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I'm not an expert here, but it sounds like your server is configured to resolve wildcard subdomains. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly technical enough to even begin to tell you how to solve it. This is generally configured in your hosting account cpanel, with a subdomain set to *. ( I believe there may be an .htaccess element to it as well.) Since there are so many different server configurations, my best advice would be to consult your hosting company and seek their advice. Otherwise, proper absolute canonicals (with full URLs) on every page should act as a backup safety solution.

I have filed several DMCA reports against scraper sites that are scraping my original content (mainly original images that my community is creating and submitting) and those scraper sites are still getting a TON of traffic... Alexa rank less than 2000) and nothing has happened. Any suggestions as to what else I could do?

Hi Christy, This question was answered for me but not here at SEOmoz but instead on Danny Sullivan's recent blog post "How Google's Disavow Links Tool Can Remove Penalties". I will be using the disavow tool to remove these banned links. Cheers, Nick

In my experience, 301 redirects work better than canonical tags for redirecting non-www to www. Even with the redirects in place, though, you should still use canonicals because it helps prevent duplicate content in cases of query parameters getting indexed. Here is the htaccess code if you need it: #Options +FollowSymlinks Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch RewriteEngine on rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc] This will automatically redirect all non-www URLs to www.

Good to hear Distilled on this one Thanks Mike!

Thank you Oliver

Thanks AntkitMaheshwari and Danrawk, I've just downloaded a chrome extention to view text versions of the cached file. Our built in template is spewing multiple h1s but that's something we need to look at separately. We also have a lot of menu links which might be pushing the crawling to review the text at a later stage..But still, it skipped the H1 and first paragraph. I'll look into this a bit more. Danrawk, on page grader gives an A and there is no weird formatting. Maybe it's a conflict issue. It's counting the first H1 and skipping the second. Hmm...

Did you make changes to your site? I.e. when ranking and bounces rates changed, was it (looking at analytics) at a specific time that you made structural changes to your site? have you looked in google analytics to see where the traffic decline is coming from? i.e. have you looked to see if hte decline is in organic search or adwords traffic? just google? just bing? or across the board. looking at these things will give you an idea as to whether this is a wholesale issue, or perhaps a technical issue with one service. your open site explorer metrics look decent.

Optimization is only a small part of ranking well in with SEO. Think of it as a piece of a larger pie.  Use the open site explorer tool to understand your backlinks against your competitors and the keyword analysis tool as well. This will give you a better overall picture of why you are not ranking better. Lastly, i understand where you are coming from. it's really seductive to get crazy about page optimization, but all the page optimization in the world isn't going to compare to a bunch of high quality, really great links with anchor text.

Thanks for your help!

Sorry, I wasn't too clear above. I would certainly remove those links whether or not they were the cause of the drop that you have experienced. As you quite rightly say, they may cause you more trouble later on. However, I would still be vigilante about what else may have affected the site, especially if these are (like most blog comment links) nofollow links. I hope that has cleared it up. K

In the past, I too have had this issue. I've found repeatedly that the quickest way to get verified is to get the Google Places/Local dept. to actually call you and speak to a real live person. This way, you can verify instantly over the phone and not worry about postcard PINs. Furthermore, I expect you'd be able to actually verify all your business locations during the same call, though it might take a while. Directions as follow to reach Google: What you want to do is to verify ownership of your business over the phone. In order to do this, you actually need to call Google. Visit this address to get the process started: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs Under "Which verification method did you try" select " I tried PIN verification for a single listing" .  At the next prompt, check "The status is NOT needs action". At the verification method prompt, check "Postcard"  and then last check "Yes" when asked "Have you waited 15 days". You will be given a "call us" link and a contact form. Never mind the form and click the call link. You'll enter your name and number and a real live Google rep will call you within a minute. Simply explain to them that your are trying to verify your Local+ or Places page, and ask if you can do it by phone. You should be all set within two weeks, tops.

Hi Akram, thanks for the reply. The website already has language buttons linking to the language page. We didn't make a landing page for the .com/ because we did not want to have one extra page that could be marked as duplicate content. Would you sugest having a landing page on the .com/ where user just selects language and does not display content?

44 relates to the number of pages with the same urls as in your sitemap - it is not everything that is index. Your old site is still indexed and being found, as Google visits those pages and gets redirected to a new page it is likely that number will increase (from 44) and the number of old indexed will decrease. Google doesn't index sites on a one-off go around because then if may take say 4 months to come back and index again and if you've a new important page that gets lots of links and you don't get indexed and ranked for it because you've not been visited you wouldn't be happy. Also if this was done on every site it would take forever and take much more resources than even google has. it is annoying but you've just got to grin and bear it - at least you old site is still ranking and being found.

Tahrim, I don't think it's a mater of on-page SEO.  It looks like your site is still only a few months old and you're going to have to build up some more content in order to get the kind of traffic you're probably hoping for.  Your content looks good but you're just going to need to keep at it.  Over the next year +, you'll see your traffic increasing.

I think you are right in observations and thanks for response. The url is generated when someone puts in a search for a location.  it searches the items in that location then shows the embedded map with the flags plus the searched items. Yes Google should index the url's.  Long Url being generated as per example above. This is generated when someone puts in a location search and the location items appear. Thanks Jaz

I am assuming getting the high PR links from different regions or country TDL won't matter as well, because the idea is to buffer the PR to a relevant english site. Do you agree?

Hi Letty, I agree with the others here. There are exceptions, but for the most part you want Google to be able to follow most of the links on your site. The rule can be broken, but as a best practice there's usually no harm in following your links. That said, I'm a big, huge fan of link consolidation and faceted navigation. I've seen a lot of positive results from sites that have cleaned up and consolidated thier footer links, so I'm hopeful about what you're doing!

Hi Stephanie, I wanted to ask just so I know how are you liking WP engine so far compared to blue host? Your feedback would be very appreciated. I wish you the best doing well on a managed WordPress does that tops the charts. I can even show you some tricks on there if you want of ways to do things that are easier than others. If you're interested let me know. The feedback is for my own information about my blog not for commercial purposes. Sincerely, Thomas