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Ryan, Thank you for the great information.  Was your last sentence cut off or was that the end? We do not believe it will be possible to fix the penalty in time frame we have so we have decided to just go with a new domain. We would like to try and maintain any customers that happen to stumble upon our old site but want to make sure we do not get penalized in any way.  We were thinking of just putting up a generic single landing page stating that we have moved but are afraid to actually mention or link to the new site as we do not want the new one to be penalized.  Is this something we should be afraid of or could we link to the new domain?  Or should we keep our current pages in place and link to the new corresponding page? Do you have a recommendation / procedure to shutdown the old site properly and remove from Google before the new site is launched?  Is there a problem just making small changes to the site but pretty much making an exact copy of the old site? Thanks, Brad

Thank you, John. That is helpful.

Sorry, I don't think I explained very well :). I was recommending that you didn't redirect these pages to the homepage of the other sites, but instead selected the most relevant page on the other sites and redirected to these. That way you would still take advantage of all the relevancy benefits.

Very unusual and I doubt that's your issue: Some quick tips for you: Don't have empty alt tags for your images - fill them out Use an image site map Use microformats and tag each photo Use absolute URL's Add more text to the page Good luck.....

It looks like some other people are already doing this as I did a query for the first two sentences in quotes. And if you are linking to the same content on their site then there is a very good chance that at least one will be filtered - and it will probably not be springer. If you have lots of these pages on your site you could be hit with a Panda problem that could reduce your rankings site-wide. I would not place these abstract pages on my site unless they were noindex, follow

This might be a much simpler solution for you - http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-IIS.asp This might also be helpful as installing a form of ISAPI rewrite module would also make the solution quicker and more simple than what it sounds above. http://forums.iis.net/t/1176085.aspx Hope this might help..

Good stuff, let me know how you get on. Have you done any analysis on which anchors are causing the problems? That is, which keywords has the site lost traffic for? If you do a compare between the two weeks before and the two weeks after the penalty and look at the organic keywords in traffic sources you can see the specific ones that have dropped in traffic. This will give you more input into which anchor texts are problematic so you can dig further into the link profile. Anyhow, do let us know how you get on. Cheers Marcus

Thanks Phil I guess my main concern is avoiding duplicate content situations. So it sounds like only allowing categories to be indexed is the best bet

Use the google category and google product type in your adwords product extensions for best chance of getting product/image ads showing in search results. Make sure your campaigns/product types in Adwords are matched to your product feed.

This might help. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Thanks for the RE Cyrus. One of my architects and I came to a similar conclusion, but it's definitely good to hear it from another source in the SEO community on the development side of things. We decided to implement a side-wide rel=canonical to the http URLs to avoid duplication issues, as well as ensure resources are using relative links. I'm hoping this solves each issue with minimal impact!

I don't see why not. In my opinion, getting links from the same C blocks can't hurt you. Sure, it won't provide as much SEO benefit as a bunch of links from different C Class IPs, but I feel that it would still be beneficial. Just be careful with blog networks - as you will have read, a number of these networks were penalized by the recent algorithm updates. I would just make sure I'm building my links to relevant sites and not specifically targeting blog networks for link building. I feel that when you're building links in such a way that you're having to take heed of the C-blocks of the links, then you're probably going about it in a "grey" manner. Focus on high quality links and you don't have to worry.

Check in the root directory for a file called .htaccess A typical way of listing the 404 redirects in the file is like this: ErrorDocument 404 /404-error-page.php If you don't see a line that starts with "ErrorDocument" then Joomla or Virtuemart are causing the problem.  If it is an old version of Joomla, it needs to be updated anyway for security reasons.  If the line seems messed up in the .htaccess file, you can at least send it to a working page like this: ErrorDocument 404 /index.php Maybe that will at least send it to the front page.

Without diving in too deeply, looks like you guys might be overoptimized for the keyword motorcycle parts. OSE anchor text report shows that that is by far your largest exact match anchor text, with almost 7,000 links from 44 root domains. I'd improve the link variety for this page by using anchor text variation. You've also got some onsite issues I'd clean up, like capital letters in the URLs, a www and non-www canonical issue sitewide. These are just a few suggestions I quickly found - good luck!

First how important is domain rank in a back-link audit? Should I remove myself from indexes with low domain rank, and leave ones with high? Should I remove myself from as many indexes as possible? What about obvious paid blog posts that have high domain rank? Do you leave those? What is considered a low Domain Rank for back-links, under 35 - 40? This is a pretty open-ended question. Instead of judging your back links by domain authority, ask yourself about the nature of the link and the quality of the site. You should consider removing links from "obvious paid blog posts" regardless of domain authority. Domain authority should not be viewed/used in a vacuum. In fact, if you're going to limit yourself to one metric, I might suggest mozTrust (although I wouldn't recommend relying solely on that either). _Second, what is a good success rate for a back link audit. How can you measure improvement, other than waiting for your PR or SERP to go up? _ I suppose success should be measured in your ability to achieve your desired result. If you're truly facing a penalty situation, you should spend some time doing research before you begin to arbitrarily remove links. You might start here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update In many instances, a perceived penguin penalty wasn't actually a penguin penalty. If you truly are facing this type of penalty, you may need to clean up your profile and submit a reconsideration request. Again, before you start removing links and submitting reconsideration requests, read up on this subject. _Third, in some situations it looks like back-links are legitimate, but they all point to my home page. Is it worth pursuing for example asking these people to link to the specific product they are referring to for example children picnic tables instead of just our home page? _ Yes. And, lastly what legal rights do I have to get back-links removed? This is not intended, and should not be construed as legal advice. That being said, in most cases, it's not an issue of rights as much as it is an issue of practicality. Depending on how you're links were acquired, and from where they were acquired, it might be difficult enough to get a hold of the site owner, let alone try to take some sort of legal action to have links removed. Is it possible to prevent Google from counting these back-links through an .htaccess file? Not that I'm aware. Best of luck!

No worries - Glad I could help out.

If you're just getting started, I'd recommend the Beginner's Guide - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo Also - You'll want to make sure you've 301 redirected all of your pre-existing .asp URLs to your new .php URLs. You'll lose all of your incoming links with the URL changes unless you are using an extensionless structure.