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Thanks Ryan for this info! I am relieved that I haven't spent hours for nothing

Thanks Ryan. This is the answer I wanted to hear.

Hi Kelly. Temporary redirects for things like adding items to a cart, changing languages, and the like are acceptable and shouldn't be viewed as an error per se. You could possibly put your cart in its own directory and then have that directory be ignored by Moz to clean them up, but in your use case it's not an issue.  Cheers!

thanks Ryan Gareth

hey guys, Any updates on the ahreflang tests? I'm in a similar boat - one site got a manual hit in Feb2014...sitewide penalty, at one point brand name was even deindexed. Got penalty lifted in 5 months. But traffic has not recovered one bit since then.

Thank you! Very helpful

Hello Geoff, It looks like you've installed the Yoast plug-in now and the category pages have a noindex,follow robots meta tag. That might do the trick, but you should make sure the posts are in an XML sitemap that you list in your robots.txt file and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - or whatever they're calling it this week. I checked several things and it looks fine: No robots meta tag blocking on posts. No robots.txt blocking of posts. Followable Read More links from category pages Mostly unique content on posts (though they may be seen as thin affiliate pages in some cases). At this point you should focus on getting your posts into an XML sitemap and also look into the following: Lots of pages that shouldn't be indexed, such as /contact pages with various parameters and redirect.php with various parameters: http://tinyurl.com/qdne3g2 Security errors. I see several popping up in Firefox, including "This website does not supply identify information". I'm assuming you have a valid SSL Cert?

You're very welcome -Andy

Hi Erik, How are you trying to do the redirect? Can you share the code? I'm not an .htaccess guru, but some of the guys here are. -Andy

Absolutely, I'd say even most sites that receive a penalty probably don't receive an email or warning on time to make sure they can prevent on what's going to happen. These days it's getting better with Google sending different alerts for link issues or their site being down but in the past they barely send any emails.

I think so in terms of whether or not it helps people engage with your site or spend more time on your site. If a difficult to navigate site is what first greets a user trying to find something specific based on the search result, the bounce back to the search results is going to drive down ranking. It will also lower the likelihood of sharing. From a technical perspective, if a site's navigation prevents a crawler from adequately indexing a site, that could cause indexation issues which would in turn make fewer pages available for ranking. So yes, it is an element in ranking and site performance overall.  Cheers!

You might be better off starting over with a new domain. Getting the penalty lifted can be a long road and if you have little invested in keeping the domain,(links etc) I'd move on. Maybe the ".org" version of your name, assuming the penalized one was a ".com" Best,

I wrote this over 2 years ago http://www.flyingpointdigital.com/2013/04/16/google-thinks-your-title-tags-and-meta-descriptions-are-not-good-enough/

Hello. I wouldn't be too concerned with this as a thin content issue as the content of each page is the image, its attributes, size, etc. Several sites--Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, etc--are almost all purely image based content with the great bulk of their pages being one image on one URL and very little other content. Google is aware of image heavy sites and gallery formats and has a system in place for aiding in indexing this type of content, their Image Sitemaps: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636  I'd use that system for indexing your separate image URLs and then monitor the success via Search Console. If your search console (Google Webmaster Tools) is displaying a manual action for thin content, it's likely not the image galleries. Cheers!

It sounds like you might be using an automatic redirect based on IP. Is that true? If so, that's why Google is only showing the US numbers. They don't prefer one over the other, but you are inherently only showing them the US numbers if you are doing that redirect. My suggestion is to let people set their location with a javascript based popup that sets a cookie. That will then modify the numbers. If you prefer Google sees the metric numbers, show that to any user that doesn't have a cookie set.

You have some great responses so far, and I wanted to add one additional thought. Header tags are really important for screen readers.   When in doubt about the best way to use page elements, I tend to think to myself about what would be the best case for Accessibility. The answer is usually one of your top options for search optimization also.

Yes, the videos have a common theme and we rank pretty well on long-tail variants of the main keyword. The bounce rate for that page is well under average for the site and we get a handful of new users every day.

I would redirect if you can as there may be duplicate content issues if you simply republish without them... I would also check that your content hasn't been copied by any external sites as well as we neglected this and lost rankings as Google thought we'd nicked the content when we redeveloped our websites. It all worked out OK in the end, we did the DMCA request, and sent letters to the people who copied us asking for removal but it was a pain in the proverbial - and entirely unnecessary if we'd have done this before we switched to a new site hierarchy.

It sounds like this is a complicated situation. Regarding the disavow, each file you upload completely replaces the previous one. So, if you had unnatural links and then you uploaded a new file that did not contain some of those unnatural links, you've essentially asked Google to start counting them again. It can take time for them to start to count again as Google has built a lag in to the system to prevent people from trying to game it. However, it's certainly possible that the unnatural links are hurting you. The main algorithm that uses data from unnatural links is Penguin and Penguin has not refreshed since 2014, so it is unlikely that Penguin is affecting the site. But, there are other algorithms that use links. If one of those is affecting you, then reinstating a full disavow file should show some positive effect within a couple of weeks. With that said, as far as we know, the Quality update was not related to backlink quality, but rather on-page quality. So, if you dropped because of the Quality update then there are likely other issues with the site.