I have an E-Commerce site with tons of categories.  These categories live on each product page for easy navigation of the site.  This means that the entire site has some 500 internal links with optimized anchor text.  Is this an issue and if so .....what to do.

Amazing ..... this huge update (from what I read on other sites and listening to Matt) and almost nothing here on SEOMoz.....What is up with that.

Sorry to hear things are still bad for your site.  We are still suffering reduced traffic and have done a ton of work on backlinks, created a list of very old ugly backlinks and a few new ones that frankly must be negative SEO (yea all you people that want to jump in and say no it is not negative SEO ....that is very rare to non-existent...dont bother....I dont want to hear it....your are wrong...you are as niavie as you are a fool).

We have now sent 1000s of emails and or filled out contact forms for link removals from these sites .....and gues what.....ZERO reponces so we are creating a disavow file and will try and come back here and let you know how it goes.

More on the negative SEO.....we have some recent links (according the MAN himself) that are super suspect.  We did not ask for them and there is really no reason for thse site to link us except competitors trying to pile on the already diminised ranks.  Hey negative SEO guys.....Get a life...

I would love to throttle some penguins.

I thoughs so ...just checking.  I get that the PR is only updated periodically.  I just frankly find is super hypocrytical to even index these sites.  In fact I will go further and say that if Google should either.

1. Just ignore links from sites like these as part a sites link profile.

2. publish a list like a wanted board an allow you to simple disavow.

I know once again I think they should think like me and I know this will not going to happen....so off I go to play the game some more.  Expect it to become harder and harder for small or even medium sized business to play this game.  In a few short years page one will belong to the large companies.

I am determined to fix the link profile of this site.  I found 52k backlinks..... Needless to say lots of them are old and the site no longer exists but at least once done I will have a cleaned up link profile.  A new starting point.

Thanks again Ryan

Signed backlink sloger jw

Ryan what do you think about directories like this

http://www.getbacklinked.com/

I don't think they pass the smell test but some do have thousands of pages index at google and even have PR from 1 to 4 on a few of them.

These are kind of like dmoz (a good idea turned joke IMHO).

My inclination is to request an unlink because I personally think that any site that just lists sites should be nuked from the internet.

I have been making as bad any site that has a submit your link or other such button in the top menu bar.

jw

Cool....I will stick to the ones we found that are not natrual if we dont get a reponce to remove.... I am still going to be amazed if any of these sites repond but out of 52k links I almost have the list of domains to contact.  Stuck the exports into a Microsfot Access DB which makes them easier to click and categories.

Cheers

So when I finally get around to disavowing some of these links should I include domains that are now parked or no longer have a functioning site.  That is to say the links are no longer active.  The reason I ask is there are many like that which are sites which were obvious link farms.....so it google holding those against the site even though those site are no longer active...... I could create a section in the disavow..and comment label it something like

OLD links that show up using various tools but no longer seem to function but we are including in order to make sure the link profile of this site is clean.

????

My plan was to use your last statement as my approach.  "if search engines did not exist, would this link be here"?  Said perfectly.  Does it mean I will remove some good links....well maybe but if google is not indexing a site then I suspect it is not giving me juice anyway and there are tons of links that google is not indexing.  This site does have some nice links so hopefully cleaning this up will get the site out the the box where penguins are stored.

I used netpeak for these status....great tool but worried me a tad as Malwarebytes blocks some outgoing traffic that tool is trying to send to their web site.  I assume just stat info and not the content of my hard drive....LOL

Thanks for the bing and AHREFs thoughts.  I will go grab them also, netpeak them and pull them in to the ACCESS database where I am making a superset list of junk.  Unformtualy the list is something on the order of 1000 links.  Give are take a few.

Thanks to the both of you for your help.  Sorry for the tardy reply as I was in transit.  The client has agreed for us to try and contact these sites and request link removal.  If that does not work then we will put a disavow list together and try to get this link profile repaired.  Then we will work harder on some quality links.

It is still hard to swallow that a practice that was once rewarded now requires money to fix....guess we will just caulk that one up to "Life isn't always fair".

I am just going to take Google Recent, Majestic SEO, and Site Explorer put them all together and get to work.

Ryan if you can share the name of the tool that would might give me a better handle on the actual age of the link that would be great.  I don't really want to share the links publicly and have my client to get 100 of calls.  If you are really curious I can PM details to you.

I suppose we would consider a reconsideration request if once these ugly backlinks are removed or disavowed the traffic does not return.  It is tough to think that something that was done 6 years ago now has such a huge cost.  I still think that if you are going to change such a fundamental rule (or finally actually inforce it might be a better way to put it) that you should allow people to simply reset their link profiles via the Disavow tool..... but hey .....no one is going to give me Matt's job anytime soon.

In the case of this site I watch the traffic fade starting the day of Penguin and it dropped more over the course of something like 5 days......It seems pretty clear Penguin implementation is the cause of the traffic lose also becuase long overdue deep on-page work did not help one bit.

Let the hours and hours of work begin....Ugh

I suppose one good thing about trying to get the links actaully removed is that traffic might start to recover during the effort as opposed to load up the disavow and wait.  In that sense we will start with the most agregious sites first.

The one thing I am still puzzled about is the 2012 backlink that are so harmful.  It is hard not to conclude this site is under attack by competitors.  I know everyone like to say this is rare but hey if you are being attacked then for your the stat is 100% ...not rare......why else would really scummy sites be backlinking to this site.  Please someone tell me a reason other than the 3 I have describe in this thread.

I could turn it off each night and turn it on in the am...LOL ...or better yet redirect it to google.com each night and redirect to the real site in the am.

The 301 works fine no matter the page.  Chances are most people would only type www.a.com and all the backlinks are to www.b.com (the real site)...

The actually site is at the incorrect spelling....but it is a common misspelling.

Thanks for the help.... I did not want to get goowacked for a simple thing.  That is a good new verb ...goowacked.  If you run out and regiester the term ....send me my royalties.

Cheers

At the heart of every algo change is revenue not fairness.  To believe otherwise is to be naive.

John Pring hit the nail square on the head.  If you don't increase sales who really cares if you increased rankings.  Many SEO companies use Rankings as a measure of success.  While it is one factor if that is how they want to be paid......run!  An hide!

Actually for me is seems to be about 2 months old.  We were hit hard by penguin and it seems I am just now seeing that April debacal hit the rankings page.

Anyway.... perhaps it is ok when things are running smooth but in trying to monitor rankings more closely it seems quite useless.....

I know some people will want to jump on here and tell me I can't monitor rankings that closely that it is a fools game.  Please don't bother ....I am tired of being preached to about big picture....yea there is that but anyone that had traffic cut in half needs to look at rankings weekly for a while.

Our rankings are fluctuation wildly from week to week.  On page one for days and then no were and then back to page one and then to page 5 and then no where and back to page one.  Google sucks and is penalizing white hats and still rewarding total spam.

Take any comparisons shopping site.  That is not a site.  It is a site that lists sites.  That is spam.