Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Kent - Just guessing here...  IF you had to change your settings, did you clear your cache? Might be worth a try to see if that solves it.  Good luck.

Joshua - I moderate all of the comments to my blog before and remove any links before they go live.   I find this effort worthwhile because the comments seem to increase user engagement (time on page) on the articles that have extensive comments.  These pages seem to become reliable traffic generators and seem to withstand the algo changes.

Nor would it help local search.  This could be a major factor in deciding where to purchase heavy printed materials.

I found Marie's comments very interesting.  Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be my problem.

I agree with Marie's advice not to do anything to respond to a perceived penalty.  Doesn't look like your site is "penalized" but the swings are extreme.

My EMD site dropped from 12 (on last Saturday's MOZ report) to 41 (last night) to 32 a few minute ago for the EMD keyword.  The site has also been affected by Panda (April & again recently) but, as Elia's response suggests, G is probably adjusting the EMD values.

My Moz points seem to increase immediately by a couple of points when I post a question.   I know that Moz awards a point for the question so I assume the "extra" 2 or 3 points come from some sort of caching issue which updates when Moz awards "automatic" points for something.  Just an observation if that helps your techs who are looking into this issue.

Darin & CMC-SD.   Thanks for your comments.  I am highly experienced in my field.  Very few guest blogging opportunities are available in the properties that occupy the SERPs I'm competing in.  Smaller indy blogs (whose owners I've known for years) probably offer realistic opportunities for guest blogging. But I don't want to convert their customers to mine. (The product should be inherently local but there are national providers.)

My concern is how to counter the "authority" of the copywriters.  I'm concerned that G will look at the authority, page rank and engagement (bounce rate & time on page) of larger sites and reward the copywriter with authority status based more upon the platform they publish on than any real authority on the matters they write.

Although G could begin to compare the number of fields an author publishes in and add an educational history and licensing status to G+ pages, I suspect that G wouldn't bother to go through any extra steps (costs).  Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but selling Adwords is G's business and search results just need to be "good enough" without being too darn good.

Again, thanks to both of you.

To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?

I've been wondering which would be better given G's "authorship" tracking program.

"Onreact.Com" indirectly raised this issue in a recent blog post "Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores" as :

"Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all."

Assuming all other things are equal, would you use "Guest Author" with G Authorship attribution (if allowed) or just ghost the article and include an in-text link without attribution to you as the author?

Eliathah - I agree.  Blog commenting is extremely inefficient use of time. I wonder how many of the people who promote blog commenting as a method to obtain traffic would pay someone else to put "meaningful comments" on relevant (no-follow) blogs.  I wouldn't and I doubt many people would.

Dexm10 - The substantive text on the sample page consists of 47 words.    In the U.S. 10 on similar legal topics, I doubt 470 words would work on a legal site nonetheless a page discussing such a common subject.

I noticed 10+ sub-topics on the sidebar.  My guess is that you'll need to combine the child articles into the parent and offer much deeper content to be competitive.  It will probably require a substantial investment of time by people who know the subject areas.

You probably omitted the "www" prefix.  (Without the prefix, OSE says DA = 1).

I searched first with the "www" and came up with the same numbers as Dana.

Dexm10 - The substantive text on the sample page consists of 47 words.    In the U.S. 10 on similar legal topics, I doubt 470 words would work on a legal site nonetheless a page discussing such a common subject.

I noticed 10+ sub-topics on the sidebar.  My guess is that you'll need to combine the child articles into the parent and offer much deeper content to be competitive.  It will probably require a substantial investment of time by people who know the subject areas.

The links from low authority, unrelated sites are not likely to help much.  The anchor text (all keyword rich and targeting a couple of phrases) is scary.  Warn the client about the Penguin mauling you expect when the client reaches the tipping point.

InHouseSEO - this is a GREAT question.   I wish there were more discussion of realistic case studies like this one rather than so much "focus" on negative SEO and a handful of high authority sites that were probably hit by mistake.

The consensus seems to be that you can file for lifting a penalty IF you can show you removed bad links AND document the efforts you made to remove the bad links that remain despite your efforts.

Matt Cutts appears to say you're more screwed if the penalty is algorhythmic.  Huh?  Buy BMR links, remove them and escape the penalty G imposed on your site for 50  -100 presumably manual and relevant blog comments?  Gimmee a break!

The 50 -  100 blog comments are probably going to be the worst of the lot to attempt to remove.  Have you had any sucess removing the trash directories?   You might be able to out grow the penalty by developing new links so that the number of suspicious (or bad) links falls below the tipping point.  On a recent WBF, Danny Sullivan opined that Penguin is just a devaluation of the bad links. (Not my opinion but it's an interesting opinion.)    No one has shared results but some people have suggested combining removing links with developing new strong ones.

Penguin is bizarre.  Some of my pages are (very) slowly returning to their former top positions even when some of the bad links point to them.   New pages with extensive content (think 2,000 words of unique/expert content) were among the first 2 - 3 to cover the event but now rank around 120. (Ouch).

I share your suspicion that for many of our sites, it's aggressive use of anchor text.   Developing non-aggressive links may dig us out.  Would love to hear from anyone who had tried this and what results they acheived.

Joshua - I moderate all of the comments to my blog before and remove any links before they go live.   I find this effort worthwhile because the comments seem to increase user engagement (time on page) on the articles that have extensive comments.  These pages seem to become reliable traffic generators and seem to withstand the algo changes.

When I read that part of BMR's post, I heard Claude Raines saying "I'm shocked that gambling is going on" and Peter Lorre saying "Your winnings sir".  B.S. indeed.

Been wondering about this myself.   Did anyone who had a site that was otherwise clean get slammed by Penguin because of IBL's derived from widgets?

Riplash & PVB : Thanks for sharing your observation about local.    2 - 3 months ago, I joined a thread and asked whether anyone thought optimizing for local would decrease national search SERP rankings and no one seemed to think it would.  My main site got mauled by B&W critters in April.  So, if I set up a new site to replace it, I'll set up a micro-site optimized for local and move the good local links there rather than to any replacement non-localized site.  Again, thanks for sharing this useful info.

Cesar :

I looked at your Scrabble Dictionary site. (Nice).

I probably wouldn't blog but would spend time trying to involve the user with the site and try to build loyalty or continue to build authentic socials.   (On other info search sites, forums seem to do pretty well and moderating the UGC to exclude spam is far easier than sustaing a blog.)

The scrabble game is buried in a secondary page and takes a LONG time to load.  (The ads for "Buy A Link" which appear to delay the game loading up in Java do not help.)

I'd consider moving the game to the home page or at least makiing it more prominent as a choice on the home page.  Then, I'd consider awarding some sort of prize (a Scrabble game?) to whoever scores the highest on site that month.  If you can restrict the prize to those in your FB community, you'd limit the CPU drain and gain community in FB. (Sort of a take off on EGOL's "Free Beer").

Just my .02 drachma/euro....   We'll see what far more experienced people suggest.

To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?

I've been wondering which would be better given G's "authorship" tracking program.

"Onreact.Com" indirectly raised this issue in a recent blog post "Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores" as :

"Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all."

Assuming all other things are equal, would you use "Guest Author" with G Authorship attribution (if allowed) or just ghost the article and include an in-text link without attribution to you as the author?