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Looking at the current links you have, there are some good quality sites already linking.

How long has the site existed for? A quick check on the domain in OpenSite Explorer reveals it has zero G+1's. It looks like you currently don't have a Google+ page, so the first thing I'd do is create that, then work on getting some more G+1's to your domain.

How long has the page existed for?

Have you checked its not ranking at all, or just the top 3 or 4 pages?  Eg. It might be ranking already, just very low. Also, how long has http://jobs.hays.co.uk/ existed for, as currently its not showing any moz metrics.

There's a great plugin that can help you initially, as well as another one that can optimize your images for the long-term.

Try "Enable Media Replace" (http://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-media-replace/) to simply replace your existing images without uploading them as new files.

Also try "WP Smush.it" (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/) as a general image optimizing plugin.

Further to my previous update, it now seems that Penguin 2.1 positively affected our site. So there's still the chance that the disavowed links have not been taken into account yet.

Either way, rankings have remained strong, but we still think there is further to go. We're continuing to contact sites directly, asking them to remove or nofollow our links.

Update...

Our rankings suddenly improved on Saturday October 5th, and we've seen an uplift in google traffic by a factor of 20/30% so far, but manually checking some of our rankings puts us on page 1 for a lot of medium/long tail keywords. We've not seen rankings this strong for ages.

It's still a little too early to tell fully so I'll update again in another week or so, but from an initial couple of days of data & analysis we're seeing better rankings right across the Google network

As well as simply disavowing the links, we also contacted 10 of the sites asking them to remove our links directly. Two of them responded saying they had done this on Wednesday, but this seems a little too soon to see an effect from so we're putting more belief that the the disavow links have been reflected.

This is the first time I've felt like we're finally seeing daylight, and it was the last source of links we've thought were damaging us!

Quick update on this - we've disavowed 22 entire domain links from these fansites and will monitor rankings to see if anything improves.

As mysterious as the disavow tool is, we're expecting to have to wait anything from 3 weeks to 3 months before anything happens. Will report back here with our findings.

Cheers.

Thanks for your reply Alan.

Do you have any idea why Moz would list them as incoming links in OSE?

We used a CDN to host all of the images on our site, and the paths are such:
http://cdn.onedirection.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/harry-styles-tongue5.jpg

Frequently we get a lot of other websites using our images, which we're fine with, but I would like to know if we get any SEO value from these image links? Interestingly they do appear in the "Just Discovered" section of OSE.

Cheers,

Chris.

301's will pass "most" of the value, typically 90%, and you shouldn't see any long term impact from this. However you might notice a bit of short-term action from the changes, particuarly as you have around 15 million pages indexed. Whats the website? Will be interesting to take a look.

I don't think anyone can honestly say what the exact impact will be, but large sites do undergo changes such as what you mention, and you rarely hear reports of long-term pain. As long as you make sure that everything is correctly redirected then you probably won't notice much of a difference.

If you pushed for a definitive answer though I'd estimate within 3 months everything should be steady and back to normal again, and from then onwards you can judge whether the additional keywords have had any impact.

Cheers.

Thanks for your quick responses guys.

Since the original penguin update back in April 2012, we've cleaned up our link profile immensely, improved the load speed of our site by over 150% and totally reworked & simplified our UI. Throughout all this we've provided unique, daily content.

As such it's been annoyance that we've only seen our rankings drop, but frankly we've never touched our core of fansite links. I'll be quite surprised if these are indeed the source of our problems - but at the same time delighted to have finally found the culprit.

Still, ignoring whatever decisions Google has made in its algorithms, are these fansites (and ourselves) actually doing anything wrong with their sitewide links? What is it that Google doesn't like about them? Usually the individuals who run the sites provide a lot of up-to-date content that other fans like to see, and quite often users will be interested in similar artists/bands, hence the links to "friends" or "affiliate" sites in the sidebar.

Is this a niche way of doing things that probably should have an exception from Google's calculations?

Or are they just bad, bad, bad?

There's a great plugin that can help you initially, as well as another one that can optimize your images for the long-term.

Try "Enable Media Replace" (http://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-media-replace/) to simply replace your existing images without uploading them as new files.

Also try "WP Smush.it" (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/) as a general image optimizing plugin.

Thanks for your quick responses guys.

Since the original penguin update back in April 2012, we've cleaned up our link profile immensely, improved the load speed of our site by over 150% and totally reworked & simplified our UI. Throughout all this we've provided unique, daily content.

As such it's been annoyance that we've only seen our rankings drop, but frankly we've never touched our core of fansite links. I'll be quite surprised if these are indeed the source of our problems - but at the same time delighted to have finally found the culprit.

Still, ignoring whatever decisions Google has made in its algorithms, are these fansites (and ourselves) actually doing anything wrong with their sitewide links? What is it that Google doesn't like about them? Usually the individuals who run the sites provide a lot of up-to-date content that other fans like to see, and quite often users will be interested in similar artists/bands, hence the links to "friends" or "affiliate" sites in the sidebar.

Is this a niche way of doing things that probably should have an exception from Google's calculations?

Or are they just bad, bad, bad?

Hi everyone,

I've spent the last hour or two googling information on Google Play app rankings, and a few websites mention that standard pagerank of the app page is taken into account when calculating rankings.

This seems to make sense, though I'd estimate it's probably not a large factor, with daily downloads being a much higher factor IMO.

So my question is, how much of a factor does standard link-building for a Google Play app webpage have in the rankings?.

We're trying to increase exposure of an app we've built (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.onedirection), and though we seem to have more downloads, reviews and +1's than others, we seem to be ranking beneath them.

Thanks,

Chris.

Thanks for your reply Alan.

Do you have any idea why Moz would list them as incoming links in OSE?

Looking at the current links you have, there are some good quality sites already linking.

How long has the site existed for? A quick check on the domain in OpenSite Explorer reveals it has zero G+1's. It looks like you currently don't have a Google+ page, so the first thing I'd do is create that, then work on getting some more G+1's to your domain.

301's will pass "most" of the value, typically 90%, and you shouldn't see any long term impact from this. However you might notice a bit of short-term action from the changes, particuarly as you have around 15 million pages indexed. Whats the website? Will be interesting to take a look.

I don't think anyone can honestly say what the exact impact will be, but large sites do undergo changes such as what you mention, and you rarely hear reports of long-term pain. As long as you make sure that everything is correctly redirected then you probably won't notice much of a difference.

If you pushed for a definitive answer though I'd estimate within 3 months everything should be steady and back to normal again, and from then onwards you can judge whether the additional keywords have had any impact.

Cheers.

Quick update on this - we've disavowed 22 entire domain links from these fansites and will monitor rankings to see if anything improves.

As mysterious as the disavow tool is, we're expecting to have to wait anything from 3 weeks to 3 months before anything happens. Will report back here with our findings.

Cheers.

Update...

Our rankings suddenly improved on Saturday October 5th, and we've seen an uplift in google traffic by a factor of 20/30% so far, but manually checking some of our rankings puts us on page 1 for a lot of medium/long tail keywords. We've not seen rankings this strong for ages.

It's still a little too early to tell fully so I'll update again in another week or so, but from an initial couple of days of data & analysis we're seeing better rankings right across the Google network

As well as simply disavowing the links, we also contacted 10 of the sites asking them to remove our links directly. Two of them responded saying they had done this on Wednesday, but this seems a little too soon to see an effect from so we're putting more belief that the the disavow links have been reflected.

This is the first time I've felt like we're finally seeing daylight, and it was the last source of links we've thought were damaging us!

Further to my previous update, it now seems that Penguin 2.1 positively affected our site. So there's still the chance that the disavowed links have not been taken into account yet.

Either way, rankings have remained strong, but we still think there is further to go. We're continuing to contact sites directly, asking them to remove or nofollow our links.