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Karen, Was the site ever ranking for these terms?  In other words, did they have rankings and then lose them? As others have mentioned, the backlink profile for this site does not look good.  You have a large number of keyword anchored links from low quality sources like directories and press releases.  This type of link profile is a prime candidate for a Penguin hit.  Can you tell if you took a hit in organic traffic on a known Penguin date?  The last one was October 5, 2013.

It resolved itself in the next week with no further action taken. Site verification wasn't a problem - in fact, I couldn't find anything that was causing it. Normally it's less than 24 hours for our sitemaps to be processed and indexed, this one just took a few days.

Hi Jane, Yeah, a number of our clients are in the leisure and hospitality industries which means many travel bloggers naturally link to them in reviews, lists of places to stay in certain areas etc. Occasionally we need to think up clever ways of encouraging that, but it's a field where those who are pleased with the offering tend to give you, at the least, a mention. This particular client, however, doesn't really fit that bill, but they are in an industry where there's plenty of scope for expert advice, FAQs, guides and so on, so I'm sure we can find good content-led solutions. The content side I'm fine with, but it was more the tech aspect of harnessing cloud-based software. Thanks for your help with this - happy just knowing I'm not missing anything on that front! Kind regards, Nick

Hi Stephen, That's part of the syntax used to transfer a site URL-by-URL - what the entire snippet of code means is that a browser or search engine will come across www.oldblog.com/post123.html and immediately be taken to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html. If you are not using the same URLs on the new blog, you won't need to or be able to use this particular function in your .htaccess file. You say that "the new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog" which makes me think you'll need to redirect category URLs separately at least (I must have missed that line when I read the question at first; apologies). Once you've redirected everything, you will need to keep the old domain. If you let it lapse or sell it, the redirects will no longer work unfortunately.

Hey Arthur, Your CSS is not the issue here. None of your content is is hidden or "cloaked." You can see this when you disable CSS and JavaScript with the Web Developer plugin to get a sense of what the text crawler would see.  However the issue is definitely that the content is indeed thin and you're not offering anything beyond what can be found in the product specifications sheet on the manufacturers website. You should absolutely consider some more text-based content. You may consider having user generated content in allowing people to  comment on the differences between the two and what they like better. Responses would be inherently keyword-rich and the approach allows you to scale it across numerous pages. However the UX is very nice. Best of luck and let us know if you might be interested in sharing your progress. -Mike

Hi Christy, at the end the site started to recover the rankings naturally...

This is all great information! Mozzers rule! So I am in the process of recommending 301 redirects from a stronger domain (old but still getting a lot of traffic) to a weaker one (new, refreshed design, same product). No one is maintaing the old site and we want to pass the link juice. I am concerned that what happened to Cindy will happen to us. I want that traffic and I want to make sure that the 301 redirect will work. And of course, don't block old domain with robot.txt One question though: What happens over time with the 301 redirect? I am assuming that the newer domain will eventually show in search results for the KWs that triggered the old domain to show. Is that a safe assumption?

As Marie says, doing this isn't likely to throw a penalty your way due to the way Google handles duplication (and you're unlikely to be doing this on page after page after page of your website). You always want to link to the source of the quote, with the (very likely) assumption that the source is not linking back to you (and if they are via a trackback "comment", that link is probably nofollowed). If you're quoting something like the author is in this example, you've taken quite a hefty chunk of text from the source, but you're providing a LOT of original commentary, linking back and providing a blockquote tag (which is not "necessary" but probably sends a good signal).

The idea of the "sandbox" is an old-fashioned way of looking at a site that doesn't have enough authority to rank well yet. In the past, Google employed different ways of making sure brand new sites were worth ranking before they ranked them, but those methods have changed and the term doesn't apply anymore. Is it possible that the site simply has too few backlinks to be competitive yet? It's often easier to rank well in Bing than it is in Google (although it's surprising you mention that it is not ranking in Yahoo as Bing powers Yahoo's search engine now).

It's just a naming convention, so for strictly navigational purposes it doesn't matter what you call them as anything will work.

Hi Pete, I just wanted to confirm, based on what you wrote: "I don't think the picture- and video-heavy pages are going to rank all that well by themselves. It's just a question of whether those additional pages are diluting your MLS listing pages (by using similar regional keywords, etc.)." I did following: Deleted words "Home" and "Condo" from the title tag and H1 so the neighborhood name is still in title tag and H1, but no mention of home, condo, real estate etc. all written content has been moved from "guides" (where pictures and videos are) to lower part of MLS result pages and I imagine over a 1-2 month period the MLS result pages will get the SEO credit for this unique written content (despite no 301 redirect) I interlink from picture / video pages to MLS result pages with "neighborhood homes for sale" My hypothesis is that over the next few months as G gets a better idea of my website (as the site gets more popular - still only 5 months old) G will know what to rank for "neighborhood homes for sale" search terms. Makes sense?

The site does have and has had ranking issues since the first Penguin and has really had problems the last few months. And other than some minor things low quality links are really the only problem with the site.

Exactly, I removed some URLS, and tweeked the priorities, in Dreamweaver, then saved.  I want to make sure nothing got messed up.   WMT has the ability to test before submitting, which I just learned.  I used xml-sitemaps.com stand alone, which passed the WMT test.  Now I'm going to do some editing, and try it again before submitting.

Perfect, appreciate the help!

Why do you want to remove the file?  Are you concerned that you may have disavowed links that you shouldn't have? When you remove the file, then as Google recrawls each of the sites that were listed in your file, they will re-avow them which means that they will once again start to give you the link equity that comes from that link.  If it's a good link then you'll regain some good link equity.  (But then this begs the question of why you would disavow it to start with.)  If it's an unnatural link then at first what will likely happen is nothing as Google will not give you any benefit for this type of link.  But, if you've got enough unnatural links then the next time that Google runs the Penguin algorithm your site will look less trustworthy when it comes to links and you could see a drop in rankings. It's complicated though.  If you are already under the effects of Penguin and you filed a disavow and then you removed your disavow then really nothing would happen. I wouldn't recommend removing your disavow file unless you feel that you have accidentally disavowed links that are good ones.  If you're not sure if you've done that then you should consider having someone review your links for you and give you an idea of which ones should be disavowed.

Thanks for the tips, Highland. Per the PPC info, they aren't running any PPC now and will be using another company for those strategies. On the optimization side of things, providing a "Disclaimer" in the footer or even on the individual product page could do some help. We did discuss implementing content on the site for "Comparison of A & B Products" type blog articles, but my clients feel the other company is simply protecting what they built, even though my clients essentially bought over their market share. Big brand ego's! Appreciate your tips. Any others would be great to read. - Patrick

Thanks guys! Upon further research what's happening is "Entity Escaping", where symbols have to use a code...ie & = &, so it's all good. http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

**Do you know how to do it in Windows (web.config)? ** Sorry.  I only know about .htaccess. When I purchase hosting I always look for those that can handle .htaccess - because it is so frequently used on my sites.

Check out the page cached in Google and go to text view. Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools Web Developer Toolbar with cookies and javascripts disabled. User agent switcher with your string set as Googlebot so you can determine if different content is being shown to users than bots. Browseo.net

Hi there, The points others raise here are very good. Look also at the total number of links coming into the website. Links are still very important for rankings - Google may be trying to steer away from having inbound links influence rankings as much as they have in the past, but they are still a big part of the ranking algorithm and it's difficult to rank well without them. Open Site Explorer only shows the site receiving links from 13 separate domains. Cross-check this with your competitors - how many do they have? And as David mentions, do these links point to the pages you want to have rank?