Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks - joined you there!

In terms of links and link profile diversity, I recommend you study the top ten competitors in your niche, with a close focus on the top 3. Consider their backlinks, quality and diversity. A competitive link histogram is helpful in fully visualizing the types of links that competitors have: By anchor text By DA (domain authority) We generally create a minimum of two, one for each of those areas, and then study then. This gives you specific averages with which you can focus on more closely in your campaign to shape it closer to naturalization, or get a better picture on what Google wants to see in your specific niche, or what is working. Also, be very sure to rule our on-site and / or other issues at the same time. Hope this helps! Todd

hi, there are thousands of ecommerce sites with over 200 or 300 links on their home page and they perform pretty well with no fluctuations in their traffic throughout years. Just a thought.

Not sure you'd see any direct SEO benefit from having your URL written out. If your brand/company name is mentioned then you may get some benefit from those citations. Context and relevance are key here. A link would of course be better - both for visitors and for your website. I'd reach out to the webmaster and see if you can get this converted to to a proper link. As well as potentially passing link equity, if the page that's linking to your site is getting some visitors you might also benefit from some referral traffic.

If you ask me....   Waste Oil Heater is going to be used by most people for a small portable device.... Waste Oil Furnace is a larger device used to heat a structure.... Waste Oil Burner is a component part of a Waste Oil Furnace. You could make unique photos, instructions, articles and diagrams for each.  Some people will use these terms interchangeably but I view them as distinct.

Thanks for jumping in Dan! I think that it might be a niche issue. I am just trying to rule out any technical stuff. We actually do put out white papers, ebooks, infographics, webinars, etc. on a monthly basis. The traffic has been steadily increasing through social and referral sources but organic has been a bit slower. Something like 10% unique year-over-year. It could just be due to the size of the local search market.

I agree with @Jimmy.  Remove the 301's, ensure internal and some external links point to the new URLs and update the XML sitemap.  As for the browsers saving the 301s, here what I found: IE7, IE8, Android 2.3.4 do not cache at all. Firefox 18.0.2, Safari 5.1.7 (on Windows 7), and Opera 12.14 all cache, and clear the cache on browser restart. IE10 and Chrome 25 cache, but do not clear on browser restart There was a write up about redirecting 301's using 302 but I recommend using the above method instead...   http://goo.gl/Z1uEr

Thanks Moosa. I'll check out the link. To add, we already do use categorized sitemaps in the sitemap_index.xml structure. We have it split into several different sitemaps. No links are duplicated across those sitemaps, and we have noticed a boost in more pages being indexed since we implemented that. My question still remains though. If this sitemap (www.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml) has the following structure: <sitemapindex<span class="webkit-html-attribute"> xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"</sitemapindex<span>><sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Pages_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Carnivorous_Kittens_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Baby_Dragons_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Jimmy_Hoffa_Sitemap.xml Can we also add: <loc>http://blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml</loc> into that same location? And if we can, is there any benefit? Thanks!

So, I've probably dug into "Phantom" as much as anyone, and I'm afraid the picture isn't very clear. I've heard of people who got hit by Phantom and then recovered at Penguin 2.0, people who got hit and then hit again, and I've seen multiple situations where people got hit by Phantom only. My gut feeling so far is that this was an independent update and not a Penguin 2.0 test. They might both be related to link factors or seem conceptually similar, but I don't think Phantom was an early or partial release. It happened across data centers and appears to follow a pretty typical algo change pattern.

Thanks Anthony. Very helpful. First thing. I don't actually see "add to compare" as an actual function anywhere such as http://www.deskcentre.co.uk/shop/next-day/next-day-office-desks.html - but it's in the HTML source code as well as Google's text only cache. Is this function something you want to exist? Because I don't see it anywhere Second - I am only seeing this as an issue for "compare" not "add to basket". The add to basket links are behind JavaScript and are not getting picked up on my crawl with Screaming Frog. Two options then; If you in factDO want the "add to compare" function, you can block http://www.deskcentre.co.uk/shop/catalog/product_compare/add/product/ in robots.txt - allow that function for the user but not let Google crawl it. However, I am kind of thinking you DON'T want the function available because it's not visible and is does 302 redirect. If this is the case, see if you can disable it entirely and then it won't show up in your source code. If you can't disable it, you can still block it with robots.txt and Google won't crawl them. Hope that helps! -Dan

Hi Stephane I also do not see duplicate pages indexed in Google. Not this page: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html or any others searching the few pages of results on a site: search. Perhaps it was a temporary thing were some got indexed. I've seen that happen on occasion, and then they get removed. If you're still seeing otherwise definitely feel free to chime back in, and provide screenshots or an example query. Thanks! -Dan

Alright, I believe The site-wide footer links are the problem. Despite being only 4 sites linking to us, they generate thousands of links... My question now will be how to proceed? I never received such a big penalty for literally 4 dammed image footer links. Should I start from a new domain ? Ask the webmasters to delete those links or no follow them ? use disavow tool? How much time should I spect for a recovery ? Thanks!

When links where treated less strictly by Google, a decent site with good content, a readership and happy customers, I guess would have had to fight fire with fire in terms of backlinks compared to competitors for the same exposure (I say competitors for the same exposure rather than "competitors" because at one time in the past even "relevance" wasn't as much a factor). A decent site getting future proof links that were harder to get (and therefore less of them) would perhaps have not appeared on google.  Given the previous lack of discrimination in links, a decent site would have had to work hard to make google's search results decent, and for the same reason when google update's it's algorithms years later, gets the boot.  If that's not Ironic I don't know what is. I'm looking for places to guest post and keep seeing good relevant sites which have had their rank and traffic go downhill.  It's giving me a head ache.

Hi Marcus, Your help has been invaluable. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this for me. Kind regards Mark

I would appreciate some more feedback, I'm looking to group some of these pages from the 100k we're bringing it down to around 33k. As regards comments not sure it's very feasible from research we did not many people go into back-dated entries so it's highly doubtful we'd receive much if any comments.

Howdy, Unfortunate, it's really hard to asses why you may have experienced a drop without a deep-dive look into your site, links, and history. But there are some basic steps you can take to help diagnose the problem. 1. Check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages, HTML suggestions, crawling errors or other indications of problems. Sounds like you might already be doing this. 2. Check the date of your drop against known algorythm updates. The Google Algo History is a good place to start. 3. Do a complete site audit. Here's a good template for one: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit 4. Completely crawl your site using a tool like Moz or Screaming Frog, looking for common errors. 5. Check your backlink profile for dodgy links. Paddy Moogan wrote a good guide on how to do this: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/ The key here is to try to identify any problems that you can fix. Sometimes Google simply changes the way they rank sites and devalues your link profile, your content, or something else that's hard to control. But once you identify the problem, it's much easier to fix.

Significantly changing the Page Title and H1 is working.  Second page now indexing after not indexing for some time.  Probably shoulda thought of that a long time ago but that noindex tag sidetracked me!

Thanks Dr Peter! I agree with you! Just wanted to feel shure about it. Yes, Gary, you can personalize also a 410 page.

Thanks Mariah! Ive actually seen that video but this is great! Going to sblhow that to our client to reaffirm our recommendation to add content!

Thanks Takeshi. Why does Google send out a warning if it isn't a huge deal?