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You are not wrong!

It differs. We have had multiple emails going backward and forward. In some cases within a day or two. The last one took well over a week and a half.

Hope this helps

Sorry, was away for the weekend.

"There are still many inorganic links pointing to your site. Here are some examples:

http://bayside-wire-designs.com/Links.php (anchor text: Unique Collection of Celtic Wedding Rings) http://bestrings.blogspot.com/2011/08/celtic-peridot-rings.html (anchor text: Celtic Peridot Ring - Celtic Rings)"

direct from the horse's mouth.

First one is what I would consider a reciprocal link. And google seems to agree. We have requested removal/.

2nd one. Scraped content, and cant really see how they can "blame" us for that one. We will still ask for removal, but do not count of having much luck with it.

Another thing I noticed while going through the link profile.
The amount of scraped content is insane. We are talking thousands of sites/links.

I really really hope we are not told to contact those sites as well as it would prove imposible in most cases.

Oh we did indeed..

Exported the link profile, put all contact details for the spammy sites. Contacted them once, then waited a week. Checked again, then contacted where the links had not been removed. Waited another week. Then checked again.

After which we updated spreedsheet, uploaded to google docs and contacted google again.

You have to be seen to be making an effort.

We had the same issue for one of our sites. We manually went through 5000+ links categorising them as

Spammy (mostly articles, link farms etc)
Low quality (reprocial links etc we built from 2004-2007 etc)
Scrapped content (content taken from our site and used on other site not related to us)
Okay/Organic (what it says on the tin)

We contacted every single on the Spammy list and ask for our links/articles to be removed. Waited a few weeks then checked again and update our list.

We then contacted google again with the list hoping for the penalty to be lifted.

Their reply was.. "There are still many inorganic links pointing to your site. Here are some examples:"
followed by a list of some of the reprocial links.

So back to going through the 1000+ Low quality links and see if we can get them removed.
Bit of a nightmare when those were links we did 5-7 years ago.

Only good thing is we still have some keywords performing well, and that our competitors are in the same boat.

Thanks alot for the response Stephen, much appreciated. I read the entire article you suggested and found all the answers I needed in the comments section. Ashamed I didn't find the article myself before posting the question! Tired eyes

I agree with you, smartphones are our only real concern going forward.

We are creating a mobile site in html5 to serve smartphones only. On a seperate domain, m.example.com.

From what I have read Google treats smartphones as desktops due to thier advanced web browser capabilities. So no need to bother with googlebot.mobile right?

Googlebot should index the site once I create a normal sitemap.xml. My concern is that the mobile site pulls the same content as the main site which is already indexed. Would this not create duplicate content?

Interesting point! However, we are creating a mobile site in html5 to serve smartphones only. On a seperate domain, m.example.com. From what I have read Google treats smartphones as desktops due to thier advanced web browser capabilities.

So no need to bother with googlebot.mobile right? Googlebot should index
the site once I create a normal sitemap.xml. My concern is that the mobile site
pulls the same content as the main site which is already indexed.

Would this create duplicate content? If so, what can I do?

Hi Guys/Gals

We do love the Crawl Diagnostics, but do find the missing meta tags ("Missing Meta Description" Tag in this case) somewhat spammy.

We use the "All in One SEO Pack" for our blog and it does stick in noindex,follow (as it should) on the pages that is of no use to us. "2008/04/page/2/" and the likes.

Maybe I'm wrong but should the Diagnostics tool not respect the noindex tag and just ignore any warnings, since it should really mean that these pages are NOT included in the search index.

Meaning that the other meta tags are really useless.

Any thoughts?

We had the same issue for one of our sites. We manually went through 5000+ links categorising them as

Spammy (mostly articles, link farms etc)
Low quality (reprocial links etc we built from 2004-2007 etc)
Scrapped content (content taken from our site and used on other site not related to us)
Okay/Organic (what it says on the tin)

We contacted every single on the Spammy list and ask for our links/articles to be removed. Waited a few weeks then checked again and update our list.

We then contacted google again with the list hoping for the penalty to be lifted.

Their reply was.. "There are still many inorganic links pointing to your site. Here are some examples:"
followed by a list of some of the reprocial links.

So back to going through the 1000+ Low quality links and see if we can get them removed.
Bit of a nightmare when those were links we did 5-7 years ago.

Only good thing is we still have some keywords performing well, and that our competitors are in the same boat.