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Thanks right Jack, Google Plus offers a do follow link back to the website and there are websites who are using Google plus comment box (similar to facebook). IF you have commented on few blogs that somehow convert that one link in to multiple links. I mean not sure if removing them will be a doable option to you but better idea is to disavow the links that are causing this and it will be resolved. Hope this helps!

Based on the last several Google Penguin updates, if your site was going to be harmed or your rankings were going to go down, they probably would have gone down already. That said, that doesn't mean that you could still be penalized. If there are sitewide badge links, they need to look natural. I wouldn't use any specific keyword anchor text, I would use your website name or brand or URL as the anchor text in the link. Don't make it look like you're trying to "game" Google by having too much exact match anchor text. If these links are only a small percentage of the overall links that you have pointing to your site, then there won't be a problem. But if you have only 5 percent like you're saying then it should be fine.

Thanks Tommy Its just a .com at the moment but language versions will be on subfolders .com/us and .com/uk with hreflang handling the rest of the internationalisation in conjunction with webmaster tools etc All the dupe content is on the .com cheers dan

Unfortunately, Google may continue to keep those pages in its index for months, even if they return a 404. The 2 best options in these cases is usually: Claim the profile in GWT - which would probably be possible but requires a lot of work with Godaddy configuring the subdomains just so you could claim the profile and de-index. I haven't tried it, but Google introduced a URL removal tools for URLs you don't controll. Might be a good use case here. Here's some info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/12/improving-url-removals-on-third-party.html

Hey Alessio, Few things to consider Domain Authority is low. Love to see few more back-links (Just 4 Links at moment) Meta Description of Home Page is too short. It should be around 100 to 160 Characters. Run Moz Audit and check other pages as well Love to see more social shares. Try to share your pages on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook. Use tags to get pages shared by others This will help! Regards

Awesome!  Thanks so much!  I will start fetching!  Appreciate that!

Hi Wayne, You've received some solid responses. Were any of them helpful? Christy

Our IT department is on a big project and we won't have any support for almost a year, that's why I was looking at other solutions. We currently add about 10 to 20 pages a month, so I probably could redo the sitemap once a month, right after the new content is published.

The canonical should pass link equity similar to a 301 redirect.

Wow - that's a huge impact. It's hard for me to believe this one change would have such an impact, but hopefully these new numbers stick.

What do you remove? Just curious. What kind of things did you do to achieve the first page ranking in the first place? Is it possible that came back to haunt you? Have you been hit with a penalty for bad links pointing to your site? Have you looked at the link profile for your domains using site explorer? If you don't get a helpful response I know a place where you could find a couple thousand Internet Marketing professionals, hiring one of those would no doubt solve your problem Good luck my friend, Matthew

Hi Mark, On our site we use responsive design / css media queries to shape the same content to fit on mobiles / tablets / desktop. We initially had the same issue with the menu, but managed to use to clever css to actually use the same menu code, just present it at the top of the page for tablet / mobile, and off to the side (sliding in via a button touch) for mobile. This works pretty well and I certainly haven't noticed any negative effects SEO wise. Best wishes, Stuart

I haven't contacted the forum yet but that's my next step. Pages indexed: 91k Blocked by robots.txt: 8.4million I don't even know how you could create 8.4 million indexable pages from our content.

Thanks Dan !

Thanks Peter!

SHTML is an old-school way to use SSI (server side includes) in what is otherwise a static HTML page. Stack Overflow talks about this in more detail here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/519619/what-is-shtml Web servers know that if the page is .shtml, then it's okay to run inline php code, for example. My guess is that your .shtml files are older remnants of SSI files. I'm not a big fan of changing URLs just to clean up things, because if you change links you will need to use a 301 redirect, and that will keep about 85% of the SEO value of the original link. If you do want to use inline php code on .html pages, I agree with Travis, above. You can modify your .htaccess file with: addhandler x-httpd-php5-cgi .htm addhandler x-httpd-php5-cgi .html (This will allow you to run php in static HTML files, without having to change the file extension to .php) Hope this helps! Jeff

Of course they aren't seeing a drop in traffic to comparable pages. Those pages are fighting under their own steam. If you send a customer/prospect to the right page, the first time, they'll likely see an increase in traffic. It sounds like they're talking about 'what is' rather than 'what could be', which in our opinion is likely better. So I guess you could make the business case that incoming referrals are bouncing when they could be buying. Hopefully there's tracking code of some sort on the faux 404 page.

Thanks guys for your help!!

I'm going to leave this as status "Unanswered", as I don't think we are much closer to any substantial conclusions on to what extent a non-generic ccTLD influences keyword matching for the country name itself. Based on my own non-scientific searches for various countries and terms like "hotels", "conference venues", "events" and so on, I've found > 50% of first page results from the relevant ccTLD without those sites keyword stuffing the country name into their URLs, so I am going to omit the country name from the website structure itself and stick with a structure of http://mybrandname.ccTLD/service/