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If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools _Honestly speaking I did not know that thanks for the update .. _

Yep, that'll work!

Well, we're using drupal also and had the same problem, we fixed it by making a custom view with some custom paths that we're smaller for example: previously: http://www.domain.com/news/typeofnews/paperback/issue-20-august-2011/itemtitle1/ (as you can imagine the titles could be large) Now:  http://www.domain.com/news/20-09-2012/title Maybe this is possible for u also ?

Have you tried going to Google WMT and performing a Fetch as Googlebot? Do you have the old GA tracking code from before the asynchronous code was used? If the answer to both questions is yes, try updating your GA code. http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/08/fixing-googlebot-cant-access-your-site.html

To my mind you already have "sponsored" articles, they are just for one of your owner/contributors e.g. http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/gastric-hypno-band/the-secret-to-weight-loss-is-inside-you-says-gastric-hypno-band-expert#.UEd-5cHN9X8 Adding other sponsored links would only diversify the content, potentially get more quality content on the site and make it a better user experience. To me you could manage the relationship with the readers and outside businesses your team are involve with in ways that visitors will gell with more.  This covers the top banner (which looks like an external paid banner when someone is on the home page rather than something a regular contributor is involved with.  There are loads of spammy looking gastric band promotions out there and you have real potential to both improve this site and generate more trust with potential gastric band purchasers by showing the relationship differently so they see the person behind the product and banner.  Also I see it is a Liverpool number that is given, I do not know whether Gastric band some of the other services that those involved in the site provide are local and the extent that they are fine to be purchased by people across the UK and beyond - If services are localised around Liverpool then having the ads in such a dominant place may not be optimising your ad revenue (which could always be put on Adwords Display Network and optimised around Liverpool if that is the case.  I tried to click on the banner too for more information and it did not lead to more information.  I wanted to know enough in answering this question to click on in and not being able to annoyed me (only a tiny bit) but would add to user experience and improve conversions. Also whether you think you do or not, you do sponsored posting and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that from a user experience perspective as long as you convey it in a way that meets both the needs of advertisers AND viewers. I think you have been given the right advice in terms of optimising conversion from an individual visit but the wrong advice more generally.  As well as a new visitors clicks you also want to engage with them so they dont hit the back button, facilitate social sharing and provide a quality user experience so that they are going to engage more with the site then you want to have less banners in different places than you do currently.  You want to make it easy for people to share the articles with others and enable your readership to grow which can make all your advertising perform better. Others have mentioned that there was some slightly dated content that was still high profile, this is obviously bad for the type of site you are doing.  You also mentioned in a positive sounding way that it was all your own group of people that were writing content which is actually a bad thing  and the two points are connected.  Would I keep coming back to reading posts at SEOmoz (before I became pro and come to use the tools) if it was just Rand and other staff posting?  Perhaps but no where near as often.  I have welcomed the whiteboard fridays with different perspectives and different expertise, I like the fact that I get access to hundreds of experts here with different perspectives and this would not happen without guest contributions.  Also it means you can have much more content without having to write it all.  Ok you might give a link away but as long as you ensure that the articles are of high quality and only a minor proportion are clearly sponsored (and do not make this too deceptive) then all you are doing is making your site better with more varied content and sponsored posts are less damaging to user experiences than big banners. I will stress that I am completely not the demographic for your site.  If I had my way google would give out moderate penalties for articles less than 1500 words and bigger penalties for articles less than 1000 words and gossipy type topics would also get google penalties unless searched for explicitly so "news" would not give xfactor or celeb stories in the SERP results. Also the most relevant people for you to get views from is your users and it does not look like you have all that many links to your site at present which will be harming your SEO.  You may want to look at getting some sponsored articles and enhancing SEO as well as addressing some of the user experience issues. But it is a pretty good site considering it is no-ones main concern.

That's what I'd do. Just make sure to set up a 301 redirect from all of those pages to the homepage, so you don't lose any visitors with the change.

Great!  Would you prefer that I didn't mention your actual website name?  If I can mention it, it would be in the form of a link which would be good...but I can understand if you'd like to remain private. Also, did you notice any drop in traffic yet associated with this issue?

Great answer - thank you justin!

Thanks Kristina, Great - thanks for clarifying, that's the exact explanation I was looking for. Good news for a wide collection of URLs Best , Jon

Hi Emily Just making sure you're all set. I can't seem to replicate the issue any more and I see you have the latest version of WordPress installed now. If you need any further reference on securing WordPress this is a nice guide on their site - Hardening WordPress The rest of the advise here looks great, thanks so much Majid and Nakul for helping out! -Dan

Regarding bit.ly, from their FAQ: _bitly works by issuing a "301 redirect": a technique for making a webpage available under many URLs. When you shorten a link with bitly, you are redirecting a click from bitly to the destination URL. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine-friendly method for webpage redirection, and is what bitly uses. Because bitly doesn’t re-use or modify links, we consider our redirects to be permanent._So you're fine there. Re your own short links, you'll have to check whether they are redirecting or using cannonical tags.

thanks everyone, that has been a great help.

Thanks Marie - I agree with you 100% on using multiple tools and resources. I'd pull the data from as many sources as possible (OSE, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic), and then combine it all in one master spreadsheet, deduplicate, and then analyze.

Egol is correct. This doesn't sound like a company i'd want to be working for yet alone paying money to look after my online interests. One good point of this company is you, in that you are wise enough to instantly spot the flaws in what was asked by the manager and in what was promised by your head of dept - no doubt in a panic. This not only puts unrealistic pressure on him/herself but also on the employees reporting to the manager. All in all i'd take Egols advice and bail. It sounds like its all too desperate based on lack of knowledge. Things arn't going right, so they pluck a figure out of the air and promise to hit it - they should be asking the guys for a brainstorming session to pool ideas and generate some realistic goals to acheive. Hitting 600+ could be possible, as mentioned if the search volume is there then why not? But how will it be achieved, where will the visits be from and will they add value to the business(s)? This could be an opportunity for you within the company to demonstrate your understanding of the situation and current landscape and prove your worth. Or seriously consider moving on.

I'm a big fan of the Genesis platform for Wordpress. The developers that Studiopress recommends on their site are all highly qualified and can do this for you. They can also produce a responsive theme if asked. There is a huge difference between Wordpress themes and quality really counts. http://www.studiopress.com/showcase

Hi Matt I had a look at the post, it is relevant but doesn't really clarify anything. I am worried that there is something I am doing wrong because the pages are well linked internally and I am pretty sure they will have external links to them too. There has been a massive restructure. I have gone from http://www.mysite.com/services/my-product.aspx to https://mysite.com/services/3-stage-name.aspx OSE shows I have no data on my HTTP status for these new pages too. I can't seem to get to the bottom of this.

They have exactly the same content - it's just an alias, using the same files. I'm pretty sure .com isn't indexed as if i specifically search for the domain, nothing still comes up.