If a website does not offer any contact information, the next step is the WHOIS information. Visit http://www.whois.com/

Site owners are required to provide their accurate name, address, phone number and e-mail when registering their websites. It is part of the ICANN rules. It is also required that this information be maintained up-to-date.

I am not a legal expert but it is my understanding if the information is not accurate, you can file a complaint with ICANN who then will attempt to contact the site owner. If they are not successful they can recall the domain.

Some sites, especially spammy ones, choose to hide their contact information using a privacy service. There is still a contact e-mail provided. If you send an e-mail to that address it does get forwarded to the site owner.

During my initial case of working on this type of penalty in 2011, the first couple contacts were through Reconsideration Requests. After that the contacts were e-mail exchanges. They e-mailed me directly.

There seems to be a bandwagon of "Google is bad / evil / [insert adjective]". In my experience if you are sincere and put forth the proper effort, they will do what they can to help. In the overwhelming majority of cases I find people are not sincere. They are not sorry they cheated the system, they are sorry they got caught. They are not putting forth the proper effort, they are putting forth the minimum effort. When this happens, the relationship becomes adversarial.

"The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code."

Has the issue been fully resolved? What steps have you taken to ensure the site's code is clean and remains clean? Some examples:

• placing the code on a test server and having an expert examine the code
• crawling the site and examining all links
• upon completion of the code analysis, implement a system which detects any coding changes and notifies you of the change
• ensure you are using professional development services with professionally developed extensions
• check your hosting. At a minimum, VPS hosting should be used. Do you have a firewall in place? What type of precautions does the host take (i.e. are you with a major host such as Rackspace, HostDime, etc? Or a host no one has heard of?)
• Use a service such as Symantec or McAfee SSL which offers daily site malware scanning

Every time I have worked with a compromised site, there have been major gaps or a complete lack of site security.

With respect to the links, the Disavow Tool can be used as a means of last resort. Google is very clear the tool should not be used until all other methods have been exhausted.

Have you tried contacting any of the webmasters to inquire about the links? That would be a start. You stated they are from independently owned sites. If that is true, then some of those webmasters will likely be cooperative and help you understand why they are linking to you.

We are happy to help Matthew. There is a lot more detailed information required which is missing from your question. There are dozens of possible causes and solutions.

Hi Robert.

Once you determine which version of a URL you would like to represent your site, the best method to enforce that decision is to use a 301 redirect. For example, direct all non-www traffic to the www version of the URL the same way SEOmoz URLs appear. With this approach, 100% of your URLs will appears as the "www" version in SERPs and there will never be any confusion or conflict.

I've heard people talk about using canonicals or setting the preferred domain in WMT. Neither step is necessary as long as the 301 is in place. The reason I still do both is I like to account for failures in a process. You never know when someone will make an error and modify an .htaccess file incorrectly and wipe out your redirect.

If you have the redirect in place, OSE and similar tools should clearly see the redirect and act appropriately every time. If the tool does not work correctly, I would examine the header tag of the page to ensure the 301 is working properly. If it is, then I would perform the same action you did and report the bug.

If you do not take the proper steps to enforce a "www" or "non-www" structure, you will see the results which you described. Some users will visit and link to each version of the page which will lead to both versions of URLs being indexed. Google will index a version based on which was discovered first or which version it deems more important based on links and other factors. When you perform searches for a site, some URLs will appear with the "www" and some without it. The backlinks will be divided and, as you know, that is bad for SEO. The duplicate content issue will set off alarms for the SEOmoz crawler and similar tools, but Google will still index one version of the page.

I am not sure if this completely answers your question Robert. If I missed anything, feel free to ask.

Rather then using a sub-domain use folders on the existing domain.

www.mydomain.com/es not es.mydomain.com

This method allows you to keep all of your domain authority in one place and strengthens your site as a whole. There really isn't much difference between using a subdomain versus using completely different domains.

Guy,

In looking at the page this appears to be a legitimate problem. Your server settings allow you to present a page with any header code you wish. You can 301 a page but still present the page with a 200 code if you want. Presently it appears the page is being presented fine but your server is offering a 404 header code.

I can't tell the actual source of the problem other then to say it appears to be on your end and should be fixed. I originally looked at the code with the MOZbar but then checked independently with another tool as well. http://web-sniffer.net/

All tools show a 404 header code for the page. This response code is generated by your web server.