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Hi, My company has enjoyed pretty good rankings for our main keywords in Google for the past 13+ years we have been in business. We have always been very white-hat about our SEO -- always erring on the side of not doing anything rather than risking a penalty. Well, last Thursday, we received the dreaded Google penalty due to a pattern of unnatural links. The hit is devastating - we are not even in the top 50 for our own company name anymore. Through research, we believe we have found the culprit -- and it has nothing to do with any of our own actions. We operate a discussion forum, and there was a link to one of the threads that was being used as the target for a lot of link spam -- Chinese blog comments, etc. We had nothing to do with this, but obviously someone had an agenda and was working on spamming to this page. Who knows - it may have even been the company that was being discussed negatively in the thread, attempting to have us blocked. We discovered it the same day we received the penalty notice, and issued a reconsideration request, detailing what we believe we found. So far, we haven't disavowed any of the links, but I am thinking we should. We have asked Google if they're able to just turn off any link juice for that one page, especially since we don't know who is doing this spamming, and whether they will continue. Has anyone experienced something similar? How does one prevent themselves from receiving a penalty that they had nothing to do with? What is there to keep any competitor from launching a spammy link-building campaign to get their competitor removed from Google? Is there anything we can do to resolve this? Thanks for any and all thoughts...

Curious: do you all tag your social media links with Google Analytics parameters? I know Google Analytics automatically tags referrals from social channels, but I am interested in possibly adding additional tracking parameters to links that I share and potentially promote. If I tag my social links with GA tracking codes, and they are shared widely, do I lose any potential SEO value from those links?  I know Google isn't necessarily factoring in social shares from Facebook, etc. yet, but it would seem that, since tagged links are ones that we've influenced, any shares of that link would potentially be considered unnatural? Just curious what others' best practices are for social sharing.  Thanks, in advance.