going to have to have a price war on bidding on our own company name? Thanks for your help! Chris

We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general. One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK. My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.

Hi,
I'll keep this really short and sweet... I'm just intrigued more than anything. With the exception of user testing has anybody ever had a good experience with Fiverr? Obviously I'm not  contemplating SEO services for $5 but I'm just curious as to whether anybody has found any services that were genuinely useful in a day to day capacity?

Hi,
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch. Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition. For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges They will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink. What are your opinions of the fact that: a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title. The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first. Cheers all!

Hi,
I was wondering if I could ask is perhaps someone could give me some clarification as to how the amount we bid on Google Product Ads reflects the product positioning on Google Shopping? We have a Google Product Data Feed which is then linked up to our Adwords account so that we can determine a PPC bid amount. In instances like this it doesn't seem to make sense that one person may be paying 10ppc and another 20ppc when the buyers criteria for sorting merchants was purely down to the price. Since the buyer has the option to sort their products in price from minimum to maximum the sort order cannot be manipulated by Google based on the amount the merchant was paying. As such, how is determining a cost per click figure relevant when the customer is searching by base price low > high on Google Shopping? Surely I should just set the limit to £0.01 and rely on the customer determining the sort order (which ultimately will lead to a higher conversion rate) than allowing Google to skew the results based on bidding 20-30 times this amount? I should state that I'm in the UK. I do realise that a high PPC amount will increase our chance of exposure on standard search pages but my question does relate solely to results listed on Google Shopping. Thanks for your help! Chris

Hi all, Our category Meta Title Tags are a little woeful and so I'm in the process of rewriting them. Let's say you have a product for sale.... some inkjet cartridges for a Canon BJ10V printer for example. In an effort to keep things concise I was thinking that for this category I should have the meta title set simply as: 'Canon BJ10V Inkjet Cartridges' and perhaps our company name after this text (and a pipe delimiter) This takes us just under 50 characters which is ideal but doesn't include any real keyword variation and will result in the company name being duplicated at the tail of the title tag on 6,000 odd pages. A large number of my competitors have title tags along the lines of: 'Canon BJ10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers' I understand the reasoning behind this but does the variation of keywords compensate for the fact that the title looks spammy (to both humans and Search Engines). What would you do? Keep it clean and concise or stuff the title full of keywords. In the event of the former would you include the company name in each title in the knowledge they would be well under 50 characters without? Thanks for your help.

We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

Hi, Our eCommerce site currently includes a blog section known as Igloo which we have filled with unique and helpful content that is useful to a fair few people, not just customers of ours. It currently attracts a large number of visitors (more than the actual eCommerce side of the site in actual fact) organically who aren't currently customers of ours. Very few of these turn in to paying clients so it's not really a money spinner but it has worked quite well from a linkbait perspective / traffic generation perspective and undoubtedly a few of these people do end up making a purchase on the actual shopping end of our site. We're look at ways to encourage these people finding help on this free resource to take a look at our homepage and hopefully make an order but in the meantime I am worried that there may be a few downsides to us creating this content: Google may see us more as a help site than a shopping site. Since selling products is where we make our money this could ultimately be a bad thing. Our bounce rate is REALLY high (I'm talking around 94%) on the help site versus around 20% on the eCommerce site. I guess people land on the article they want, read it and then disappear. Would this bounce rate skew our entire site stats and ultimately result in decreased performance in the SERPS. I would appreciate your opinions and, in the event you do feel it may be hurting us overall perhaps some suggestions on how to mitigate the effects? Many thanks!

Hey all, I'm in need of some serious inspiration and I'm hoping one of you generous people can help. We're looking to do a spot of link building for an eCommerce site which I would describe (without putting it down too much) as 'boring'. This isn't our fault per se as the site sells printer cartridges and there's only a certain amount of excitement such a product can create. As a result natural linkbuilding is quite tricky, especially when it comes to creating links to anything other than our homepage. For the past couple of years we have focused on creating good content and indeed have a thriving database of hundreds of helpful articles and videos on the site. These are generating decent traffic (and rank #1 for many different help related search terms) but the problem with these articles is that they don’t convert in to sales at all well. I’m also conscious that it will ultimately end in us developing a link profile which would classify us as a printer repair resource rather than cartridge sales website. I have read numerous guides on Moz but they all tend to focus on products which are a little sexier than those that we sell. Getting someone to share and link to a truly unique product would be incredibly easy compared with asking someone to engage, share and link to the latest Epson cartridge. I started writing articles on some decent quality business blogs however the links given don’t look particularly natural and the link would always be to our homepage. We have the staff and the time but we built a whole host of rubbish links back before Penguin and I want to ensure that we are going to head in the right direction before embarking on something new. If you had a site which was really dull how would you devise a link building strategy that was relevant and, most importantly, natural? Thanks for your help. Chris

Hello We're soon going to be embarking on a fairly major site overhaul and while this isn't a particularly SEO related question, I’m keen to integrate user feedback quite heavily in this process and would appreciate your opinion as how best to collect this feedback. These are the kind of questions that I would like to pose: Is it clear when you visit the site, what it is that they do? What is your first thought about the site when you visit it? On the homepage, where is your eye drawn to immediately? When wishing to purchase a product, would this product page draw you into the sale? Do you get a general feeling of trustworthiness on the site? Using the series of drop downs on the homepage, please choose any product and follow the process through to the checkout. Did you feel that this was engaging throughout? Rather than yes/no answers I’d like the user to spend a good 5-10 minutes giving their detailed opinions so that we can gain some genuine inspiration on how best to improve the site. What would be the best method of collecting this data? I was thinking perhaps Amazon Mechanical Turk but the thrust of the work offered there seems to be so diverse that I’m not sure we’d get people in tune with offering the kind of detailed answers that I’d be hoping for. Thanks for your help.

Hey, I know this has been discussed to death but look back through previous postings there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the exact Meta tags that an eCommerce site should include, specifically whether to remove the keyword tag or not since it is believed that Yahoo potentially still makes use of it. Currently our homepage has the following Meta Tags: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" /> Keywords" content="<a class="attribute-value">ink cartridges, cheap cartridges, inkjet cartridges, inkjet ink cartridges, ink cartridge, printer ink cartridges, laser cartridges, toner, laser printers</a>" /> Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/> author" content="<a class="attribute-value">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" /> expires" content="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>" /> robots" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp,index,follow</a>" /> Language" content="<a class="attribute-value">English</a>" /> Cache-Control" content="<a class="attribute-value">Public</a>" /> verify-v1" content="<a class="attribute-value">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" /> viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" /> This is too messy but before I do something drastic that I'll possibly regret please can you confirm that, in your opinion, I am best to remove everything with the exception of this: <title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title> Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" /> Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>
viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" /> I realise there is a verify-v1 tag in there but this can be done through a file on our server so while cleaning up that might as well go. Would there be an argument for keeping any of the other tags or are they all pretty much redundant now? Many thanks! Chris

Hey,
I love the resources available to me through Moz.com and although I've found it's possible to make a half decent attempt at improving our site using these tools. I have however got to the point where it would be nice to have a second opinion as my view on our site and what can be achieved is no doubt somewhat stale. Obviously asking the community through Q&A is a start and I have benefited greatly in the past from your advice but I wouldn't expect anybody to give our site more than a two minute glance for free. As such I'm hoping to locate someone that I can pay to talk things over with just to get some fresh ideas and perhaps a list of tasks that my staff and I can continue to undertake over the coming months. I appreciate that Moz has a list of recommended SEO companies however these all seem to be targeted towards larger brands and I can imagine a relationship with one of these companies being less personal than I would like. Asides from going through lists of users and checking out their profiles individually, is there a resource that lists the smaller independent on Moz.com and if so where can I find it? Alternatively are their any external resources that might help me to find someone that would be a good match?
Thanks for your help. Chris

I'll keep this one short and sweet   🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks

Hey,
Over the last six months or so we've been going through our backlink profile and cleaning up links from poor quality sources. Week by week there have been small changes in our Google Webmaster Tools 'links to your site' section to reflect this. I logged on this morning however and there has been a dramatic shift in the information displayed. Pretty much every bad link has been removed from the list including sites I know for a fact are still linking to us as they didn't communicate at all to our removal requests. Additionally, rather than showing the top 1000 links to our site as it used to, WMT is only showing 73 linking domains. The remaining 73 domains are good natural links from high quality sources. I'm guessing Google are just in the middle of an update and that the remaining linking domains (including the bad ones) will reappear shortly. This isn’t a request for advice or help but I’m just curious as to whether anybody else is seeing anything similar?

Hi,
We're about to start integrating video content on our eCommerece site in order to bolster the quantity and diversity of useful content that each page presents a potential customer.  We’re talking product reviews, information relating to the differences between different products and company information.  From an SEO perspective it has been suggested that Google will like this however I have a question regarding the actual method of integration. Usually I would just insert some embed code linking to the correct video on our YouTube channel however I’m really conscious that a search engine will just see the embed code, notice the page loads slightly slower and not really gain anything useful from the video file. I’m assuming that this isn’t the case but I have several questions: -          Would you host on YouTube and simply insert the embed code in to the page.  Would any alternative site (or even self-hosted) be preferable? -          Should I be padding out either side of the embed code with a description of the video and an annotation on OUR site? -          Does Google actually look at the link and ascertain the relevance of the video file to the actual page?   If it does this does it gain anything useful that could help on-page SEO? These are probably all pretty basic questions for which I do apologise but I want to make sure that before spending a sizable amount of time on this that we start off with a correct integration! Many thanks

Hi, We recently asked for some pointers to use on our site bit.ly/4Cogch as one of our SEOmoz private questions.  One of the points that was picked up was that the title of the homepage looked quite spammy: Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner I completely see this however I've checked out our competition and no one seems to be doing things any better and the SEOmoz On Page SEO tool seems to like it so I'm not sure what changes to make. Does anybody have any inspiration that I could possibly use?  It was suggested that Google is quite brand focused and so I should integrate the company name but how else would you change things, bearing in mind the ink and toner market that we're focusing on? Thanks for your help! Chris

Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about.  I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index.  Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap.  Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!

Hi, We have a fairly successful YouTube Channel where we create unique and helpful videos that are related to our core business activity. When we create these videos would you consider it a bad thing to not only post them on YouTube but also a couple of the smaller sites such as Metacafe and Dailymotion?  Sending to multiple sites would possibly achieve more total views but would this kind of duplication potentially be harmful to the overall success of the video and have a knock on effect when it comes to how it ranks in Google? Thanks for your help.

Hi, This is a slightly odd one I was hoping someone could shed some light on. One of our staff just did a Google search and located these listings on Google UK Product Search: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ink+cartridges&hl=en&sa=X&biw=1074&bih=499&tbm=shop&prmd=imvns#q=ink+cartridges&hl=en&sa=X&tbs=store:3287803270081455254&tbm=shop&prmd=imvns&ei=xp5pUP6uN8i_0QXUuoHADQ&ved=0CI0BEMcMMAE&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=333b49ec245f6031&biw=1074&bih=499 Do you happen to have any idea where Google is getting this regionalised data from and in particular the pricing which is incorrect? We have a Google (UK) Product Feed however the prices given are different than those being displayed in this localised search.  Additionally the product feed that we supply relates to our main website and not a specific store. If you click through to compare prices from multiple merchants you'll see our prices being listed correctly under our company name and website rather than the incorrect pricing attributed to a specific store. I have checked our Google Places Account and our Google Product Feed Account but I just can't figure out where this data and incorrect pricing is coming from and indeed why it only affects our physical stores and not the more generalised website pricing. If someone could point me in the right direction so I can get this corrected I’d appreciate it! Many thanks Chris

Hey, We recently had a Google Penguin related links warning and I've been going through Google WMT and removing the most offensive links.  We have requested resubmission a couple of times and have had the standard response of: "
Site violates Google's quality guidelines We received a request from a site owner to reconsider your site for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. 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 encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
" On the 5th September after spending another couple more days removing the most prolific offenders we resubmitted the site again and again got the automated response saying they had received our request.  A week later on the 13th September we got a slightly different response of : "
We've processed your reconsideration request We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index your site. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take. " I left it another couple of weeks to see if we'd get a slightly more in depth response however so far there has been nothing.  I'll be honest in not being entirely sure what this means. The e-mails says simultaneously 'We've now reviewed your site' (as in past tense) but then continues with "If we don't find any problems" which suggests a future tense.  I’m unsure from reading the e-mail whether they have indeed reviewed it (and just not told us the outcome) or whether it’s just a delayed e-mail saying that they have received the reconsideration request. Of course, if I received this e-mail off anyone other than Google I would have thought I was still in the dog house but the fact that it differs from the standard ‘Site violates Google’s quality guidelines’ message leads me to believe that something has changed and they may be happy with the site or at least happier than they were previously. Has anybody else received the latter message and has anybody managed to determine exactly what it means? Cheers guys!

Hi, With the recent Google updates we're thinking that unique content is more important than ever in order to gain high quality, natural links from genuine users. As such we're thinking that our blog (http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/) might be more important than ever.  Don't be put off by the lack of Page Authority or Google Page Rank; we've only just moved to this address from the subdomain igloo.refreshcartridges.co.uk. The content is certainly rather niche; an article like http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/how-to-the-reset-purge-counter-on-a-brother-printer-with-a-numerical-pad/ will be helpful to thousands of users who own this particular range of printer but it's debatable as to whether it is sufficiently mainstream to be openly shared and linked to. We ping to sites such as Technorati, produce videos to accompany much of the content (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dxmm4-blN8&list=UUH93Kwax4CcEIAOsXWb6CiA&index=1&feature=plcp for example) and provide easy sharing buttons.  I do however think that we could be doing more to actively ‘push’ this content on to potential customers. I'm not naive enough to think that niche articles like this will be enough to get hundreds of links and tens of thousands of reads but printer news, reviews and support is pretty much the only thing we can write about while being relevant to our core business.  I would however like to get the best exposure that we can for these articles which is why I’m asking for your advice today. I would really appreciate any ideas you may have as to how else we could gain the best value from these unique articles and videos.  I apologise for this being such an open ended question but any and all advice on how to maximise this resource would be appreciated. Many thanks!

Hi, I'm sorry to ask yet another question but the advice I get here is always so accurate and friendly that it's almost addictive. After Penguin I'm constantly thinking about what looks natural to Google. With regards to link building I can't really envisage any situations where natural anchor text would be anything other than either the name of our company or 'click here'. The only exception to this I would have thought would be if a customer was referring to a particular product on our site.  Even in this situation I would have thought they'd have said 'I bought my cheap cartridges at Refresh Cartridges' with the company name still being used as the anchor rather than 'cheap cartridges'.  I think if we're stripping it down to what works best from a human rather than search engine perspective then using 'cheap cartridges' rather than the company name would be just a little odd. Therefore my question is whether, when link building, I should just use my company name for all anchor text rather than trying to artificially mix it up to make it look ‘natural’.  While I could vary the anchor text by saying 'cheap this', 'high quality that' and playing around with the text, almost certainly when used in context with whatever I am writing this would look unnatural no matter how many combinations I used. Is this correct or would my overuse of the company name make what should be a natural looking linking strategy look unnatural and harm results by not conveying the potential content of the page by using targeted anchor text. Thanks for your help. Chris

Hi, I have been reading with interest that many SEOmoz forum members still believe that a link in BOTW, Yahoo Directory and Joeant can still add value to a linking strategy. It's my understanding that the Penguin update was designed to stop unnatural linking and link buying but Google does still seem to place some kind of value (although potentially diminished) in these directories despite them being pretty much exclusively paid for links. What am I missing here and in a money no object world would you guys still consider them part of a good linking strategy? Many thanks

Hi, We have an eCommerce site www.refreshcartridges.co.uk and currently publish videos, unique articles, troubleshooting advice etc. on a subdomain igloo.refreshcartridges.co.uk.  The hope is that the content on igloo will prove sufficiently useful for someone to either link to or bookmark for future reference.  Eventually this will hopefully result in sales through the main site. We were assured several years ago that we should host this content on a subdomain but the more I think about it, the more I think that this content should be hosted as part of the main site (for example www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/). My logic is that this would extend a couple of advantages, not least that any links built to this unique content would be attributed to the primary domain rather than the subdomain.  Although I appreciate the subdomain does link back to the primary domain I can't help but feel this dilutes the potential strength of any link.  Post Penguin I think it would be nice to get genuine, natural links appreciating content on our primary domain rather than a separate subdomain. It should probably be pointed out that we only publish articles related to our key business activity (printing, cartridges, technology) on igloo.  There is no unrelated content designed simply as link bait. If we were to make the move we would of course 301 all the old pages.. I would really appreciate your opinion on whether you agree or whether you would be tempted to keep the content on a subdomain. Thanks for your help! Chris

Hi, We have an eCommerce site that has recently been hit for some unnatural linking, resulting in a warning in our Google Webmaster Tools account.  We weren't doing anything particularly underhand (and indeed before Penguin there wasn't a cause for concern) but nevertheless Google has picked up and penalised us. We've instantly removed the worst offending links and requested a resubmission.  If this doesn't result in positive action from Google we're planning on employing the services of an Oracle member on SEOmoz who was kind enough to give us some fantastic free advice in order to go through and remove any further links that may be seen as questionable. Moving forward however I'm a little bit overwhelmed as to exactly what we should be doing in order to create a positive, natural link portfolio.  I understand the emphasis is on ‘natural’ linking but we’ve been online for 8 years and I think it’s fairly safe to say that the number of links we have now is probably representative of about our ‘lot’ when it comes to 100% natural links.  It would be nice to give our portfolio a nice gentle push in the right direction. I’ve checked through SEOmoz and the most up to date link building article they have appears to be http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links - This guide however does seem to suggest some things that are potentially frowned upon now (for example, highly optimised anchor text I understand is now a no-no). Obviously, in days gone by I could look at Open Site Explorer to try to emulate my competitors but, to be honest, most of them have what I would describe as a fairly poor link profile and if I'm going to invest real time in to this I want to make sure I'm heading off in the right direction. Does anybody on here know of a really high quality post penguin link building guide, either on SEOmoz or elsewhere that I can use as some bedtime reading?  Our website is eCommerce in nature so an article tailored towards online selling would be ideal. Thanks for reading! Chris

Hi,
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised.  There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back: "Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
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 encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team" I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks.  The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start. We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation.  I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me. Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out! Thanks in advance. Kind regards Chris

Hi, We have been using SEOmoz for a good few months now and have found it incredibly useful.  Unfortunately however I think we may have slipped up a little bit as we have just received the following message in our Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ I have a funny feeling I might know what the problem is but I'd like a confirmation before I potentially go off on a wild goose chase. We also own the domain name www.computerarticles.co.uk and recently started introducing the author at the bottom of the post along with both a link to the website homepage and a link to a deep, popular page on our website.  For example, check out http://www.computerarticles.co.uk/twitter-time-saving-tools/ We genuinely didn't realise this was a bad thing and thought it would just provide Google with a way of deep linking straight in to popular areas of our site.  I would really appreciate advice as to whether you think it might be these links that are causing the problem or whether there is something else that could be causing the problem. In the event it is these links that are causing the issue would you recommend removing the entire 'about the author' page (as we have published around 500 pages on that site) and simply put a link in the blog roll or simplify it to just link to the homepage. I appreciate in advance any help you could give. Regards Chris