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Some CMS tools route clicks through a click tracking script, so they can count how many people click on each URL or widget.  It could be that you had a tool like this installed and that it was misconfigured - though I couldn't see anything from viewing the source on the pages you linked to.

yes, inbound links are those coming from other sites - and quality is important there- as well as diversity, both in the types of links as well as ensuring to keep the majority of links coming from as many independently separate domains as possible.

Thank you Collin!

Have you tested this with cleared web history/cache/cookies and what not? Is this due to the user being logged in and showing previous visits? You should thoroughly test this before coming to a conclusion that Google is outranking you for previous search terms.

Thanks Zack, sometimes you just need to hear someone else say what you're thinking 'out loud'

Hi George, thanks for the link! It looks like google has changed the mobile rules. I've added a new meta tag: http://www.schicksal.com/Astrologie/Astro-Schule/Transite and on the mobile version: And I've removed the robots.txt entries. I cannot use the "vary" - "User-Agent" header because the site needs to be cachable by varnish. Let's see whats happening in the next days. Best wishes, Georg.

Although I cannot see the whole initial URL, it might be that all those 10,000 pages are being redirected to that enable-cookies URL (like if the content was behind a login page and therefore if you are not logged in, all URLs will be redirected to the login page to access the content). Did you change anything on the site that requires visitors to have the cookies enabled to work? Could this be related to the European Cookie legislation, where visitors should opt-in to cookies before they start using your site (see http://www.ico.gov.uk/)? Cheers Michel

Does the Google account you are using have sufficient permissions? When you log into WMT and you see the site, look at the box to the right which says Manage Site. If the only option is to "delete site" then you do not have sufficient permissions. Redirecting your site with a 301 is the proper action to take. The results you are seeing are normal. Google is slowly crawling your site over time and seeing the redirect on your site's pages and making adjustments. Usually 4 weeks is enough time to see all the changes but there are various reasons it could take longer. Perhaps your site had a momentary problem during a crawl. Perhaps your robots.txt file changed. Perform a site: search. As long as the number of URLs on the old site are decreasing steadily, I would not be worried.

Hi again, Since there are a lot of directives in this that are specific to certain conditions in your site that we cannot see, you should leave them alone. Your redirect should appear at the beginning of the .htaccess anyway, so your best course of action is: Make a copy of your existing .htaccess file with a different name so that you cannot accidentally lose it by overwriting Place your redirect code at the beginning of the .htaccess (remembering that "RewriteEngine On" should appear only once) Save and upload your new .htaccess file Check in your browser to see if the redirect works (as many known pages as possible) If it works, CELEBRATE! It it breaks, replace your file with your copy of the original and ask the original developer, or one with access to the detail of your site to sort it out for you. Incidentally, the rule you have above will redirect from www to non-www...just to be sure that is what you intended. Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Tyler, It looks like you might have been viewing the internal links for www.ontracparts.com only. If you view internal links for any page on the root domain you will see there are 13 listed. It looks like the report is accurate. It may not reflect some of the recent changes, but we should be seeing a new Mozscape update soon. It's scheduled for the 27th so you may see the information change after that. I hope that helps. Let me know if you need anything else. Thanks, Joel.

What the???

Okay I finally got some host gator hosting but I have no idea what to do. I am up to the part where I am entering the details for the CNAME but it says the record already exists? What the ??

It's always hard to talk in generalities about complex issues like this, but it sounds like a situation where cross-domain canonicals might make sense. I guess it really boils down to whether you're having issues with the duplicates and what the scope is (are there 3 of each or 300). In some cases, those duplicates just mean that one site will win, and Google will pick the winner. In other cases, the main site could actually be harmed by the duplicates. In some cases, honestly, multiple sites might rank fine. It really varies wildly. The cross-domain canonicals would help prevent any kind of duplicate penalty (like being hit by Panda), but it would also mean that the non-canonical versions would no longer rank. So, you'd be protecting the strongest site for each listing, but possibly cutting off the smaller sites. I haven't seen an implementation where different sites were canonical for different listings/articles/etc., at least not on large-scale, so that's a bit tougher to predict. If you have sites A-Z, and A is canonical for one listing, B for another, C for another, etc., that could get a bit tricky. I know large organizations, like newspapers, who syndicate content, have had good results in many cases with cross-domain canonical. There is also a syndication-source tag, but that's really a weaker tag, and I haven't seen much data on it. The other option, traditionally, would be a solid link-back strategy (the non-canonical versions link to the canonical version). Unfortunately, at large scale, that could start to make you look like a link network, so I think that gets risky in this case.

They've rebranded to Swish Digital now, here is a recent thread discussing a site currently being worked on by them https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/keep-or-fire-the-seo-company-please-help-asap.2654110/

Scott, Digging out here and wondered if you would share a little more information. Did you ever receive one of Googles letters claiming you had unnatural links? Do you have any search terms on Google? Or is it across the board every search term 50+? How long did it take Google to reply to the reinclusion request? Comment about the WP, I wonder if there any recovery stories other than the WordPress one, curious that one jumped back up but of course it had national attention. Google could have flagged them in a positive way. Force7

Dan, Thanks for your reply.  I have enabled the XML Sitemap via Yoast SEO. I also wanted to share with you the below note I received from Bing Customer Service. Could you please let me know what a webserver log is, where I can find it, and if I should be concerned with sharing that type of information? Best regards, -David | | Microsoft Customer Support | 4:35 AM (5 hours ago)[image: cleardot.gif] [image: cleardot.gif][image: cleardot.gif] | to me[image: cleardot.gif] | | Hi David,This is Manny from Bing Technical Support.Since you verified that nothing is blocking Bing bots from visiting your site, may we request for your webserver logs so we can investigate further. Kindly attach the logs on your next reply to us.Regards,Manny Bing Technical Support --- Original Message --- From : "David Rachelson"   Sent : Sunday, June 24, 2012 1:19:17 PM UTC To : "Microsoft Customer Support"   Subject : Re: SRX1179171626ID - Bing:Other[image: cleardot.gif] Manny,Thanks for your note and quick reply.We had not done anything to block the bingbots.Could you please let me know what can be done to resolve this problem?Best regards,-David On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Microsoft Customer Support <SERCH.SRCH.WW.00.EN.NCO.QUE.TS.T01.SPT.00.EM@css.one.microsoft.com> wrote: Hi David,Thank you for contacting Bing Technical Support. My name is Manny.I understand that your site is no longer ranked in Bing. Your site, www.onlinemathcourses.org, was ranked number 5 for the phrase online math courses on 6/08/12 and then, on 6/15/12 we were no longer in the top 50. I know the urgency of this issue. Allow me to help you.Investigation shows that your site was being crawled and indexed by Bing but lately, we could not connect to your site and getting fetching error. Could you please verify that the bingbots are not being blocked by you? I further checked on your site and it is showing up okay.Once you verified that Bing is not being blocked, kindly get back to us and we will see what we can do. If you have other details that can help us in our investigation, please include them on your next reply.We look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you for contacting Bing Technical Support.Regards,Manny Bing Technical Support

That's one thing I hadn't considered thus far - thanks for the tip, Anthony! I'll make sure the URLs are removed properly. I just think creating 'new' pages would be easier than working through the mess the old SEO company left behind. With decent content on-site and a few relevant in-content links, it shouldn't (hopefully) take too long to get back up the rankings!

Hi Lucas, If the URL is automatically changing to the non-trailing slash version it sounds like there is already a redirect in place. This is good practice for SEO. Multiple versions of a page (e.g. www,mystite.com, mysite.com, www.mystite.com/, mysite.com/) can split ranking power and lead to lower rankings overall. A 301 redirect transfers the majority of the "link juice" to the page that it is redirecting to. This post on the official Google blog is a great starting point to learn more about trailing slashes and their implications for SEO: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html