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I agree with deleting the WordPress.com account and if you or the client are worried about losing people just put up a "Sorry, we've moved" post up stating and directing people where to go. Then delete it!

First I suggest reading this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/information-architecture-faceted-navigation-duplicate-content-oh-my You may want to consider limiting the depth of your indexable facets. If these are strictly search pages, and you have an alternate form of navigation, you may consider not allowing any of them to be indexed, as Mike recommended. I couldn't say for sure without knowing more about your particular site and situation. Your bottom line question seems to be "How should we handle these" and in my opinion I think you should focus more on the user than Google. It sounds like a pretty annoying user experience to spend time drilling down five facets deep only to reach a page that has no results. Why even allow them to drill down to that last page? Why not grey out the option? And if they do drill down that far, try showing them some alternatives. If you want to dynamically serve a 404 status code in the http header for such pages that would be fine too, but it could cause problems if you sometimes have products on those pages and sometimes don't since that URL would be constantly coming in and out of the index. A better solution would be to make the page more useful and/or limit the depth of indexation. Also, as Mike alludes to below, if you have another source of navigation on the site the "search result" pages probably shouldn't be indexable at all. It depends on your situation so I'm not going to say for sure that you shouldn't index them.

PR1 is a good minimum, but it really depends on your niche and how much resources you have to do this outreach. If you want to make sure you are only getting links from quality sites, I would do a manual review to see if the site passes the sniff test, and also run a backlink report to make sure they're not doing anything shady.

I love public Q&A because everyone gets to chip in, but nobody wants to share the domain in question (which is understandable) so that makes the job of answering a question really difficult. Can you hide the actual domain name but provide some examples of URLs? For instance: ourdomain.com/honolulu/four-seasons?rooms=4&view=0&page=1 Did you try any of Dr. Pete's suggestions? If not, I would implement one of those first, as they are still as relevant today as they were when he wrote them. Rel next/prev has received a bit more attention since then, but it only solves part of the problem if you're dealing with parameters beyond simple pagination (e.g. rooms, views, etc..). From the information provided above I would probably go with a rel canonical tag to fix this issue. I would not rely on a rel nofollow tag on links pointing to variants, as was suggested by Smarties, because Google is going to find those URLs regardless and a no follow tag on a link doesn't tell them not to index it. Smarties #2 suggestion sounds good but I'd allow them to be followed. i.e. robots meta noindex,follow as opposed to noindex,nofollow. This allows pagerank from external links to flow through non-indexable URLs. Good luck!

It can be tough to turn an exact match domain (EMD) into a branded domain sometimes. I would be careful of labeling this as any certain algorithmic filter / penalty. Back when EMDs were being devalued I'm sure there were a lot of false positives. This could be one example. It could also have to do with anchor-text over-optimization that isn't specially "penguin" related. I guess my first question would be: Why do you think this is related to the use of the client's brand name? Is it just those keyword/s that have lost rankings? Is it limited to certain landing pages, keyword phrases, etc... ? What is the domain / keyword? And if you can't provide that, how about a close example? For instance, is it something like: buy-blue-widgets.com Or more like: bluewidgets.com Or like: bluewidgetsincorporated.com or ??? The first example is difficult to turn into a brand. The second one is doable. The third shouldn't be seen as an EMD at all.

Peter, I have added a new editorial review on the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html Also, by looking again to your suggested http://www.origenmusic.com/free-piano-music.html, that page is quite different from ours and it is not dedicated solely to that specific title (Moonlight Sonata). So, I don't think the possible "duplicate "issue may be the real problem (not for that specific URL at least). Any more thoughts? Someone else? Pretty desperate to understand what happened on those pages to drop so much in rankings!

CloudWalk also ranks at the top in the same fashion... You are also ranking on this page (9th absolute position)

Thank you, I think you clarified the problem very well. Appreciated your help!

Build links to your blog post, not to your home page. Also, I use Hootsuite to put the same blog post one rotation, ie I tweet,fb, g+ the same post multiple times. I guess maybe I have an unfair advantage in that I market a site that already has authority. There are many subjects in the webinar on this. The webinars are included in your SEOMOZ subscription: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars

Hi Spencer I'm honestly not sure if they'll show a 410 (I would assume so). I just check a bunch of profiles in my WMT tools account and didn't see any, although they are less common. This help page and other sources from Google have always seemed to imply they don't think of them as very different, in regards to their impact on search. If your goal is to make sure the pages return the intended codes, maybe you could keep a list and crawl them in list mode in Screaming Frog to check the response codes. If they do show in WMT for you, let us know! I'd be interested to see confirmation of that. -Dan

Hopefully.  You may find that you have to either get some of those overoptimized links removed, nofollowed or disavowed in order to see improvement.  It's a tough call though because you have the potential to do more harm than good.

Is absolutely normal Google bounce around a little bit especially in higher numbers. If you are anywhere in and above five you should expect fluctuation and it's the algorithm is so so complex that if you updated your site one day Google bot might not indexed it or it could've indexed it and seeing something that didn't like. Remember your competitors for those keywords are also being judged. So it's trying to figure out exactly where you fitting. And I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just keep holding quality content and you'll be alright the one thing that you can do and it's the right thing to do so I hope that answers your question and expect fluctuation from  Google from time to time. When Google gives you a break that you stay at a rank  for a while I think it is uncommon for somebody that is not watching to actually see the fluctuations because when you login to your Google account Gmail or something like that you see a different ranking than what I would see maybe you'll see a higher ranking and I will because you're searching your on-site more often than I am us Google will tailor the results to you if you are working. When you go on SEOmoz   and see the real Rankins then it can be frustrating. However fluctuation is normal part of the game and it's something to be expected rankings also highly dependent on geographic placement  however if you keep creating what Google wants witches he could user experience or the best they will keep cranking you hire and all you may fluctuate always feel fluctuate less and less and hopefully be in first place. I hope I've been of help sincerely, Thomas

Mike, there is a technical solution specifically for this situation that will give you the best of both worlds! You're only considering moving the blog to a subdomain because you need to make management of the backend code more efficient and you're wondering how much of an SEO hit you'll have to accept in order to accomplish that. As EGOL says (and I fully concur), moving to a subdomain is going to do serious damage to the value of the both the primary site and the blog. What you really want is to have the WordPress install elsewhere, but still have it show to visitors (and search engines) like it lives in the /ecommerce-blog subdirectory. This is exactly what a reverse proxy is designed to do. It allows you to have the WordPress code installed on a subdomain, but still serve the pages to the visitor from the subdirectory as you have been doing. So to the user, the blog looks and works just as it does now, but the code is actually running off a subdomain. This can be a little tricky to set up, but as long as you have reasonable control over your server, and an experienced server administrator, it's not all that difficult. Especially in your case as you're replicating an existing structure so you won't need a whole slew of redirects. In fact, a reverse proxy could even be used to house the WP install on a completely separate server if you really want to separate the code from the ecomm code. If your site runs under the Apache webserver, reverse proxy is available as a fairly simple Apache module (it's the config that's tricky.) It's also doable under Windows/IIS but harder. (Note this typically can't be done on shared hosting, but as an ecomm site, I assume you're running on at least your own VPS server?) Here's a post from here on SEOMoz by PointBlankSeo for a little more background on reverse proxies. Hoe that gives you a second option to consider? Paul

Hi Darin, Let me add my 2 cents: If it makes sense from a usuability standpoint to have the author bio on the page, then by all means leave it there. What's most important, from a search engine point of view, is that the unique content on the page is the most important. This means placing the paragraphs about the print description front and center on the page. Since Panda, Google seems to treat page content using more of a Reasonable Surfer model in a similar manner as they handle links. That is, the higher up and more prominent the content, the more likely that weighs into their calculations to what the page is "about." Matt Cutts has previously said it only takes 2-3 sentences to make a page unique, but personally I think closer to a couple hundred words is a safer number. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Great explanation.  Thank you for further clarification!

Thanks for the assist, all. @Matt: If the client is an idiot, someone should tell her. Though you're right. I shouldn't point this particular client to this thread. I love this site. Very generous mozzers. Best, Paul

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Yeh I mean regular expression, it's apache mod-rewrite and we use .htaccess I'm struggling to figure out to 301 old url query strings to the new ones. There are several possible query strings for each product category so would take forever to do them one by one in magento re-write. The query strings will be the same i.e. ?price=1%2C10 but the category url will be different as you can see in my example above. any ideas or do I need to hire an expert? Thanks

Hi Will I just want to make sure by "referrals" - do you mean organic search traffic, or do you mean actual referral traffic from other websites? I can give you some suggestions for your site, but I think what you'll really want to do is use segmentation and your data to isolate specifically where the traffic loss is coming from. Start by looking at the "mediums" - does one drop more than the other? Direct traffic ok? Is it just organic search traffic that dropped? Then dig deeper - is it's organic traffic, is it a particular keyword? Is it a particular page? Also, see if you can isolate an exact day - or did traffic drop gradually. Also, look at desktop vs mobile traffic - maybe something happened there. I'd also suggest looking into webmaster tools data. Traffic loss is an effect of many possible causes; lower search volume due to seasonal fluctuation etc a drop in rankings - did any of your main keywords lose ranking? less clicks. you can rank just as well but get less clicks from some reason So - dig into that and try to isolate one particular traffic source/keyword/landing page. - Now, regardless of what you mind, I see some things that you might want to fix. MadeGood.com I see there's a site at .com that relates to the main .org site. Does this receive any traffic? I think you might be best to 301 redirect .com to .org - there could be potential duplicate content or confusion there as it's a similar site. Backlinks I looked through some of your links in OSE and found a few that could be hurting (or at best, no longer helping: ie devalued) viennacyclechic.at/tag/winter/ - are these image links in the sidebar ads? This site needs to nofollow those, as Google requires nofollowing any paid links ("ads"). peak-hives.co.uk/ - the sidebar in "other links". this could be totally natural, but it seems a little misplaced (different topic, kind of random?). hotvsnot.com/Sports/Cycling/ - not terrible, but possibly among a set of links that are not helping anymore. The good news is I don't see anchor text issues, just the placement of some of these links. What I'd recommend here, is; 1. Remove any links that you can that might seem oddly-placed or out of context. Any ad space you're paying for, make sure that site is nofollowing them. 2. Continuing building new links! I think you had a pretty good idea on some of those - using photos to get links, related industry sites etc. Start here. Hope that helps! -Dan

Do you use cPanel? There's a nice redirect feature in there - most control panels offer something similar. If not, you may need to get your hands dirty. I'm not that techie but I think it's the htaccess file. cPanel Redirect htaccess redirect Good luck!