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Uhm.. If you got hit by penalty, just re-indexing the website without any content/backlink profile changes will not do anything. To recover from penalty, you would need to find out what penalty it was, then change a lot of stuff on your website. If you decide to dump old website whatsoever and build new one, don't redirect the old one to new, since, if there was a penalty, associating with old website is not a good idea. There are several articles on MOZ about recovering, read them all https://moz.com/ugc/from-disaster-to-triumph-how-to-recover-from-an-algorithmic-penalty https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=moz%20recovering%20from%20penalty

If they want to keep those "tab content" pages as their own indexable URLs to capitalize on long-tail traffic and provide a more targeted page then I would advise making them separate landing pages instead of "tabbed" content URLs. If they want that content on the product page then I would advise embedding the content on the product page without the use of these external URLs. It sounds like they want to have their cake and eat it too?

As far as the penguin is concern, it doesn’t matter what pages/websites you are linking out to what really matters is what kind of websites are linking back to you. If they are spammy and shady websites probably the chances are you will get hit by penguin but if the links are from decent and relevant websites you are safe. As far as the best practice you are talking about, think about your customers and readers if they are fine with it, there is no technical issue with all on one page with linking out to PDF and manufacturers. Hope this helps!

Thanks Dirk for your information, that was exactly what I needed. Richard

Try to isolate as many changes as possible. Everyone wants to do a big splash relaunch, but unless you're a serious brand, you don't need to do some fancy huge explosive relaunch. Each of these are big variables, and are best to not do all at once: Changing domain name Changing website design Changing website URL architecture Changing platform The worst is when people try to do all of those at once! It seems that you're staying on Drupal. The above article mentioned by Dirk is very good. A few things to always remember: Noindex/hide your development/staging site Always double check your robots.txt after launch Always double check your Meta Robots directive after launch Always 301 redirect page for page your important pages receiving links and traffic if those change Verify before and after everything in Analytics and Search Console Create a checklist of everything. Almost 100% of even the smartest people will miss at least one thing in a relaunch.

thanks we will test getting rid of all the utf 8 characters in the meta infos

Maybe Google is desperately trying to find a page which is replying within in reasonable delays... Time to first byte is horrible: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151104_SQ_WXJ/1/details/ Apart from the speed issue - the 301 as proposed by Justin is the best solution; Dirk

Don't have hard evidence - but from my personal perspective: My browser is set to be-nl (Belgium)- when I'm in the Netherlands (nl-nl) I am automatically redirected to google.nl & all the results I get are from the Netherlands (even for international sites were Dutch Belgian versions exist). Browser language will have an impact - but in my opinion proximity will be more important. Dirk

Thanks for taking the time and looking at this Russ, been pulling my hair out so any help is appreciated.

Thank you Dimitri, we fully agree with your proposal !

Hi Dirk, Thanks for confirming our thoughts - we'll focus on building content for now, benefit where we can with our landing pages on sub-domains, and optimise further once we pull away from hosted solutions for content pages.

Those are ajax hash fragments https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

Hi Dan! Thank you very much for your help and suggestions. I will try to follow your guidelines also. Riccardo

Hi Cyrus Thank you for you feedback. I'm going to leave it there for now and see how we go. Thanks again

Thanks Tom - that's very useful - appreciated - and thanks also Clever PhD re: the robots.txt tester info - Luke

I'm a believer in subfolder > subdomain

Hi Denise, For implementing various technical SEO tasks you should have knowledge about 1>Basic  HTML - To learn basic html please visit @ http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp 2>Basic Javascript - To learn basic Javascript please visit @ http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp 3>Basic CSS - http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp Hope this helps. Thanks

Hi Taiger. I'm assuming the sidebar widget is linking to ?cat=9 instead of /category/category-name/. It seems like this is a relatively uncommon issue. The simplest fix would be to use a list instead of a dropdown. If that's not an option, you could look into hardcoding a dropdown menu yourself instead of using the widget code. You'd need to open up the source code, fix the incorrect links, and paste that HTML back into a text widget. Hope that helps, -Kane