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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?
We're currently in the middle of a link audit on our website OneDirection.net and a large part of our incoming links come from fansites such as the following:
Now, our previous way of thinking was that these are very relevant websites in the same niche as us, and therefore should be passing some value? However all of the links on these sites come from sitewide images with no alt-text. Some of the sites are passing 1000+ links to us.
We've been wary to disavow or request removal of these links as we've usually gone with the thinking that Google applies "common-sense" based logic in its algorithms, and therefore these backlinks should be ok - in our opinion.
However we think we are suffering from some kind of algorithmic penalty with our current rankings, and are now thinking these could be the cause.
What are people's opinions on these links? Should we stay clear of sitewide links altogether? Should we contact the site owners and try to get them to mix up the alt-text? Or should we get rid of them altogether?
Thanks,
Chris.
Just noticed that our domain authority has returned to what it was before the recent update. Likely Moz has re-jiggled a few of it's calculations
I have a forum at http://www.onedirection.net/forums/ which contains a gallery with 1000's of very thin-content pages. We've currently got these photo pages disallowed from the main googlebot via robots.txt, but we do all the Google images crawler access.
Now I've been reading that we shouldn't really use disallow, and instead should add a noindex tag on the page itself.
It's a little awkward to edit the source of the gallery pages (and keeping any amends the next time the forum software gets updated).
Whats the best way of handling this?
Chris.
Exactly the same thing here. Our main site has dropped from 42 to 40. I sincerely hope it's the entire index that has been affected though, and not an indication that our sites rank has decreased. I'm sure this will be a majorly hot topic today...
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.
I'll take a look at Ahrefs - never used it before, thanks.
Press release might be a good idea. So looking at everything as a whole, the main issue just might be the percentage of .com links compared to .co.uk links?
Chris.
We did have a drop in traffic in April from Penguin, but the US rankings are still very strong, so for any Penguin penalisation wouldnt it be applied equally across all indexes? Ah, well spotted on that site - we'll get that link removed straight away - in fact I thought that was already gone.
With the explosion of the band, again if this was a a major factor, wouldnt we have dropped equally on Google.com ?
Thanks for your help.
Hi Bernita,
Rankings for other keywords have also dropped too, only on Google.co.uk though.
Did you look at this in OpenSite Explorer? We did remove a number of site-wide links that we thought might be causing a problem, and these were taken off about 3 months ago.
Wouldn't this also effect Google.com rankings though? This is what is confusing us.
Hi Alex,
Yes the site is registered on Webmaster Tools, and no it doesnt have any geo-targeting set. We did experiment with this a few months back, but it has been reset to nothing for the last 2 months.
We definitely don't want to lose US traffic.
Chris.
I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk.
The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk.
The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time.
However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one.
We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating.
All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me.
Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though.
Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment- which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site.
We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue.
We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk.
Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be?
Cheers,
Chris.
