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I think the first question I need to ask you is the following Did you have a manual penalty in GWT? Did your rankings drop from algorithmically? Do you know exactly which updates you were effected by? (panda, penguin, top-heavy, layout...) What made you decide to disavow links? Did you even need to? One of the biggest mistakes I have seen many others do when their rankings drop is "panic" and start disavowing links. SEO'rs tend to run to the disavow tool when they may not even realize that their issues have nothing to do with that. Of course if you have a manual penalty they you have something to go by, but if you are effected from an algorithm change then you have some work ahead. I think the first step you need to do is try and figure out which update(s) you were effected by. That will give you a better idea where you need to focus your attention. Here is a great article that will help you to understand Once you get past that then here is an awesome article in which even helped me to recover, it takes some work but I promise it was the best thing I ever did.

Hi, Yes, it will be a pain for your writers, but that's what they're paid for. For example, if you had four t-shirts, all different colours, it wouldn't be too difficult to write unique content for each. I wouldn't use the same content and just change the colour, this may cause you problems.

Amazing, thanks for the information and the attached article. It's more than useful. Thanks for sharing

Writing a blog post and mentioning another site as a useful resource is the very definition of when you should leave a link as do-follow. Makes no difference what the DA of the other site may be. There are really only two main reasons to no-follow a link: You are linking to untrusted content/you didn't create the link yourself - user-generated comments in a blog are a good example of this, or if you're linking to a questionable website to use it as an example of a bad practice. Links to websites with which you have a commercial relationship - e.g. links that have been paid for, or are part of a business arrangement with the other site. The third reason is if you are linking to pages that aren't useful for a general reader, like registration pages, though this aspect often gets overused. Hope that helps? Paul

Thank you for the advice. I am not keen on leaving pages with no products to offer as I do feel it may annoy customers.

Good suggestions. Let me do that research and i will get back to you. Thank you!

make sure you have a 301 strategy in place! You could also use a canonical tag in order to solve the duplicate content. using only one website is always better in the long run!

At any given time Google has lots of different indexes.   They are always testing different algos and using different vintages of data.  All of this happens on thousands of severs at multiple data centers worldwide.   So, if your pages are relatively new then they might be in and out of the the search results that you see depending upon which of the many servers responds to your query.  The newer the pages, the more volatile they might be.  The weaker your website, the longer it will take them to stabilize in the search results. That is a partial answer to your question.   (Read the book "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy.  Very interesting, helps you be a better SEO because you will understand how they think and work a little better.) I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been. If you did this Google will probably index them and start displaying all of them.  Then, if Google decides that some of these pages are not as unique as they would like, some of them will be filtered from the search results.  To find out of this is happening go to the very end of the search results and on the last page you might see something like..... "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If your page can be found in the "repeat the search.... " then you will know that Google thinks that the page is too similar to other pages on the web (on your site or on other sites) and they have filtered your page from the search results. If you have lots of these pages then google might think that you have a low quality website and their Panda algo will get you.  That will demote the rankings of almost all of your pages for almost all of their relevant queries and your traffic will drop suddenly. If you really make them mad with this stuff they might consider your site to be even lower  than low quality - meaning spam - and deindex lots of your pages or your entire site. So, that is the stuff that can happen.  Don't publish a lot of cookie cutter pages or just change place names and insert synonyms.  Google has been slapping people for that stuff for at least ten years. Also see here and here for good responses to similar questions asked by you and answered by Patrick Delehanty.

Hey! I am not familiar with that app so I can't speak to it. I am willing to bet it's an issue with their crawl, because again, I am not seeing anything on my end other than the issues I listed above in my quick scan. Does Check My Links have anymore documentation to how they crawl 404s? I can't imagine it's any different than other crawlers, but again, not familiar so I can't say either way. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there These pages don't appear to be deindexed. Are you thinking this because you are not appearing in your searches? [1] [2] [3]

Thank you Tom - I like it - if in doubt, take it out. We will contact the businesses with the widget and ask them to remove. If we can't get hold of them, do you think disavow will be satisfactory before filing a reconsideration? Additionally, I have read recently there is an option to remove URLs from within WMT (a section called "optimisation.") But I cannot see this - and wonder if I have misunderstand.. (It looks to me the only section in WMT regarding link removal is an option to remove pages from within your own website from the index?) Is there a section in WMT to remove inbound links from third party websites? Thanks indeed for your help

Hello Tom, You answered a question for me some time ago, and i appreciate it.  I wanted to ask you, I am a very small business, I do my own site, seo, etc.  After being involved with a company that milked me for $...i realized that I can do SEO on my own...I have a great blog, 10,000 followers on Facebook Page, doing ok in basic SEO.  I do believe that this kind of has to be done organically these days, as content & linkbuilding needs to be authentic now? However, I obviously am NOT a professional, I believe my site has some issues and I cannot really deal with them well.  For example, my RSS feed is screwed up...http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/ I am getting this error message..."RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 257, column 32" I have not been able to fix this...and I think I have other on-page SEO isssues that are above me. Do you offer a one-time service that could address these kind of things?   I do not have big budget, but could use a look-over of my page for on-page issues that you could "optimize" for me? Also, what is you opinion on linkbuilding these days?  Is this something you think i can address on my own? Thank you,  Rob Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo

Kristina, Those are excellent points. Thank you for taking the time to respond. -Alex

Ha ha, I know! It's like giving the developers a little present all wrapped up with a bow...here's the problem, and here's where to fix it

For the last 2 years my site tanked and I have tried everything under the sun to fix it and nothing ever changed it. I was going crazy. I just realized that I had this set on much of all my links on my site and I am wondering if this is what happened to me. Did you say that you were effected by the same thing? Did you recover?

Thanks!

Without knowing the site structure, or seeing how the duplication occurs, it might be a little awkward, but you could set a canonical tag from 3 of the pages to 1 primary so that Google doesn't get confused about what should be returned for a search result. You could also stipulate how landlords should title their pages and just monitor as an update happens. -Andy

Thanks man it does help. Do you think the Page Layout Update is integrated now into the mobile Friendly Update and are they refreshing as they do or is it now part of the algorithm?

Currently working on one http://schemaplugin.com That functionality will come later but currently, it's great for local businesses and personal branding business sites