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The tool you are seeking does not exist, and likely will not ever exist.

The public does not know which links Google values and does not. The best we can do is guess. Even if we knew, it takes 2-3 weeks for SEOmoz to crawl the top 40% of sites on the internet, and then 1-2 more weeks for the data to be processed. Therefore we will always be 1-2 months behind Google.

The tools in existence are designed to locate links and then offer you detailed information about the links such as whether they are follow'd, are image links, etc.

In my experience the top 3 tools for analyzing links (outside of Google) are:

Open Site Explorer http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Raven http://raventools.com/

AHREFS https://ahrefs.com/

Another tool is offered by Bing. Sadly, Yahoo Site Explorer is gone.

Ahrefs is new but is off to a great start.

I would recommend against using it for your company's main blog. Adding a quality blog to your main site is a very helpful way to improve your site. A blog should contain fresh content which is relevant both to your site and recent events. It is a way to bring in fresh traffic. Adding a blog to your main site will help increase the Domain Authority of your main site.

If you split your blog by adding it to another URL, a few challenges are created. First, you lose the advantages mentioned above. Secondly, you are linking from one site you control to another site you control which is not the type of link which Google values.

Otherwise simply redirecting your .net to your .com would be the current best practice.

It is a good idea to control the .net version of your site to better control your brand name. Depending on your hosting set up, you could use it to serve images or other content in parallel. I am not up on the latest site optimization techniques in that regard. Otherwise there is not much additional value owning the .net site offers.

Your link is 5 clicks away from the home page which, for DMOZ, should be sufficient enough for the link to be discovered. I checked the AHREFS and Raven but neither show the link either which causes me to suspect this link is new. Can you confirm what date the link was first created?

I checked some other links from the same DMOZ page and they are not being seen by OSE either, but they do appear in AHREFS and Raven. I therefore opened a ticket with the SEOmoz help desk to investigate this issue.

Hopefully, the link will appear on 5/29 after the next update.

Across the board, SEO tools can benefit from significant improvements, including the SEOmoz tool set. I was excited to learn about SEOmoz recent acquisition of $18 million. I am hopeful a significant portion of that budget will be allocated towards the development and improvement of SEO tools.

With the above stated, I do not anticipate any SEO tool to be able to keep up with the massively number and type of changes made by search engines. Just look at the past year. The following changes were HUGE: Panda, G+, Local, Bing taking over Yahoo, HTML5, a massive increase in mobile usage, Penguin and much more.

I too am seeking better tools and if you find them please share them with the community.

With respect to your DMOZ link, was it earned in the past 60 days? If it is older then 90 days and has not shown up in OSE, it is unlikely to appear after the next update. That's about all the information I can share without examining the link.

All of the SEOmoz tools are based upon the Linkscape crawl of the web. The crawler takes 2-3 weeks to crawl the web and then another 1-2 weeks to process the data. The SEOmoz tools and Open Site Explorer (OSE) are updated about once per month. The next update is scheduled for May 29th. You can view the update schedule here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule. In summary, the backlinks you see are always going to be 1 - 2 months behind.

You should also know the link profile shown is not 100% complete, nor even 90%. The last I heard Linkscape crawls about the top 40% of web pages. That is perfectly fine in that, for the most part, if a link is not visible in OSE it likely has little to no value.

There are numerous other tools out there that also crawl the web in a similar manner to Linkscape. I have researched many of them and, in my opinion, the next two best crawlers are Raven and AHREFS. All of them have the same issues. They are not complete. The internet involves tens of millions of websites. There are single websites which offer millions of pages so the total volume of pages to crawl reaches incredibly high numbers.

My worry is that there seems little value in the SEOmoz tools if their not at least as complete as Google webmaster is to allow me a fair comparison!

Google had $38 billion in sales in 2011. They have the ability to index a page in seconds where it would take SEOmoz at least weeks to capture that same link. Your expectation is that a group of companies whose combined sales is less then 1% of Google be able to produce results which are "at least as complete"? It's simply not reasonable.

If you wish to try Raven and AHREFS tools you can. Perhaps they will even see a specific link you desire such as the one from DMOZ.

If you can share the URL of the DMOZ link and your site, we can offer a more complete analysis. The problem with DMOZ is the depth of it's site. Web crawlers, including Google, only go so deep into a site. The question is, using your mouse, how many clicks would it take to get to your DMOZ link from the DMOZ home page. The design of a site like Wikipedia, for example, is very flat. The design of DMOZ is very deep. The page which contains your link matters a lot.

The idea is the overwhelming majority of links to your site should be earned. People should want to link to your site. If a large percentage of the links to your site are self-created then I have two suggestions:

• review your website. Consider all aspects which may affect the user experience.

• review your content. Is it authoritative? Is it accurate? Is it compelling? etc.

Let's take this Q&A post as an example. SEOmoz has a great site. It is a custom built site. There are many aspects of the site which help offer a great user experience. It is still a work-in-progress, but hopefully some of the $18 million they recently received will be set aside for site improvements

Also look at the content of this article. It seems very helpful to many people based on the responses received. This Q&A is relevant to the site, it's a current topic, etc. If you can generate great content on your site, then you should earn links naturally.

The challenge with contacting a host is their hands are tied. There are only two ways I can think of for a host to potentially help you:

1. Provide the site owners contact information. That would be a breach of confidentiality. There is simply no reason for a host to share this information with you.

2. Remove the links to your site. If you filed a DMCA complaint regarding a copyright infringement, then a host is likely to help you. They may also assist with trademark complaints. Otherwise the site owner is free to link to any site they desire. The site owner is not breaking any laws by linking to your site. Therefore the web host is not able to take action.

Ron, you are missing the key idea.

You should simply not worry about anchor text. Why? Because you should not have control over anchor text. If you earn authentic links from others, they will link to your site.

I control less then 5% of the anchor text for my clients. I would have to think further about the math but it may very well be less then 1%. At those low percentages, you are not at any reasonable risk of incurring a penalty related to manipulative anchor text links.

If a website does not offer any contact information, the next step is the WHOIS information. Visit http://www.whois.com/

Site owners are required to provide their accurate name, address, phone number and e-mail when registering their websites. It is part of the ICANN rules. It is also required that this information be maintained up-to-date.

I am not a legal expert but it is my understanding if the information is not accurate, you can file a complaint with ICANN who then will attempt to contact the site owner. If they are not successful they can recall the domain.

Some sites, especially spammy ones, choose to hide their contact information using a privacy service. There is still a contact e-mail provided. If you send an e-mail to that address it does get forwarded to the site owner.

Exactly!

Let's use three examples involving product reviews of the latest James Bond spy watch.

1 - A product review site which offers 20 affiliate links to various sites visitors can go to and purchase the watch being reviewed. The site owner earns an affiliate fee from all of the sites so he/she does not care which site is used to make the purchase.

2. A product review which offers 1 affiliate link. The site owner likely chose this link because it allows them to earn the highest commission.

3. A product review page which offers the best ?4 links. The site owner shares he searches many sites and provides the best offers for visitors. He compares the affiliate sites and mentions why each link was selected (i.e. fastest shipping, best price, best return policy, etc). He also has an understanding with the seller that if there are any customer service issues then his site will pull the links to the "bad" site. In this case, the site owner is acting as a customer advocate.

If you wanted to buy a product, which page would you find most helpful? A sea of 20 links to random sites offering the products so you can try to figure out the best price and other factors which are important? Or the one link which you assume has a deal with the site owner? Or the last option which seems authentic and the site owner is genuinely helpful?

The concept of anchor text manipulation deals with replacing the URL with text which is more targeted to the keyword for which the site is trying to rank. Editorial links mostly do not use ideal anchor text. Many simply use the site link while others use text that is not ideal for SEO.

When the site owner or a SEO builds links to their own site, one of the many signals that point towards manipulation is when the anchor text is perfect. Try this...check OSE for Google.com. Look at the anchor text. Filter out the image alt text and just focus on the anchor text. Of course you will see "Google" a lot but you will see a nice variation of terms used to link to the same page. That is because those links are natural.

Look at your client's site. When you look at the top 20 links and 17 of them show "Best watch" for the anchor text, that is a clear sign of manipulation. Either the site owner or someone working on their behalf likely created those links. Another possibility is the site owner influenced the creation of those links. These links are not natural, or at the very least are less natural.

I hope that answers your question. I will also add the suggestion you are focusing on the wrong area. The best way for a site owner to build links is....to create amazing content which others find useful / helpful / amazing then let the world know about it. If you wish to build more links, then embed yourself as a member of the community related to the site's niche and sparingly mention the site.

The measurement Google uses to determine if a directory is ok or not is not whether or not the directory submission is automated, although I would share I am not aware of any directory which accepts automated entries that is compliant with Google Guidelines.

The question Google will ask...is this link you created on the directory truly helpful to users? Would you have created the link even if search engines did not exist? Or does this link seem like it was created mainly to manipulate page rank?

I apologize for the delayed reply.

Extra links on the page does not really detract from the ability of that page to rank. Instead it detracts from the value of all the other links on the page which can impact other pages on your website.

Links are one of the many components which are used to evaluate your overall ranking for a given keyword.

In short, step back and look at the page as a visitor. Try to present the page in the manner which is the most sincerely helpful to users, and the rest will work out. If you present one affiliate link to your best affiliate site, that is helpful. If you present the top 3 with a description of the differences, that is helpful as well. For example:

Site 1 link - cheapest

Site 2 link - free 2 day shipping

Site 3 link - 5 year warranty

If you offer 10 links and they are all the same, that is really not helpful to users.

Got it! Thanks for the clarification Keri.

Hi Rochelle,

I am not clear what you have in mind for "Remarketing and Display marketing". It sounds like physical displays that might be located in stores?

With respect to job title, as you shared they vary greatly from one company to the next. When I hear the word "manager" I think of managing people but then others may share a different view. I can only recommend providing a job title which most accurately reflects the duties of the position.

Congratulations on your expansion and good luck.

What exactly are spammy links or "inorganic links"? Can you (or anyone) explain in simple terms what that means?

Organic links are links you earned. They are usually links which are editorially added. Inorganic links are ones which were created to manipulate Page Rank. There are various examples and details which can be offered to further clarify the distinction but at a high level, that is the distinction.

People say the other problem is having too many links with the "exact same anchor text". Does that mean having too many links pointing to the same page (like home page) using the same text in the URL - like MYHOMEPAGE.COM?

No. If you use a URL link then the concept of exact match anchor text does not apply. If you sell sports watches and then build 10 links to your page with the anchor text "sports watches" that would be an indicator the links are not organic.

Right there is the challenge Bill.

Some site owners are passionate about their products and services. I have one client in England who sells packing boxes. You are probably asking...how can a person be passionate about packing boxes?! Well, this client has run a family business for 30 years. He will go into detail on the differences between a "cardboard box" and a "packing box". When he speaks, you can hear the enthusiasm in his voice. He expects his family will be in the same business 30 years from now.

Meanwhile, there are dozens of other similar sites which sell packing boxes, but from examining the competitors I get the impression these companies just throw up sites selling various products and really don't have any commitment to the business. They may sell packing boxes on one site, watches on another, and radio controlled cars on a third site. They don't care and are just in it for the money...and it shows clearly! That's the difference.

If you are focused on one site, you commit to that site's success. Your articles are much higher quality, the site's look and feel is better, the customer service is better and so forth. Many of the Google changes over the past two years are helping to separate the authentic businesses from the people who run a dozen websites. It is getting easier and easier to help legitimate businesses rise above their competitors.

If you are selling well on eBay, that's great. Selling on your own website puts you in direct competition with the other sites who are doing the same thing as you. It then becomes a pure competition. The more committed site owner wins (assuming they also work smart).

Rand replies on this topic here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-penalties-be-passed-via-301-redirect

There is not much more I can add. I would love to find the time to perform some experiments and see results first hand.

My best guess is some penalties will pass while others will not. This variance would be logical and explain the mixes results which are reported. Some people seem convinced one way or the other. For example, a penalty based on manipulative links would be passed since those links are now pointing at the new site. A penalty based on manipulative on page tactics would not be passed if those tactics are not used on the new site.

I have tremendous respect for Pete and I can understand his thought process. I'll share a different viewpoint.

I am fully understanding of a client's past history. If they practiced black hat techniques in the past, that is not my concern. The past is the past. If I work with a client, they must agree that going forward they will not use any black hat SEO, and they will actively work to resolve any issues so their site complies with Google's Guidelines.

Based on the above, I complete the Reconsideration Request. I have nothing to fear from Google. I would have already reviewed the client's website. I would have identified and be actively working on any outstanding issues. I practice full transparency with Google. This approach is how I choose to operate, and I believe I am more successful because of it.

What's the alternative? Hide from Google? At best, it's only a matter of time until they catch up.

Perhaps I am naive. But if you do have a manual penalty then the fastest way to resolve it for the client is the Reconsideration Request tool. Google can actually help you identify the issue and they can tell you exactly what is required to resolve it. I'll share one example.

When I was reviewing the manipulative link issue mentioned above, I found many free directory sites and I initially classified those links as being ok. Based on the information shared from Google, I re-evaluated those links and removed them. I firmly believe if we are fully transparent with Google and sincerely try to resolve violations, they will be helpful. That is my experience. Many others share different experiences. When I question them and review their communications, I quickly determine they fall short of full transparency so I can understand why they are struggling.

Francisco is dead right.

On a personal level, I do not like the BBB. A few years ago they had a scandal where it was uncovered they were basically selling ratings. If you paid them money, you received a good rating, negative feedback could disappear, etc. Since that time they claim to have cleaned up their act.

The BBB is NOT a non-profit organization. Sure, the head office might be, but all the local offices are privately owned franchisees who operate for-profit businesses. Once again, I don't care for the lack of transparency where they present themselves as a non-profit business.

With the above said, I encourage clients to join the BBB. Why? Because the public sees the BBB as a positive organization and for the reasons Francisco shared.

In December 2011 when I encountered this issue for the first time I suspected it was a manual penalty. I contacted Google via the Reconsideration Request tool and they confirmed the site was indeed manually penalized. After the initial wave of cleanup, Google confirmed the reason for the manual penalty was the "inorganic" links.

In our post-Penguin world, I would presume the issue is algorithmic but since we are all so new to Penguin I would still use the Reconsideration Request tool if the client approved.

That works but you can also use the SERP Control Panel and select US

No, I would recommend a developer for either choice.

If you are here at SEOmoz, I have to assume SEO is important to you. There are some people who put up a shop and live with obtaining 3 - 4 sales per month. If that is you, then a GoDaddy store or your current cart is fine.

If you desire a store which ranks on the first page of Google results and can handle volume, you need to go with a professionally developed solution.

I spent 7 years working for Verizon Wireless as a database administrator working with and leading a team of programmers. I have taken courses related to web design and have built numerous sites. I also have an analyst working for me who is close to finishing her certificate in web development. Even under those circumstances I would not build my own website.

Why? I am not a professional web developer. I do not have the formal training, the passion, the experience nor the tools to build a high quality website. If I had to do it, I am sure I would get it done but the amount of time it would take would be several times what a good programmer would take. Additionally, during that time I would not be earning revenue from my core job functions. Lastly, there is the opportunity cost which would be lost. It would take me a lot more time then a professional and all the time my site was not up I would be missing out on sales.

The question to ask yourself is...how serious are you? Is this website business something you are passionate about? If you love RC vehicles and feel you have found a new career, then I advise you to invest in that career. That effort begins with a professionally designed site. You will need thousands of additional dollars to set everything up correctly: Verisign for SSL, TRUSTe for your privacy policy, join the BBB, a locally hosted shopping cart, bank set up fees for accepting MC/Visa/Discover/AMEX, etc etc.

What drives SEO is passion. There are people in each state who want to have a site like yours. They set up the site, use a data feed from a vendor so they do not have to carry inventory, drop ship products, etc. etc. That is not the quality way to run the business. At most, it is the shoestring way to get started. At some point you need to make the transition if you wish to run with the big sellers.

Thanks for sharing this tool Stephen. I watched the video but the site does not share any info about the mechanics of the tool. Some questions:

• how is the contact info pulled? I am wondering if it sometimes misses info or pulls the wrong info

• for the PR, does it always show the home page PR? Or does it calculate the PR for other pages by subtracting 1 for every click from the home page? I mainly ask so I can respond to client questions if they ever see the tool.

• any idea of what Agency pricing is?

I am just asking in case you happen to know some of this info. Otherwise I will reach out to the author.

Thanks again Stephen!

If you want to offer a competitive store, you need to host it yourself. Hosted solutions have too many limitations in my experience. There are changes you will want to make and then be informed you cannot make them.

I am not personally familiar with 3DCart but it is likely you can resolve the issues but it will cost time and money.

What many people do not realize is the various "free" and low cost solutions are simply hooks to pull you in. Once you set up your site you will then want better performance and realize you need to step up and incur some costs.

If you desire a professionally developed store which incorporates current HTML best practices (valid code, mobile site, security enhancements, etc) and best SEO practices (internal linking, site map, 404 page, etc) then a Joomla + Virtuemart solution or a WordPress solution is somewhere around $3k.

You can go with Magento Go or stay with 3DCart but you will struggle hard to compete with others who have professionally developed websites.

Yes.

In the first case I shared, the client actually performed all the website contacts. I offered guidance on what was required and the client ran with it.

If my team was going to perform the work, I would request a mailbox be set up on the client's domain which we could use for this process.

Olga, here is a link to a ZenCart store which is in development (i.e. not a live site). http://www.durazestcanada.com/store/

Take a look at the images. Right-click on them and depending on your browser plugins you can "Inspect Element" or view the source code. The images have names and ALT tags which relate to the product. I am not aware of any true shopping cart which does not allow this flexibility.

We are left working with educated guesses. I would recommend a cleanup of spammy links for any client. If the client is currently not penalized, my judgment would focus only on sites listed in WMT which also have over 100 links pointing to the site.

Once the links have been cleaned up, I would check all client sites again after 30 days. Any client who exceeds 90% spam links clearly required further effort. No one knows where the threshold lies, but it's a pretty good guess that if 90% of your links are spammy you are not in a good place.

Your process seems sound. A bit of additional feedback:

• I would complete a Reconsideration Request but then proceed without delay to removing the links. You know the site has spammy links and should be removed.

• I have no familiarity with Netpeak Checker but I'll take a look at the tool. Otherwise I cannot comment on it.

• The "resubmit to Google" is not necessary. If they confirm the site has been manually penalized, they are seeking for you to remove all the spammy links. I have talked with others in this situation and Google is quite firm on their desire for you to address 100% of the problem. I would not bother submitting another Reconsideration Request until you have either removed all the manipulative links, or can show solid documentation of your efforts to do so.

Good Luck.

You can complete a Reconsideration Request. In the initial case, Google confirmed there was manual action taken. After the 100+ duplicate sites were taken down, Google then confirmed the remaining issue was due to the manipulative links.

With the recent Penguin update, Google may have automated part of this process into their algorithm.

But if someone can tell me the exact reason why nainital page is ranking instead of mussoorie will be greatful as it might help me to get my rank back!

I am not sure what other words can be shared to help you better understand the situation.

The travelmasti website has legitimately earned a first page spot for their website. For an unknown reason, the wrong URL is presently showing. You are correct right now there is not a 301 in place. The current page does not show a canonical tag either. It is possible there was a 301 or canonical and it has been removed. It is more likely there is some other issue causing this confusion.

My expectation is Google will resolve the issue soon replace the currently result once they index the /mussoorie.htm page.

The recommended approach for improving your site's rankings is always to focus on your site. Even if you were to get this result removed from Google's index, the improvement to your site is insignificant.

If you wish to speed up the process, change the header response to 410 instead of 404 for any pages you know are gone.

**So Ryan in your opinion if they saw some major drops in rankings you would think it would be a safe bet that the site was penalized? **

Not necessarily. There are numerous issues which can cause ranking changes. A page could accidentally be blocked via "noindex" or robots.txt.

Diagnoses of a problem normally requires the highest level of skill. When you go to see a doctor with a problem and he or she can't figure out the cause of the problem, you are stuck....until another doctor comes up with the correct diagnosis. The pharmacy has all the right meds, but a diagnosis is required. The same holds true for SEO. When your business or health is on the line, you don't want to play guessing games.

In my opinion, whether Google chooses to index a page or not is not a consideration. You should remove all spammy links. Google could choose to reindex the page at any time and either way, they can still see the page with your link on it.

If anyone else has any solid information on this topic I would love to hear it. Otherwise I vote to play it safe, especially in a penalty situation.

My preference is Alertra: www.alertra.com. It's free and easy to use.

It checks from 6 points in the US and 1 in the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and China.

This seems like a simple case of the wrong page appearing in search results. The correct page is likely: http://www.travelmasti.com/mussoorie.htm

The site has a DA of 60 and at a glance seems legitimate. If you perform a Google.co.in search for "http://www.travelmasti.com/mussoorie.htm" then the URL http://www.travelmasti.com/nainital.htm appears as the first result.

There are several ways this issue can occur and it seems unlikely the site intentionally caused this to happen. The page could have been 301 redirected. The page could have had a canonical tag which was removed. The site is very poorly coded with hundreds of coding errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.travelmasti.com%2Fnainital.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

One of the coding errors could be the problem.

This is a case of a legitimate site ranking for a term it should rank for, but the wrong page is being offered.

What browser are you using?

For example, in Firefox you can use folders to organize your bookmarks. You can even nest subfolders within folders so you can have a SEO folder with subfolders such as CRO, Tools, etc.

I agree with Marie but I will add one twist.

You mentioned the pages are ranking on page 1 of Google. More information is needed. Are they ranking as #1? or #10? What are the client's goals?

If a client is not presently #1 but is focused on earning the #1 spot, then I would go through and perform even minor tweaks to the page such as correcting the URL. I am probably in the minority on this topic.

Keep in mind URL weight for ranking is very low. The primary value comes whenever a user uses the URL as a link to the site. If you find your site's visitors copy and paste the links into forums or other articles, then the importance of solid URLs increases.

Thanks for the feedback Robert.

The main site to which I refer had a manual action placed in November 2011. Looking back, I would say it is was a prelude to Penguin. This site exceeded 99% of the links being manipulative so it is pretty clear any reasonable threshold would have been triggered.

What surprised me was how determined Google was about all the links being removed, and the level of documentation required. It is possible I simply received a hard-nosed Google employee but I really trust Google's manual team has a high degree of manual calibration in these cases. I think back to the leaked Google Panda notes and the tests to become a Google tester. They are extremely calibration focused. That's my two cents. It's just speculation but that would be my best guess.

If GoDaddy is unable or unwilling to help, you then should consider what John shared above. Packages like GoDaddy offer a quick and easy solution, but not a quality site.

There are many methods for you to provide your site in a quality manner which offers you flexibility to make the changes necessary. A few solutions which I like are:

Joomla + Virtuemart extension for the shopping cart. The software is free but you may have to pay a bit for some extensions, and you should also have a developer involved in the site's creation.

WordPress + a WP extension for the shopping cart. Comments are same as for Joomla.

ZenCart shopping cart. This solution would be more for a stand alone store. If you want a full site where you add articles (blog) about your content and maximize your SEO, the Joomla or WP solutions would be preferable.

There are many other solutions available as well. The best shopping cart software is Magento, but that is for stores with thousands of products. The development time and costs are much higher and the resources required to host the site are higher as well.

Your content is very thin, your site is low quality, and to top everything else the content itself is duplicated multiple times. Your page would not necessarily be in the top 1000 under those conditions.

Daniel, I should have been more clear. I would not work with a client who produces automatically created content. The goal is to use the software to generate ideas related to the content and to learn about additional references and areas where the topics are being discussed.

I have gained a lot of experience cleaning up spammy links over the past 6 months. This task is the most time consuming and unrewarding task in SEO. It is also necessary if your site has been manually penalized for "inorganic" links.

Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?

I worked with Google on this topic for a client. My client's site was manually penalized specifically for "inorganic links". The client is an industry leader in their niche doing about $20 million in sales per year. They had millions of manipulative links pointed to their site from over 1000 linking root domains.

Step one: Google was absolutely firm in their expectation the links be removed prior to the penalty being lifted. This client had over 100 websites which were various forms of their main site (i.e. duplicate content). All the duplicate content sites were removed except the legitimate, human translated language variations of the site. We reported to Google these efforts which resulted in about 97% of the links being removed. Google responded that it was not enough and they required the links from the other external sites to be removed.

Step two of the process: we created an Excel spreadsheet to contact the sites giving priority to the sites with the most links. We tracked the following information: date of contact, initials of employee who performed contact, URL of domain, method of contact (e-mail / phone / contact us page), we provided a link to a copy of each e-mail we sent (see notes below), the date a response was received (if any), and a confirmation of whether the link was still visible.

Regarding the e-mails which were sent, they were very polite customized letters for each site. The letter format was as follows: introduction, description of the problem (i.e. our website has been penalized by Google...), the request to remove links, the location (URL) of all known links within their domain, and we thanked them for their efforts.

The results were we contacted hundreds of domains. The response rate was 14%. In this case, the company had these links built by another "SEO company" mostly between 2007 - 2009.

We reported our results to Google, shared the documentation and their response was:

"Thank you for your request and all of the follow up analysis. We've reviewed your case again, and unfortunately there are still many inorganic links pointing to the site. For example:..."

That led to step three: we went back to the original list of linking sites. For each and every site we covered four methods of contact: e-mail (if their address could be located), phone call (if a phone number could be located), contact us page (if the site offered one) and we looked up their WHOIS information and used that method of contact if the information was different then what was previously available.

Additionally, we went ahead and completed the list of contacting EVERY site who showed a link in Google WMT, even the hundreds of sites with only a single link. We knew our efforts would fail (14% rate of success) prior to starting so our focus was providing solid documentation. If you named a link we could present a copy of an e-mail request sent to remove the link, the date/time of when it was sent along with who sent it. That was the goal.

After submitting this final information to Google, they "partially" removed the manual penalty. The site seemed to rank normally but not as well as before. Google's response:

"Hello Ryan,

Thank you for your follow up email and all of the information provided. The documentation you provided was very helpful in processing and understanding this case.

After re-evaluating your site’s backlinks we are able to partially revoke a manual action. There are still inorganic links pointing to your site that we have taken action on. Once you’ve been able to make further progress in getting these links removed, feel free to reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort"

Another client was also penalized but they had a single SEO company build most of their inorganic links. In this instance, the SEO company was able to remove almost all the links directly. They had control over many of the linking sites, they had retained their usernames / passwords to forums, etc. The success rate of link removal clearly depends on how long ago the links were built, how spammy the sites are (i.e. if you build links on disposable sites which are not monitored, you clearly wont find help having them removed) and how the links were built.

Good Luck,

-Ryan

Is using the parameter pws=0 still useful for turning off personalization?

Yes

The easiest way to achieve what you desire is using the SERP Control Panel in the SEOmoz bar on Firefox. This tool allows you to de-personalize search results with a click. It also allows you to assign your area to any locality including a city, state or even whole country.

Any excellent article to check out: (scroll to item 2) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/big-update-to-the-seomoz-toolbar-for-firefox

**When I tried to redirect the index.php last time, I couldn't login to the forums. Everytime when someone tries to login to my forums, it takes them the to the home page. **

The first thing you should clearly understand is altering your htaccess file is not something which should be done except by professionals who understand the Regex language used and how htaccess works. If you make an error your website can become instantly unavailable, or worse you can open up a security gap in your site and it may be exploited at a much later time.

Additionally, not only the code matters but exactly where the code is placed within the htaccess file. I would recommend contacting your developer or web host for assistance. With that above understood, here are links to two articles which share instructions on how to achieve the results you desire:

Add trailing slash: http://enarion.net/web/htaccess/trailing-slash/

Redirect index.php to root: http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/redirect-index-blog-root.html

Is there any tools that provide information on how many results there are for a given keyword?

Google AdWords Keyword tool does such. A better tool is SEMrush (which uses AdWords data) but it costs about $70/month.

Either way, be sure you understand the difference between "exact match" and "broad match". You also should understand "global" searches vs "local" searches. Lastly, you need to be careful as the "difficulty" ratings in AdWords relate to ads, not organic searches.

Even when you use other tools to provide an organic difficulty rating, these tools are often highly inaccurate. Many base the difficulty solely on the site's Domain Authority. You need to consider the quality of the web page and how well it is optimized.

To start, begin working with AdWords and try to gain an understanding. Like most SEO tasks, you can learn a fair bit right off, but the finer points take time, experience and tools.