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Hi there,

Where is the crawl test tool located in this new moz site?  Formerly it was, http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Hope you can help.

Thanks:)

I would appreciate a copy too please if not too much trouble.

Thanks David, Monica and Lewis for your responses - I appreciate your thoughts - and I love how you all so consistently started your responses with "stop worrying" - you're right of course!

I have communicated my discovery to the client and my intended course of action was pretty much as David suggests - run fast and bury those links in a sea of press releases and other high quality organic link-building.

Still scratching my head as to where the links came from - but I need to stop worry about that don't I?

Thanks again!

Bit of an unusual one for me - appreciate your thoughts...

I did an SEO audit for a potential client last week and discovered that 3 of their top 10 strongest inbound links (reported from OSE) are blatantly paid links from those "Link Bid Directories".

The links were created mid-last year, so reasonably recent.

Strange thing is that they have been using a highly reputable SEO agency for several years who do NOT engage in link buying - so I'm pretty sure it is not their SEO agency buying these links. Also - the link anchor texts are the company name - not a target keyword - so I suspect they either:

a) have someone internally in the company who thinks they are "helping" by buying links - or,

b) in my most paranoid fantasies, a competitor is setting them up for a Google smack (very long bow, I know!)

Anyway my questions are:

1. If I decide to take on this client, should I DO anything about these links?

These link are almost certainly currently "working" to pass link juice and I don't believe the site has been penalised (yet!) for them. I suspect when these links are switched off, the site will drop in rankings so my thoughts are to just ignore them and proceed with a normal link building campaign in the hope that if (when) the links are killed we will be OK.

2. Is there a "safe" way to report them to Google? By which I mean, let Google know to ignore these links and NOT penalise US for them being there.

3. Is there a way to get the links removed given that we don't control the accounts that created them?

Oh - and feel free to comment on my paranoid fantasies Have you ever seen paid links appear that you KNOW didn't come from you?

Thanks!

Steve

Hi there,

Where is the crawl test tool located in this new moz site?  Formerly it was, http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Hope you can help.

Thanks:)