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Hi Guys, A while back, my company had a 'partial match' manual penalty from google for 'unnatural links' pointing to our site. This glorious feat was accomplished by our previous SEO agency for quite heavily spamming links (directories, all kinds of low quality sites). That being said, when the penalty hit we really didnt see any drop in traffic. In fact, it was not long after the penalty that we launched a new website and since our traffic has grown quite significantly. we've doubled our total visits from prior penalty to now. This previous SEO also did submit a couple of reconsideration requests (both done loosely as to fool Google by only removing a small amount of links, then abit more the next time when it failed - this was obviously never going to work). Since then, I myself have submitted a reconsideration request which was very thorough, disavowing 85 Domains (every single one at domain level rather than the individual URLs as I didnt want to take any chances), as well as getting a fair few links removed from when the webmaster responded. I documented this all and made multiple contacts to the webmasters so i could show this to Google. This reconsideration request was not successful - Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously. But really, my main point is; am I going to do more damage removing more and more links in order to remove the penalty, because as it stands we haven't actually noticed any negative effects from the penalty! Perhaps the negative effects have not been noticed due to the fact that not long after the penalty, we did get a new site which was much improved and therefore would naturally get much more traffic than the old site, but overall it has not been majorly noticed. What do you guys think - is it worth risking drop in rankings to remove the penalty so we don't face any future issues, or should I not go too heavy with the link removal in order to preserve current rankings? (im really interested to see peoples views on this, so please leave a comment if you can help!)

We're in the process of The Great _Inquisition_piecing together a reconsideration request. In doing so, we reached out to an agency to filter and flag our backlinks as safe, should be no-followed, or should be removed. The problem is, they flagged several of our earned, industry partner links (like those pointing to us, HireAHelper, from 1-800-Pack-Rat and PODS for example) as either should be no-followed or should be removed. I have a hard time believing Google would penalize such a natural source of earned links, but then again, this is our second attempt at a Reconsideration Request, and I want to cover all my bases. What say you Moz community? No-follow? Remove? Leave alone?

I have a google profile https://plus.google.com/u/0/106631271958142100588/ wich is assigned to the url www.propdental.es but i also write a lot of content for to others url My question is if should i create another profile to the others urls witch are also mine but not associated between them. Or can i use the same profile without the risk of losing ranking on the weakest url, as they all compete for similiar keywords Thanks

Why does Google recommend schema for local business/ organizations? The reason I ask is I was in Structed Data Testing Tool, and I was running some businesses and organizations  through it. Yet every time, it says this "information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets". Additionally, many of times when you do search the restaurant or a related query it will still show telephone number and reviews and location. Would it be better to list it as a place, since I want to have its reviews and location show up thanks? I would be interested to hear what everyone else opinions are on this thanks.

Hello, I have been in contact with a smo to optimize my site for search engines and social media sites. my site was doing great from last 4 years. but suddenly it started dropping in ranking. then i came and joined seomoz pro to find a way out. i was suggested to categories content in form of subdomains ... well that put a huge toll on my rankings.. thanks to suggestions here i have 301 them to sub directories. Now another huge question arises. i found out that my smo guy was taking artificial votes or whatever youc all them on twitter, facebook and g+ ...twitter and facebook's are understandable but i am getting to think that these votings on g+ might have affected my site's ranking ? here is a sample url http://www.designzzz.com/cutest-puppy-pictures-pet-photography-tips/ if you scroll below you will see 56 google plus 1s... now the big question is, i have been creating genuince content. but nowt hat i am stuck in this situation, how to get out of it ? changing urls will be bad for readers.. will a 301 will fix it ?  or any other method. thanks in advance

Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.