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I'm in the same boat as Steve, Google's got it locked down in the UK and in my experience clients aren't willing to pay for anything other than Google optimisation. However, as you say Steve, good ranking on Yahoo / Bing usually follows success on Google.

One thing I am looking into though is the Yahoo's Shopping search (Product Submit). It seems to be a largely untouched space in the UK and I'd be interested to hear if anyone's seen success with it. From my investigations so far it seems that you have to submit your feed in $s which is obviously a problem for UK merchants, however I see listings in £s. Do we have any UK experts in this field?

Anthony, Marie, Chris, thanks a million for your responses, all most helpful.

Chris, it's funny you should mention this: "...site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you."

The most recent response I had from a site owner was exactly this. The email stated the link had not appeared there by chance, it had been placed free of charge by either my client, or someone acting on their behalf. Which is true, unfortunately.

Marie, the particular sites I'm dealing with at the moment I will never want links from in future

Thanks again for your responses, you've definitely answered my query.

Hi,

I'm in the middle of a link removal campaign and getting a lot of replies from site owners asking for payment or directing me to a link which is effectively a payment page.

The way I see it is my client is paying me to do their SEO. I'd rather be spending my time and their money building quality links, therefore the link removal process is in my way and requests for payment an insult.

However, I am not without sympathy for site owners being expected to remove links free of charge. After all there's absolutely no incentive for them.

So far I've had a zero tolerance attitude towards this and refused to pay, but just wondered what everyone else's opinion was.

On the other hand, many site owners have been very helpful and removed the links at my request. Is it the right thing for me to remove these domains from my Disavow Links file?

I'm finding it to be a bit of a moral conundrum to be honest!

I don't control the original site, it's a SEO directory. There are links from it to a page on my site that I want to remove, so I figure I'll 404 the page on my site and re-direct the url back to the directory site.

It is rhetorical given that you've already confirmed that it's enough to 404 the page.

I don't follow, sorry.

In this scenario:

www.badlinksdirectory.com/pagewithmylink

links to

www.mydomain.com/targeturl

and re-directs to

www.badlinksdirectory.com

Presuming I've changed the url of /targeturl so the content still exists on my site and /targeturl is effectively 404'd.

How are the links consolidated?

Wouldn't it become just an internal link but with a detour?

Thanks for clarifying, I appreciate it.

Out of interest, what are your thoughts on re-directing the link back to the source? e.g. re-direct www.badlinksdirectory.com/pagewithmylink to www.badlinksdirectory.com

This is of course a somewhat moot point given your response, but I'm just curious what your opinion on this would be in a rhetorical scenario.

Hey Dr. Peter, thanks for your reply. No need to apologise, I really appreciate your critical opinion. I'd like to explore this a little further if I may. If I 404 the page (which is something I've considered), the links are still pointing at my domain, so remain potentially harmful until removed, right?

Same applies if I meta noindex it, I'm still stuck with the links. And with link removal being a major part of SEO at the moment I'm seeing more and more webmasters applying a charge to remove links, so it's either costly or a stalemate.

Obviously, that's what the Disavow Links tools is there for, but I haven't seen much evidence of it working... not quickly anyway.

In your opinion would re-directing to badlinksbin.com move the links out of harms way?

I take your point about negative SEO and concede the activity may have the same hallmarks, but I'm not actually breaking any rules here, right?

Yeah I've seen that Chris, thanks. I think it pulls this in from the @connect tab on Twitter.

This is not a question as such, more a gift

I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links.

For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site:

www.mydomain.com/viagra

and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links.

The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo!

Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page.

Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links.

This bypasses the lengthy link removal process.

Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed.

And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site.

As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too.

I hope it helps some people.

Chris, Jonathan, Christy, thanks for your replies. I'm really sorry for such a long delay acknowledging these, I've actually only just realised there were answers to my post.

@Chris, I already use Hootesuite and find it really useful, but for this particular task I don't think it's up to the job. This is the scenario: I created a piece of content that got over 100 tweets. I wanted to very quickly send a follow up tweet to these people, basically to add fuel to the fire and keep the conversation going. Hootesuite does not do this, as far as I am aware.

@Jonathan, I've not used Tweetadder. Sounds interested and could possibly be what I'm looking for. I'll check it out. Thanks for the advice.

@Christy, not simply a thank you tweet as such, but something to continue the discussion and hopefully get more shares for the content. You're right, mass tweets isn't the best way to go about things, but individual tweets was simply not possible on this occasion.

Thanks to all 3 of you for taking the time to reply.

Hi Sam,

This issue is still occurring today. It seems to be specifically a Chrome issue. I've tried IE and seems to be working fine, shame I don't use IE, hey!

I've cleared my cache and deleted cookies in Chrome and the same thing's happening. Each time I enter a new domain in OSE I have to log in. It's getting pretty frustrating now tbh.

Thanks for your help Sam.

Yes, that's exactly what I have been experiencing. I'm glad to hear it's not just me, but on the other hand sorry you've suffering the same frustration. Thanks for submitting a ticket, hopefully the issue will be identified and fixed soon.

Thanks Patrick. It hasn't happened for a couple hours now, so hopefully it is just a temp glitch as you suggest - fingers crossed!

Anyone know why I'm being logged out automatically?

I'd concur with Lesley Paone, that definitely coincides with Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't seen your link profile but you mentioned there's just 100 backlinks. It may be this was enough to rank you before, but not anymore. Just a thought.

I was just going to post a new question, but this is related so I thought I'd join in here. I have seen drops in keyword ranking also which I believe is Penguin 2.1. My question is this, can I rely on the manual action section of webmaster tools to tell me if the site has been hit?

I've been searching for a tool that will allow me to send mass tweets to multiple @accounts?

For example, I use Topsy to see who's shared my content and want to send a follow up tweet to everyone who has, but find it time-consuming to do this manually.

What I have in mind is something where I can upload a spreadsheet of Twitter names, write one tweet and for this to be tweeted at everyone on the list.

I haven't found what I'm looking for so far. Does anyone know of such a tool?

Hi Kimberly, The links on the wordpress.com blog may be an issue. Are there many exact match anchor text links on it pointing to the site.org domain? Do you have any other backlinks on other sites other that the wordpress.com blog that may be 'unnatural'? It sounds like a link audit might be necessary to investigate further why you've received a warning from Google.