That's good. Sorry, but I had missed the part where you said your clients site was compromised previously....

Hi Matthew,

Sorry to hear this, and it's not good news. As to how/why it's happened, I can only guess one of two resaons. Either someone who knows nothing about SEO has decided s/he would "help" the whole SEO process and buy some links in. Or, and possibly more likely it may be a competitor who is doing a negative SEO campaign with the desire to lower your organic rankings, ensuring you will be penalised by Google.

You can now use the Google Webmaster tools and use the disavow tool to tell Google to ignore those links.

Hope that helps and all the best.

Gordon

As always, this area of paid links seems to bring about differing opinions. Are paid links on directories still valid? Listening to the likes of Ken McGaffin over at Wordtracker, he seems to suggest we should never pay for links or directories.

Moreover, if it is acceptable to go with a legitimate list such as this one  is there such a thing as too many of these (in this list) paid directories?

SO.... is there a final definitive word (at least for today!) - paid directory links - still acceptable and will it harm if I did 30? 50? 200?

Not that it's an issue, but when will this be taken out, as it's still causing confusion and it's nearly a year since we saw this reply?

Thanks