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My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark

2 years ago we took over a client who had a hacked site and also had signed up with a black hat SEO team that set up 50 spammy directory links back to the site. Since then we have cleaned up the hacks, had the site reviewed by Google and readded to the Search Index, and disavowed all the directory links through GWT. Over the last 2 years, we've encouraged the client to create new content and have developed a small but engaged social following. The website is www.fishtalesoutfitting.com/. The site's domain authority is 30, but it struggles to rank higher than 20 for even uncompetitive long tail keywords. Other sites with much lower domain authorities outrank the site for our primary keywords. We are now overhauling the site design and content. We are considering creating an entirely new URL for the primary domain. We would then use 301 redirects from the old url to the new.   We'd welcome insight into why the current site may still be getting penalized, as well as thoughts on our strategy or other recommendations to recover from the events of 2 years ago. Thank you.

Hello, One of my client's sites is ranking lower than he should. This happened when we took off backlinks (20 little blogs, several site-wide paid links. It really dropped the site, but it had to be done. Since then we've increased his # of root domains by 10% through white hat link building in his non-competitive niche, and rankings are still poor. I know that's not much in the way of added backlink value, but we're working on it. My question is, how have the recent (and coming) updates possibly effected us. We want to take the remaining problem areas off right away, but another drop in traffic is not a good idea. Even though the blogs (see below) have no backlinks of themselves, they cause drops when taken off) He still has -20 little blog backlinks w/ a quarter of them being exact match anchor text.
-1 sitewide paid link - an image,  exact match alt tag anchor text
-1 non-site-wide paid links that is an image near the footer, exact match alt tag anchor text.
-3 links on a domain, this one looks fairly editorial, but there are a bunch of paid links on that page. Changing to non-exact-match  anchor text
-2 links on two domains that look completely editorial with no other paid links on that page. non-exact-match anchor text -70 backlinks total with about 1/3 being problematic. How does this site look in regards to updates and when to take links off without tanking our site even more? Thanks.

Hey All, I am currently working for a company and they are publishing exactly the same content on their website and yahoo. In addition to this when I put the same article's title it gets outranked by Yahoo. Isn't against Google guidelines? I think Yahoo also gets more than us since they are on the first position. How do you think should the company stop this practice? Please need urgent responses for these questions. Also look at the attachment and look at the snippets. We have a snippet (description) like the first paragraph but yahoo somehow scans the content and creates meta descriptions based on the search queries. How do they do That?

Hello, For nlpca(dot)com one of our main keywords is the term "NLP" We are ranking 25th for that term.Possible causes: 1. keyword stuffing on home page, though we need to use the term over and over again to describe ourselves. Also, competitors like nlpco(dot)com and nlpu(dot)com also mention "NLP" a lot 2. Backlink profile: see this spreadsheet. We have a lot of sites from other countries and many sitewides but all natural and almost all branded. Ou company names are NLP Institute of California, NLP California, and NLP and Coaching Institute. 3. nlpcacoach(dot)org is a sitewide footer link. So is iepdoc.nl. We're going to ask the first site to take our link down. 4. No "What is NLP" article. I think that might help. 5. Most of our 60 articles are posted on other sites. We author about 30 of them. I'm working on authorship via rel="author" and rel="me" links. There's usually 2 authors 6. Most of the title tags used to be 4 keywords separated by pipes -"|" I changed them all after the updates took the keyword "NLP" down. That's about all I can think of. What do we do or clean up?

I know this individual does this with several sites and then offers them for sale to his competitors. Obviously spammy thru and thru, but how can google reward a site thats not even two months old, with 1900 + links with a ranking of #3 for a highly competitive keyword? Please dont post the actual name or url of the website as we dont want to give him any more credit but this blows my mind as he has done this several times with other sites and never gets penalized. http://tinyurl.com/b9jysa5 Any ideas as to how he can accomplish this besides almost 2000 links in less than 2 months? How is that even remotely natural? I know his other sites have been reported to google but they never did anything about it. Thanks for any feedback.

Is there a way to find out if your site has an over optimization penalty?

Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!