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so the deal with subdomain vs domain is that you need to think of them as two separate sites; one is just living in the same database as the other. So when you moved the site over to a subdomain, it's possible you took a little hit but I don't think you would get penalized for having the main site live on the subdomain. It might come down to how you migrated and managed the redirects (did you map everything appropriately?), lost links because people were still referencing the old domain with the www subdomain, and a variety of other factors. The .co ccTLD is actually for the country of Columbia, and isn't for "company" as some people may use it for. While there are a ton of spammy sites that use the .co because it's easier to snag an exact match domain, that doesn't necessarily mean you're being targeted for it. There are billions of websites out there. Having the .co and hosting in the US could send mixed messages, which may impact; however there's no real way to tell with any certainty. Review your site migration, and make sure you have all the pages moved over correctly. Next I would check links. Reach out to people who are linking to you and ask them to update to the new domain. 301's lose a good percentage of equity passed, so it's better to get the full value with the correct link. Check local directories as well to make sure you cover all bases - those will need the URL updated. Finally, review your on-page optimization. Are you targeting the right keywords? If so, do you have the appropriate pages optimized and set up with good internal linking? Check your traffic in analytics to look for specific dates it either spiked or dropped. That will also help you narrow down what you changed/what you need to change. Things like this are more detective work in the beginning to bring problem areas to light. Start with that and let us know what you find.

Hi, It's my understanding that using responsive design/content, and dynamically serving content, does not cause a risk for any cloaking penalties. These are all recommended ways, along with a separate mobile site, to serve content to users (see this Google Webmaster article) The most important thing is that smartphone users see all content which Google's Smartphone Googlebot will see, and that desktop users see all content which the desktop Googlebot will see (as there are different Googlebots for this). Here's a video from Matt Cutts, explaining that as long as the hiding is done for user experience rather than search engine deception, it's ok: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hiding-content-17136.html

Just get those keywords you're trying to rank for somewhere naturally on the page - within the text, headings, alt text, etc. So long as doesn't look keyword-stuffed.

Thanks,  I was clicking fetch and not fetch and render.

If we can't change the tags before launch, but change them immediately after, how long does it take Google to recognize the change and adjust our ranking? Will we be digging ourselves out of a hole if we implement it the wrong way and fix it shortly after?

Thanks for your reply. They are definitely low quality and have no relevance whatsoever. I definitely didn't post the myself, so not quite sure how they got there.

Google often has a long memory.   You removed the links, now you have to wait for Google to forget them.  It might take weeks, but more often it will be months.  I've seen things in Google Webmaster Tools that are over two years old.

Understood - if you're ranking on the second and third pages, it may just be because it's a brand new baby website and needs to accrue more links and authority.

Duplicate page titles Duplicate meta descriptions A number of page titles in the 80-100 character range = too long. Many WAY too long meta descriptions. Meta KWs usually act only as a negative ranking factor, if anything. You have a LOT of the same KWs & KW spam. Anchor text issues for all 4 words: newport, beach, plastic and surgeon. All way over optimised. Majestic historic shows a HUGE number of referring domains but a much, much smaller level of IPs - typically a spam signal so there may be even more in Search Console that needs clean up, removal or disavow. I would assume this site dropped initially during a Panda algo update at some point. It has a lot of content-quality issues and some anchor problems.

I would echo what Dirk said and add to that. Did you do 301s from the old URLs to the new URLs? Are the new URLs crawlable by Google? These type of links are notoriously bad for SEO because they're almost always implemented improperly. How long ago did all this happen? Has Google caught up? What URLs are in your sitemap now? Again, it's probably related to not being setup correctly. I have seen 100 of these clients and maybe only 1 or 2 that was done with any intent to make sure it still ranks. Check: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started?hl=en Finally, you said you just introduced these as new pages? Consider this: http://searchengineland.com/google-has-deprecated-their-ajax-crawling-scheme-233402 If Google is going away from these pages and you're going toward them, that is something I would seriously think about for the future of the site.

My first instinct is obviously to say "if you lose 50-75% of your links, will your rankings drop" - well ... yes? I mean that seems fairly obvious? But I didn't want to be that obtuse so I thought about it a bit longer. And really, the question is much more teachable than that over-simplified answer. What you are talking about is domain-level vs. page-level link factors. ANY link to your site affects the whole domain (domain factor) but a direct link to an inner page has more page-level effect. If you look at the Moz Ranking Factors Survey you will see this: Domain-Level, Link Authority Features: Based on link/citation metrics such as quantity of links, trust, domain-level PageRank, etc. And that, right there, is your answer. On the domain-level, we assume quantity of links, trust & PR of those links affects the domain as a whole. If you have poor quality links it can also tank the whole site even if they all direct to one inner page. So yes, the long answer is "quantity and quality of links can affect domain-level metrics and thus affect your rankings."

Cyrus Shepard went into some of the value of nofollows on a Whiteboard Friday in the past year or two. There was a fair amount of discussion about it in the comments. Scroll through those and you should get a decent idea of how everybody thinks about them. Think about it this way: Google isn't giving you any value from the link, but they still use it for crawling, and they also value all kinds of on-page signals beyond just links. So there can be value to the signals around a link even if the link itself passes no value. And there can be value to a link even if there is no ranking value to it—though I think the whole "referral traffic" thing is wildly overblown, never seen anybody get more than like 4 visits from a comment. But they can help you build communities/relationships online. Plus there's all kinds of things like co-occurrence that Google uses that I suppose, hypothetically, could possibly be a benefit from nofollow links in the right context, even non-editorial links. Check Bill Slawski's blog for more on that!

My gut says that this is not a Panda hit. Any sites that I saw get hit with Panda in July were hit on exactly July 17th or 18th. The decision to noindex (I'm assuming you meant noindex rather than nofollow?) product pages is one that would likely need some in depth investigation made in order to decide. But, in most cases I do not recommend noindexing products. A drop from #1 to #3 does not sound typical of a Panda hit. That said, I have seen some Panda hit sites that start with a slight decline and continue to fall from there. But, again, my gut is saying this is not Panda. A drop from #1 to #3 could be a whole bunch of things and I'm guessing that having some thin product pages is not your main problem. This sounds like a question that is probably a little too detailed to be answered in Q&A. Perhaps if you are able to provide the url you can get some better feedback, but otherwise you'll mostly be getting gut instincts and opinions.

It's impossible to know - Google keeps the images cached on their server to increase performance when displaying them in the search results. It's only when people click on the "view image" that they get to your site. These views you could probably check in the server logs. Don't try to redirect these images back to the "original" page when called from Image Search. It's something Google disapproves and again could lead to a manual action (check http://www.thesempost.com/google-manual-actions-issued-for-image-mismatch/ and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137?hl=en) Dirk

Thanks for clearing that up and all of the help!

You can use a form as described here. http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/textsubmit.shtml You can also ask the affiliate site if you can place their shopping cart code on your site.  Most carts will even allow branding themes that you can use to make their shopping cart have the look and feel of your website.  Your customers will be checking out on the affiliate program site, and their URL will be shown in address window.  Although there are ways to make it look like a subdomain on your site.

Hi Tim, Thank you very much for taking the time to explain this. Best regards, Ed

I am also not familiar with the plugin. I use the Redirection plugin (that's its actual name!) for WordPress redirects. Can you not specify the full URL? Otherwise, can you use /news/www.website.com because that is the path after your website.com actual URL? From the screenshots of the plugin it looks like that might work...

yes, since you are not changing domain name and keeping the same content, you should be fine, since you were original author of that content

Yes, change the color in places I've mentioned to whatever colors you want. Swap #fcf9f9 to whatever color.