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Did it solve the issue?

Hi Jamie, Thanks for the link. We're not on an ecommerce platform. Our product descriptions are written by our own team and we've made a lot of effort to make them unique, since even a small change in our products makes a big difference in the use case. The on-page content is less of an issue for us, I'm more worried about splitting our search influence by trying to target the same keywords across 5-6 pages. It helps to read that product descriptions are key though! Thanks again for your help.

They send tons of links from other domains that have been hacked to the waldorf domain. If you check open site explorer you see that there are 100nds of links to a page type /style.asp  - all with anchor text replica watches, probably the previous target. I guess they did the same thing for the soccer site - but that these links do not yet show up in open site explorer. Seem to be the only plausible explanation why this site would rank for another sites brandname. Apparently Google' algorithm is unable to catch these quite obvious tricks (cloaking, spammy links, duplicate content,...). rgds, Dirk

Definitely agree with the others, they have some great suggestions. Another idea could build upon what was already said. Have you considered hosting more creative forms of content on your blog or website like infographics (could be a great way to display survey results or scientific data) or videos? The infographic / more visual content would be a good way to lighten up serious data and statistics and the videos have the potential to be funny and lighthearted, which lends itself to sharing. Also, have you addressed FAQs before? Whether they are about your site in particular or about online dating? Addressing these questions and "myths" in a creative way might get some attention. Get creating and be sure to execute things properly and I think these could be great link-earning content pieces.

Cheerd Don

Hi Angelos. You have a great question and there are a few ways to take this. What I would recommend is having your www.example.com be a starter page that doesn't have your "homepage" content, but rather, asks people to pick a language. You can detect it from their browser settings or from the IP (whatever you do, do NOT redirect anything based on IP address) and prompt them from there, or just list them all. That page would be your x-default in HREFLANG terms. It's the page that doesn't have a language. Then all of the others would be linked to from there. This would of course have English as /en. You don't have to do that though. If you prefer, you can totally have www.example.com as all English, and just have the other languages under their subfolders. I would detect if you think the user prefers one of the other languages and use Javascript to popup a prompt to ask if they would prefer that language. If they say yes, then set a cookie and take them there. If not, it keeps them on the English URLs. Just please don't redirect anyone based on IP address. This can cause problems down the line. I hope that helps.

Ok great, thanks for your advice Linda, have a nice day.!

Thanks Jasmine!

Hi, Google's advice on this configuration is to use the "Vary HTTP header" to let the Google bot know that the same url is used for mobile/desktop. See also: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/dynamic-serving?hl=en . While Google strongly recommends responsive design - this option is also valid. Matt Cuts says the same in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va6qtaiZRHg (it starts with all the caching stuff, the part which might be of interest to you starts at 3:38) Hope this clarifies, Dirk

Hi Thomas, I don't think that technically there is a problem with adding url's to a sitemap & then blocking part of them with robots.txt. I wouldn't do it however - and I would give the same advice as you did: regenerate the sitemap without this content. Main reason would be that it goes against the main goals of a sitemap: helping bots to crawl your site and to provide valuable metadata (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en). Another advantage is that Google indicates the % of url's of each sitemap which is index. From that perspective, url's which are blocked for indexing have no use in a sitemap. Normally webmaster tools will generate errors, to let you know that there are issues with the sitemap. If you take it one step further, Google could consider you a bit of a lousy webmaster, if you keep these url's in the sitemap. Not sure if this is the case, but for something which can easily be corrected, not sure if I would take this risk (even if it's a very minor one). There are crawlers (like screamingfrog) which can generate sitemaps, while respecting the directives of the robots.txt - this would in my opinion be a better option. rgds, Dirk

Adding a blog is a good way for you to publish unique, useful content for your visitors, which will help with organic rankings if you don't allow the other pages to be indexed. However, if you allow the other pages to be indexed and Google determines that the content on those pages is not unique, or doesn't provide added value, then the entire domain could be penalized (i.e. Panda) so in that case a blog wouldn't help much.

Sounds solid. Thanks, Dirk!

If you canonicalize the damaged product back to the original product, the damaged one won't be findable in search anyway, same as if you had deindexed it. In either case, people could still find it on your website. And are you sure you cannot change the canonical? This support page seems to imply that you can.

Hello there, Answers to your questions below My client's site has a .com domain where most others have .co.uk I suspect this isn't the issue. but provided your client is only targeting the UK you might considering setting up geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools - see: http://moz.com/community/q/geographic-target-set-up-in-google-webmaster-tool Most sites on the first page have either jewellery, wholesale or both in their domain names This is unlikely to be the issue. Relevance of linking sites could be playing a part here. My client has links from wholesale sites but few from jewellery-related sites. Attracting relevant links is never a bad idea, plus even if you don't see ranking improvements you'd hope that relevant links sent good quality traffic. I'd definitely do this if I were you Within my client's link profile there are very few, if any exact anchor text links for the term 'wholesale jewellery' I'd suggest it's unlikely that this is the issue - anchor text is not the ranking signal it once was. Legacy of a penalty could be making ranking progress that much more difficult? I think this is the most likely answer, but I don't quite agree with your phrasing. You mentioned a past penalty - given that you're ranking on the first page I suspect you're not suffering from said penalty any more. However, if you do still have a lot of 'low quality' links, then further clean up might be the way forward. However, you'll also need to continue to build the sorts of links that Google want to reward (i.e. links which are editorially given from quality sites) in order to improve your rankings. Incidentally, you mentioned you've disavowed a bunch of links. 3rd party tools (ahrefs, majestic, moz) aren't able to filter these out because they've no access to your disavow files I hope this helps, Hannah

Hello, I am also having this issue with hundreds of dummy urls that never existed as a part of our website's blog. Do I go into parameters and specify each of the dummy urls to avoid this? Thanks in advance for any help!!!! (and sorry to piggyback this question Theodore-hope you don't mind!)

Hi gardenbeet.com had the same problem about 4 years ago - do not be alarmed. It just means that the internal page has (probably) higher value links than the home page . At the time I was advised to look at my site architecture to ensure the link juice gets distributed around the website (at least as evenly as the home page would redirect the juice)  (not sure if that point is still relevant).

Not a problem - would love to see the finished version once you complete it.

My vote is for neither of the above but a different combo. Boston Pet Store - Company Name I think the 1st part is how many would search. I don't think many search for KW in city st. For organic national SEO I would not normally take up space to add name, but in local Google seems to like company in title for local search.

Basically Google’s algorithms has a hard time figuring out where to rank it. As time goes on, info increases and determines rank. Here is an explanation on why from Matt Cutts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzfK6isC7CA

Your sitemap will already be doing that and you can get Google to index a page almost immediately by using the "fetch as Google" section in your Google Webmaster Tools. Probably not a direct answer to your question but have you thought about putting all those helpful links on your 404 page instead? Your site instantly goes from Zero to Hero in my eyes if it has a friendly 404 page