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Ok I have changed the way the keywords are used... let's hope it works ! Thanks guys

Unless there's a valid user reason to keep the outdated pages in place, my recommendation would be to implement a 301 redirect from the previous year to the current year's page.  It's the cleanest user experience and sends proper ranking value to the current year.  If no event takes place in a given year the 301 redirect should be to the main page for that event.

Was the hit from Penguin, or a manual penalty?  If it was not a manual penalty, then in theory, you might be safe enough to keep some of those to maintain some diversity. I would caution you though that there's no way to know what threshold exists for how many need to be cleaned up in order to address the penalty vs. how many can remain while working on obtaining higher quality links. This is further complicated by the notion that if it was not a manual penalty, some of the losses could be to current on-site failings that were caught up in other algorithm changes before, around the same time as or immediately after Penguin. For example, what if there were 5 problems with the on-site SEO, and the Penguin update caused a "trigger" due to link anchors?  And what if it turns out that you might only need to do some link clean-up but simultaneously also do some on-site work? There's just no way to know in advance.  Especially without a full evaluation across the board. Very interesting concept though. And for the record, there truly is no secret percentage formula regarding brand instances in anchors.  With hundreds of factors to SEO, one site could have only 20% anchors with the brand in them and still have higher trust than a competitor site that has more brand anchors but weakness in other signals.

I would suggest creating a transitional custom page solution.  In this scenario, you keep the page itself but instead of the product information, you show a custom message such as "We're sorry but this product has been discontinued".  Then below that, you might present one, two or a few similar products for the visitor to consider, along with an invitation to browse the category that product was in. If this is going to be done, I would suggest building in a time-frame for using this method, such as x months.  At the end of that time-period, I would implement a 301 "permanently moved" redirect pointing that page to the next highest most relevant page, such as the sub-category or category the product falls within.  This way, you give users options and an opportunity to still buy from you, in a respectful way. Alternately, if you don't have any products that are essentially like the discontinued product, I would implement a 301 redirect right away, again to that next higher most relevant page, and I would suggest including a custom message at the top of that page's main content area, communicating how that product has been discontinued, if your programmer has the skill to implement that custom message based on the source of the visit...

Domain Authority is evaluation of the site's overall SEO trust across the plethora of signals that go into SEO, as interpreted by the SEOmoz system.  Building up internal strength, along with external signals specific to your most important keyword phrases, as well as for the brand identity itself, will, over time, increase overall Domain Authority. So everything from depth of quality content on individual high level pages where that depth reinforces tight topical focus, to increased user engagement in social media, to increasing the overall inbound link footprint in both size and quality will all contribute to that outcome.

Hi, What I was trying to say is that it is not easy to contact the webmaster of certain websites to add the canonical tag to prove that you are the original author.  Therefore, if you are planning to do it, make sure you can reach the webmaster and they are willing to add the canonical tag. Since I don't know which industry or niche you are in, it is hard to recommend authority blog sites to guest blog on.  What you can do is either 1) Google "Guest Blog + Industry/niche" or 2) Visit http://myblogguest.com/ and browse the forum to see what blogs are looking for guest authors.  It is free to create an accont and everyone in the community is nice.  If you ask people, I am sure a lot of people will refer you to that site to look for guest blogs. Hope this helps!

I have had a similar issue and we had to remove PDFs in order to clear a penalty. Having said that, the PDFs that were linking to our site were very spammy and purely written for SEO with unnatural anchor text links (So Google rightly penalised them). If the PDF/s of your client (it would help if you told us which one it was) were very high quality and not written in the standard spammy SEO way then I don't think that you have as much to worry about. Finally, all the sites you have listed are PR0 and of very poor quality removing them is unlikely to have a negative impact on the site that you are optimising. Hope this helps.

Hi Chris, yes i have been recommending a move from this old version of cubecart for four months, no avail :(. However the isse of noindexing is not really down to cubecart, its down to product listing managers copying data from other sources and not having the time to update it, as we sell our own products and they are not branded, the noindex issue on products is not a huge issue but i agree we are definately missing our on long tails!

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? You will generally receive a warning if you are being penalized for unnatural linking: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Google Webmaster Tools also has a "disavow link" tool, which allows you to tell Google which of your links are poor quality links you don't want counted against you. You can also try reaching out to the sites that you received the low quality links from, or contact the people who provided you with the fiverr gigs to see if they can remove the links. If you didn't have much of a backlink profile to begin with, it may be easier to just start with a clean slate and start a brand new site that doesn't have all those spammy links.

You have an eagle eye. Thanks for pointing that out

Face palm ;).  Thanks, Oleg.

There isn't much traffic at all as the link is actually in a sub-sub-menu in the nav (the strange things people do). But I'm more concerned whether removing the link will actually have a negative effect on our SEO

Don't stack 301s. i.e. Don't redirect to another redirect. Update all your current redirects to point to the final pages. In general, you shouldn't worry about too many redirects. I haven't watched the webinar but if you are currently doing well in rankings, I wouldn't change the permalink structure. I also think that WP automatically sets up redirects when you change the permalink structure (from my experience, would like someone to confirm though).

This might shed a little more light on the subject. The sites are per video game.  So they could be completely different from one another. I like the way a subdomain looks and for this purpose, I've seen other sites doing it this way for a long time. From where I sit subdomains seem to be the "right" way to go about this but if sub-dirs are going to be BETTER for SEO then I want to do that. I don't mind SEOing multiple sites and I would somewhat prefer to keep things separated out like that. I guess what I really want to know is, Is this a personal preference thing if workload isn't my concern?  Or is one going to be objectively better than the other. Thanks for the replies so far.  Much appreciated.

Hi Brett, Having more unique content above the fold is very important.  As Irving mentioned, it is important from a content to ad ration.  When visitors visit your site, they want to see the contents right away instead of scrolling down a few ads before seeing the content.  Being able to see the contents right way is good user experience and Google likes that.  Google rolled out an algorithm for content above fold. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2216227/Google-Updates-Above-the-Fold-Page-Layout-Algorithm Hope this article from search engine watch will answer your question. Enjoy!

Include everything. You want Google to spider everything. Let's take an example: Two pages which talk about Llama Grooming, one which focuses on Llama Fur Enhancement, and the other that focuses on Llama Fur Lustre. The content for both pages really is the same, just the SEO is a little different for each. Your main page: www.llamas.com/lfe.com (Llama Fur Enhancement) has all the copy SEO'd for Llama Fur Enhancement.   Your "alternate" page has the same copy, but optimized for Llama Fur Lustre with a Canonical REL tag back to the original page.  If you omit the second page from the Sitemap, it doesn't get spidered, then what's the point?  Both need to be spidered, but the Canonical REL tag tells it which is the "official" page so you don't get dinged for duplicate content. Capice? Jim

I agree with you!