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Time heals all wounds... Now we rank in at position 14-15 for this keyword. No further improvements have been made. So the changes I made two weeks ago and perhaps some kind of punishment being obsolete has helped the SERP.

Hi Prateek Wow, that's strange that someone should build those links without being hired! I understand if you don't want to change domain and I think that would be a rash move too. I would try and contact the webmasters of the worst links (i.e. from adult sites and the forums that have most spam comments) and ask them if they can remove them. that's going to be a lot of work, but it seems like the only way to get rid of those bad links if you haven't built them. getting better quality links could definitely attenuate the effect of the bad links. but you will run the risk of getting more bad links, yet again! plus, it might become even more obvious to search engines that you are building links manually. so you've got to be really careful here and not build too many at a time and only go for really excellent quality links.

thank you for the follow up, Dr. Pete!

Due to the scope of the Internet it takes a search engines bandwidth to be able to crawl the entire web. SEO moz hits about the top twenty five percent of links. If links are more recent, there is a chance they won't show up for 4 to 7 weeks due to the data having to be processed after the crawl and the sites crawled only once a month (you can see the dates on the site). Majestic SEO offers a decent free service for your own sites, and the monthly if you handle a lot is small medium level is about $50 per month. Even with the free you will see a lot more links and it shows some additional data as well. For the paid, you get historic, etc.

Links to categories/login/search/facebook/links in the post + 57 comments with links in them will easily add up to 100+ links on the page.

Yes, thank you. I have the Yoast plugin installed but must have missed the option when settings up.

Thank you.  Tried it and this answered my question.

Now that the new site is ready maybe you can move it out of its set-up directory into the root domain?  I'd also set-up 301 redirects so the pages from the old CMS are forwarded to corresponding pages on the new CMS www.yousite.com/blog/story1 >>301 redirects >> www.yousite.com/news/tech/story1 Is it a problem if http://www.mydomain.com is not optimized for anything? The root domain is forwarded onto the directory with Joomla install so you can't optimize it for anything.  If you keep it like this make sure its a 301 redirect. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the post. Good to hear that someone else went through a similar situation! Did you do anything about any external links that might have been pointing to some of the pages that went away? Is there anything else that you could suggest that I might have not thought of? Thanks again, Scott

Yes, but technically (and according to Google's docs) when you robots something out, you are saying "This URL shouldn't be indexed." And if the special page a)lives at the HP URL, or b) is redirected from the HP via 302, you are telling them "please don't index my homepage." The docs say "when we see noindex, we pull the page." My question really is whether the 307 is any better than the 302. I think I implied above that I saw no difference but with the "only cacheable if" language It looks like it's supposed to be. THEN AGAIN, that same language is in the HTTP1.1 definition of the 302 as well as a 307. Bbut I'm hoping someone has an example of using one successfully (where success = the temporary content did not get cached in SERPs). Thanks!

When you say "templates", can you explain what you mean? Do all 9 variations have the same content, but with a different wrapper (graphical look and feel)? In that case, I agree with @eyepaq - the canonical tag would be your best bet. It's a bit tough to tell with a specific example, but the key issue is how different the pages are (and if they have search value). I have to disagree, though, regarding internal duplicate content not being a Panda issue. I think thin and near-duplicate internal content is very much part of the Panda equation. I've also seen large-scale duplication cause massive ranking problems.

SuperlativB is correct in his statement.  Use the tags to provide a description of the image and additional informative data.  Remember to use best practices with img alt tags as website readers for visually impaired rely on alt tags for proper website experience.

Hi Robert, thank you. Indeed, it would be great to have some research to validate the actual answer, if indeed there is a definitive answer. From reading my original answer and your reply above, it seems that we are both in general agreement that hyphens in domain names tend to have no bearing on SEO. User Experience is key to choosing the better option rather than SEO. We've just gone about explaining the same thing in a different way. From my experience and knowledge, hyphens in a domain name have Zero Direct Impact on SEO and search rankings, they make no difference either way. However, there are Usability factors such as User Engagement that do affect SEO; if having a hyphen in a domain name or not affects the click through rate one way or the other, that could well have a small part to play in the overall ranking algorithm, thus in search rankings. Personally, like yourself, I like to see hyphens in domain names because it does often read better. So to summarise, I believe there is No Direct Impact when it comes to hyphens in a domain name, however I believe there Is In-Direct Impact through User Experience factors. With best regards, Simon

Hi Paul, In the UK people are pretty comfortable with either a .co.uk or a .com - and likewise I've not seen any evidence to suggest that the search engines favour .co.uk sites. As .com is stronger I'd be inclined to go with that Hope this helps, Hannah

I agree here with almost everything, especially with linking and transferring the GA accounts. About five years ago an AdWords customer of the one person agency I was contracting for disputed about $30-40 total worth of charges, spread over three payments. All of the AdWords accounts I had were suspended without notice, even those on different credit cards and those not at all related to this agency. Most of them did have an analytics account in common, and they were all on the same Google Webmaster Tools account. Google would not say how they had determined which other ads to shut off, but I did get the rest of the accounts back online in short order and never had another problem with them.