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I tried to confirm that example and came up short. Were you able to? This is so funny to me because I've literally had this exact same argument at executive meetings. I've lived this nightmare! It doesn't matter that the two brands target different verticals. What matters is the product, as you've pointed out. You can target different verticals from the same domain. But competing domains are a no-no. I would go back to focusing on how beneficial it would be to combine these. Try the concept of subdomains with them. So have a parent brand let's call it just that, 'parent.' Then you will have your consumer vertical and your smb vertical, right? so you can go consumer.parent.com and smb.parent.com -- Have them branded differently but not violate Google guidelines while still bettering your SEO situation and improving DA/organic traffic and visibility. Does that pitch make sense at the high level I threw it? Could you run with that? I'd track down their examples also as that doesn't sound right to me. My CEO threw me examples and I shot them down on the spot when this happened to me. Don't give up! You know you're right

Another thing which is weird: If I google "site:medexpress.co.uk" the page /clinics/erectile-dysfunction/viagra appears. If I google "site:medexpress.co.uk viagra" that page no longer appears! I could see why my page would have maybe dropped in the rankings but to go from a rank of around 30-70 for most of the keywords for this page to dropping off the index points to something more extraordinary. Its been like this for almost two weeks and I'm considering maybe changing the URL (as I mentioned other long-tail optimized blog pages are now starting to rank so it appears to be just this page). Is it possible this page has been moved to the supplemental index for some reason?

Wes, I would be more than happy to give you my feedback that's awesome that you are starting a YouMoz! Your right Moz this full of very talented SEO's Can't beat it. I have one more suggestion this is something I really enjoy and it's helped my career immensely. I would definitely sign up for SearchLove, MozCon,  inbound, SMX and other marketing conferences. I just returned from SearchLove San Diego and inbound 2014 I can tell you firsthand they are worth every penny. Your enthusiasm for this is fantastic and my best recommendation. I would recommend you do VIP you have the opportunity to have dinner with the speakers and get to know them. This led to more clients and more resources for me. Not to mention a whole lot of fun. I have attached a photograph of the  3rd day for me but is 2nd day of SearchLove. My interactive schedule this is something you can watch while you watch the speakers and ask questions and do way more it's really cool. The reason I posted this is you might see somebody familiar at the very bottom is a speaker. He was also a speaker at SearchLove of Boston earlier this year. I have the pleasure of seeing him again at inbound 2014 that ended last week. Of course MozCon awesome conference I recommend you go to As many as possible. I love the way Moz teaches I think they do a top-notch job however because when SEOmoz became an SAAS company they needed a partner to give their existing clients to they chose Distilled one of my favorite companies. There has been a very good relationship to say the least between Moz & Distilled making their offerings very complementary in my opinion to each other. Distilled is a marketing agency that offers a tool that was built to teach their own people. They released it approximately 3 years ago ( could be off by a year) I of course use both Moz and distilled University because they each offers so much when combined together they offer even more. the 2nd photograph attached is a personal Distilled U page showing what you have done and it's a considerable amount of time that will take to finish all the courses. And they're constantly adding new ones. However, this is great when dealing with clients because you can show them what you have done and in my opinion this  is very valuable. Check out distilled.net/u it is really an awesome way to practice what you've learned as well as obviously take in the always evolving new information in the search marketing world. I hope that all this is helpful and hopefully I will see you at the next MozCon & SearchLove Sincerely, Thomas DUTsPeT.png T1I5mSR.png

"Large pictures tend to be bad for user experience." I disagree. I think what you mean is slower loading is bad for the user experience. Higher quality pictures are better for the user experience. I've been looking into deferring loading of the additional slider images. That should definitely improve load time as all the bandwidth can be used to download the first slider image. Also the first slider image if you use a progressive format should show something quickly and then improve over time.

Hi there, The good news is that this issue is very common for Joomla installations! Have you checked out the following guides?: Duplicate Pages in Joomla: Causes, Most Common Errors, Solutions Avoid Duplicate URLS - Joomla SEO Joomla and Duplicate Content: Fixing htaccess

thanks for your responses and clearing this up.

It depends on how the content on secondary domains organized. If each secondary domain has a content theme, then it would be easier to get separate links for each of them and thus it benefits everyone. It helps user to quickly find/contribute what they are looking for, helps to attract different specific links and pass the value to primary.  If there is no such theme, then all those secondary domain will compete with each other  for mindshare, user contribution and attracting individual links which would make them to achieve high DA, I have similar setup. but instead of separate domains I have multiple subdomains with content categorized by theme. It helps may ways 1) Easier for single sign on. Use logged in one site does not need to log in again on anotyher site. 2) Can attract different types of links 3) easier for segmentation for advertisers.  Not all subdomains can achieve same DA or traffic but it helps overall network by internal linking.

Darcy, Blocking URLs in the robots.txt file will not remove them from the index if Google has already found them, nor will it prevent them from being added if Google finds links to them, such as internal navigation links or external backlinks. If this is your issue, you'll probably see something like this in the SERPs for those pages: "We cannot display the content because our crawlers are being blocked by this site's robots.txt file" or something like that. Here's a good discussion about it on WMW. If you have parameters set up in GWT and are using a rel canonical tag that points Google to the non-parameter version of the URL you probably don't need to block Googlebot. I would only block them if I thought crawlbudget was an issue, as in seeing Google to continue to crawl these pages within your log files, or when you potentially have millions of these types of pages.

Unfortunately, these situations can be very difficult to diagnose without a ton of details. I will say this, though, and I know it's a hard thing for many people to hear. Negative SEO is very rarely effective unless there's already an underlying problem. It may not be a deliberate ("blackhat" SEO) kind of thing, but for a negative SEO attempt to succeed it could mean that: (1) There were issues with your link profile you are unaware of. This could even be a handful of links that violate a specific guideline and that are easy to overlook. Remember, it's about Google's perception of quality, not yours (and their perception wins). (2) There's some technical issue (say a crawl issue or large-scale duplicate content) that's make you more vulnerable. (3) There's a content quality issue on some part of the site that's harming the rest of the site. Dig deep, because it's easy to see some errant 3rd-party links and assume that's the entire problem but in 95%+ of cases, it isn't. If it's really 100% bad links from someone else, disavowing and requesting reconsideration are about your only option, Unfortunately, if it's Penguin, then you have to wait for an update in most cases, and we're many months since the last one. In most cases, though, it's a combination of factors, and you may have control over some of them.

I believe your problem is in your robots.txt file. You're attempting a wildcard blocking of the search results pages with this line: Disallow: /listings/search**?*** However, the asterisk ought to precede the question mark. If you want to block all URLs that include a question mark (?), do this: Disallow: /listings/search***?** Try that and see what happens. I've also found Aaron Wall's article on robots.txt to be helpful. Good luck! Also, adding "noindex, nofollow" to the section does not necessarily keep a web page out of Google's index. When you think about it, you realize Google has to crawl the page the see that meta tag in the first place. Robots.txt is much stronger.

They had switched the title months back but once I shortened the pixel width it righted itself.  Thanks for the answers it is much appreciated!

When Google sees more than one canonical reference on a page, they will more than likely ignore all canonical hints that page has. Keep that in mind when you make your decision. If the canonical tags are working on most pages, but not on that one specific page with ?m=0, you might want to keep them implemented. If the issue is larger than that and you're seeing it effect your site in a negative way, remove them and see how Google responds. Here's a link to canonical information I refer to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

Hi there, This is definitely a crazy problem! It looks like you've done what you should, but Google's ignoring you. Here's a theory, though: I don't think that Google loves the idea of there being no "home" page; it probably only expects domain.com/home or domain.com/default.asp or domain.com/index.html as alternatives to domain.com, so seeing http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ redirect to http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ could be confusing it. Is there a reason why you don't want http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ to be the homepage? Kristina

Hi Ed, Something similar just happened to a website I am managing. Did you ever figure out what happened to your website? I do not have a manual action email in my GWT inbox. I got hit September 13th and today is the 22rd and still no email. I am in Argentina land www.google.com.ar and all updates come later than in the USA. I am also thinking it is a server issue. Got this message from GWT when trying to verify the Google Analytics code. The connection to your server timed out. Thanks

I'm in agreement with Chris on this one as well. That said, your checklist is an excellent idea, just don't put it on the home page. Instead use the home page to explain why your company is different from all the competitors you have alluded to, and direct them to a separate page with the checklist. Make it compelling. "Get real-world, practical advice in the form of a checklist" or "Avoid over-spending using our requirements checklist" or something else that clearly states what's in it for them.

As others have said, that result is not, unfortunately, something you can outrank - it's not organic, and it doesn't have to compete with organic listings. Once Google determines the query requires a definition result, that one-box will be at the top. Why does Google determine this query needs a definition? Unfortunately, we're not entirely sure. It's possible you could do something to influence that decision, such as build a brand so powerful around the keyword that Google shifts the entire query to a different intent. Honestly, though, that's a tall order. So, what are some more realistic options? (1) Buy AdWords ads. Yeah, I know it's not the answer you expect from me, but the top 3 ads come above one-boxes (try a search for "assurance" to see what I mean). Sometimes, you do what you gotta do. (2) Work on mid-tail keywords surrounding that keyword. There are probably variants on "resting" that are more advantageous to rank for and will convert better. If your client isn't a household name, then people searching for "resting" probably aren't looking for them, and this isn't really that great of a keyword to obsess over. (3) Focus on "brand" signals like social accounts (especially Google+), get yourself into Freebase, and see if it's possible to get some kind of Knowledge Graph entity related to your brand. This is going to take some doing, but it's possible.

Fix broken internal and external links, like the Yoy-search url. That should solve one area of your 404 problems Identify why you have 404's in the first place. Find the root of the problem. Are these dead product pages? Definitely 301 them to the correct URL. If the product isn't there, consider redirecting to the homepage (or asking the linking site to change the URL to a relevant page) or showing a custom 404 page to show their other relevant offers.

Thanks, Rajeev. That's really nice to hear!

Looks like Google doesn't trust your site enough to offer the pages you think are logical as results for the query.  I'd say G Bot isn't confident about your content, and is triggering an algo filter.  True, internal links may be causing the confusion, but I'd also suggest checking your external link profile to make sure relevant sites are leading G Bot back to your blog.

'nofollow' - got it. Thanks for the response, and your logic makes sense. Would love a 2nd or 3rd on that from the masses just to make sure. RE: the use or random posts as opposed to related - great question Oleg! My guess is this was a theme feature that was added in to fill the footer, TBH. I use LinkWithin for related posts on almost every blog I manage - I might need to suggest that to this site, too (or something similar). Appreciate the extra insights.