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Probably not the easiest way:

I'd just run an advanced report with external links to any page on this root domain. You get up to 100.000 backlinks which equal 1/3 in your case.

Then you order them by URL, so you can see which URL provides more than let's say 100 backlinks and with text filter you can extract the exact amount per "mass-linking" domain.

After you identified those sitewide linking sites, you can filter them out, so you have a number of links that's more meaningful.

Thanks for the link - I read this before though.

Well, the correlation data is the result of a high amount of websites that have been analyzed and how their rankings were positely/negatively related to a certain dimension, in this case number of different c-blocks/IPs linking.

Even though I agree with you that a more diverse IP profile should have more impact than diversity in terms of c-blocks, it might just be that websites having a high diversity of IPs also have more websites from different c-blocks linking and vice versa.

Just my thoughts...

Let me get this clear: What do you mean by "disguised as regular links"? Because I am only talking about Adwords and I am not aware of a way to disguise them.

If you are not talking about Adwords. For my standards, I can prove that Adwords have an impact.

Or Google Analytics is getting the seperation between paid and non-paid mixed up. Ever heard of anything like this?

http://www.seomoz.org/q/links-from-same-c-block

if I understand it good, it is no different between, if you have links from

webpages in one server (one C block) or

from webpages on another servers as your web is,  because both correlation is  0.25

This is the big difference - if you have a vast majority of links from one C-Block or one IP address, both has a negative impact in the same amount. Links should come from a wide variety of different IPs on different c-blocks

Hey Alan,

thank you for your answer. I really appreciate it.

Best believe me, I'm just as curious, probably even a little more.

I've been looking into it today and the outcome was pretty surprising: You know how Google always maintains that Adwords doesn't affect organic ranking in any way, i.e. neither positively nor negatively.

Well, apparantly, the "signal somewhere" is exactly there with Adwords. The project I took over was before managed by someone who did it to the best of his knowledge. Sadly though, despite a quite good results, his product knowledge was pretty limited, so he advertised with Adwords using keywords that didn't match the product at all. So imagine we are selling Mercedes SL600 but he advertised for Citroen 2CV. Not exactly our targeted customer segment.

But what really suprises me is that these Adwords ads generated non-paid traffic onto our website for those keywords.

Or do I miss something here? Can Adwords be a signal for Google as to what the page is about?

Actually, I don't think so. I mean that my SERP is that different.

Why I think so? I just checked with an independent tool (searchmetrics) which has the rankings of up to 16th of October. So as of October 16th, you're ranked 11, losing 6.

Have you installed unpersonalized SERP for Firefox/Chrome? Maybe it has something to do with that. Even though it doesn't really make sense that personalization filters out your own project.

Even though you certainly know it: Sites that you "traded" places with are datlabs, unirecovery and mjmdatarecovery (new)

For me, it is ranked 16 for "data recovery" and it is the page "www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm"

1. Taking this into consideration, disappeared does not apply, even though 16 is really not intriguing

2. Just a hint: document name "data-recovery.htm" as well as 65 keyword mentions as opposed to 23 on starting page

3. I don't understand that one

4. which websites are you talking about? I see strong competition as big names like chip appear, but I guess that's due to me being from Germany.

5. Nobody can really answer that one regarding changing back to what you judge normal. Observe it for a week, then take action. I mean, establishing good back links, optimizing on-page is never wrong - so also not now.

Hey people,

I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html. 
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user)

Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP.

But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month.

Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords.

You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped.

So I'd like to know if you observed similar results.

Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago?

Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though.

All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise...

I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!

After I finished work, I will dig through my history and can hopefully deliver.

Update: I spent 1 hour going through my browser history and I was not able to find it. Kinda freaks me out. Sorry.

There are actually some studies that can be found on the internet that suggest that the CTR correlates with the extension shown on the SERP, namely .html is supposedly having a positive impact on the CTR of up to 200%.

I was trying hard to find the website I read it on, but on the quick I couldn't find it. It contained a "study" on it with eyetracking and it made sense.

I've personally never run a test on it, but I decided to add html to our documents by means of Mod Rewrite.

As far as search engines are concerned, it does not matter at all. But overall, the visitor should be more important and seeing that it does not negatively impact rankings, it's worth a try.

I am from Germany. Having said that, I use the following to track down search volume over time:

Searchmetrics Essentials and SEODiver (I hope I am allowed to mention "competitors" here). Both provide great insight on when a certain search query is most popular. And provided that these graphs/diagrams are right, they provide great recommendations on when to focus on which type of products. For the industries I'm preferrably working in, the results are absolutely correct as they're reflected in the inquiries we get from customers.

Addition: SEODiver and Searchmetrics show the volume relative to most popular month and SEODiver also gives the number of searches of the strongest month which provides you with an estimate amount for the others periods.

Neither tool is free, but worth the money.

And obviously, these tools have made me neglect the Google Trends offering - when did they change the layout like that? And how can I "zoom in" to only see a period of 1 year for example?  mixed up Trends and Insights, my bad

While I cannot speak for a whole platform (this will soon be happening), I just tested it with a single page of which I changed the URL structure as well as optimizing on-page - the whole website is one mess of spam.

I can only second the advices the posters before have given you: Wait until the crucial time for you business is over.

I experienced the following: I prepared an optimized text for the adjusted site, figured out the best keyword to rank for (quite competitive)  and decided which URL would serve my needs the best. So the structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word2-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.

We used 301 Permanent Redirect.

The outcome: After 2 days, the old URL was kicked out of the index. Then it took Google 6 days to index the site with the new URL structure but with disastrous ranking (28 first entry). Then it took around 5 days until we reclaimed rank 20. Three days after, we ranked 10 - and we're still there.

So for the targeted short-tail keyword, it payed off.

BUT: Nearly none of the  long-tail keywords that generated traffic for the old page are ranking keywords for the page right now. Only little by little we start to rank again for them, but it is 3,5 weeks now.

To cut a long story short: I'd do it another time in the year, it is better for the client's business.

Probably not the easiest way:

I'd just run an advanced report with external links to any page on this root domain. You get up to 100.000 backlinks which equal 1/3 in your case.

Then you order them by URL, so you can see which URL provides more than let's say 100 backlinks and with text filter you can extract the exact amount per "mass-linking" domain.

After you identified those sitewide linking sites, you can filter them out, so you have a number of links that's more meaningful.

After I finished work, I will dig through my history and can hopefully deliver.

Update: I spent 1 hour going through my browser history and I was not able to find it. Kinda freaks me out. Sorry.