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Yes I always check Google webmaster and I do't get any message from Google.

Thanks Marie. Sorry, yes, by "take effect", I meant see better results in the SERPS. I understand that I have been affected by Penguin (I had an audit carried out by Paul Macnamara, who you referred me onto.  He was great, BTW). So I guess it's just a waiting game.  I'm crossing my fingers very tightly! From Paul's audit, I do have a good base of links, and I am continuing to build them.  Also, for many keywords, the site actually ranked higher before any link building was ever done by the bad SEO company.  With these things in mind, I'm really, really, really hoping that my fortunes will change on the next Penguin refresh - whenever that might be!!  Will be very disappointed if not.  SUCH a frustrating thing as it feels very much out of my control. Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I've tried this. I moved content from page 'A' to page 'B'. I did not even delete page 'A', and google re-indexed both the updated pages correctly. In webmaster tools, I submitted page B first, and then page A immediately after. Note: There were a few scraper sites that were scraping the content in question. Performing a 'site: <domainname.com><"string of text in quotations here">' in Google showed page B for the content first, above the scrapers. I know this is not a scientific way of determining if you are the owner of content, but it seems to me that Google still gave our site, and page B, the ownership of the content in question.</domainname.com>

If you interlink a bunch of your own sites like this and make a few thousand links, you'll get a penalty.  You're begging for one under Google's link schemes guidelines. We've had several clients who had "maps" with all their locations in the map and all the links going between each site.  It can create a few thousand (or a few hundred thousand) links very quickly. If you're going to do this, at the very least make them no-follow.

Thanks Brady, the backlink profile looks clean.

Hi Alan, Can you give us an update on how things are going? Do you have any more questions? Have you seen any changes recently?

You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that: http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

Just to add what some other folks have said here, I think that the look and length of the title tag may have a CTR effect in search result listings. Because the vast majority of people tend to overstuff and over-elongate their title tag, I think that a pithy one stands out on the page -- particularly if it is optimized for the exact keyword phrase that the searcher entered into the search engine. Just as the Google author tag adds in CTR value to the listing vis a vis author photo, name, etc., so too might the concise, short title tag pop a bit more. (I have no data to back this up, mind you. Totally just a theory.)

It's good to keep in mind that the Google keyword tool isn't 100% accurate, and it's often VERY wrong when it comes to smaller keywords. Just because Google suggests a small number of monthly searches per month doesn't mean no one's searching for it or for very similar related terms. Also keep in mind that organic search isn't the full story. There are personal bloggers who made money without even trying to target terms. They simply built an audience through great quality writing and content. XKCD, for example, gets millions of visits per month. I guarantee most of the traffic to XKCD is direct, referral, or using Google to find something specific they've already seen. So the fact that there's 0 or )-) search volume doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth writing. Finally, don't trust anything Alexa tells you. I've seen their guesses estimate 10-50x too low or too high. I'd doubt the site is making "good money". I think they're just trying to grow traffic at this stage.

The Google on/off tag is only good for their search appliance, which you use to run internal searches on your own site, and doesn't affect Google's main index.

Firstly you would never be penalized for using rel=canonical. If its the same content yes I recommend using the tag pointing towards the one you want indexed.  It seems like a messy layout though have you looked into making it neat and maybe a bit more friendly for users, could you not have a lot of that information on one page ? In short - Yes use canonical to avoid duplicate issues.

It really depend on what those 'no follow' links are. Generally they cannot hurt you, but if they are done in a manipulative way eg mass blog comments, and furthermore if they are on bad sites  -  then they can hurt you - see Matt Cutts video with more info on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSEqypgIJME watch?v=QSEqypgIJME

Sorry, I'm completely confused - you said that there's no notice of a manual action in Google Webmaster Tools, but the manual action page isn't empty and Google is giving you examples of URLs? If the page isn't empty, then you have a notice of manual action. I think I'm missing something. Did the message come and go in GWT?

Perhaps those URLs were indexed before you blocked them. If you have them blocked now, either by robots.txt and/or by robots meta noindex tag, you can use Google's URL Removal Tool in GWT to get them out of the index. It may take awhile though. I see nothing wrong with adding a nofollow tag to those href links. Go for it. If nothing else, it could help you salvage your crawl budget.

You made complete sense. Is there no way of updating the old blog to your site design? A few questions you could ask yourself to figure out if it's worth moving to the subfolder and leaving the subdomain where it is: Does the old blog get much traffic? Does it have many links and shares? How old is it and how many posts are there? Despite that, if you do move to /blog the best case scenario is still to 301 redirect old posts to a new unique URL for each post if you can. From what you say I'd also think the new design will look more professional and therefore, potentially lead to more sales.

Hi Patrick, While an HTML site map is one way to add internal links to these pages, it may not be enough to get them to rank for anything (even if they do get back into Google's index thanks to the new links). In addition to the HTML site map, if you choose to build one, I would take a look at these pages and see how they can be better integrated into the main site. What are some user paths that might make sense for people to take to arrive at these pages? Bringing these orphan pages back into the fold will have a higher SEO impact and also increase the likelihood that people find these pages by browsing your site. I know this is a solution that will take more time and effort, so in the short term you might try the HTML site map and see how far that gets you. Good luck!

Thanks Alan, Wigas and Tommy for your in-depth responses.  Really appreciate the insight! Alan - no notifications on Webmaster Tools.  Feel like I'm between a rock and hard place with the spammy links.  Google does say if you upload another file it will completely override the first disavow file, so perhaps I should consider uploading a new file with only a couple of bad links, thereby negating the original file with over 800 spammy links. Wigas - Crawled through Moz showing over 100 critical fixes including configuring attachments as no follow/no index with redirect to main site. Need to work on improving the backlinking! Tommy - Disavow is just a mystery. Bottom line probably is if you don't have any warning notice in Webmaster Tools, don't disavow, just improve. Will revisit title-tags and image weights for sure to improve response time. Certainly have a big mess to clean up! Thanks again!

Here's a link I couldn't find earlier - it's outdated now but might still be of some help: http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

Generally agree with everyone (well, everyone so far ) - there's no need to remove authorship in general. Google isn't penalizing sites with authorship - they're just showing authorship thumbnails less often, as they found they were overdoing it (at least in the eyes of users). The only exception I'd give is to be careful about applying authorship tags to every page on a site - home page, search results, product pages, etc. Some CMSs go crazy, unfortunately. This is technically against Google authorship guidelines. Again, most likely, they'll just ignore your authorship mark-up (it's not a penalty situation), but if you want that mark-up to appear in SERPs, then use it appropriately.

Hi RCF, Here is what I see: Searching for 'doctor of business administration' with my location set to Redmond Oregon, http://www.georgefox.edu/business/dba/ is coming up #8 organically. Doing this same search, but with my location set to Newberg, Oregon, I see http://www.georgefox.edu/offices/sfs/grad/tuition/business/dba/ coming up #2 organically. It looks like my exact rankings may not be identical to yours, but at least my searches appear to confirm that the 2 different pages are surfacing with the 2 different locations being set. Unfortunately, I agree with Moosa that it's very hard to hit on a precise reason for why Google would be favoring your tuition page over your home page when a user's location is set to the town the in which the institution is located. I do have a suggestion, though. Why not try putting Newberg, OR in the title tag of the page you'd like to be ranking highest for Newberg-located searchers, mention it in the H1 tag, and mention it more than once in the copy. I'd also recommend that you put the complete NAP (name, address, phone) in the body copy of the page, though I see it's already in the footer. Perhaps by increasing the optimization for Newberg on this page, you might strengthen the pages chances of ranking the way you want it to? Just a suggestions.