@EGOL, I wholeheartedly agree. If it is an expectation, it should be shared in advance with the quote.

@Kiran, there is not necessarily anything to do other then have your expectations set these links offer little if any value.

Under anything remotely normal, it is highly unlikely a search engine would consider a "website developed by EGOL Design" as a paid link. If a site owner tried a footer of "[website development], [website design], [graphic artwork], [seo] and other work performed by ABC Enterprises" where each term in brackets was a link, that clearly steps to the spammy side.

Even then I wouldn't necessarily call it paid links, but manipulative links which falls into the same category.

It is a common practice for a site's developer to provide a self-promoting footer link in the site's they develop. There is no harm in doing so. You should not expect any noticeable value from the link either.

The entire concept of a valued link is an "independent vote". More specifically, it is a natural link which a user chose to provide. Links from sites you develop or host on your server are not chosen by the site owner. You choose to place the link. You could argue the site owner could choose to opt-out, but that is a another matter.

Google offers very low value to links in footers. Google also offers a lower value to site-wide links. Google also devalues links from sites on the same server. The bottom line is these links are not earned and you should not expect any value from search engines for them. If you build a high quality site then adding a footer link may occasionally earn your site a visit from someone interested in having their site developed. That needs to be enough for you.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

If you know of any software or techniques to crawl and download multiple (html) pages and images of a site then please let me know.

There are many programs designed to crawl websites and grab the html code. Legitimate sites are often duplicated in this manner. You can try searching a couple relevant terms or searching black hat seo sites.

Most sites are database driven. The public does not have direct access to the database. Accordingly you cannot download the full functioning website in the manner you desire.

If it is a very basic pure html/css site, you can pretty much achieve your goal.

Do you obtain control over just the domain? Or do you have access to their hosting account? If you gain access to the hosting account, you can request the host restore the site from a backup.

Even if you gain access to the full site, you really need to be careful. Your goal is purely to manipulate search engine results which makes these activities black hat and subject to penalty. I understand your intentions are good, but the method is not complaint with Google's Guidelines.

If you own the brand, and you have a trademark, you can build quality sites promoting the brand. You can use every social media page, etc. If you put in the time and effort, these pages will rank very well in SERPs.

Some great legal victories are being won in the US to help with these types of issues. Coach recently won a similar case. It's great to hear the good guys are gaining some ground.

Based on your question I am not clear if the site is deleted prior to your gaining control over the site.

If you are trying to copy a site before you have control over it, all you can do is download the HTML of the various web pages. If you spend a bit more time, you may be able to figure out file names on the server and download them, but that is moving down a path of internet security and hacking.

If you are trying to copy a site after you have control over it, the easiest method to capture everything would be a cPanel backup. cPanel is the most popular software used to administrate Apache web servers. That is the most likely hosting environment for counterfeit sites. A single cPanel backup will capture everything.

Otherwise you can go through and copy the public_html folder (or whatever the main folder is called, it will vary based on server setup) along with the database and other settings you wish to retain such as e-mail.

Understand the old site owner will still have all the passwords and an understanding of the code. While it is unlikely, they could leave themselves backdoors into the site as well. This is one reason why maintaining their site is not likely to be a good idea.

Once you began running these sites from your server, what is the plan? You would place a "counterfeit" notice and then ??? that's it? Or would you redirect them to your site? If you redirect them to your site and maintain these sites up on an ongoing basis, it can be seen as a network of doorway sites.

I understand what you are doing and why. The issue is you are taking actions purely based on search engine rankings. To do such for a short period such as 30-60 days is likely fine. To do it on a more permanent basis will likely lead you to a penalty.

Thanks for the advice Robert.

Bing WMT Index Summary shows zero pages indexed.

The site has no major issues in terms of malware, hidden content, etc. The site does have issues with duplicate content and thin content. I am working with the site owner to resolve these issues.

Is there any means to determine if the penalty is manual or algorithmic? Since the site's home page has been removed should I assume it is a manual penalty? The articles I referenced above seem to indicate Bing will algorithmically remove a site from it's index if it feels there are content issues.

I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing.

Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results.

Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties?

Here is what I have done so far:

• http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request?

• Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856

• there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post).

Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.

I have several blog posts that I want to publish (40 or so). For freshness is it better to stagger their publication over several months or is it fine to publish them all at the same time.

I would publish them all at once, but I think you are asking the wrong question.

Why do you have 40 blog posts? I am willing to bet the quality of these posts are poor. You may feel the articles are average, above average or even "good", but that is not even close to acceptable in today's world. When you perform a Google search for the keyword focus of most articles, thousands and perhaps millions of results are returned. Your goal is to land on page 1 of those results. You need "best on the web" content.

It often takes a full 8 hour day or more to write a top quality article. These types of articles don't accumulate. In every case a site owner has shared with me they had 40 articles to publish, they were your average 500 word internet articles being cranked out by a team of content writers, and the articles were never going to reach the top of any competitive keyword search.

I am also concerned about closing comments. You are denying your readers to engage the article and offer valuable content and ideas. This frequently happens when the site owner fears what readers might say. I would suggest a different strategy where you feel comfortable receiving comments.

I made a couple intuitive guesses in my response. If I am mistaken, I apologize.