Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. If the SEO company has the ability to easily remove those links then you don't want them anyway.
2. Sadly, you may experience a slight drop, depending on your overall link profile.
3. On a positive note, you likely have a much cleaner link profile now.

So what's the search term that you used to make that screenshot? I have a few guesses but best to confirm with you.

If it makes sense to have them there then leave it, however if you feel there has been a traffic drop then it may be worth investigating if it was these 1700 indexed articles that have caused it.

Next step: Check your backlinks for unnatural anchor text distribution.

Panda still runs in installments, not continually. Rewriting content sounds like a massive task, hope it's worth it (e.g. is it better to write new stuff instead?). Have you got any pagination present on the site or indexable search results? We are under assumption here that you are certain that the problem is caused by Panda filter and not other factor and that your page layout and ads are not the cause of the drop or that the problem is not link related. I see no problem with 301 of pages with duplicate content to a new better content page. Sounds like something users might appreciate as well.

Submit a reconsideration request explaining the situation in as much detail as you can. Worst case scenario you will find out if it's a manual or algorithmic penalty. If no manual action has been taken then you will have no other option but to try harder to remove the links from dodgy sites.

My choice with be a rel canonical, however have you considered using rel prev and next?

Here are a few footprints which Google can use when evaluating your links (some are algorithmic and some manual if you are under audit/review and some are cross-referenced):

• Time of the link placement and any related groups of links generated within the same timeframe
• Link location (blog roll, footer vs content and navigation)
• Pattern of buying from known link sellers
• Strict use of exact match commercial terms in anchor text
• IP address / C-class
• Author name in article submission
• Open calls and invitations for link exchanges, selling, buying
• Widget anchor text manipulation

Or anything else that can be seen as a link scheme.

I would focus on local citations as much as possible and until all relevant places have been covered. While you're at it you will score links as well so probably the best way to start as it's easy and ROI is fairly good. Next step is identifying best branding channels - a very broad and difficult question - I guess your client's budget will be the helping factor and you'll have to decide what to attack first in line with budget size.

Prioritisation is not easy and you will no doubt hit the wall many times before you find the right solution.

You're about to target a multitude of potential search terms. What needs to happen is series of prioritisation activities. Your work starts of course with on-site review and understanding whether site architecture and the way home page cascades down to other sub-units passes link equity to other pages and if that arrangement is optimal and in line with your priority research.

Tools like GWT can be used to easily extract the highest ranking page for any number of terms. Pages with multiple phrases in serps or in reverse terms and which pages that rank highest for should be the starting point in understanding how to model the site structure - naturally with common sense and user in mind.

Once on-site is sweet, based on whether the content is linkworthy enough you may choose to work on link building towards key pages. Again, you almost never have time and resources to do all at once so prioritisation is the key thing here.

I hope this makes sense.

That one single hour in each day when I get in the "zone" and do week's worth of work in a single shot. Still figuring out how to extend that for the full 8 hours

Going offline.

Have a TV or radio ad and tell people to search "your keyword".

I believe this was successfully executed for phrase "seo found" in Australia. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=seo%20found I was first suprised to see a peak in search volumes in Google Keyword Tool and was later told that they had a massive advertising campaign for this phrase.

This is something I intend to try in the future.

seo-kwt.png

Google has endorsed use of breadcrumbs in several of their videos. They are a helpful device for website with complex structure or hierarchy such as eCommerce sites. They not only aid user navigation but also help search engines get a clearer picture about your site's structure. For example if you're using faceted navigation you could end up on a product page that has a long URL and ambiguous placement in the site's hierarchy. Breadcumbs can aid with this. Another neat thing is in the SERPs when you get little: Top Level > Main Category > Sub Category type links under your snippet.

I would use it at the top only, it's become a bit of a standard and people know where to expect it. Referncing it twice would be just a doubleup of the same set of links.

GWT > Your site on the web > Links to your site > Who links the most (More) > Download all links

csv will contain all your backlinks registered in GWT.

This works on every domain I tried so far.

I've recently discovered: http://explicitly.me/ and love it.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200622210180

Whatever it sells for I'm giving to: http://www.beaheroaustralia.org/

Thanks guys,

Dan

There is absolutely no mystery about whether inbound links can harm you or not. Apparently Google is very good at determining whether it was you buying links or somebody trying to sabotage you. I had a chat with Tiffany from Google's web spam team at SMX in Sydney and she said that there has been no cases when they got it wrong when they issue penalties.

I have a different theory however. To get penalised you need to demonstrate consistent link buying pattern over time. What typically happens is that SEO people buy high PageRank links only with very closely matched anchor text. Often these links are sold to other webmasters with different site topics. This is very easy for Google to spot.

What happens though is that during this process the rankings will shoot up like crazy and if you were to try and sabotage your competitor you would have helped them in the process and also spent an incredible amount of money. All that for them to submit a reconsideration request to Google and be out of jail within weeks.

As far as I know attempts at cheap forms of link spam in order to penalise competitors have so far been unsuccessful.

This is a smart move by SEOMoz, this forum will take over dwindling SEO forums we used to visit which are now full of spammers and ridiculous content. Barrier to entry is the key to quality here. Well done.

Just to add that I would personally be scared of having domainname.co if I know my competitor has domainname.com - too easy to spell it wrong and send free traffic the wrong way.

Use H tags as they are meant to be used but if you can nicely embed your phrase within that would be great. How to use H tags? Same as you would with indentation structure of a bullet point list. Have them indicate document's topical structure.

For example:

-H1: Vehicles
--H2: Cars
---H3: Sedans
---H3: SUVs
--H2: Motorbikes
---H3: Dirtbikes
---H3: Roadbikes
----H4: Harley Davidson
---H3: Sportsbikes 
----H4: Suzuki
-----H5: SFV650
------H6: SFV650 Engine Specifications