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There is evidence that Google sees hyphens in the root domain as spam. A lot of lead generation publishers, unable to afford domains like www.freecreditreport.com will resort to buying spammy domains like www.free-credit-report.com. A lot of porn sites utilize this tactic as well. I would definitely steer clear of this as a tactic...most sites that I see using this almost always have manipulated link graphs, paid links, etc etc. Hope this helps. Be well!

What about when the old URL no longer exists at all (page no longer saved on server) - how can you do a 301?

Thanks Svet!

Hi AJ. I was able to verify your site is indexed in google.co.uk. I disabled the flash on my browser and can see your html code appearing normally. It looks like you have a WP site with both Yoast and the All in One SEO plugins. There are some conflicts you should resolve. Currently your page has two meta descriptions and three canonical tags. These extra tags are not the root cause of your current issue, but they should be cleaned up. With your site indexed and your home page not showing up in SERPs for even targeted phrases this leads me to consider that your site may be under a penalty. I wish I could look at your site further but an issue just came up and I need to leave my office.

Thanks for the link, the plugin works a treat! Life saver.

If this was my client I would leave the content as-is. There will be no benefit to moving the content other then a cleaner URL. Yes the cleaner URL is preferred, but based on the backlink situation you described, it is not worth the move. If you were to undergo a CMS change or other situation which required a URL change, it would make sense to move the content at that time. If you didn't have many backlinks, or if you only had a small amount of content, it could also make sense to make the move.

Can you tell us the URL of the site in question? That can help us to help you, because we can look at the site and maybe spot something like an improper robots.txt or site architecture that makes it hard for a robot to crawl.

Thanks for the answer I suspected that, I'll go back over existing sites and be sure to 301 sites going forward, cheers.

Definitely agreed. There are lots of clues pointing to the existence of a penalty, but I can't figure out what the penalty would be.

They only have between 30-50 products (water filters systems and replacement filters) that don't need to be changed out very often.  Yes it definitely needs to be user friendly as well as SEO friendly.  I'm new to shopping carts so this is a learning experience for me too. I will look at foxycart.  Thanks!

The only thing internal site links can realistically do is adjust how PR flows within your own site. If you wanted to stretch for a corner case, you could have an island page or deep page that was not indexed or seen previously, but since you created a link to that page then it is seen. If that page had issues with it's content or links, then a penalty could be involved. Based on your replies and the small amount of ranking drop, I really don't think a penalty is involved. The maximum it would be is a discounting of links. If not do you know of any alhorithm changes in the past week? With around 500 algorithm changes each year, there seem to be changes every week. I am not aware of any major changes but minor ones happen all the time.

It was two a long time ago, but not recently. If you PM me the articles, I'll pass them along to the team and flag them for possible updating.

Yes, that's exactly what it is. Our company uses them a lot for print collateral so the URL is easy to remember, not long, etc. No content lives on the vanity URL, it just get redirected to somewhere else. Thanks Keri.

It's better to sort out the problem in the source rather than patching it with rel canonical. One thing you can do to help the situation is to teach Google about your URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools: url-parameters.PNG

I don't know the answer on this one. If you don't get any responses in Public Q&A, consider using a Private Q&A credit to get an answer from an Associate. A bonus there is that it is private and not indexed, and you can share the URL if that helps you at all.

Thanks Ryan. I'm going to remove the parameters. I'm glad these issues are related.

I think the footer is the best way to interlink the websites in a non-obtrusive way for users.  This should make your main corporate site your top linking site to each subdomain - and this is something you should be able to verify in a tool like Google Webmaster Tools.  I do not have any specific examples to support this, but this is a common web practice. This is not 100% related, but Google recently suggested using Footer links as one way to associate your web content with your Google profile account: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 So you can figure if Google looks to footer links to associate authorship - they would likely do the same to relate sites together.

The first thing I would do is login to my webmaster tools account and submit a reconsideration request. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1 this goes a long way with Google. Just explain everything as it happened and confirm that the problem got fixed. I hope that helps!

The biggest concern is duplicate content. If the domain acmewidget.com points to widgetzone.com/acme-widgets and that directory is accessible from the widgetzone.com website then the search engines will see acmewidget.com as a duplication of widgetzone.com/acme-widgets and almost certainly exclude it from the search engines. I'd recommend setting up microsites under your keyword rich domains that sell a small range of products - the work load is manageable and as long as you provide some unique descriptions and content will work alongside your main website.