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You aren't alone!  I have a client that just lost all of his 1-5 rankings!  About 20 in all.  Taking ubiquitousinnovation 's direction, and creating a disavow file for the spammy links that were created before our firm started working on the site.

SEMrush got back to me, and it was a bug. But glad to know that I was checking all the right things. It's good to get confirmation from another SEO that I was doing this correctly. Thanks

Another thing to consider is the visitor/commercial intent of the specific keywords you're targeting. You can find that even very similar keywords/synonyms can have a different intent or level of customer awareness and even though they may be "talking about the same thing", you may want to create separate pages that match the searchers intent/objectives. Don't stop at the point you determine the keyword volumes and whether the keyword is relevant to your business/services/products, but ask yourself "what is the visitor looking for/trying to do when they search for {query}" And take a good look at the search results returned from each keyword it can tell you a lot about how both google and your completion view the term.

No I would invest in Schema, but in this case I personally think that the attributes listed would not be implemented in any search engine soon. Some of them you would have to use the additionalType and that would be one of my last guesses for attributes that would ever be included.

Another quick question about your comment on the link profile quality. There are currently no messages or warnings about the link profile quality in WMT. Would you suggest still reviewing these backlinks and trying to get them off the link profile? Thanks!

It's not a problem, it's just a little bit of a wasted effort. First, EMD's have less of an impact as they once had - so rather than trying to game the SERP's with the micro-sites - you can just kill it with local content on things to do once you rent the car. Think of these other sites as opportunities to create an umbrella of related terms to your main keywords - with links back to your money site. Also would 100% differentiate the layouts for each site - the more unique each site - the more value your links will have within your network of websites.

Thank you Tim, Your response certainly makes much sense and I have noted it in my strategy for this clients. Much appreciated! Meaghan

The shortest and simple answer to that is forget website B and stick to website A combining or 301ing both website will hurt the reputation of website A as well. Hope this helps!

i would parse the js later and reduce it as much as possible. try pagespeed i take a bet it will say the same. [Offtopic SEO but fits to your site: no chance for ASR vs FCB 2day ]

Thank you Bruce.

Thanks a lot Chris ! There are lots of great learnings in your reply. First, I will focus on the long tail keywords so I can understand if I am doing things right. And learn. Then, I might move to more competition but that's for later. And thanks for the feedback on our blog. I will think again how I might provide more useful content to our users.

I'd defenitely recommend not to use keyword rich anchor text. Just use your brand name and diversify your link profile.

Hey all, I wanted to add one more post to this thread as I believe I've found the better solution I was alluding to a year ago: Divshot. Definitely worth a look for anyone hosting a static site, has great libraries for SEOs like redirects and slashify. Cheers, -Danny

Screaming Frog is the best crawler out there imo. Have you talked to your hosting provider? They may be refusing the connection on their end.

Hi Sam. I would advise you to move on with safer SEO in any case! As Chappers states, Google won't notify you of algorithmic penalties. If changes in rankings/traffic coincide with know algorithm updates, that is your clue. Things may change a bit in the days to come as things settle but might as well clean up those backlinks now! Hopefully the next refresh will not take so long. Sorry!

Hi, Thanks for taking the time to do such thorough research and offer some avenues for me to check out. To date, none of the above options work for me in Adobe BC. I can only get the hack to work in the blog layout (hack to implement rel="canonicals"). However the results tests out that every page renders the same - not to the individual post, but to the blog list of posts. This leans me in the direction of moving all clients to another platform.

FWIW, after this crawl, our organic traffic has been gangbusters since this heavy crawl period (which stopped around 9/12.) Whatever this heavy crawl was, it appears to have been a net positive for us!

Thanks Lantec, I didn't realise you could do this, even if you didn't own the website. Good to know. I've just checked before using the tool and the cache has been removed already, so really quick work from Google, very good. Even though I didn't need the tool you suggested, it's a good one to remember. I just tried the tool to see what happened, and if the URL you enter is still live and on the web, then it says on the first screen: The content is still live on the web. Before Google can remove it from our search results, the site owner needs to take down or update the content. Has the site owner updated or removed the content? Yes...No.... All makes sense. Nice find

Hi This is a really interesting article by Matt Cutts https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en I think this will help you to clarify your concerns on syntax etc Bruce

I'm running into the same issue right now. Has anyone discussed this with Sitefinity? It seems to be a very common issue with their CMS.