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Hey Alex Is it possible to get a link so we can review in more detail? Without a link, I can give you some general feedback and I am sure we can try to flesh this out a bit further. If you had tons of duplicate content and had a traffic drop in Feb then Panda is a likely candidate but if you have removed the duplication and built a new site then that should have resolved those issues. There is nothing to say you have not picked up another penalty though or have some other problem and Penguin is the next likely candidate to review. So, check your analytics and see if there were further traffic organic traffic drops from Google on  April 24 and/or May 25. If so, then you likely have external issues (links) that may be effecting your chance to rank. Action Points 1. Set up a new campaign for the site in the SEOMoz tools and be fastidious in resolving any reported errors 2.  Review the traffic losses in Google analytics and compare against the dates of known algorithm changes here 3. Review any messages and or problems in Google Webmaster Tools 4. Once you have identified any Panda / Penguin problems or any other issues then attempt to resolve them. There are several good guides online and I have a few simplified ones over at my site or check out the posts on Penguin and Panda over at Distilled. Summary Ultimately, it is really hard without a link to give a specific review but it sounds like some kind of penalty or devaluation to drop from page 1 to page 6. Likewise, the fact you still rank in Yahoo & Bing would indicate that the site is being penalised. It could be a manual penalty or one of the algorithmic penalties. If you have resolved the duplication issues (check against copyscape and the moz tools) and have no manual penalty (check in webmaster tools for messages) then the likely candidate is external issues so a spammy or manipulative link profile. Hope this helps and feel free to fire over a link so we can give some feedback specific to your site. Marcus References 1. Simple Google Penguin Audit  2. Google Panda Problems and Solutions 3. Detailed Penguin Audit 

Hi Irving Our main competitor has double the keyword density on their homepage - a fair point though and I will as a result reduce the occurence of this phrase and see if this has an impact. I am seeing spam in search results for #1 placements for competetive phrases which is a first since I have started in 2008 - i'm thinking that we might just have to ride this out until Google fixes the algorithm or forces us to survive on adwords like so many other effected companies... Although it seems Penguin has hit us, we don't have the link profile for such a hit. Regards Andy

When you say it did not fix them, do you mean that the 301 was not working, or that the 404s did not go away in the GWT report? You will not see an immediate change in GWT for those errors.  They may take 30-90 days to clear out.  If you have them fixed, you can mark them as such and then take the error out of your console. As a part of the SEO Membership, check out the SEOMoz report for some option.  I have used Screaming Frog SEO spider with some success to look through my site and find random links. P

Excellent, Thanks for your advice, i love the idea of the IP tracking, Regards,

Thanks Marcus, appreciate it...

Adam is pretty much right on. The October Linkscape update only crawled 55 billion URLs this time. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/octobers-mozscape-update Our DA went down two points after this update. It's nothing to worry about. The real question is, have your rankings dropped?

Hi, First off, even with a canonical, I'd suggest you have a unique title tag if for no other reason than users. Changing the title, even slightly, can help. For my clients, I usually suggest something simple like adding ", Page #2" after the main title. Google may or may not index the page, but that way if a user bookmarks the page (or shares it), the title is different. Second, you need more than a canonical link to correct this problem. You are dealing with a sequence, which means you need to use rel prev/next as well as the canonical. (For example: on page 2 of your jobs, the canonical would be /jobs/2, the rel prev would be /jobs, and rel next would be /jobs/3.) Treating these pages like a sequence will help explain this group of pages more effectively. And, that means... Finally, the rel prev/next would also help those second, third, fourth, etc. pages  from falling out of Google's index and allow Google to find those jobs listed on those subsequent pages. Instead of telling Google that the subsequent pages are duplications (which is what you are saying by having a canonical referencing the main page on each subsequent page), you instead would be saying that these pages are grouped together as a sequence making it acceptable for Google to crawl through those pages. I hope that helps. Also, I'm not sure how SEOmoz handles the canonical in regards to duplicate content. Thanks.

Thanks Egol and Keri for your replies. Really helpful and much appreciated. Ant

Your next route would be to set up a Google Places for your location so that you return in the local searches for where you are based. So when the search term 'Dental Clinic Bangalore' is searched for your website will appear. After that for specific regions, have different pages on your site such as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-jayangar. This means that the page name is dental-clinic-jayangar as opposed to www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/jayangar where the site structure leads to a page name of just jayangar. If the page name is the search term, you stand in a lot better for ranking in the SERP.

Many thanks Casey, i'll give that a try. Sounds exactly what i need! Regards Dave

I would absolutely agree with you that the FAQ and Help pages would be very useful for searchers, and that the current lack of branding on those pages is a problem. I'd be really tempted to integrate their content into regular pages that could be linked to as usual instead of as popups with no site navigation or breadcrumbs. Good luck! Paul PS I agree it's the CMS using the "+" signs - big job to change them & create all the rewrite rules, but they sure are a usabiltiy issue!

Thanks Dana. I am watching the video now.. will be trying to fix it...

Thanks for all the info. Last question, does having a list of monthly archives on the bottom of my site hurt in terms of dup content? I just have at the bottom the month/year and when you click it, it shows all the posts in that month. Should I be removing this or does it matter?

Well, there are a few HTML elements that you can use with being the standard for a quote and being for a quote from another site or source. With regards to duplication, I am not really sure I have ever come across a hard and fast rule here so tend to think the standard rules apply and if you have a good percentage of unique content on the page then having a few quotes won't matter. That is likely as true if you use italics, q or blockquote. From my perspective, I would use blockquote to indicate it was from an external source and not worry about so long as 90% of my page was not quoted from an external source. What you can't do is pinch content from another source and just wrap it up in blockquotes and call it good. Seriously though, I quote things in my blog posts all the time so keep the unique ratio high and this is not something to worry about. The HTML quote details can be found in more detail over at w3c schools: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_q.asp If you google around this topic, you won't find much, a good indicator that people are not having duplication problems due to quotes and citations else the internet would be moaning about it. Hope that helps. Marcus

Hey Brent, This has still really perplexed me but out of the blue as I started to think about this I think I may have come to this conclusion.  I am running my content as inline iframes, could this be the reason why I am getting the above errors?  My site is http://vortexcleaning.com any help here is appreciated and thanks in advance.

Antonio, I came into this question a little late so I'm not sure how it was back when you asked it, but right now the problem I see is that the page that does exist ( http://www.comparativadebancos.com/mejores-depositos-bancarios-de-marzo-de-2011/ ) has a rel canonical tag pointing to the page that doesn't exist ( http://www.comparativadebancos.com/depositos/marzo/ ), which returns a 404 response code. I think right now the best thing you can do would be to change the rel canonical tag on /mejores-depositos-bancarios-de-marzo-de-2011/ to be http://www.comparativadebancos.com/mejores-depositos-bancarios-de-marzo-de-2011/ .