Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bilal, As Alan has said 2-3 weeks is typical. Are you positive the information you provided (street address) is correct? And does your address comply with the guidelines? Is the address you provided a real, physical street address (not a P.O. Box or virtual office)? Just double-checking on this.

301 isn't perfect. It transfers most rank, but not all. It also takes time because Google has to catch up in indexing both the old and new. In the meantime, it's possible your new site gets hit with a duplicate content penalty. Make sure any link partners you might have link to the new url and not the old. Look at your traffic before and after. Did the missing keywords bring in a lot of traffic overall? My suspicion is they probably didn't but, still, you probably did lose some rank by not having the words there. As long as your content is solid for the missing words, you should still do well. Domain age is no longer a major ranking factor. It's possible to make a brand new URL rank well now.

Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site? You don't "have to" at all, but I would recommend doing it. Google will recognize the redirects and over the course of a month they will update their index. In my experience if you inform Google via WMT that your site moved, they can update their index much faster (i.e. within a day).

Use the anchor text tab with it set on "phrases" and "all pages on this root domain." Once it loads - look for high volumes of exact anchor text. Specifically terms that are not branded or the websites domain/URL. This is a big identifier of spammy tactics.

Matt Cutts has discussed this pretty well. Cloaking means specifically showing something different to Google than to the user. Hidden content is not specifically cloaking, it is a different issue altogether. If I had to choose between the two options, I would choose the second. The 302 redirect can be problematic. You should assume that Google is going to find BOTH of these and execute the javascript appropriately. Just don't make anything on your site behave differently specifically for Google. LivingSocial and Groupon both do javascript redirects and are not suffering the consequences, so I think you should be fine too.

Probably, but why would google highlight the word gsmarena? We roughly get around 1,500 brand searches [people searching with 91mobiles as the keyword]. All I am asking is that when people are clearly specifying the intent by adding a keyword 91mobiles as part of the query, why would google don't honour that..isn't that a bad user experience? I am very sure this is a technical issue which can fixed. But I am not sure how. SEOMOZ Experts can you please help?

I agree with everything inhouseseo says above. Sound advice. I've recently been looking at the wedding niche with a view to finding guest post opportunities, one thing that came to light is there's a ton of blogs out there that love publishing series of photos from weddings. I'm not sure where you stand with ownership of the photos and whether you have the right to publish without the consent of the 'models'. Theres a great opportunity to assemble 10-15 shots write some commentary and then create a series of posts using 6/7 different shots from the collection and differing comments and post them around various wedding. Myblogguest.com is great place to start. I think this could be the cheapest/quickest way to get the links your looking for. Best of luck and I sincerely hope you get your old positions back. Regards Aran Ps.(oh and in the mean time you might wanna hit facebook/twitter/pinterest and post some photos, connect with your target audience, it could drive some valuable traffic in! and it just might help you rank)

Thanks very much alan.

Unfortunately, a lot of those links you may have a very hard time removing. They were probably part of a network that was used to sell links, and the webmaster does little or no upkeep. I also know that some webmasters or companies will ask you for money to remove the links. Another problem is, you have to do A LOT of research to determine which links are hurting you to the best of your ability, Otherwise, if you go about it with carpet bombing approach, you might remove some links that are actually helping you. This will cause more harm. Given your difficult situation, this is what I would do: Article directories : remove all duplicate copies of articles and leave ONE copy on the best site, i.e Ezinearticles. You may even want to remove them all and put them on your own site if it is a real quality article. Try to remove as many forum comments, spammy profile links. Other links (i.e blog posts, etc) - for each keywords/page affected, find the the backlinks to that page. Use OSE AND Webmaster tools. WEBMASTER TOOLS IS YOUR FRIEND HERE. Google is telling you which links are being pointed to your site. If you know if  a spammy link, and Google is not showing in the links to your site, you better focus your energy elsewhere. Make a list of these sites, and examine the site: spammy jibberish content;  excessive links pointing out; their backlinks (they may 100s of backlinks with spammy keywords like "viagra" or "payday loans," this is a red flag that the site is likely hurting you); links to pills, gambling, and porn. Approach the sites via contact, email, and whois contact. Document ALL correspondence and attempts to clean up. Once you feel you have done all you can, send Google another reconsideration request with all the documenting as you can (be thorough). Specifically, tell them which links you have made good faith attempts to remove and have been unsuccessful. Hopefully, they will lift the penalty or let it expire.

Hi David, I did add ton of new web pages and because of those got those 404's.  I've since cleaned them all up.   i thought I had them cleaned up before the my traffic fell but there could be a lag there.  I am a little bummber my PR is 2...  pretty marginal improvement over 0. I will keep an eye on my traffic and hopefully it was the bad links. Thank you for the thoughful response!

Agreed - although I think a 301-redirect or canonical tag implementation would probabyl be ok. If there's a database lookup that can translate the DocID into a URL string, the canonical is easy (I write some CF code, so I can at least tell you it's doable). Keep in mind that "article.cfm" is only one template, so if you can find a solution that's data-driven, it's just as easy for 1,000 pages as it is for 10. You could also create a dynamic 301-redirect via <cfheader>- the core logic is the same. Basically, you look up the URL from the DocID and dynamically create the tag. You just need someone who understands your CMS and data. The actual code is only a few lines, but understanding your setup is the time-consuming part.</cfheader>

Anybody else any thoughts on this?

I know that the links listed in WMT are not all, but the download excel, which is so much bigger, I think might be....I am sure I saw Matt Cutss say that in a video somewhere. Anyone else know the video or blog post I mean?

Not necessarily. Yes, you shouldn't automatically nofollow every external link; however, nofollowed external links versus followed external links have to be treated differently. Especially in cases of online journalism and blogging, it's not unheard of to link to a site that might be unsavory. Using a nofollow in that case (where otherwise, external links are usually followed) would clue crawlers in that "this site might be bad, don't ding us for it". If 95% of your external links are spam/porn, and you nofollow one of those links, then, yes, you should expect to get smacked down. But, when you have a slightly shady in-context link that's nofollowed, and plenty of other good links that are followed, it's not going to be an issue.

but remeber thats notyy a on-index tag, its a no-index,follow tag, you want the links followed, but the pages not indexed.

I agree with Alan, 10 links from great sites like, edu, gov or news sites can far outweigh thousands of spam links. My advice is to go after a few high quality links yourself. Your serp rankings will go north and eventually your competitors will go south.