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If all the links are from 200 different domains i would skip the step of contacting the webmasters and go straight to the disavow, its often very time consuming and i would suggest that time could be better spent elsewhere. I swear by this guide for a disavow http://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool Good luck

SERP position is clearly relative to other sites.  If they are generating links of a type and at a rate that Google favours more than your activity you will appear to drop in ranking.  Anyone still see the 'Google Dance'?

You will only be able to monetize them if you have ads enabled on your current channel and are targeting the channel with the real estate ads. However, this is not a good strategy. Real Estate may not share the same user base and then your video ads will not have been beneficial.

Canonical and duplicate content are both interresting issues, thanks for your anserws!

Hi Keri. You're right! I am not a professional in the matter and I am trying to catch up little by little. Thanks for your advice!

Very controversial...duplicate content...

Thank you Kristina; I'll take a look.

When you say "exclude your search"...do you mean exclude that soft 404 page specifically from the search bots? Can you take a quick peek at one of the pages in question...? http://www.seadwellers.com/search/page/8/ There are 8 of them....only diff is the number at end of URL...I am afraid I do not understand how/why it exists? Any insight you might have time to give is greatly appreciated...I'm trying to learn. Thank you Martijn

Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens. I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account? Tony

Hi Jac! Are you concerned about the category pages themselves being indexed? If not, you can block crawlers from accessing them with robots.txt. You might even try adding "noindex, follow" to them, to ensure crawlers move through their links without indexing the "duplicate" content.

Hi there Actually, if you have ScreamingFrog you can run a crawl and this will tell you what pages these internal link errors live on and what their anchor texts are so you can quickly pinpoint and update them. If this is something you don't feel like you can do (or have time to do), shoot me an email and we can discuss - my email is in my profile. Otherwise, there other companies you can reach out to if it's easier for you! Hope this helps! Chat soon.

Thank you both for helping us.  We talked about what you wrote this morning and are making changes based on this advice.

...as this would then make the blog perform better in search results No, this wont make the article rank better, but it does make sense from a usability point of view because you have both a news and blog sections. Are you running Wordpress? Do you have the Yoast SEO plugin? Key to being ranked well is how good the article is, backlinks and some debate over how much impact social signals are having. -Andy

Isn't this something you can do with the open site explorer? Just fill in the final URL and tick the box 'link type' - 'only 301'. Sander

A redirect chain and loop report is now available in Screaming Frog http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/audit-redirects/.

Hi there, I want to dig in a little about what's concerning you here. Are you worried that you're splitting link equity? Because, it's okay to have 4 pages about chocolate cakes. There's no penalty from Google for having multiple pages about the same thing - just think about how many pages Nordstrom has for black sweaters. There's actually a benefit to having multiple pages on the same topic, if you're willing to write unique content for each page. It means you can rank for more long tail keywords, just as you mentioned your .html pages do, since each page will have a slightly different angle. So, if your question was about duplicate content, know that you're okay. Leave the URLs as they are, but tweak the page titles and headers so they more clearly target the long tail search term that they're ranking for. Link to the .html versions of /chocolate-cake from /chocolate-cake.asp so that's clearly the higher level page, and spend more time optimizing that. If, on the other hand, what you're worried about is link equity, the idea that by having 4 pages about chocolate cakes (and 4 pages for every other other baked good), you're getting 25% of your link potential going to each page, making 4 PA 20 pages when you could have 1 PA 30 page, then there are a few things to look at. If there are external links to all 4 pages, then your answer lies in your competition. Search for the primary keyword that you'd hope you'd rank for if you could combine link equity for all 4 pages with the Moz toolbar turned on. Look at your competition - would you be able to beat that? Does your DA compete with other pages? Would your potential link count, once you had links from all 4 similar pages, allow you to rank on the first SERP? If you have no chance of ranking for your primary keyword, I suggest that you stick with your 4 variations and make sure you rank for a wide variety of terms around your core keyword. That'll get you more traffic, in the end. If you could rank on the first page for your primary keyword once you redirected those links from the .htmls, try to consolidate the content from all 4 pages. If you're cautious like me, I would do it one page at a time, combining content from both pages, redirecting one page, and then making sure that the .asp page can rank for the long tail terms that the .html page I redirected was ranking for before moving on. If you're less cautious, you can do them all at once, but you may lose that long tail traffic. Wow, that was a lot of "if"s! I hope I didn't lose you there. Also, I hope I answered the question you were getting at. Let me know! Kristina

It's always a tricky one when changes have been made and reverted Joel. There is an element of waiting for things to settle down again, while a part of you wants to carry on and make more improvements - but this can work against you. It 'looks' like Google is trying to figure out where you should be, but I don't think it is anything more sinister than that. It's certainly not a penalty at work as they give you a hit and rarely see movement like this. I would monitor the stats for another couple of weeks and then see where you stand. If it levels out, you at least know where you need to be heading and what changes to make next. -Andy

Patrick has covered everything you need to know here, and most importantly, it wont hurt your rankings one bit. -Andy

cool cheers

Martijn is correct.  I would recommend a subdomain as the last resort. It sounds like the pics have great SEO value. I would also recommend your client watch this WBF.  It covers many aspects including touching on video. https://moz.com/blog/panda-optimization-whiteboard-friday