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This is a great question, and from some posts I've seen it seems that plugins like SEO Smart Links have caused issues with Penguin: http://www.itechcode.com/2012/05/19/vital-seo-tips-after-penguin-algorithm-update/

So I would say yes. Be careful using things like SEO Smart Links or KB Linker, as they can cause you to unnaturally link certain words all the time, in a way that is not good for user experience either.

It's harder when you are talking navigation, etc, but I posit (and I have no proof of this) that menus and such are not as at-risk to be hit with Penguin as overdone in context links.

As we always say, what would users expect to see? Give them that.

Hope this helps

Yeah, this is a huge problem that Google needs to deal with. If it's a directory network, then can you find the owner of it and take action to get them to remove your link from there? Honestly, even if you have to pay them to do it, it will be worth it in the long run because you will be ranking again.

I wouldn't be surprised if these links, if they appeared all of a sudden, have tripped the Penguin algorithm filter.

Good luck.

Blocking the links in .htaccess won't work, as that's not how Google crawls. If you have the webmaster information, you could maybe send a cease and desist order. I'd also submit a reinclusion request and show them the domains that are redirecting to your site and show them that you do not own these sites. I would also show them the drop that has occurred because of it.

Be totally transparent with the reinclusion team.

Hey Alan -

Great question here. I honestly do not know if that htaccess trick will work. I've heard it postulated that it will, but have not seen anything conclusive on it! Unfortunately reinclusion requests take some time. If you think that you have been targeted unfairly, I'd recommend making as much noise publicly as possible. Get in front of Google and plead your case.

As far as I see it, here are your options for the spammy links -

• If it's a KEYWORD-SPECIFIC penalty to that page, 404 the page to disavow the links and build a new page on your domain targeting that term. Build good links to this.

• If it's a sitewide drop in traffic, then you need to remove as many of the links as possible. There are tools out there to help with this, but generally you need to find low-PA/DA, exact anchors. These are going to be the ones that are hurting you most. Also look for sitewides with exact anchors that can be seen as manipulative.

• Google wants to see "good faith" in getting links removed. So document all sites that you contact, the sites that get back to you, the links you get removed, and the links you know about that you have not been able to get removed, including reasons for why (ie 4 emails sent, no reply, cannot find an email on WhoIs, etc). You have to be completely transparent.

One tip for you is to share all of these links in a Google Doc, which you link to from the reinclusion request. Then, shorten the link within the reinclusion using a bit.ly link so that you can see if/when they look at the links.

Good luck man. I know how hard it is to wait on hearing back, having gone through it a few times myself.

John

I totally agree that placing a link in-context does not make it a good link. I could also show many examples of links in-context that are obviously manipulative. So we have to go what I've been saying for a long time - is the link adding value to the article? Is it placed at the time of publishing? Is it there just for the link, or does it provide value to someone who would click through?

Studies have been showing time and time again that readers are much more likely to click on something like [click here] or [this article] instead of an exact anchor. Exact anchors are basically only done by SEOs.

So we should think carefully about when'where we put these links too. I think the argument and studies done on partial-match anchor text being valuable bolsters the argument to link whole sentences instead of just the keywords you want to rank for. You may also get more referral traffic if you do this.

To your reason for the article, it goes back to your mindset I think - you can either do it for the link and therefore have to produce content, or you can produce content that happens to have a link. Any link is paid for in some way, by someone. Salaries, bandwidth, etc.

I just don't think it's that straight forward, as I said in my first reply on this thread.

So, I think this is a great question and underscores a very important part of SEO - it's not black and white. Some links are obviously paid, others are not. Then we have the middle where we have to interpret what is being talked about as "paid" or "incentivized" links.

I wouldn't consider any of these "paid links" I don't think. The only one that I wouldn't say this about with 100% clarity is #3, but in that case you're paying for the article, and technically you could pay to publish an article without a link, right?

The problem is that money always muddies the waters. By buying an ad spot you are advertising yourself, but it's obviously marked as an ad. Also, if you buy ad space you're probably guaranteed to be accepted as a guest author even if it is "reviewed by submission".

By paid links Google is talking about links that are "meant to manipulate Pagerank". All links manipulate Pagerank in some way you could argue. So are all links bad? No. I could show many examples of paid links that add nothing to the page on which they are. THOSE are the manipulative paid links, not one within a blog post that has a publication price.

Also, going in and paying for a link within an article after the publish date, and especially in an article that was not written by you, is definitely manipulation, even if the link makes sense.

Those are my thoughts. I'd love to hear the thoughts of others, though this topic has been discussed to death in the past few years.

Good question, Daniel. It depends on what you mean by "sponsor". Is it like people sponsor sections on SearchEngineLand (which are really affiliate links)? Or is it an image that shows that you are a sponsor?

I agree that it's a grey area. Wil Reynolds always points out that if Google was going to penalize something like sponsoring a hospital and having a followed link back, then something has gone way wrong. I tend to agree with him.

Think about if it's adding value to the user and the organization. If it's like what Wil talks about, then I think it's fine. If it's labeled as a sponsored link in line w/ FTC guidelines, it should technically be no-followed. If it's an image that is followed, it will pass link juice (Matt Cutts said so last month in a Webmaster Video). I personally say that a sponsorship where your image is displayed is fine and it does not have to be nofollowed.

If they're suspect, or could put you at risk of over-optimizing from anchor text, I would leave them to 404. I assume these are links that were built for you in the past.

If they're branded links and you have a strong backlink profile, I might 301 them. It all depends on what your current profile looks like and how these may affect your current standing in regards to Penguin.

Hi Indexxess -

I think the point is that no one knows at this point. I've seen some talk around the blogosphere and on different forums that a domain-wide 301 will sometimes rescue a site from Penguin, but not always.

It's so hard to know what to tell you. I have a client who got hit that I am testing out different tactics on different domains (they had multiple sites get hit). On one, we're trying to clean up the exact anchors. On another, we're redirecting domain-wide to a new domain. On another, we're building a lot of branded links. We're doing this because no one knows what will work.

I'd say you should, regardless, focus on getting good links. Get branded links. If you were hit because of a lot of exact match anchors, then you need branded anyways to balance that out.

From what I've seen and heard, negative SEO could work, and people are claiming it works. But it will take a lot of time and effort to do this to your competitors, and honestly I think you could better spend time on your own site and providing value than going negative and trying to knock your competitors out.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but at this point, there's just a lot of conjecture and testing going on out there.

Hi Nicola -

Great question here. As Malcolm said, ad networks do not pass link equity. However, a banner advertisement that is not part of an ad network is technically a paid link (unless it's an embeddable badge or something). Often these will have referrer numbers on them as well. I think that Google devalues these when they see the referral code, but that is not for sure.

But, to be safe, I would add the rel="nofollow" to these links.

Hi Andrew -

If this question has been answer/the issue has been fixed, could you please mark it as Closed?

Thanks!

Hey John -

Are these links pointing to your homepage, or to other pages on your site? This makes a big difference in knowing what to do with them.

Also, might there be other factors at play here, such as over-optimization onsite? I'd love to take a look at your site. If you don't want to share the URL here, feel free to PM it to me.

David -

Thank you for explaining more clearly, it's really appreciated!

If all major keywords have dropped 5-10 spots, it seems that your traffic must be down quite a bit, not to mention brand exposure.

I would submit a reinclusion request. I would be totally transparent, tell them what you have done to try to get the links removed, but also tell them that you did not build these links. Show them what links you are responsible for.

Unfortunately there is no way to know how long it will take for your client to recover. It's possible that they will be sandboxed for a while. What I would recommend doing is moving forward to building really good links for them, trying to get good press coverage, and try to get in contact with someone on the spam team to review your case.

John

Hi Lynda -

I hope I can help out here

One. Yes. If you have the same page titles on either pages or section pages, this can hurt SEO because you are targeting the same keywords on the same pages. I recommend reviewing this - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development and this - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Two. I am not familiar with  iMIS15, but if this is just a parameter at the end of the URL, that should be ok.

Three. Seems like these are parameters appended onto the URL. A canonical tag will deal with these issues, but it would be better to get the system to stop generating these. You can block them in Google Webmaster Tools, using the Search Parameters section, but this is just a temporary fix. You need to deal with the base of the issue, the fact that the extra parameters are being generated and causing dup content.

Hey David -

It all depends on how long it takes for the reinclusion request to process, if your rankings have indeed tanked. If you didn't build the links, be sure to talk about this prominently in your reinclusion request. Other than that, honestly, make a stink and get on Google's radar. If it's a case of negative SEO, then we need to make Google aware of it.

David -

What's your definition of a "good website"? If traffic has dropped 75%, Google has lost faith in your site and something has gone horribly wrong, thus your site is no longer considered "good" in their eyes. If you've done any unnatural linkbuilding (any comment spam or bought links), you need to get as many of these removed, or at least let Google know about it so that you can get back in the index.

There is no way, beyond being notified in GWT of unnatural links being detected and seeing a drop in traffic/rankings, to know for certain that a manual penalty has been applied. Usually you will receive a notice in GWT when this happens, though. Otherwise it's algorithmic.

Hey guys -

Good question here. You are right, JFKORN, that the scenario I described in my post was where content that should be accessible to Google was hidden behind Javascript. Of course, Google is now indexing Javascript and can parse it quite well, so I'm not sure it still holds true, but I still recommend, to be safe, to not serve content using Javascript.

It seems to me, though, that you are asking the opposite. But what they are doing here seems to be legit to me. In my mind, it is not any different from simply using a collapsible DIV to put tabs onto a page, like on this page: http://www.rei.com/product/812097/black-diamond-posiwire-quickpack-quickdraw-set-package-of-6. I would actually say that it's fine to do this. But, be careful with the content because you do not want to get into "stuffing" the pages with keywords, which can hurt your rankings, even without an official penalty. I've seen this more as an assumed algorithmic penalty that then went away when the text was removed.

So be careful, but I don't think you'd be doing anything greyhat here.

Hi Ennovation -

To directly answer your question, if you nofollow the link back, they will not receive any credit for your link. If they have a followed link to you, then you do receive credit. Simple as that. People doing link exchanges are usually quite wise to this, though, and when they find that you nofollowed the link to them, they will often remove the link that is pointing to your site.

I also have to tell you that I don't recommend link exchanges. I suspect that pages that exist just for link exchanges, or sites offering them, are quite discounted in Google. Plus, it ends up looking quite spammy, even if the sites you are exchanging links with are in your niche.

Since you are already thinking about building and keeping relationships with people, why not take it a step further beyond a link exchange, and instead do a guest post for them? If they want to do one for you as well, I think that's totally fine.

Good luck.