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C This is one of the reasons I love this forum: it requires thinking because many who ask questions are thinking. (think about it;) While I understand what eyepaq is saying in one sense that search engines "could" treat them as stand alone; it appears search engines do/could because as the subdomain holder you are not seeing links going only to the main domain or other subs, you are the one who controls it, can move its hosting, etc.  But, according to Google, they do not in the sense of linking: If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you. Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change. So, as for external linking, it is clear that if there ever was a question about domains and subdomains, there is none now. But, that does not mean you should not use subdomains. Eyepaqs point around user abuse is an excellent one, but you should also be monitoring this like a hawk. At the end of the day, I would think that using subdirectories is going to be easier if you are planning on a large site. But, the ease you mention for the user with the short domain name is intriguing. I agree with Muhammad on sub domains might get a little expensive and, if your choice is to use both (I wouldn't as it seems to me that you are creating more and more work for your dev team) the canonical should be the subdomain. Again, thanks for the thought provoking question. Robert

John Muller from Google published a good set of specifications for this. Maybe it will help. https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation There are several points in this list that you could check and double check (translations, currency, mentions of the target countries and so on). Hope it helps. If not and you have a more specific agenda get back with a reply here.

Have you checked out this post we recently had on YouMoz about pagination? http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/mitigating-mixed-signals-effectively-consolidating-paginated-urls

There's no way for you to force the affiliates to do a canonical tag from their website to yours. For you it makes sense, for them it doesn't. Because once they do a canonical tag to your website, their pages won't be indexed any more which means if their traffic source is SEO, they won't get any of that. There's no reason for them to do it. The best way to think is if you can do the datafeed without descriptions or maybe much shorter version of the meta description, like a lot of merchants do Short Descriptions. It helps both the affiliates as well as the merchants. Less duplicate content. I hope that helps.

Just wondering how you are making out with this. I checked Google US and didn't see you rank in the top 50. Curious to hear an update. Hope its going well.

Glad to hear everything is working for you Marisa. It's hard to know the root issue but again, it's great to know you are OK now.

Some things are mentioned below, I don't want to give the farm away but hopefully this sparks some ideas for you. Find a way to get unique information when URL 1 & URL 2 are compared against each other. Perhaps put an additional snippet of text that says when these trailers were released or put in a transcript of these videos on the page. Other ways to differentiate the content includes curating all the teaser trailers on URL 2 for that movie (because you know there will be more than one if the movie is especially popular). You could make the synopsis shorter in the teaser but bigger and more detailed in the full film teaser. You might additionally want to create a method where users can upload additional versions of the trailer so you create a system (upon approve) where you get free new content for your site. You may additionally want to include reviews by critics on the short teaser and the full teaser as a way to generate unique content through UGC (user generated content). Make sure these reviews are marked up with rich snippets and schema. Perhaps you can implement gaming dynamics and reward these users when they provide UGC by assigning points and give away gifts - its a way to generate unique content for your website and differentiate it from thin affiliate sites.

A great way for you to improve the page rank of your website and blog would be to listen to what 'kellymandingo' said: try and focus on getting unique quality content added to the site and build your links. Some other things you can do to start 'fast-tracking' your efforts to boost page rank include adding things to your site like 'rel=author', building your presence on Google+, using social media channels and article/PR directories. Another great way to work towards improving your Page rank would be to guest blog on another person's site. Not only will a guest blog spot, in all likelihood, provide you with a backlink, but it may open you up to an audience that you may previously never had exposure to. As a result, you may be able to leverage this relationship into other guest blog opportunities (and earn more chances to build links), gain more traffic to your site and improve your relevance as an 'authority' within a certain industry or niche. Beyond that, have you considered buying links from sites like linkmarket.com? It has been at least 2-3 years since using this strategy (and the links can be a little pricey), however, the links are coming from sites with a higher PR and can help you get more domain/page authority in a much shorter period of time than it would take you building these links 'organically'. Anyway, hope this helps...

Do you guys think it may have more to do with onsite than offsite? offsite: I have a similar number of root linking domains as my comeptitors who are still ranking in their previous positions onsite I thought it might be that I have a section for accommodation that has hundreds of pages. These pages all have unique content, but the content is quite thin, and the pages never actually get any traffic from google. Should I just robots.txt these pages?

No problem Craig. Well, if you do need some help with your social, I can help you there. Send me a private message if you want some more info on what we offer. Matt.

No, I don't have exact match domain. But, I have added duplicate content on too many product pages since last two week. I believe that, Google have crawled all product pages which contain duplicate content. And, I am getting issue regarding ranking.

Hi Oleg Sorry I did not respond sooner. I missed your reply! Those site are really useful. We are going to get some nice articles written up that we can post to out blog and link a plenty back through to our main site so I will see how that goes. Social media is something we are yet to touch and know how important is to get on with it. It will come once we have some more of the main site optimised and ranking better than it currently is.

Yes you are right. I just wanted to help by making you see that your problem has in fact happened to many people. Mine is a bit diferent. To be honest, I still don't know why it happened and Google also told me it was not a penalization... Good Luck.

This is an age old question (kind of). Your answer lies lies in weighing the pros and cons of redirection and consolidation. The questions you need to ask are: 1. Are there inbound links targeting any of the 'old' pages in question. To find out, use OSE. 2. Are the "old" pages that are still in the index, ranking for anything of value? Use Analytics CONTENT > LANDING PAGES to check and make sure "old" pages aren't getting visits. If 1. is yes, then you should look at the value of those links - if there are some really good ones (old, from pages with high domain authority, etc) then I would consider making a request to those webmasters that the link be changed to the new page URL. This is a courtesy most webmasters will acknowledge since it saves them having a dead link on their website.  If the answer is no, and there are no inbound links proceed to #2! If 2. is yes, then you should definitely make sure that all inbound links have been changed to the new page before redirecting. However, in addition to redirecting, also make sure that the page you are redirecting to is similar in nature. If the ranking page has a lot of good content, then make sure the new page does as well, etc. I

Sry guys - must have posted while others were writing. Even if you didn't get the original email - if Google is saying you have unnatural links, then you need to deal with that problem. Submitting recon makes no difference if you dont get rid of the bad links You will almost certainly need to take action by linkmining your website, identifying 'unnatural' links or links from blatantly bad neighborhoods, submit requests for removal from the webmasters, and so on. Document all of your work and then add that information in with your reconsideration request. If you do not put the work in you will not get a positive response.

You can just use a canonical url and have both pages. Ideally, you would noindex the /tags/kw and link to /kw directly from everywhere but that would probably require a decent amount of work.

Thanks for the reply Dana.  No, a view-all page is not an option, some of the categories have over 11,000 items - so we can rule that out! I've looked at all of the existing resources, and while all of them offer great advice, nothing touches on the subject of multiple sort options - they seem to be only for standard page 1, page 2... etc listings. The link you provided to the YouMoz post we have read through thoroughly and they do it a little differently.  In their example, they sort the items on the current page, while our sort options would change the order of the entire category, therefore we can't use canonical... as the page content is 100% different. We want to work with multiple sort options and wanted to know the best way to do this.

We did a soft launch of the new site and really took it live in December of 2011, so that is the bump you are seeing there. The Penguin hit was sharp and instant on April 24th. Not sure precisely when the clean out was done.  We have an off-site SEO who handles that. I was told that it was pretty much one bad link that had replicated across a a slew of blog postings and has since been cleaned up. The 301 redirects were done more recently, in August.  It took us a while to figure out that that was part of the problem.  Some of the redirects have worked perfectly.  The new site replaced the old site in the SERPS with almost no change in ranking.  Others fell off a cliff.  All the content and tags were relatively consistent across the pages that had the redirects applied.  It just seems like we've got two separate groupings here. One has recovered from Penguin and the redirects have worked and the others we just can't get fixed. At no point in any of this have we received any notifications from WMT. Thanks! Doug