It's to be expected that some of your blog posts will have a hook to whatever your selling.  Every single post might be overdoing it slightly, but certainly some would be a good idea.  Not just for sales, but also for SEO.

If one of your blog posts becomes very popular, as in it earns external links and social signals, it will become a strong page on your site. If you link your strong pages to your key landing pages, some of the SEO strength will pass through.  Furthermore, your internal links can use a lot more exact match anchor text than external links, so feel free to link to those pages with the keywords you want to rank for.  Again, don't use exact match every time, but you can use it much more often than with external links.

Hope this helps.

Hi Vince

What happened when you disavowed the links? Have you submitted a reconsideration request and has the penalty been revoked?

Until you get a message saying the manual penalty has been lifted, it won't matter what you do to your rankings or links - they'll keep on going down.

I'd definitely keep the disavow file in there (and add to it if needs be) and keep filing reconsideration requests until the penalty has been lifted.

It's worth noting as well that sometimes these bad links will be powering up your site.  I mean, one of the reasons people use bad links, for black-hat reasons, is because they can and do work.  However, they're not sustainable in my eyes.  If you've built a site with bad links, you're effectively a ticking time bomb and that's probably not the healthiest way to do business - at least in my opinion.

So disavowing those links could quite conceivably been the cause for the drop in rankings (even if you didn't have a penalty), but you're much healthier in the long run.  My recommendation - after getting that penalty removed first and foremost - would be to replace those links with high quality and authoritative ones, as you have mentioned.

Hope this helps.

Hey there

Screaming Frog is a great (and free!) tool that lets you do this.  You can download it here

Simply insert your URL and it will spider all of the URLs it can find for your site.  It will then serve up a ton of information about the page, including whether it is a 200, 404, 301 or so on.  You can even export this information into excel for easy filtering.

Hope this helps.

Hi Ramesh

There's two clear choices here:

Either you redirect all of the URLs to one main URL and try to rank that website.  This will result in only one site ranking, but no risk of duplicate content and Panda penalties.

Or, you give each website its completely unique content.  And that doesn't just mean rewriting the written content of the main site - you should try and give each domain as much unique value as possible, so it is quality content in its own right.  In doing that, you will stand a much better chance of ranking all 5 websites.

Also, take care that you do not link the 5 domains together on every single page.  A few links might be OK, but having too many links could constitute as a link-wheel, which would also see your site penalised.

Hope this helps.