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Yeah i wont probably do any better or it will take a long time which i cant afford, so might as well 301 it to new domain and see what happens. Thanks

Hi Rich, This is a manual action, which means your site has been penalized. You DO need to take action to get this penalty lifted, especially if you have noticed a decrease in traffic/rankings. In general, the Google Webspam team likes to see ample evidence that you did everything in your power to remove links BEFORE using the disavow. If you submit a reconsideration request after skipping this step, your request will likely be rejected. This process has been well-documented by several webmasters. I highly recommend reading these posts for more background and advice: http://moz.com/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem. When you use an image on a page, you are embedding that image from somewhere else - it's own URL. Therefore, if the page itself is "noindex,follow" - that does not apply to the images (or anything else like a video, pdf etc) that is embedded into the page.  Provided that the URL holding the image is allowed to be indexed on your root domain, which it will by default, you can index the image. You can test this out by uploading images to your root domain and then, in the next few days, performing this site search: site:yoursite.com filetype:jpg (or png/gif/whatever you used) That will show any of the images that you have on the site that are in the Google index.  If that does not work, try this search: site:yoursite.com inurl:imagefilename Replace those details with your real site and what you named the image when uploading and it should show you whether or not it's indexed or not.  If not, you could try sharing the image on Google+. G+ is ridiculously effective at getting web pages and content indexed. But just because the page where the image is present on is instructed to be noindexed does not mean that the image itself will inherit that quality.  By default, it should be indexed properly.  You can also create image sitemaps to help with indexing (I believe you're running Wordpress, Yoast's SEO wordpress plugin can help with this). Hope this helps.

I've tested this a couple of times and each result has been: no. If you 410 a page, Google does a bloody good job at never bringing that URL back.  I've changed the response code back from a number of 410s, socially shared the page, built natural links to it, even blasted links to it (for testing's sake of course!) and Google has never reindexed it. It's both good and bad - good in the sense that it really uses the 410 response code properly, but bad in the sense that, if you make a mistake and want to reuse the URL, you're pretty screwed. If you're going to use it, be absolutely 100% you wouldn't see any use in using that URL again (such as offering the product again in the future etc.).  If there is any doubt, leave it as a 404 or redirect it.

From Screaming Frog you have redirected correctly the www version to the non www version. (Which is what you stated above you wanted). By selecting the non www version in GWMT, you are just reinforcing that it is done in a way that works for you. There is no damage to the www not showing. Go to the nav bar and type in drumbeatmarketing.net and enter; you will see it resolve to www.drumbeatmarketing.net.  So, any non www page is not going to show unless we have something wrong. All is good. Yours is just the opposite as that is what you wanted. No matter what anyone says, it is irrelevant which you choose to use (with the obvious exception where the site has not had a preferred domain and now has two values for PA and you are trying to merge them). Good question, glad to help, Robert

Hi Remus, I have read all the articles besides for this one: Web Site Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs and it's really great. I'm in middle of devouring it now!

Hi Eric, you've received some good answers. Did they answer your question?

In most cases, Google does seem to "de-index" the non-canonical URL, if they process they tag. I put in quotes just because, technically, the page is still in Google's index - as soon as it's not showing up at all (including with "site:"), though, I essentially consider that to be de-indexed. If we can't see it, it might as well not be there. If 301-ing isn't an option, I'd double-check a few things: (1) Is the non-canonical page ranking for anything (including very long-tail terms)? (2) Are there any internal links to the non-canonical URL? These can send a strongly mixed signal. (3) Are there any other mixed signals that might be throwing off the canonical? Examples include canonicals on other pages that contradict this one, 301s/302s that override the canonical, etc.

Thank you for your comments.

Thanks for confirming that Paul ! Ive also noticed that when using services like Buffer etc, to post socially, that the articles image is not being displayed as an option in the images to choose from, to display as the image in the post, Instead its only showing options like the site logo etc which we don't want.  I asked Buffer tech support and they said that if the images had height/width attributes then they should then be presented as image options to accompany the post All Best Dan

That is a rather horrible hack! It'll probably work, but in terms of data structure it's not good - which generally leads to long term headaches. We've built a number of systems that function as the back-end to multiple sites. Likewise content served in different languages presents similar challenges (or for ultimate fun: several sites in several languages leading to 12 pages per item!).  I would always have this data served in separate fields. The easiest way to imagine this is that you had either a separate copy of that form for each domain, or 2 columns in the form with domain A on the left and domain B on the right. Presumably in your example, the details are separated out at the point when the page is rendered. It's messy, it suggests to me a developer who is constrained by their understanding of the platform that they are working on. However, it should work.

Have a look at this Screaming Frog http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ Its one of the best tools to use for creating sitemaps in our opinion.

As it's all sorted now, I really wouldn't worry about them too much. You can use the remove URL functionality in WMT, but this is a manual process so I wouldn't do this. If I were in your position, I'd probably just let the pages keep 404ing'. After a bit, Google will usually stop trying to recrawl the 404 pages. Right now they are probably trying to recrawl incase the 404 was an accident. If it's causing a bandwidth problem, you can solve with a robots.txt as suggested earlier.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my question - I'm going to implement 301 redirects and put this issue to bed!

Hello Peter, Thank you for your very clear answer. I was thinking about collecting user behaviour data for this dropdown menu by using Analytics' onclick event trackers. Your idea is way better to use a clickmap or heatmap! I checked the internal links again and I think there must be a way to cut out some unimportant product categories in the navigation menu and cut out some non-essential footer links. So, I am not going to change my winning team drastically. I am going to collect some data and I will decide after that what to do with all the links in the dropdown menu. Once again, thanks for the help. I can move on now. Marcel

One thing I forgot to mention... Your company likely services a very local area, correct? Are you including the names of the towns you service in the keyword phrases you hope to rank for? If not, perhaps that will have a positive effect on your ranking efforts. In my experience many people think they are targeting well-searched phrases, but they have done no research to back that up. Just guesswork. Or they think they are ranking well, but don't realize its for their brand, which they should rank well for! Or, they rank well for a phrase that is not worth targeting because it has minimal searches. Again, good luck;)

Very strange!! Is it back to normal now?

If you are changing your URL structure when you change your CMS, you should 301 redirect your important pages from the old site to the new site. If your URL structure is staying the same, you do not need to worry about implementing 301s to maintain your authority/rank. Your authorship should not be affected as long as your are staying on the same domain. Changing code (in your case a new CMS) and design can have an affect on your rankings. Having a responsive design is great for users and that is what you should be concerned most about. 301s are perfectly fine and are encouraged if you are changing your URL structure. Your other option would be to maintain your current URL structure with the site redesign. Someone asked about a Website Redesign SEO Checklist a couple of months ago and Thomas Zickell provided some good resources. Hope this helps. Mike

I believe you have it misunderstood - they took action on the pages (on your website) which were benefiting from the unnatural links, rather than taking action on your entire website. You should still try to target and clean up the unnatural links. Best of luck!

I've asked the same thing in the past and told by authoritative users in this forum the following: "If your site is structurally sound, you shouldn't need a sitemap." I've bought into that principle. If customers scroll to the bottom of my pages without finding or keyword searching what they need, I've probably not done a good job of setting it up. Put into practice, we're in the process of revamping to a top navigation with search suggest features and left nav filtering functionality.