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In light of the all round astonishment I went and checked the actual numbers, rather than off the top of my head - it was 44% removed.

So still way better than I'd expected.

Have to say I haven't done it your way round - we've completed three rounds of email outreach then submitted a disavow file, so I don't want to guess to far on advisability of doing it the other way around.  For starters I've no idea how well / quickly Google handles domains removed from a disavow list.

Your first assumption needs comment though - every domain we're removing links from was from a spammy website (zero quality SEO directory), as a result of a submission package they bought years back before I joined.

We managed to get about 50% of the list removed from that email outreach process.  Granted one was a directory network with over 100 domains, but even counting their domains as one that we got about 40% success.

Around 10% responded with a demand for a fee - ranging from 99c to $50.  Clearly all those were instant place in disavow list

So to summarise I was really surprised how successful the email outreach part was - we'd been expecting next to nothing by way of response rate rather than around 50% success.

Even if you do it disavow first, hoping for a Penguin update in the next three weeks so the file is actioned prior to your season starting is a little optimistic!

I'm hoping for a couple of second opinions of my conclusions here before I shoot 60% of our link profile in the head...
a) I've not needed to deal with an angry Penguin before,
b) it's not as black and white as most of the blog posts seem to find.

Domain is www.world-text.com

The Penguin Google Says...

●  We have no unnatural links warning in WMT
●  We have dropped out of the top 50 for all keywords except three.  Those three are a couple of pages down.
●  We still own page 1 for a brand search (World Text), though we lost the bottom result.
●  Overall traffic down 25%, organic down 50%, SERPs impressions down 50-70%

I'd love to know where the remaining organic Google traffic is coming from as we currently rank for nothing (useful anyway);  the analytics doesn't show the usual off a cliff to nothing, more a few quiet weeks.

Several other players in the sector appear to have been obliterated too - searches on several keywords are a total mess with total unknowns and spam showing up on page 1 SERPs.

Adwords traffic is up markedly which I put down to the mess that is SERPs

Our adwords are nicely optimised and our top keywords are hitting quality scores of >=8, mostly 9 or 10.

Why did the Penguin Peck?...

Simple.  Opensiteexplorer should make it blindingly obvious what the issue is.

We have a horrible link profile that I have been muttering about for 18 months or more.

●  Long before I joined seems they got a 5,000 search friendly directory submissions package or equivalent
●  Sadly not a single one of them was from the long obsolete SEOMoz directories list, or worth keeping.
●  Every single last one of them has identical anchor text and description.  Still, makes for easy analysis.
●  The anchor text used isn't likely to be searched often
     "World-Text.com Text Messaging Services"
●  3 of 4 originally submitted sites/directories have since expired, removed links etc

Findings

740 judged bad domains:
    All the identical anchor text SEO directories
    a couple of others picked out as unwanted
    the domains serving malware

Only 235 class Cs in these
    144 have 0-2 indexed pages - not useful for a directory!

500 judged maybe:
    No links found even though in WMT (a lot of these)
    down, suspended etc (a lot of these too)
    parked
    links that are less than ideal but not identically anchored spam.
    (for instance someone who had linked to us has had their site scraped and dropped on dozen or more forums including our link)

another pass of these in a week or so, just in case some come back to life...

400 judged good (well harmless):
     Natural links
     real directories
     all the assorted alexa like scrapers, domain valuation junk etc.

Executing Penguins and other vermin...

Apparently pretending to know nothing doesn't help, so...

●  Disavow the three discovered sites serving malware
●  Remove where possible every last one of the SEO directory entries avoiding any extorted payment.     Track contacts and responses.
●  Disavow the rest

{Reconsideration request}

I KNOW this is for manual penalties, and we don't have one, BUT I've seen countless sources suggesting reconsideration for Penguin.  Really?

Anyway that was far longer than intended, so thanks for making it this far!  I look forward to comments!

Excellent response from Dana to which I can add only one thought:

What's their backlink profile like now?  Do many of their product pages have links to them?  Do any have a decent number of links?

If they 404 all those links it's going to hurt.  You know that already.

Some stats of how their backlink profile is going to be affected might also help your case.

I've been trying Bing for about the last two months.

Still early days, but we imported our Adwords campaign and it's thus far working really quite well - we're getting some good traffic at a lower level than adwords, and clicks work out cheaper.  Strangely our best performing key words on Google aren't turning out to be those doing best on Bing.  Still early days, but it is proving worthwhile.

Beyond that it would certainly be worth hearing someone out, but I'd be asking many questions on who's in their network etc.  Obviously you'll want to be reassured that any web properties they're showing ads on are relevant to your niche, and the right sort of visitors.

Unfortunately the only way to be sure with most forms of advertising is to throw a hundred pounds or two at it and see what happens!

It's all about link profile.

GoDaddy may appear to get away with site footer links on domain holding pages, but they have a massive link profile, not least of which they gained during the whole SOPA/PIPA outrage.

Chances are it's not harming their ranking overly much, but it certainly isn't helping it much either.

Whereas a small web designer with a site wide footer link on every site they create could well have those as the vast majority of the total links - leading to a heavily skewed and very unnatural link profile.

Now then I'm sure that some of the larger web design and service outfits got where they are with the help of site wide footer links, site widgets etc, but Google moved the goalposts so you can't take that route any more.

Depending if it's a one-off or recurring event, you could also include a summary of what took place, and some teaser copy for next year: "Look at what you missed, watch this space for the 2014 conference" or some such.

Otherwise 301 redirects are probably the way to go.

I think it's equally probable both are right!

There are SO many variables that making a clear case one way or the other is unlikely.  For example techies are unlikely to ever click ads - and for many even see them as they'd have AdBlock installed.  At the other extreme there's many non web literate folks (yes, even these days) who, frankly, haven't distinguished between ads and organic:  Top link = top answer.  Even if that link is an ad, or an injected ad due to the malware littering their PC.

In the middle there's a massive group who are aware, see ads and likely choose when / if to click ads.  Different intent will lead to different likelihood of clicking ads in different circumstances.  If searching for a product to buy I think most people will factor in sponsored results, at least at some point - perhaps organic didn't give the desired results, they want the widest range of products or companies to choose from so open every link, etc.

The Nielsen article seems to be talking more about branded search, certainly not money out searches, whilst the Wordstream infographic is talking of high commercial intent searches - ie money out searches.  Unfortunately their sources are a bit small to make out and aren't clickable so I can't look back further.

But given the difference in search intent between the two pieces I'd be comfortable with them both being right!

I suspect the answer is something along the lines of "soon" (tm) with a pinch of "when it's ready".

Having been in software far too long, the absolute worst thing they could do is unleash it as beta to us when it's still a little flakey or inconsistent.  Analytics that aren't consistent and correct are of marginal use (yes, ok I know about Google Analytics issues), and would probably generate a whole load of support requests - time that will be better served polishing and completing the service.  Would probably lead to a lot more questions along the lines of "are we nearly there yet?" too!

I'm sure there's a few carefully chosen alpha testers who are willing to put up with pain, compare with Google and other analytics and not rely on it for any sort of decision yet.

Me, I'm happy to wait until they think it's resilient, consistent and accurate enough to survive us, the great unwashed.

At which point I hope to be very happy to have the option to kick GA into touch.

Moz crawl your site weekly and any updates to duplicate content issues will get updated at that time.

The actual day it gets crawled varies depending on account I believe.  You can check when it's due in the Crawl Diagnostics section of the campaign overview.  At the bottom right you should see last crawl date and when next is due.

So any fixes you're making won't be reflected until the next Moz crawl.

Suspect it's just a wrinkle as a result of the change from seomoz to moz, but on seomoz the remember me checkbox had a time to live of a few weeks, possibly a month, which was excellent.

Since the great rebranding and migration (which is excellent by the way), time to live from ticking remember me is in the order of a couple of hours, which is pretty annoying.

Any chance the web folks could bump it up a little, better yet put it back to 30 days?  

It's also worth bearing in mind that if you submit your site to DMOZ some categories no longer have volunteers dealing with applications, so your submission may sit in the queue for the next several years going nowhere.  So even if it is important, it's not necessarily achievable  

So submit and then instantly forget about it and stop caring.

This week's crawl results were a little crazy for us too.

We dropped to 1 error (-171), and to 48 warnings (-538), yet most of the issues not reported this week are still most definitely there.  I guess roger was having a lazy week?  

I've been trying Bing for about the last two months.

Still early days, but we imported our Adwords campaign and it's thus far working really quite well - we're getting some good traffic at a lower level than adwords, and clicks work out cheaper.  Strangely our best performing key words on Google aren't turning out to be those doing best on Bing.  Still early days, but it is proving worthwhile.

Beyond that it would certainly be worth hearing someone out, but I'd be asking many questions on who's in their network etc.  Obviously you'll want to be reassured that any web properties they're showing ads on are relevant to your niche, and the right sort of visitors.

Unfortunately the only way to be sure with most forms of advertising is to throw a hundred pounds or two at it and see what happens!

It's a bit hacky, but you can 301 them simply.

Create a directory in place of the pdf called document.pdf or whatever, then inside that folder add a default index php (or whatever you're using) to 301 them from http://www.yourdomain.com/document.pdf/index.php to wherever the pdf now lives.

I'd be tempted to hang fire a little while before "fixing" the problem, and give it a while longer to shake out.

We had something very similar around the time of Penguin 2 on one of our sites, and like you for only a selection of our keywords.  Half of the dropped keywords have returned to roughly where they were.  Of the other half most have increased, but are still down compared to pre-Penguin.

One keyword went from 3rd to not in top 50 and back to 4th this week.

Aside from burning a fair bit of time trying to figure out what was going on and if we'd been partially Penguined, I'm not sure I'm any the wiser!  Nothing notable going on with key competitors, nothing news worthy or topical in the sector - just temporary obliteration of around a quarter of keywords.

If they're in your industry it's not going to do you any harm.  But from a low authority site it's not going to a huge amount of good either!

So if it's going to take several hours of time to get them to agree to link, it's probably not worth the effort.  If it's a 10 minute of email back and forth, go for it.

Never discount a link if it's a company site though - it's not quite the same as a dodgy seo directory of everything - a directory is never going to get better authority for the page linking.  A company site may grow in stature as they work their own site and seo efforts, so in a year or two the link might have significantly more weight.

Likewise, never discount the human, rather than purely seo, value of a link - if it's a company in your industry, it might attract actual, interested, visitors.

I suspect the answer is something along the lines of "soon" (tm) with a pinch of "when it's ready".

Having been in software far too long, the absolute worst thing they could do is unleash it as beta to us when it's still a little flakey or inconsistent.  Analytics that aren't consistent and correct are of marginal use (yes, ok I know about Google Analytics issues), and would probably generate a whole load of support requests - time that will be better served polishing and completing the service.  Would probably lead to a lot more questions along the lines of "are we nearly there yet?" too!

I'm sure there's a few carefully chosen alpha testers who are willing to put up with pain, compare with Google and other analytics and not rely on it for any sort of decision yet.

Me, I'm happy to wait until they think it's resilient, consistent and accurate enough to survive us, the great unwashed.

At which point I hope to be very happy to have the option to kick GA into touch.

Personally I think infographics and videos are both in very overcrowded spaces these days.

As it's likely far more time-consuming to create one than a blog post or page of content their creation is a fairly inefficient way of getting a link.  But if it goes viral of course...

Mind you, it's not just about the link.  If you have something compelling or unique they can, and do, still work - slide decks and videos tend to attract different searches and searchers so they can still be a good way of drawing human traffic to the site.

Videos and images can appear in Google organic results, so increasing your presence.

So they're worth considering as part of your strategy so you have a presence on some different content sites in the hope of gaining exposure to different groups.

Is that a signed out, no cookies search giving you #1?

As I've just searched Google UK and can't find you in the first 10 pages, so it seems the ranking report is about right.

If you were ranking and have suddenly dropped, how's your link profile?  Amy messages in Webmaster tools?