Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yeah I deliberately showed you that as a pretty awful example haha! This is what I'm dealing with. Unfortunately most of the links follow a very similar theme and that's why I'm worried I'm going to be removing a lot of links and alerting something at Google!!

Also, there's a few links in the same format as that example, but which have brand anchor texts and the page has Page Rank - I assume it should still go?

Hi Philipp

Thanks for your prompt reply. The company did receive a unnatural links message back in July 2012 (along with thousands of other sites at the same time!) - however this was the 'targeted action against links' message rather than a site penalty.

I agree with your rule of thumb but it turns out that most of their links go against this principle - hence my caution! I'm tempted to remove all the links with PR N/A or Zero straight away - I'd be surprised if Google was assigning any value to these anyway.

Obviously I want to future-proof my strategy too - I don't want to have to clean up after getting hit by a penalty or an algorithm update!

Let me show you one of the pages as an example. There's a few links on this page so obviously I'm not revealing who my client is. http://scorec.org/the_plumbing_information_you_need_to_read/

What is your general approach when removing links for a new client? Just taken on some new work and found links that I wouldn't dream of building now (unrelated domain name, blogroll, single word, exact match anchor, dead sites).

However some of these are brand anchor links, and some of the pages have decent Page Rank (2/3/4). Obviously I don't want to remove links that might actually be helping the site in a weird way. It would be good to get an idea of other peoples approach to link removal - what goes, what stays etc?

Hi all

This is the situation. I have a client who runs a number of ccTLD sites (all exact match brand name domains), including a .com which they use for the US.

This is a hair care product and due to Advertising Standards Authority (UK) restrictions, they cannot use a certain phrase to promote their products - 'hair loss' on the domain.co.uk site. However, in the US, there is no such restriction and can use wording this on the site.

A brand name search in google.co.uk brings up .co.uk as 1st result and .com as 2nd result, so the .com is indexed in google.co.uk. Any non-US user visiting domain.com will be redirected to their ccTLD site.

Here's my question - could I feasibly get the domain.com site ranking in google.co.uk for certain 'hair loss' based keyphrases, considering the fact that I can mention it in the copy on there but not on the domain.co.uk site. Would I need to remove any Geographic Target in the WMT account for domain.com?

Or is this a form of Google cloaking and could see the site penalised?

Thanks

@Greg - It was enough to pretty much wipe out all keyphrase traffic. They were still ranking for their brand terms however, which obviously suggests it was not a full site penalty. The new site will be hosted on the same domain, but with some new URLs, hence my question about whether I should redirect them.

@Marie - The rankings drop happened on April 25th, definitely Penguin. And yes it only affected a handful of pages and keyphrases. I really can't see anything in the backlink profile that suggests the anchor texts for these pages would be regarded as spammy. About 50% of the keyphrases are brand-based. However maybe there's something I'm missing and perhaps I should cut my losses and just manually edit all the links I've created myself, which I know aren't spammy? (hope that makes sense...)

There are a couple of pages where I'd like to change the URL structure, so I can either start from scratch with these new pages or redirect the old URL there.

Ps Would I have received a bad link warning from Google if it was Penguin?

Hi

One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site.

I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks.

My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty?

Thanks

Thanks for your reply Knut.

So you would advise against using the same copy?

Also, just to clarify, the .com is going to be the UK site, and they are planning on purchasing .us for the US site. Is this acceptable practice?

Hi SEOmozers

Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me!

Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market.

They don't want to set up a simple redirect because

a) the .com is UK-hosted

b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made

However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site?

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks