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Hi, sorry... I just meant if you did have a few other spammy links from other sites, those could hurt you. I doubt the woorank ones are hurting, but perhaps the other 3 spammy sites you mentioned could have been.

Thanks for the details. It may not be those links, but if there were even a few others, it could potentially hurt the site. I had a client who had done some spammy link building in 2011ish with another agency and just those few links hurt the site. I would try removing or disavowing anything you can find that's spammy, and not helping, and see if they helps anything.

The types of things to de-optimize on your own site would be more like keyword stuffing in the titles, URLs, headers and internal anchors - not so much blocking pages from being crawled. Blocking crawling it typically only if you want to improve crawl efficiency on really large sites or you just don't want Google to page attention to that content, but it won't fix a Penguin issue if it's on-site.

-Dan

agree with Dan. If it's not any of the above and you are sure none of the other links are spam, you might not have been hit with penguin 2.0, but some other penalty.

I would check with other tools as well. Use as many tools you have at your disposal and create a comprehensive list of backlinks.

It depends. If the sitewide links were;

• off topic from the site it was on, not as relevant
• among a giant list of other "blogroll" links
• on a site that may have a penalty against it
• exact match commercial anchor text <--big one
• if it's part of a "link exchange"

Those issues could hurt you coming from one site. If the links were exact match commercial anchors I'd see about changing them to brand or domain name anchors. If the site linking to you is a random topic, or you're among a big giant list of links, or part of a link exchange get the links removed or disavow.

-Dan

I agree with David here. Someone made a custom category plugin for WordPress which will do what David is suggesting. I would not block anything, but rather noindex what you don't want in the index, which is typically for me tags, subpages, author and date archives.

-Dan

Penguin 2.0 is definitely from webspam and backlinks. I suggest using Google Webmaster Tools as your backlink dataset. They provide links that are more likely to be causing problems. It's extremely unlikely the internal links are hurting you if it is Penguin 2.0.

I agree with Alice I would not block them. If the content is unique, they can't hurt you. Category sections show up an SERP's all the time and will increase your CTR (click thru rate)

Category, you can block it, if you see they are creating duplicate content to the website.

Read More: Why block this? I mean it is link to your post and this is very much ok so I personally will not recommend you this!

Author Link: Hello No, Infect making it more interactive can allow you inspire new readership!

If possible add unique content to your category pages, and use unique post extracts. Then no need to block.

Don't block "read more" as these link to full posts.

Hi,

I wouldn't block these pages from being crawled by search engines. Category pages are great for making sure more link juice flows to your deeper blog pages and making sure they get indexed. I believe author links give authorrank to the corresponding blog post too. I'm not sure about what you mean by 'read more' links. May I ask why you are concerned that these pages hurt SEO?