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One of the more successful competitors in my niche has embarked on new strategy that seems to be working well for him. I noticed that many new links began to appear to my site from my competitor's stable of many websites. It appears that he has setup a link wheel to benefit a site that has been in the top Google position for several months now.  The rim of the wheel links back to authority sites, including my own main site (established 7 years, now hanging on to the lowly 10th place on the serp).  So the strategy seems to be: a) create a dozen sites that no-follow link back to authority sites including competitors, b) place links in a such a manner (bottom of page, uncolored links, from images) that a customer is unlikely to ever click on it, c.) do-follow to your own site and blast it to the top of Google. I don't think this competitor is worried about getting penalized. I've been watching this for years. When one site gets burned, he just shifts things around and brings up another one of his sites. He seems to age them for years, calling them up one by one as they are needed. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a trend?  Because it sure seems to work. He's crowded the front page now with 4 of his sites. Would it be appropriate for me to "disavow" his links? Would it matter?

A competitor recently jumped very high in the SERPS after adding Ratings markup schema to his site. His site shows in the serps with a 5 star rating for a software product. Here's his site: http://bit.ly/11hp2KX The source of the "rating" appears just to be hard coded schema markup, not connected to anything external or impartial.It appears at this point that Google is taking this markup data at face value, and maybe is giving it some authorityHave you seen this kind of abuse in your vertical?

There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally.  Google... Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use?  From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others? I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.

I logged into GWT today.  It typically reports that our page has about 9,000 inbound links, but today it said we have 225.   There are no warnings or messages about any manual action. In fact, this site has never received any penalties or warnings. Since November I have used the disavow tool to remove porn links that a competitor has pointed at my site.  Typically I go through Google's "new" links list and add any of the obviously bad links to the disavow list.  That effort seemed to be going ok, and my site does not seem to be penalized for this negative seo. The 225 links that remain are scattered back through 2010.  This site has been online since 2005 and has accumulated lots of links over the years. Some great, some not so great. Queries are down about 1500 per day since last week, about a 15% drop.  There is a slight drop in some keyword rankings, but nothing huge, and most of the SERPS I track do not seem to be impacted.  The PR is steady at 4, where it's been for years. So... what do you think I should do?  Just watch it for a week and see if they come back?   Try removing the "disavow" list just in case it some how messed things up (looks ok on the surface to me). Has this ever happened to anyone else?

I've seen some discussion here about whether or not negative seo is real. I've just spent 6 months recovering from Penguin, rewriting content, removing hundreds of bad links, and seeing our traffic slowly improve. Yesterday we noticed in Google webmasters tools that we're ranking for the term "Free Sex."  Here... http://screencast.com/t/ezoo2sCRXQ Now we have discovered that thousands of "sex" links have been directed at our improving domain. I am convinced I know who the culprit is. What would you advise a client to do in my situation? Forget about removing these damn links. I don't have the time, money or energy to go through that again. I'm sure he can add them much faster than I can ever remove them. Is the disavow tool best answer in this case? Or is there an international court of seo justice that I can appeal to?

After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website.  Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it   mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the  engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page.  There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign.  All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html   what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html  ?    Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site?  It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block?  Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all