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Just block /premium-content from your robots.txt page then (or include a meta noindex on the page if you can). There's no reason for it to be indexed I presume if it only redirects to your registration page and can't be access without authentication? Disallow: /premium-content/

Yea no messages in there. Totally confused!

I wonder if it is actually wrong to generate backlinks in this way though?  I know there was some guy who used the widgets to advertise unrelated products but that's not what I'm doing. I had two, one one the front of the poll with our domain name, and a second with "Create your own free poll" on the results (displayed initially as a hidden div which appears once the vote button is hit) Well I chickened out today and set both links to nofollow as the sites already ranked well before the polls were launched and I don't want to risk it. I just wish there was some official guidance on this.

Thanks for the replies. Linking the sites together would be difficult as they are marketed at different segments. The main sites are well known and marketed to different segments, (free and professional.) People search for them by brand so I wouldn't want to merge them, + that's too many eggs in one basket for my liking. The third site is a branded toolkit containing the same services plus a couple of others.  It's already had a PR7 site in a related niche merged into a sub folder about a year ago. My plan was to link (either one way or reciprocal) the free and professional sites to the under-performing mixed bag one. There is no duplicate content but if anything could cause a problem then I won't do it.

What exactly are you trying to achieve? No rich snippet markup from schema.org is required to embed a testimonial into a page. If you are intending to provide additional information to a search engine which helps gather a better understanding of what your website is and does so they can display markup in the search results, then this would be where you would use the appropriate markup. You may want to research the rich snippet markup for reviews to see if this is appropriate for what you're trying to achieve. It may be useful to read my other response to a schema related question I wrote a few moments ago too.

The penalty varies widely by page.   The penalty appears to hit certain keywords associated with individual pages.

It was everypage on the site. I also noticed the pages that are not indexed no longer, they have no PR, is that expected?

I don't fully understand the question, but I can tell you that if you had rankings for the blog at a certain domain or sub domain that is then removed and put somewhere else you will lose all rankings for the original blog and have to start from scratch on the other one

Hey Ben, Thank you so much for your response. I 'm pretty sure it was the Penguin update that brought our rankings down. We don't participate in any paid linking, no blog networks etc. The only thing we did was submit to article directories- which i understand are frowned upon now so we'll move away from that. We'll try to get all the non existent pages to show 404 codes and any clear any duplicate page title and page content errors and hope that we'll get back in google good graces.

I am referring to "live" Serps. It would be nice, to have in once place all the automatic google filtering rules, the resulted rank drop and how to fix it. So you can see a drop of 10-20 spots in your ranking and know you were hit by a filter and how to fix it. Maybe Rand will pick up this idea for a post.

Why not 301 the 404s to similar pages? Fix your problem AND transfer some of the link juice.

Hi, There was just a great post on Google Webmaster Central about this very topic - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html Register both domains with webmaster tools, make sure the new domain is crawlable by googlebot, 301 redirect the old pages/site to the new pages/site, and in webmaster tools of the old domain, use the change of address option under site configuration to tell Google that your site has changed domains and is now on the new domain. Make sure to check out Google's post, as they give some good tips and walk you through the process. Good luck!

If yo want to use the subfolder version, it is perfectly possible and it is a good idea because all the links built for all the countries' subfolder are going to benefit all the other subfolders. But be sure to do these things: In GWT geotarget every subfolder to its corresponding country doing so: once you’ve added your main site (e.g. domain.com) and verified it in Webmaster Tools, simply register a new site in the same account – but set the new site as domain.com/pe (or whichever your root subfolder is named). You can use that account to geo-target to Peru – the option is in ‘settings’ in the left-hand panel. You can repeat the same process for as many folders as you want to geo-target. About the Information Arquitecture, I don't like what you plan to do, as you are creating an uselless level. Instead do this: domain.com (your main country market) domain.com/es-mx/ (Mexico) domain.com/es-pe/ (Peru) domain.com/es-ar/ (Argentina) Use the rel alternate hreflang="x". Be aware to use the canonical only if really the content is identical. I suggest you to read this post by DejanSEO about the use or not of the rel canonical in conjuntion with the rel alternate hreflang > dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/ Remember all the classic ToDos of international SEO (currencies, phone numbers, addresses, local flavours of the language... as you know that Spanish in Argentina is not exactly the same to the one spoken in Mexico...) Remember to create sub-link building campaigns for any of the countries you are targeting, in order to give to any of your country subfolders.

Thank you Moosa, Yes, I think your right. Ironically after the last pagerank update today, the site in question actually increased by 1. I don't know, I think I'll add some new content and try to find a few quality links before I do something drastic. I think its good to let things settle before reacting. Your help is appreciated!

Jeremy, I could not agree more. It was among the worst decisions I've made in the seven years of working with websites. It was completely knee jerk and plain dumb. I think the drop was likely partly due to such a site wide change and then due to the duplicate pages that then resulted. Thanks for the input.

I'd ask that question again when people have a better understanding of the Penguin update. Although with all of the work Google has done over the past few years to push brand and devalue exact match domains I would personally invest in something other than redirecting my domain to a genericKW dot net. This is just a philosophical point though - I don't have hard facts to back it up.