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thank you. I appreciate this.

Hey Ryan havent heard anything yet. Have you had a chance to investigate further? Thanks

You can still use whatever you like in ads, it doesn't stop the other variant working. Although perhaps for links it has an seo effect?

I would second Irving on this. We got hit with exactly the same issue. After a bit of head scratching our best bet was over-optimisation of anchor text. With a bit of work we managed to get a fair few of the anchor text changed, some removed and we also diluted the exact match anchor text ratio by linkbuilding with generic www.mysite.com type anchor text and the rankings returned after a few months.

_Nope they are not. These links are easy links and therefore, will not have any impact on the rankings whatsoever. And as Alan has rightly said, these RSS Feed may increase the likelihood of duplicate content. _

Hello, The answers you have so far are all good.  wp.com is a great resource but it is not great for building your brand.  I use it mainly for industry leadership purposes i.e. big picture stuff so that visitor are interested in finding out more by visiting the main website..  However, no links in content..  leave that to your profile.

Ok, this is going to be a bit lengthy. As you have said, your website has been affected by Penguin update; I would like to know if the website had received any mail in Google Webmaster Tool regarding unnatural links? If yes, then it is a manual penalty. In that case, you need to remove all the links that look unnatural or coming with exact matched keywords. Try get as many links down with it as possible and then give Disavow link a try before sending a reconsideration request. But if you have not received any mail, this is probably affected by Penguin Algorithm. In that case, Disavow Link is the only way to exonerate. Now, let me come to real part of your post. Yes, you need to get all the links down from site; all of them as the links are coming with exacted match key phrase and they are do follow. Or, else just add no follow attribute against each link.

Hi Valter, if you're intention is doing international SEO using one domain name and the subfolders way, then the domain should be a generic domain name (.com, .net) for the simple reason that you cannot geotarget any Country Code Top Domain Name (.es, .fr, .de...) but for its related country, and the same for its subfolder. If you decide to use a .com and subfolders, instead, in Google Webmasters Tools you can target the domain to your main country target (i.e.: uk or us) and the subfolders to their respective countries (/es/ to Spain, for instance). Then... to use create as many sites with Country Code Domain termination as are the countries you want to target is, at first sight, the best idea, as ccTlds have a stronger geotargeting power. The question is: are you sure you want to earn links for every single site and maintain the On Page of all of them. Are those domain names consistent with your business plan? Will you have a real presence, not just "virtual" in those countries? I suggest you first to answer those questions and just after deciding what option to choose. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but - honestly - it will be your business plan what will give you the correct answer. Then... if Helados Olimpia is the name of your brand, sincerely I would not translate it. Remember that Google prizes Entities (and Brands are entities) and that branded keywords are everyday more important. And that you will have to deal also with other digital channel, as Social Media: are you sure you want to have as many Facebook pages or Twitter handles or Google+ Business pages as are the translated name of your Brand? Finally, if you want to do International SEO, I suggest you to check this post about the topic I published here on SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Thanks for the advice John. This is very sensitive contact info due to the nature of our niche.  I do agree that a more simplified lead form on all pages with the extended info on a secure page would be best, but that decision is beyond my control. Besides, if we were to make that change now, wouldn't it just delay the recovery since all urls would change again? So it seems like we're at a point that we should be trying to make things work as is.  It is definitely not the ideal setup, but I think we should still be able to recover rankings with this setup.

Hi EGOL, great job... you have completed a very important step!  Try the following process to move forward (I know this is an old post, but it may help if you have missed any steps). Prioritize a portion of your keywords based on high search volume, high relevance to your product/service, and low competition (pick out the best words from your list). Create Keyword groups from your priority list (you want to go after 10-15 keywords per landing page.  This can be done through effective keyword grouping). Create a landing page / content strategy to accomodate your keyword groups. Build the pages (or modify existing pages) accordingly, ensuring that you take in to account all of the onsite optimization techniques (H!/H2 structure, URL structure, interlinking, content relevance, keyword frequency, etc). Once you have the pages up, perform some research to determine the best places to get inbound links (I use Open Site Explorer on competitor sites to see where they get links, to start, and PageRank (google chrome plugin) to find a nice list of viable inbound link opportunities. Work with the inbound link opportunities and use a SERP tracker to monitor your progress, making modifications to the landing pages or link building campaigns as you go. Don't forget conversion optimization!  Test those landing pages out and make sure they are converting for you, if not then try things out like clearer messaging/calls to action, trust factors, etc. Hope this helps! Brice

Hi Tony I would consider setting up a 301 redirect for all the urls you have mentioned to your www.ckpoole.co.uk/ this will take care of the issues you have mentioned and it will pass link juice from the others and help increase the authority of that page essentially amalgamating it all into one - 301 redirect will pass 90-99% of link juice from each url helping increase authority. look at this for more: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection You must make sure that all your navigation points to that version of the page as well and not /index.html for instance. For your canonical tags question SEOMoz doesn't pick this up when doing a crawl even if you have done it correctly and search engines will recognise it see  SEOMoz staff responses here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

Thank you very much Martin!

Can I ask a question that leads on from this - how attractive a proposition is syndicated content it to publishers if you ask them to add a noindex / cross-domain canonical as well as a link from your article? Surely they want  a chance to rank, expecially if they are planning on adding their own take and UGC, to differentiate it where possible, as Rand advises here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-leveraging-syndicated-content-effectively Personally, content syndication is not something I would ever recommend for a client due to the complications from dupe content outweighing the benefits from links that could be earned...it just makes more work when that time could be spent on high quality guest blogging (in my view). However, a new client is really interested in doing it. But if we offer content for those terms (link + noindex / cross domain canonical) - will there be any interest to use the syndicated articles at all?! Maybe it would be better to offer the content in return for a link and a guarantee that they will either add unique content to it or canonicalize / noindex?

Thank you, Good point. Cornel

Thanks for that Barry.

Thank you Keri! Much appreciated.

In short you can't as that content requires paid access to be able to read it so anyone who isn't a subscriber that comes to it won't be able to view the content - Googlebot is essentially a none paying visitor so it can't crawl and index information that is blocked by pay wall. You could allow a certain portion of each page to be visible to anyone visiting the site (maybe the first some many lines), this will get it indexed and has been carried out by other companies successfully. Call it a teaser to draw visitors in and increase subscribers if you want more search traffic...

Hi I would also suggest to make sure to change internal links if possible and make them point to the page you want to see in the index

Thanks again Keri. It feels so good to finally have this particular issue resolved. The company has been struggling with it for more than 5 years, but until I came along (lucky them, lol!) - they had no idea what was wrong or where to even begin fixing it. I do have a follow up question I am going to post regarding how Google views this sudden massic increase in links....