I would agree with everyone here that duplicate content isn't really an issue here. And it's really not the concern it once was. I personally would take a screen shot though, just to show where the original is for your audience. I also heard somewhere that you can't republish Yelp testimonials elsewhere, or maybe it was Google+, and have them still featured on the original source. So you may want to double check the rules around testimonials for those two sites.

Thanks Alex,

It I assume could also be the "nofollow" issue Mike mentioned.

Thanks for the input. I've never seen something like this before, nor can I really tell why it would benefit content.onlineagency.com, but I figured perhaps this was a normal black hat tactic I had not heard of.

Perhaps if it is a tactic to get travelexinsurance.com more inbound links, it's somehow designed to copy relevant content from someone else that is already pointed at travelexinsurance.com, and then simply create another backlink, piggybacking on the content.

I must not be explaining it well.

Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com.

One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516

In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/...

So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in all that.

And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com.

So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I fear this might be a part of that.

Hopefully it makes more sense.

My guess is no. I'm fairly new here, but I'm sure my predecessor would not have.

Or are you asking if these websites who link to use are using canonical URLs? My guess in that case is they wouldn't be either.

I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre.

Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com.

One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516

In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/...

So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on.

And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com.

So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.