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You'd have to add the disallow in robots.txt and then go into the Google Webmaster Console, use the Remove URLs option to get Google to deindex that page.

From Google:

Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ( have you read our removal requirements? ). Only site owners and users with full permissions can request removals.

This is a code injection kind of spam that you have been hit with. I suggest you go ahead and upgrade your wordpress to the latest version as well as the plugins and themes.

The code injection is either placed within mySQL database in the wp_options table or inside your header files.

Check this article for an exact fix - http://www.mydigitallife.info/wordpress-hack-recover-and-fix-google-and-search-engine-or-no-cookie-traffic-redirected-to-your-needsinfo-anyresultsnet-golden-infonet-and-other-illegal-sites/

Do they have great content ? Do people like the content ? Do actual users share or interact with your content ? Is it ideation of your e-commerce products ? Or is it more like information about your products ? Does it add value to your customer ? How much content do you have on your microsites ? Are they same/similar topics ?

It depends case to case, but you could indeed consider doing what you are thinking based on the answers above. Just make sure it adds value.

Also, have you ever received a penalty or unnatural links warning ?

Honestly, my advice would be to grab a list of your backlinks using both Google Webmaster Console as well as the OpenSiteExplorer and merge them into a spreadsheet and get rid of all the duplicates.

Next step would be to identify which of those links are spammy and you'd be better of having them removed. This is in my opinion the hardest part depending upon the volume of sites/links.

Then hire somebody to find email addresses of the websites where you want links removed. Finding something on the page and if nothing else, using whois. I would then send an email to each one of those contacts and in a quick short email, tell me the URL where the link is located and your site URL. Tell them to remove the link right away since you have received a Google Warning. I would imagine this taking care of a good portion of those links. I would send another email in a week and then again for a total of 2-4 times to see if you get a response and get the link removed. When nothing else worked, offer then $10 for the link removal and that should gain their attention. If that does not work either, I would suggest you move on.

I hope this helps. You could get somebody on odesk.com or a similar site to get all the labor intensive work done.

I agree with Andrea's comments. I'd also like to highlight the answer from within the question.

"My main competitor has a lot more pages".

Great content, strengthens your entire website. Attracts more social media activity, more shares, more time spent on site etc etc. So If I were you, I'd see what I can do to provide useful content. Find the gaps. Look at your analytics, see what keywords people are using to come to your website. Do you update your content ? Is there an opportunity there ? If you can, see what people are looking for in your site-search.

I hope this helps.

How much other unique content is there on the page (if any) ? Judging by your question, it does not sound like there's a much bigger piece of content that's unique to this page only. So if you have 1-2 paragraphs of sales pitch which is duplicate or similar to the sales pitch or promotional copy on other pages, it's okay if the ratio of the duplicate snippet is small. If however it's a big proportion, then it's thin content and the site may drop off in the SERPS. I would recommend doing a complete SEO Audit, see what you are doing, how you are ranking, what the competition is doing and how they are ranking and create an SEO roadmap to follow. I hope this helps.

I just responded to this exact question. Here's my answer and a link to that question:

Honestly, my advice would be to grab a list of your backlinks using both Google Webmaster Console as well as the OpenSiteExplorer and merge them into a spreadsheet and get rid of all the duplicates.

Next step would be to identify which of those links are spammy and you'd be better of having them removed. This is in my opinion the hardest part depending upon the volume of sites/links.

Then hire somebody to find email addresses of the websites where you want links removed. Finding something on the page and if nothing else, using whois. I would then send an email to each one of those contacts and in a quick short email, tell me the URL where the link is located and your site URL. Tell them to remove the link right away since you have received a Google Warning. I would imagine this taking care of a good portion of those links. I would send another email in a week and then again for a total of 2-4 times to see if you get a response and get the link removed. When nothing else worked, offer then $10 for the link removal and that should gain their attention. If that does not work either, I would suggest you move on.

I hope this helps. You could get somebody on odesk.com or a similar site to get all the labor intensive work done.

There are 2 aspects to removing these pages (I am presuming these URLs are already indexed in Google).

First, you need to get these removed, so that they do not exist. Either a 404 or a Canonical to itself.

If it's a canonical, as Google recrawls these pages, they will drop the duplicates from their Index. If they are 404, then also they will drop or you can request remove via Google Webmaster Console.

I can's say specifically without looking at the actual example.

I hope this helps.

Technically, yes you could do it. However, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. In most cases, you will see that the domain expired, went to redemption, got deleted and then nobody else has bought it...yet. In these cases, usually the power of the domain is lost to a great extent, although not 100%. It's tricky.

2. Consider #1, since all the value is not lost, you could do this, but then are you planning to do this for 1-2 domains or 100-200 domains ? Where do you draw the line. Because technically, the question then becomes of 301'ing that old/expired/reregistered domain to your website. If you do it 1-2 times, it might be okay, but then if this becomes your primary link building technique or a big (un-natural) percentage of your backlinks, it will be nothing but trouble. I hope this helps.

Marie

I just found this Chrome Extension, which does have a copyscape aspect in it. So you can click a button and it can check the entire page, not just a small snippet of text or phrase.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/meta-seo-inspector/ibkclpciafdglkjkcibmohobjkcfkaef

I hope this helps.

You might also want to try the Crawl Test tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
This tool crawls up-to 3000 pages for any website and I think for PRO you are allowed 2 crawls every day.

P.S. At the time of writing this reply, I see my crawls from yesterday and day before are still pending, so there might be something going on with the Roger bot.

Slow and Steady is always a good sign. However spikes every once in a while should not be an issue at all. Let's say something from your website goes viral and you get tons of likes and other social activity related to your website for like 3 days and then it dies down. That's the nature of social media. Don't worry about it

Wordpress is like any other CMS. The same problem of SPAM exists with Google's Blogspot. Spam is everywhere and I don't think the Search engines are trying to use "What CMS are you using" to decide if you are SPAM.

I would not worry about getting penalized "Just because you decided to use Wordpress as a CMS/Blogging platform".

There are tons and tons of great, high authority, ranking websites made with all kinds of CMS platforms including Wordpress. So, I would say there's no merit to this.

Google's Matt Cutt's own blog is Wordpress Powered if that helps

You are 100% right. That's it. The concern is having 100's of thousands of links that would be very very low quality links. The affiliate link pattern will make it "sort of okay" if you decide to keep them follow. Those links are there for the affiliate tracking, but typically the majority of the web uses some sort of an affiliate tracking site like GAN (Which is closing down), CJ, Linkshare etc. Considering that, is it really worth the risk of having that many number of links ? Maybe, maybe not. And that's the business decision you need to make.

The affiliate traffic and sales is important (which justifies the affiliate program). Your natural SEO rankings (current and future rankability) helps you justify the importance of these kinds of decisions and which is why you are asking this question.

We just need to find the right balance without tripping too much on either side.

Domain Authority is definitely going to matter here, but honestly not that much. Your strength is that you can work a lot more for your local area / niche and can have a lot more local links compared to the national sites. I would find out ways to get links from local businesses, non profits and other communities and organizations.

I would also suggest looking into doing some sorts of small events / meetups for potential clients to come and ask questions. You could also organize some activities / contests for kids.

I would also look at opportunities to work with specific real estate communities and sponsor some of their events with gifts. You could also setup a photo booth there for people to take pictures and then provide them a digital or paper copy of their picture towards the end of the day (Print them at a local Walgreens and have somebody pick them up or if it's cost effective to have a decent quality photo printer that can handle volume). The photo op could have your URL / Brand in the background in a creative way along with the year and name of the event.

Again, I think the intent is to think of this as a Brand Building Technique. Links, Mentions and Citations will come along with them.

Enam, I would not worriota out it. This is a natural link. Think of other social networks like twitter. If you were to tweet your link and 10,000 users retweet it, you have that many links from different pages within twitter.com

this s the nature and structure of the website, don't stress yourself about this. If this was coming from a crappy domain or spammy bloon other it would be something to worry about.

I hope this helps. Have a good weekend.

Well, technically you could. But to me it would be more important to optimize these pages to rank, rather then use the strength to link to other pages.

So it's your choice ;). I would rather milk the cow here....

Keep in mind that these pages are probably already linking to your other pages as well via the common header, footer and other navigation links.

Domain Authority / Pagerank is what Google looks to see how deep and how frequently Google will crawl a particular website. They also typically look into how frequently the content is being updated.

Think about it from Google's perspective. Why should they index that website, 2500 pages every day. What's changing ? Does the site have enough domain authority to warrant that kind of indexing ?

In my opinion, this is not a concern. Just submit XML Sitemaps and see what percentage of your submitted pages are indexed.

You can also consider using Xenu's Link Sleuth, which can then crawl a website and provide you a list of any/all external links. This tool will essentially provide a complete list of outbound links from a website, not just from one page.

Do you have an Image Sitemap created and submitted in your webmaster console ? If not, I would suggest you do that. Other then that, if I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about this being an issue at the moment. Google is smart enough to understand this as a CDN situation. As I said above, doing an Images XML sitemap should be all you need to do in this regard. I hope this helps.

Is it a natural link ? It really depends how you are getting it and what the context of the link is. Let's say you designed a professor or a departments' website hosted on a .edu, yes, it makes sense to have a Designed by link. If the professor has a list of web design resources and mentions your website, that's also a great link. But if it's a comment link or on a forum or something else...that would probably mean there are a lot of other unrelated links as well and therefore not a good link.

I hope this helps Shashank.

I agree with Toshi one hundred percent. It's strongly recommended to change it. I'd say it's crucial you do it. There's absolutely no reason to not do it.

Go to Google.co.uk and do a site:yoursiteurl.com to see if you are indexed in Google UK. You can also check the cache using cache:yoursiteurl.com

If I were you, that's what I do. You can use the Crawl Test Tool - http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test but that is more of a crawlability check, not whether you are indexed or not.

Jesse, you have some great responses below. So great question to begin with. I also like the 4 example scenarios you posted. What I'd like to ask is, what percentage of their business is driven directly/indirectly from their websites ?

Once you know how much money a business generates from a website, you can then put some sort of an ROI and budget you are willing to spend to expand on to that. Now, the question is, would you list your business in BBB if there was no SEO value ? Let's say we go back in 1996 when Google does not exist. You have Altavsita, Dogpile, Excite.com and so on. They don't look at the BBB listings. They only look at the Meta Data. Would you still list yourself ? If you'd say yes then, I'd say yes today. If it was no then, let it be a no today.

However, if you are also struggling with some rankings and looking for some brand citations etc, you might get listed and move on. It's not really going to move the dial. Don't expect that you list today and in X amount of time, your rankings improve.

I don't know if I helped you or confused you further. Just my 2c, for whatever it's worth

I agree. They look damn scary. You can tell by looking at the list, they look like directory sort of links. Yes, definitely not a good idea...might might work really really short term but will haunt long term.

Provide some examples of how Google sent the un-natural links warning to hundreds of thousands of website owners. Link building / Off-page is always a bit tricky and the best bet is to build great content and if one out of 10 pieces of excellent, well researched, well written content ends up being loved, you get a ton of good quality, natural links, that money can't buy and your competition won't be able to achieve...easily.

I have been attending Pubcon in Las Vegas every year since 2003. I have only missed 1 or 2. Also, Pubcon is the only conference I have attended.

What I'd say about Pubcon is that I look forward to it every year, year after year. It's a busy 3-4 days conference. Usually 6-10 sessions running concurrently and the topics vary from On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate, Conversion Optimization, Social Media and so on. There are usually around 100+ sessions in total to choose from.

Overall a great event to attend.

What will you learn ? Well, that's a tough one to answer. Usually I don't go to conferences and expect something to learn other then meet a lot of nice people in different industries. Sometimes you talk to people, hear out speakers and see them talk about specific strategies they use or specially the tools. I love the tools part. There's always something new to learn in the SEO Tools area. Other then that, talking with people and attending sessions kind of gives you a very broad/but in-depth overview of where the industry is moving, whats going on in the world of search.

I also have Mozcon/Distilled/SMX Advanced/SES to the list of conferences I would consider attending based on timing and budget.

I hope this helps.

Yup. In that case, I'd go with a BBB listing for the Massage business as well as the Law Firm.

Ud, I strongly suggest you look into the latest Search Engine algorithm updates and read more about the Penguin and Panda updates. Thin, unrelated links can and will hurt you. I would instead suggest spending that money and other budgets in building and strengthening your content.

You might also want to read this article at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

Well, I think I have a different opinion here. Think from a user's perspective as well as the Search Engine perspective, here's the way I am thinking.

Let's consider I own a small company called ABC offering XYZ services. Now SEOMOZ acquires that ABC and all the services are now offered via Microsoft. There are tons of citations from Wikipedia and other new etc kind of sources mentioning XYZ. They are all linking to XYZ services page on ABC.com

Now when we redirect ABC.com to SEOMOZ.org, its all good. So till this point, we are all good, but if we have lots of deep links to ABC.com from around the web, won't it make sense to have specific redirects in place, redirecting ABC.com/XYZ to SEOMOZ.org/Products/XYZ etc provided there's a page about XYZ on SEOMOZ.

Does that make sense ? This way if I click on to a link about XYZ from somewhere on the web, I reach the desired URL, not just the homepage of a big company or corporation, where I will have to further drill down trying to find the information I am looking for.

I think there's considerable value in understanding more that goes into SEO and how you can build your business both short term and long term in the World of Search. When you say "Basically, I live and die on search engine ranking.", that really answers the question itself for you.

Honestly, I would stay away from buying links unless you are ina really really black hat, super competitive niche like Online Casino, Gambling, Rx, Adult etc etc.

Those guys are clearly selling links with PR. Huge Red Flag. Stay away.

I would suggest building content with that budget, content that helps your user find what they are looking for. Content that they would link to and so on instead of spending your money on junk links.

EGOL is right on. I would also think about what %age of your blog posts have search engine traffic ? Look at last 30/60/90 days maybe ? Is there any seasonal content ? Factor all those things and then decide. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to update them. Sometimes delete them and redirect them to an updated/newer article. It might also sometimes make sense to merge multiple similar topic articles.

Think from a user's perspective and not SE perspective and you'll be good as long as you are thinking about SEO best-practices, which it sounds like you are.

Craig

That's a great example and I agree with you, you are on the right track. Think about your competition. They would also have the similar kinds of links. So you have those low quality, but natural links should be totally okay. With the nature of the web, nobody can control who links to them. Think what kinds of links Google, Yahoo or Amazon or Microsoft might be getting all day long.

I would only concentrate on the actual links that are problem, should out manipulation, clearly blog posts, guest posts, reviews which were done from crappier sites, spam blogs.

I hope this helps.

Please see answers in Bold.

1. is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. --- **The content is good. It should help your homepage rank for a lot of long tail keywords, provided it's optimized for them. **

2)  We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page.  Is this too much? - Anchor Texts to the same page won't help. If I were you, I would rather send 5-6 important links to the most important (different pages). Multiple links to the same page from your homepage won't help IMO.

3)  We repeated footer path the same as the header fly window (same link, same word), is this over-optimized?  If not, does it serve any SEO? -- I don't understand this part of your question.

What you could do is add 1 domain, then add your common keywords only and add 3 of the other sites as Competitors. Unfortunately, you can only setup up-to 3 Competitors per campaign. I hope that helps

Would you essentially have the same set of products with exact same product categories, product names, product descriptions ? If yes, this could lead to duplicate content issues. Also, since your "microsites" will be powered by the shopping cart on the main site, I am guessing all these microsites will have to be hosted on the same server ? In my opinion, there's definitely "some" value in trying to do this with this approach. It just depends on how big scale are we talking. I mean are you talking about 5 microsites or 50 ? It would be worth if you could build a wedding or a baseball related niche site with lots of good, unique content that is only on the microsite along with the products from the main site but having a different unique description that is different then your main-site. I would also start thinking about how would you build the domain authority / links to the microsites ? IMO this is a bigger discussion that you need to spend some time on.

How widespread is your "products" appearing in multiple categories ? ARe you talking about 8 out of 10 products in the category duplicate / very similar to the same collection appearing in the other category ? It really depends how many categories you have, how many products, how deep this is compared to what other unique data you have on the page combined with your domain authority etc.

As for Show All, do you also have page 1, page 2 and a show all ? Do they have unique page titles and descriptions ? What do you want to appear in the SERPS for the users ? So if I search on Google for Red Widgets, what's a good experience for me. Is it to land on Page 1 or the View-All page ? Based on what you want to do, I suggest you look at:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

I hope this helps.

I would recommend to look at Page Authority as well in those scenarios. It's not always accurate to just use domain authority. A domain maybe very powerful, and a link from that domain is helpful. However if the page is not that powerful, it's still a good link in most cases, but not all, EG the wordpress.com example.

On Wordpress.com, anybody can setup a blog like yourname.wordpress.com but even though the DA for wordpress.com is 100, yourname.wordpress.com might be nothing/minimal. So from the 4 examples you gave, this is the only one where you have to look at page authority. On the other 3 examples, it really is more research as to what exact page the link is on and what you can do to gain a similar link.

I hope this helps.

Think of building site authority very similar to brand building. How did "Coke" or "Pepsi" become a brand ? Then think about Online Only companies, how did they become a brand ? Essentially take all sorts of things in the offline world to the online world and that's essentially Brand/Authority building online.

Anything and everything that spikes discussion around your domain name, brand and your website contributes towards Site Authority. Facebook Links, Pinterest Pins, Mentions/Cittations in online news, articles, websites. Think contests, infographics, link bait.

One way or the other they will lead to links and is in some form or the other... link building. But it's definitely not the link building you are talking about  (3 way, or non-reciprocal).

I hope this helps / clarifies and ignites some ideas/thoughts.

Was this a Wordpress blog and did you install a plugin to do these changes ?

Jan, I completely understand and agree with your frustration. This used to happen very very aggressively with scraper sites back in 2003-2006 times. Redirect links used to rank higher then the original sites.

At some point, Google will catchup and understand what's going on and rank your site better, but honesty, a lot of times, higher authority sites tend to rank better with minimal on-page content and in this case, as Ian pointed out, it's the summary of the post along with their domain authority that's making them rank higher.

See this if you haven't already: http://floost.com/search/search?q=yournextshoes

Are you seeing a considerable traffic from their site to yours ?

If you have a reason to have a press release, definitely do it. Think about it from a user's perspective. If they see your press release in Google News, would they read it and if they do, is that something they'd call a news ?

As for the distribution, yes, all/most sites have "some" SEO value. But the way I think about a PR is...distribute it with the intent of it getting picked up by offline media potentially and other news outlets..not just for the backlink.

Also, I would not recommend doing too many press releases just for a backlink.

DMOZ over the last couple years has been Submit It and Forget it. There's not much you can do. I have been a DMOZ Editor in the past and it is what it is.

Also, in the days of today, I do not value a DMOZ listing as much as I used to 5-7 years ago. I would suggest to keep working on your alternate link strategies.

Well, just check every once in a while and see when the page gets updated again. Maybe set a reminder to check once a month. As for the 301s and 404s, there are in-built tools within DMOZ to detect those as well as expired/expiring domains etc and so on.

It's just that sometimes the queue is too long. And since it's volunteer work, there's just not much you can do. I know as an editor of a regional category, I used to have tons and tons of submissions and unless you are spending an hour a day, you can't catch-up and eventually you give up.

The editor for that category has tons and tons of categories he is authorized to edit, which makes me think he is a senior meta editor.

As I said above, DMOZ is not worth thinking too much about. I know it stresses one out, but it's beyond control. Submit It, forget it. Move on

It sounds like it's been a while since you demoted those pages. I think this sounds more like a bug that it's not happening. You could go to the Google Webmaster Forum and submit a request there or if it's urgent and the following solution is doable, you could try blocking those 3 pages via a noindex tag or via robots.txt and see if they get removed that way. Once the pages have been removed using that technique, you could remove the noindex tags or disallows in robots.txt unless you would prefer to keep it that way and you don't want those 3 pages to show up anywhere...period. I hope that helps.

What about the age of the 2 websites as well as the age of the backlinks to them ? 
Also, I am sure you have already, but I have to ask: Have you targeted to get links from sites that are linking to your competitor ?

How large is their site vs yours ? Is their site updated regularly ?

Other then your primary keyword, do you outrank them on a lot of other keywords ?