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Thanks David, some interesting comments on those posts. Normal, I would not bother with disavowing but in this particular instance the volume is at a level to cause serious concern.

Loss of rankings/traffic = Yes for penguin 1.0
GWT Warning = No

We have a large site which attracts a massive amount of link spam on a continual basis. I'm talking thousands of links every day. The reason we get so much spam linking to us is that we are an authority site in a highly spammed vertical.

So, to avoid falling foul of Penguin are we fast coming to a point where sites have to constantly monitor their link profiles and disavow anything that looks remotely dodgy?

We try to keep our 404s in google webmaster tools to a minimum but in recent months, the volume has simply exploded to over 500k errors. 99.95% of this is complete spam linking to pages that never existed.

Have tried marking as resolved but they just end up back in the list eventually and don't like the idea of 301ing so many links when the pages never existed in the first place.

We can just ignore them all but this makes it hard to identify legitimate 404s that need redirecting as there is only so much data we can export out of WT.

Has anyone had experience with returning 410s? Does google eventually drop these from WT?

Yes this will help a bit - will also give your users a faster responding website

Best option is to have top level domains e.g. .co.uk and .com.au with unique content on each and host the sites in each country.

With this approach, its easier to get local links, usually requires less links to rank each site plus you get higher click-through rates from the serps.

If you use directories /uk/ and /au/ case does not matter - my pref would be to use lowercase urls

Note: AU has restrictions on domain registrations (have to be an AU business) but you can get someone to register on your behalf.

As your site is new, I assume it has not built up much authority yet which will influence how deep your site will be crawled. Also, if you are creating pages (landing) that are not linked to internally then I doubt they are getting any link juice and wont get crawled unless they are getting some decent external links.

Yep, I agree with you there - never have trusted using &pws=0 logged in or out

I doubt this will dilute the effectiveness of the keyword - what I would be more concerned about is a potential ranking penalty. I have seen this technique used in the past but hardly ever see it being effective these days.

I would stick to crafting well crafted titles designed for the user in mind - keeping your keywords first in the title.

I doubt this will dilute the effectiveness of the keyword - what I would be more concerned about is a potential ranking penalty. I have seen this technique used in the past but hardly ever see it being effective these days.

I would stick to crafting well crafted titles designed for the user in mind - keeping your keywords first in the title.

Best option is to have top level domains e.g. .co.uk and .com.au with unique content on each and host the sites in each country.

With this approach, its easier to get local links, usually requires less links to rank each site plus you get higher click-through rates from the serps.

If you use directories /uk/ and /au/ case does not matter - my pref would be to use lowercase urls

Note: AU has restrictions on domain registrations (have to be an AU business) but you can get someone to register on your behalf.

Yes this will help a bit - will also give your users a faster responding website