Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I see a lot of people asking questions and getting some pretty good responses, but the people who are responding, often do not get a thumbs up for their answer.

If you are new and you are reading this, then you maybe do not understand that a thumbs up actually helps the person who gave their time to answer your question.

There are several ways it helps, including giving feedback that the answer or the attempt to answer was actually useful, that you learned something or you appreciate the time it took to check your questions and give you feedback that you don't get in other forums, where you might be ignored for weeks or months.

This is a collaborative forum and we are all here to learn something and to pass some of our knowledge to others who need it.

Not every answer we give needs a thumbs up, but if you got something out of the answer, then, surely it is worth a second of your time to say "Thanks, that helped me" or "Yes, I agree with this"

We started reasonably early on plus, and promote a lot of our stories there every day. From the very start, I thought the idea sucked, and I still do.

Our readership is generally older. Most have no idea what g+ is and they don't care. They also want to know why the hell I've put the g+ button at the top, above Facebook and twitter which A) get more than 10 times the attention B) seem to bring in 10 times the readers

I'm expecting google to limp along with g+ until they finally work out it is a waste of time. We have 250,000 readers per month. Since we added the g+ buttons, we've had maybe 2 million visitors, yet only 600 unique visitors have clicked the g+ buttons.

Google WMT says we have too little engagement to show stats So either this means our site is worthless and the 250,000 readers hate what we're doing, or g+ is only for geeks like Robert Scoble.

I have connected with some good people there, but getting interaction is hard. If you go look at what other people are posting, their g+ area is a wasteland, even if they have some god stuff. I do go and read and interact with others.

I'm not giving up on it yet, but then I didn't give up on gbuzz and they canned that.

I was really expecting to add 20-50% to our readership, so 0.0001% doesnt cut it.

The upside of google+ is the profile. I definitely think the rel author has value.

Google is definitely trying hard and putting big resources into g+ but it looks like a miserable failure to me, and that makes me happy, because if they can't get social working, with all of their money and resources, it tells me a couple of things. A) google really don't understand social B) the people who are making a success of social really do understand it C) people who have tried social and failed are no worse than google - it isn't easy D) when I said google doesn't understand my business yet they are telling me what to do, maybe I was right E) PhDs often have no common sense, no matter how brilliant they are in other areas

Hello Jason,

Scrapers can always remove your G+ profile image and link, but if you add it to all of your articles and your site has your own profile page and you link the G+ profile to your own profile page, at least google will know that you are real and you are claiming ownership of the content.

It is too soon to tell if this is the answer, but it is what google says and it is what we are doing.

Here is a short video I made to explain how to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccVX2q_nbGo

Cameron, I always recommend businesses link to their press releases. Doing so provides value in different ways. First, if there are no links and no references to it, it basically has no value, Second, you get a little bit of third party validation from it. Third, you can get visitors from it and brand recognition. I know of releases that we published in 2005 that still get hundreds or thousands of visitors each month, because they have incoming links. Don't base all your decisions on what immediate link juice you might get from an action you take, because it may hurt you some time in the future. And yes, prlog is good. I have some I will send there this week.

Welcome to SEO - not always as interesting as photography.

Yes, I agree you can't always tell.

Quite often, the posts are not advice on how to fix your problem. Quite often, the posts are more like asking you questions, trying to qualify the question you are asking, or a poster may take the time to tell you what their experience was, with something they believe is similar to the question you are posing.

If a response makes you think about your question, so you can go back and update it, so following readers can more easily understand your question, then that poster helped you, by giving up their time, so you could improve.

As humans (I think most SEOMoz contributors are) we often see interactions that we don't contribute to, but we can quite often learn something from the posts - and that can be worth a click. Or, we may agree with what someone else posts, and rather than writing an entry that says, Yes, I agree with EGOL (he writes as lot of responses) you can simply give his post a click.

I've never been one for touchy feely stuff, but I know that feedback is important to all of us.  ( I just got a new Personal Development writer in my newspaper, and he is making me rethink a lot of things. )

I believe that the wider you cast your net, the more fish you catch.

I would rather have one link from each of 10 different sites, than 10 links from one site. Or even 100 links from one site, assuming the sites were of equal power.

But I also think it is nice to have a few different links, pointing to different content you produce, even from one site.

For example, a big site links to my newspaper, with several hundred thousand links. It is because they put the link in their sidebar. I am very grateful for that, because we get visitors from there. I much prefer the links they have directly to stories that relate to their audience, because not only do we get repeat visitors, but they are more targeted and more likely to read more than one story on the same subject.

I also notice we have a single link from thousands of small websites, linking directly to a particular story. That definitely seems to help those individual stories.

Most links that you don't solicit are good, but I think links from more new sites are better.

Hello mememax

You are only seeing a small picture, but you must remember that search engines see a much larger picture.

If it was easy, most of us would not be here, trying to work out how to stop being destroyed.

You suggest that you can buy or sell a link on the street and search engines will not know.

That is not true. If the person who paid you for a link has hundreds or thousands of paid links from other places, you just accepted $5 and what you did was place a massive target on yourself. It may have been your first link, but the other party is unknown to you, so you just damaged yourself unknowingly, because you didn't understand how the system works. My guess is that hundreds of thousands of people have been damaged because of things like this.

You can't control who links to you, but you can control who you link to.

Yesterday, I was asked for a link from a good-looking website. It was in my niche. I told them all of my advertising links are NOFOLLOW. They said that might be OK if the price was right. I checked their site, and I saw they had FOLLOW links to about 10 other sites, and some of them were outside the niche.

RED FLAG.

I don't even want to sell them an advertising link.

What would you do?

There has been a lot of discussion about press releases.

You can't only do things that you consider give you pagerank power.

(well you can, but that's not the real world)

If press releases were dead, why do the big PR companies still charge $300+ for a press release and issue 1000 to 2000 of them every day?

Press releases work. They get your name out there, and if other sites pick them up and publish them, you get access to their readers. If a journalist or blogger picks it up, you get more coverage.

Yes, my site publishes press releases, but thats not why I'm  saying this. I'm telling you because it works. If it didn't work, I would stop. I have press releases that get hundreds of readers every day, so if you have a story to tell that is worth reading, you could get those readers.

I would also use a 302.

As long as it doesn't last too long, you should be OK.

If you think it may last longer, you could change your DNS to point to the other location, but you should drop your TTL on DNS so it is a fast changeover to move it back.

This kind of thing is best set up and tested when there are no problems, on another domain, and then test it for real sometime when you have worked out exactly what to do.

Hello Martins.

nofollowing a highlevel folder doesn't necessarily stop robots reaching the lower levels.

You may have links that point to the lower levels or there may be external links pointing to those lower levels.

Unless you test it and prove something, I wouldn't believe that nofollowing an upper page will prevent crawlers from accessing, indexing and following lower pages.

The nofollow only tells the crawler to not follow any links it finds on that page.

If you had the same links on another page that did allow following, the crawler can follow them

the search bar results are good for searchers but not for search engines. You can stop all search engines and Roger (the seomoz crawler) from going into those pages by adding an entry to your robots.txt file. Roger only responds to his own section of the robots file, so anything you make global will not work for him.

User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /search/*

EGOL,

If you haven't already done this, consider my #5 in the answer below.

I wouldn't do that, because it might take traffic away from the affiliate, but the main site may not generate enough extra income to recover from the shortfall.

There is no point in ranking higher than the affiliate, if you destroy the affiliate's business, but do not recover it all yourself.

This is the age-old sales problem. Many companies, when they have a great salesman, who always exceeds his targets, change the quotas, to make it harder for the salesman to hit his number, so he works harder, the company makes more and he makes less. Eventually, the salesman will stop working so hard, and then look for another job.

Good salesmen and good affiliates are definitely not a dime-a-dozen. Look after them.

Jimmy, as Anthony says, you need to be careful about who you are targeting.

You want writers but you shouldn't be trying to attract them to the main news pages. Those are to attract readers. There should be a separate page to attract writers, otherwise you will attract writers but no readers.

My writers page does well, even though I've never really optimized it.

For stories, your keyword or theme will be in the headline and title. Make headlines short and snappy. Don't bury the lead, make sure the story covers the theme and wrap up at the end. Hints, in the form of subheads work well. So do relevant pictures (make sure you have rights to them)

Hello Robert.

There seems to be a lot of reshuffling going on right now.

The old 80-20 rules still seem to apply. - 20% of the things you can do, account for 80% of the reasons for ranking well - or not.

Take this with a pinch of salt, because I don't have proof. It is really a conversation starter.

While not wanting to have a spammy title is a laudable goal, it is possible it was not only OK, because of the domain name and the name of the site, and its theme - but also the main reason it was ranking so well.

One thing you could try is to add back the domain name in one or two of the previously best-performing pages and see what happens. See if you can get a couple of new links into them, from a couple of busy (relevant) sites, and maybe a couple of social signals, to prompt the crawler to revisit quickly.

Google seems to have a number of ways to treat duplicate content of the type you are suggesting.

You are almost suggesting syndicated content. This is closely related to a press release, which is issued with one press releases distributor and then published on multiple other sites.

A little investigation shows that google handles such duplicate content pages differently, depending on which way the wind is blowing today.

If the site that posts the secondary copies is a powerful site or a site that google likes, then there seems to be no problem with duplicate content. To check this out, find an Associated Press story , then search for it at google and you will find it on dozens, or even hundreds of newspaper and radio station websites. Most of them will have exactly the same headline and exactly the same content.

Any site that posts the secondary copies, that google doesn't like, for example, covered by panda or penguin or a manual penalty, the content will not be found in search results, unless you go to the end of results and redo the search with the duplicates shown.

If the original site is weak or covered by panda or penguin, then the secondary copies may display in search results, but your original may not. It is also possible that your index pages that contain a snippet of the original may display in the results, but not the complete original, if other, more powerful sites are displaying it.

So, if my observations are valid, it means that you should keep the original to yourself and not syndicate it. If you want to get value from other sites, then write a different story for them (guest post, as DiscoverAfrica suggests) and get a link back to your site within the body of the story.

Hello Jo.

Do you know exactly how they got in?

If not, here is one possibility:

Check to see if you have a copy of timthumb.php

If you do, and it is an old version, it has a vulnerability you must fix, otherwise it will happen again.

Here is information about that, including a scanner that should find and fix that problem.

<cite>wordpress.org/extend/plugins/timthumb-vulnerability-scanner/</cite>

If you have unix and shell access it should be a snap.

but as you're asking this question, you probably don't even know what "grep" is

Get a list of title and URLs from each site

mix them together

sort by title

this will tell you if there are duplicates or if you missed any

if the domain names are different search and replace them so they are the same

Manipulate the list so it is in redirect format

12,000 is not a lot. I worked on sites with several million.

Don't do a folder level redirect.

Honesty pays, I think. Google knows pretty much what you did. The engine guesses, but when a live body checks on your request, it's not likely you will fool them. They know which sites sell paid links. If someone else also paid for links from that site and they already did a reinclusion request and said they bought links from that site, you paint a target on yourself if you don't own up to it - unless you really didn't buy the links.

You could wait up to a month for any response, going on past history. Be sure you're disclosing everything you know about in one request. Don't think you can keep sending them in because, from what I've read, they will eventually stop listening.

I can't help you with protocol, other than to say spell it all out because they can't read your mind and expecting them to guess probably won't work in your favor.

If this is the first time and you haven't seen any others, don't worry too much.

I recommend you contact your DNS provider and ask if they had any outages internally or near to them, on the date shown in the DNS failure report. Tell them is it because google WMT told you about it.

The internet, contrary to popular belief, if a system held together with old string and sometimes it breaks.

If you are really worried about it, you should get a service that checks your DNS and access to your site on a regular basis. Then you will at least know if there are other times that there are problems. If you have only a few pages on your site, and it doesn't change often, google will not be there very often. If you have a lot of content and there are regular changes, google will be all over your site, a lot of the time, so short outages can be more of a problem.

Unless the developer has done something really weird with .htaccess, you should be able to integrate a blog to the existing site.

Send me your friend's name, I want to sell him a bridge LOL.

The developer needs to be slapped around for not building in a way to change the site and your friend needs to be slapped for not thinking of that before spending so much money on a static site.

I agree with Robert Fisher. They could just change the site to wordpress, unless they've done something really avant garde with the site - and if they have, as I've seen with a few other people recently, the search engines may hate it.

In any case, if they stick with what they already have, it should be a very simple job to add a wordpress blog. You will need to configure it correctly. I do hope this was built on a linux box, not Windows.

If there is no way to update the site without the developer, they may be in for a lifetime of being locked to the developer, their costs and their schedule. This is likely to be very bad. What are they going to do when they want to add a G+ button? What about a facebook share button? What if facebook changes their API? What if they pay the developer to add G+ and google does their usual - decides its a bad idea and can the project or change it 3 times over the next year?

And (the editor in me talking) it is "intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes."

Rasmus,

Your description and keywords tags are exactly the same on both pages.

The description should be a summary of the content of each individual page

If you fix that, it may go some way towards fixing the problem.

If that doesn't help, then consider adding more text to those stories

• say a little more about each competitor, or at least the leader or the top 3.

Another thing you could consider is using a different template for that type of page, so you don't add all that stuff under the HR tag, and maybe drop off something from the right column, so the page is a little bit shorter and the story will be a larger percentage of the text.

You also have a lot of inline javascript and a lot of external javascripts.

I don't know if the bots or the ranking algorithms care, but it would be a lot nicer if you consolidated some of that.

Try this, for linux, Tyler:

in .htaccess,

RewriteEngine on

Rewriterule ^/$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]

Thank you algri.

I wouldn't do that.

I think I did something like that a long time ago, but "natural" is a much better thing to do now.

That is what google might call "doing something for the search engines,"

rather than "doing something for your readers."

If your page is really about that keyword, then I believe you would be better off getting that keyword into your page headline, which would be in the H1.

What you are doing is manipulating the power of the H1 to achieve your SEO goal, whereas you should be doing it for your reader, but structuring it so it works for the search engine as well.

I would change what you have.

SirMax,

Domains don't rank. Only pages rank.

The front page of a site is not a domain, it is a page and it ranks on its merits..

If the domain is strong, (the combination of many strong pages), its pages will benefit from the domain strength, so if you add new pages, those pages will benefit, if if no other sites link to it. There are caveats - you could have a strong domain, but there could be problems that prevent the pages from ranking - panda and other duplication are such problems.

Hi EugeneF

The problem with tel: is that most browsers don't know what to do with that, so they see it as a URL relative to your site, and when you try http://www.google.com/tel:1231231234  there is no such thing and of course, you get a 404 error.

So here is another gotcha that we will all have to cater for in our robots files and .htaccess files.

What you need to do, to handle that, is to detect that you are dealing with a smart browser that understands what to do with it, and only display those anchor links to those browsers.

The upside, of course, is that either robots or hopefully, real people are clicking on your phone links.

The downside is that if they are real people and they get a 404 error, you are giving them a bad surfing experience.

One reason to change all URLs from _ to - is conformity.

If you have some that are _ and some that are -

the question is how will you remember which one to use, for a particular page?

For that reason, I would convert them all.

As for using a canonical tag, I don't know, you'd need to know what google and otehr search engines do with that information, if anything. I would also worry about what they will do with it in the future, because these things are liable to change.

If it was me, I would change them all and redirect the stragglers.

Hard for me to tell, but with a million pages and facebook and many others adding useless parameters on the end of our URLs, its been a major problem for a few years.

The thing I really dislike about the google interface for handling this is that there is no way to tell them to ignore all parameters. Hopefully, with the number of parameters I've told them to ignore, they just automatically ignore all new parameters.

The first rule in this business is "You can't trust programmers"

I should know, I am a programmer and I used to manage teams of them.

You can't trust them to write something perfect, because they will always make huge assumptions, based on what they know.

They should know that URLs can contain commas, and they should quote them.

If they didn't do that in the final field, it is a deficiency in the code and your stuff isn't going to workunless you fix it manually.

What you need to do to fix this is to add a quote after the 10th comma and also add one at the end of each line.

Unfortunately, even that is a problem.

The problem is there are other fields that may not be quoted, some of which can start with http://

There can also be line breaks in the title field, and possibly even in the link text field.

Quotes and other characters are escaped with double quotes.

Titles and link text can also contain commas, so it is very complex.

Some of the fields are a bigger mess because it depends on the link text, and if the link text contains an image, you'll have quotes and equals signs, commas and all kinds of stuff. You can also have upper ascii characters and multibyte characters.

They did actually quote the first URL, if it contains commas.

They really should have quoted every field

It is because Roger ignores those META tags.

Also, google often ignores them too.

The robots.txt file is a much better option for those crawlers.

There are some crawlers that ignore the robots file too, but you have no control over them unless you can put their IPs in the firewall or add code to ignore all of their requests.

Site looks nice, Paul. If you haven't done this already, use the SeoMoz tool to check your onpage setup: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new Fix anything that needs work and then start promoting your site. You can set up tracking here: http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker You will be emailed regular updates, that show if you are making progress. As it is a real site, issue a press release every week, about something interesting you are doing or that is of interest to people buying travel insurance in Ireland. Change which pr site you use, so they aren't all from the same one. Write other articles and get them published in other places - offer them to your local news sites.

Hello Sam.

That doesn't sound like panda.

If it was panda, you wouldn't be on page 1 for keywords, unless your keyword is the complete title and you are the only one with it.

More likely is that your competitors have moved up and maybe some of the sites you dot links from have been destroyed or maybe they dropped their links that point to you, or maybe they made them nofollow.

Dropping just a couple of positions would be a wonderful problem to have.

If you haven't already done so, I suggest you work through the training, so you understand more, then use the tools in the "Research Tools" menu item at the top of the page.

I believe it is much better to allow the search engines to handle it themselves. Check your logs to see what they are doing, so you know if they are hammering you server. If they are, you can slow them down using the robots.txt file On a large site, google will often such out a few hundred thousand pages per day. Yahoo will do more, but their crawler isn't always friendly or smart. Sometimes different Slurp crawlers will request the same pages. Bing emailed me six months ago and asked that we remove the 2second delay I added. I did that because they were hammering the server, but only sent a few thousand readers per day. Google doesn't usually hammer the server, but when 5 or 6 are hitting you at the same time, it can affect you site response time. - and then some of them want to penalize you for having a poor experience for visitors.

Hello.

I think google doesn't like some things about your site.

You rank #14 for motor cycle center.

I see you have a hidden div that contains a login box, right up in the top left corner, so the first 50 words on your page relate to your menu and that login text.

The rest of the text on your page consists of a mass of motorcycle-related words in links, but nothing in the way of text to tell the crawler what your page is really about.

Surprisingly, the on-page report gives you an A, but this report isn't smart enough to understand that you don't have any human-readable descriptive text,

I suggest you do a Crawl as Googlebot and see what it tells you.

Robert,

EGOL and Robert are both right.

There are some things you can do to stop the drift, and possibly reverse it, but that is more effort

I'm out with my ipad, so the formatting of this may not be good.

First, look for content that is 100% yours and see if that is falling too.

• let me know what you find.

Fix the red group problems that SEOMoz tells you about

Then

1. go to your WMT account and see if there are any problems listed. - fix them

2. check to seee if you have any outgoing links that are boroken - fix them.

3. check for duplicate titles and descriptions and content. - fix them or delete and redirect.

4. rewrite posts that are not uniquely yours - this is the hard work, especially if you have a lot of pages

5. Get a G+ profile if you don't already have one and link your site to that and link that to your site.

SEOMoz is not google.

I suspect that SEOMoz is an exact match system, so it will not pick up the nuances that google does, unless they recode that. I have seen the same with a few things I tested too.

You will only get a perfect answer here from someone who has thoroughly tested it - and you have that opeion too.

My view is that you just do one of them and let google do its thing to find relevance.

You can't possibly tie up every keyword by trying to match for them all. If you do try, you will turn your site into a mess that people will look at and wonder what the heck you are trying to do. It will probably be confusing and you will undo any good work you do. Look in your analytics to see what is working for you already. Then reinforce those things. I wouldn't try to go after things that confuse other pages that already do well.

I know, it is horrible.

I don't mind them testing stuff, but I wish they wouldn't do it on my sites.

It would be nice if they had an opt-in to be their beta tester.

I tried this a few years ago.

The strategy was to find good writers and help promote them and get them into news writing and reporting.

It wasn't about links, other than linking to stories in the newspaper, to get more readers.

It was a miserable failure.

It is a lot of work and you have to find people who are interested, get them fired up and keep them interested.

We got a couple of writers and we have one lone blogger left. I shut down the rest of the network.

We probably went about it the wrong way, but I had someone managing it, who we paid, but it just never worked out. If you consider this, you really need a lot of things in place, a great plan, a fired-up evangelist, and ways to build and increase interest.

You could go out and find people who have done this and seek their opinion and advice.

Boodreaux

If you haven't already done this, consider doing my #5 in the answer below.

That should brand your ID into your text and photos

Here is what happens with google - which is not as smart as we (and they) think they are.

If you take a snippet of text that is keyword rich, and slap it on 10 other sites, they will almost always (in google search) outperform your whole unique story.

From what I can see, there is no way to change the color of the G+ button.

They wanted it that way, most people seem to hate it, but we're stuck with it until enough people complain - and maybe not even then.

Remember when everyone hated Microsoft because they knew what was best for us, and they never listened?

google is the new Microsoft.

Melissa.

If anyone knew the answer, they would be going around selling the ability to fix panda and other problems, but I don't think there is anyone outside of google who knows the answer. We are on our own. The same thing that happened to you happened to us over 12 months ago and I'm still struggling to find a cure.

Working on a drastic change next week, but that change will not help you - your site is much too small for this change.

Not a lot of this makes any sense.

Linking to other sites - so is everyone else and they are not affected.

short content - so are many others and we're not hearing from them

some racy content - maybe, but look at all the others.

You have many incoming links from big sites. Maybe their algorithm is so paranoid about new links that it has hit you.

Here are just about my final ideas for you, after this, I can't think of anything.

1. Do you have any copyright content that someone could have reported you for?

2. Are you linking out to any bad sites - check all of your links - including the ones in your footers and sidebars.

3. check your pages with "fetch as googlebot" in case they can't find what they want

4. Check to see if you've been linkbombed with a ton of bad links, by someone who doesn't like you.

5. Register your writers with a google profile and link from their profile on their site to their google profile

You said you checked WMT many times, so you didn't get an unnatural links message

Two possible reasons nobody else has answered - they don't have an answer - or maybe they are too frightened to connect with you, because of the takedown.

Good advice from Andrea and Brent.

To use multiple sitemaps, do something like this:

The main sitemap points to the other sitemap files.

You can have up to 50,000 URLs in those files.

• mine are gzipped

This one is sitemap_index.xml

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/writermap.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/mainmap.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/201201.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap></sitemapindex>

<sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/201202.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap>

Here is a tip:

Google will index some of those pages and some it will not index.

If you have 5,000 urls in one sitemap and they only index 4957

you probably can't work out which 43 URLs they didn't index,

so if you make the numbers smaller, it can be easier to discover the pages they don't like.

• not easy, but easier

Slow down Ofer, or you will cause more damage to yourself

I know you want to fix this as fast as possible, but don't ask until you are sure you got everything.

If you fix a little bit but not all and keep asking, they may stop responding to you.

You should also thoroughly check things on your own site. I could be wrong, but I think a page rank drop penalty will not be because bad sites link to you or that strong sites link to you, but more likely that you sell links based on your PR, so google's way to stop you is by hitting your PR. Certainly your PR could drop because of the loss of incoming PR due to their sites being hit, but that would just be ranking, not a penalty. Even if you made no money, but you did a trade, it amounts to the same thing.

Did you sell paid links? If so, either nofollow or remove them.
Did you do a lot of multiway links? ( that was stupid) Remove them
Did you trade links with bad sites? ( that was stupid) Remove them
Did you spin content and point links to your site? ( that was stupid) Try to have it removed.

I think removing them is better than no following them, but if you have a quick way to nofollow, then remove afterwards, that might be useful to do.

Make sure your site is clean, then try to have other sites remove links. You need to go after the ones that don't make sense - unrelated sites.

Good luck - and don't ask for reconsideration until you fixed the problem.
When you do ask, document the changes you made, so write them down as you do them..
When you make hundreds of changes, you will never remember them all.

SEOMoz suggests you try to keep total links on a page to 100 or less, but this isn't a limit and it isn't an error if you exceed the number.

I have a small number of pages that have up to 4000 links - these are for readers to see the most read stories , all in one page, and I don't care what the search engines think of them

• I make pages for readers, not search engines, and readers don't want to page through 400 pages looking to see if something they care about appears on these pages - they want to see immediately.