I'm trying to address the above-board methods. Can you buy links without getting caught? Sure. But why do you think Google built Penguin in the first place? And what's to say they won't roll out something in the future that can catch them more readily?

nofollow is the only safe route with paid links. Anything else is playing with fire.

Let's start with the first important question: Did I pay for this link? If the answer is "Yes", then do they nofollow the link? If no, you need to either get it removed or make sure they nofollow it.

So now we've gotten the obvious ones out of the way. Now... how to spot the unnatural links. A link can be unnatural if

• It shares specific keyword rich words with other links. For example you have 200 sites that link to you saying "Buy widgets now"
• The sites are low quality. Blogs with 1-3 posts that look abandoned after posting content that reads like an ad for you. Article writing sites.
• The site has no logical relation to your site whatsoever. Tire stores linking to doll stores doesn't make sense.
• There's a network of these links. If you've not gotten the hint from the previous two, look for patterns that stick out to you.
• There's little diversity. You have lots of links from very few sites.

So how to spot them? I'd cross-reference AHrefs with Open Site Explorer and look at keyword text and, in OSE, look at the strength of the site (PA/DA columns).

Lastly, what to do about them? If you think there's something that is actively hurting you then slowly begin to chip away at the links either by requesting removal or disavow. but remember that if you don't do this without a plan you WILL hurt your site.

Rule #1 in SEO Outsourcing is this

There is no SEO Secret Sauce.

Put another way, there is no proprietary SEO knowledge outside of Google and they aren't selling it. This means that any company doing SEO work on your behalf should be providing you a report of what they are actually doing. If they balk at it, shut them down because it's the surest sign of a scam.

Rule #2 in SEO Outsourcing

NOBODY cares about your site like you do.

Even if I am paid by you to care, I still won't care like you do (or should). I am constantly amazed by people who are shocked by poor SEO going on under their nose by people they paid. There are multiple tools available (paid and free) to you to check on your website. And if you have a feeling that your website is being harmed, do your own research. While a good SEO will try to provide meaningful metrics about what their efforts have generated, they will always put the best spin on it (that's not an ethical lapse, just human nature). Look at your own metrics and make your own decisions. If you don't care about your site, don't be surprised when an SEO you paid runs it into the ground.

I really like how Stack Exchange handles their URLs

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30526714/seo-and-user-friendly-urls-for-multi-language-website

So to break down the URL, they have a directory questions, then the question ID and THEN the SEO friendly tag. Since the URL can be edited by anyone, it preserves the reference the system needs to access it regardless of what URL you're using. This might help your programmers if they know they can keep the ID in the URL. Otherwise you have the overhead of looking up the URL and then loading the correct page. Does that keep it typeable? No, but let's be honest... when was the last time you actually typed a URL (more than just the domain name) into your browser?

I've found that many sites do this, primarily for tracking reasons. Typically they'll do the tracking and then bounce you to a clean URL.

As long as the page is on the same domain and the end URL is relevant, I can't see how it would impact quality score.

There's nothing wrong with hidden elements as long as they serve some purpose other than to game Google. A hidden div with tons of content that will never be seen by a end user is spam. A hidden div that requires you to click on something to see it is not spam.

Matt Cutts talked about the issue a couple of years ago

The only way to know for sure is, after having linked your GA to Adwords, is to look at server logs and look for the following (in bold)

www.yourdomain.com/somepage?gclid=XXXXXXXXXXXX

This is how Adwords passes the session on to GA. If you click on your own ads you should see this show up when you finally arrive at your site (if not check configs).

the amount of sessions of Paid Search (in channels) and  AdWords sessions don't match up (The number of actual PPC clicks is substantially higher than the Paid Search sessions)

This is normal. Because GA relies on JS code there will always be missed sessions. Some people have JS turned off, while others have plugins that block GA from loading and sending data back. Server logs are the only real way to know true traffic.

It sounds like you're talking about CNAME vs a 301 redirect.

DNS can't really "redirect", at least in the SEO sense. A CNAME DNS entry acts as a pointer to another site. Sooner or later you have to have an A record to act as the "glue" between yourdomain.com and an IP where it can be accessed. The problem is that yourdomain.com is the end result. So even if it is just a CNAME for loadbalancer.abc.some.cloud.com, it will be seen as yourdomain.com by both the browser and any robots that visit.

A 301 redirect is an actual instruction (HTTP response code) from the web server (IIS in your case) to the end browser, saying that yourdomain.com really belongs over at anotherdomain.com. At that point your browser (or crawling robot) goes to the new domain. This is considered the proper SEO way to redirect anything, as it is known that robots respect the 301 response and most SEO benefits that the previous link had will flow through the 301 to your new page.

Correct. If you have a wall Googlebot won't index it unless you make some sort of exception for it (and even then Google frowns on walled off content). SEM had great article on this talking about Google's rules for walled news content (may not apply to you but interesting nonetheless).

I would put your wall behind your content, not in front.

You can go this route easily enough, it just requires a deliberate decision as to which is public and which is behind your login-wall. Put a different way, you're going to need some public pages that explain your site, how the process works, etc. Once you've established what is necessary from a user and SEO perspective, then you can wall off your content behind a login.

You also need to experiment some with your funnel. If you present your wall on the first page after the home page, is that going to drive conversions (registrations in this case) up or down? Maybe your users are reading 3-4 pages before registering. Where is the sweet spot? A-B test. Funnel test. Be careful that you don't go "Hey, registrations increased sales so we need everyone to register!" because you might hurt sales down the road if less people register.

You won't get a referrer. Googlebot is not like a real user, surfing from site to site. What Googlebot does is this (more or less)

1. Googlebot requests a standalone page
2. Googlebot parses the page out. During this process it notes the links on that page and, depending on various mechanisms (nofollow, internal page rank, the mood of Matt Cutts, etc) it will note those links for the system to parse later
3. Googlebot is done so it grabs another page off the page list (likely without know how it got on said list) and goes back to #1

Now, to your question. Since Googlebot has no referrer it won't get your alternate content. This means that your alternate content page won't get indexed.

I would suggest here that a best practice is NOT to filter on referrer data, which can be inconsistent and potentially fake. Instead, I would make a separate page that contains your extra data and allow users to decide if they want more information Thus Googlebot finds all your content and your users get a better experience.

It looks like you have some NS problems according to IntoDNS. The largest issue is that you have 4 nameservers listed with your registrar but only 2 are listed in your DNS.

~]$ dig NS yoactive.co.uk
;; ANSWER SECTION:
yoactive.co.uk.         86400   IN      NS      ns2.ccgdigitalmarketing.com.
yoactive.co.uk.         86400   IN      NS      ns1.ccgdigitalmarketing.com.

You should have a NS record for each DNS server. Also, your SOA is set to expire in... 5 weeks?! That's crazy long.

If you can't get this resolved with your host, you can always try CloudFlare, a free DNS + proxy service.

Hidden means the text will never be shown to an end user under any circumstances. It could be in a div with "display:none" as its style, or white text on a white background.

As long as the text isn't hidden it will be indexed properly. It doesn't matter how you display it on the screen.