Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That is the predicament I find myself in. One of my competitors who are outranking me on short-tail terms have a bunch of paid advertisements (and followed links) on authoritative sites that I am currently not on. I have a sneaking suspicion these links are a major reason for their success. Curious, did you pay up to join your competition?

Link wheels are a pretty old school tactic and Google Penguin (links) & Panda (thin content) stamped out the wide-scale use of them. Here's what I'd do in your situation: 1. Report his website(s) to Google, giving as much information as possible. The more information you can collect on the link wheel sites the better: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=en 2. There's no point you disavowing nofollow links to your website as they aren't passing link equity. You should only disavow them if they are followed links - for example if he was trying to get you a Google penalty by making it look like you were part of a paid link scheme. 3. Have a look at the highest quality backlinks his websites have (open site explorer). Chances are he has decent links outside of his link wheel that you don't if he's ranking above you. Take a look at his domain authority to get a general sense of how strong his organic profile is. 4. Take a long, hard look at your own site, content, offering and backlinks and try to improve it. Can you create engaging content for your customers? Can you create a unique proposition that will make you stand apart from your competitors? All in all, despite the frustration I would avoid agonising over any dubious SEO tactics being used by your competitors - so long as they aren't negative SEO attacks on you. If they're willing to take such short-sighted risks then they risk long term harm to their business. George

Hi Monica, Thanks for the fast response. I'm a bit wary of 301 redirecting the old pages -- this would be extremely easy to do - however: if we were being penalised on those old pages, wouldn't this just redirect all the penalties to our new squeaky clean pages? I submitted a new sitemap to Google the day we made the changes -- probably about three weeks - a month ago including the new URLs (or as many as we could include with the 500 URL limit) and removing the old spammy ones. Penalty-wise, we've never had a manual warning or anything in WMT. However, this doesn't discount the idea that we may have been suffering an algorithm penalty, right? It'd be great to hear from anyone about their experience with 301's and the likeliness of passing on 'bad' linkjuice from old pages (does this even happen?). Also whether a 410 would help - stops all the 404 errors from continuously occurring and Google assuming there's something bizarre going on. Thank you again.

Thanks for your reply. Yes I recently used the Schema Mark-Up to help Google understand the business name, address, postcode, business category etc of each location. Thanks for the link, i will have a read up now. Regards Ben

Many, for pure backlinks check the most comprehensive are ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com

Hi, Content scraping is a very common thing and fortunately, with the rel=canonical tag still pointing to your domain, there is nothing to worry from content duplication point of view and with this tag intact, their content will not make it  to Google's index. You don't need to worry about the other website out-ranking you and you don't have to use disavow here as it is for spammy backlinks and not for rel=canonical tags. However, you can approach those guys and ask them to take it down immediately and you can file a DRM or DMCA case against them if they don't agree to take the content down. You can also report the matter to Google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en Hope it helps. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

You may want to consider using a 410 in the place of a 404 as it tells Google not to come back the link is dead.

I would definitely look into the Panda 4.1 update that happened 9/25. Double check the content on the pages and make sure that it is all relevant.

Good news!

Thanks for the feedback! We have looked at the mobile vs. desktop and both are down. I segmented just the mobile and it doesn't appear that any browser type is the cause. I do recall us reviewing the iOS issue awhile ago but that didn't appear to be the issue we saw this March. The missing direct traffic has not moved to another channel either and online sales have decreased so we haven't been able to identify this as a incorrect GA implementation. We have seen some issues with organic traffic too. Since a certain amount of direct / none traffic is organic, do you think this could be an organic SEO issue? The percentage decrease of direct traffic is higher but the actual decreased number of sessions for direct/none and organic are comparable.

Matt Cutts on dash vs underscore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8

Thanks for your opinion

Mark as Answered if it helps you . Thanks

Well they are not being closed because they are being fullfilled but becasue that is the period the client sets to receive CVs. They want more CVs but for that they need more SEO visibility and I thought black hat could work for a short lived link.

The usual, compile the links, disavow them If you got a manual penalty, submit a reconsideration ASAP. Find some other traffic sources for the mean time while building better links. You can also start with some other domains as backup. There's really no way to protect your site from something like that unless you have a really good brand plus a lot of great links.

At a fundamental level, you are keeping the data somewhere and it is rendered correctly. In a CMS this data is stored in a database completely outside search engine view. So it does not matter if it is in database or in physical directory somehow. So there is no benefit in keeping the structure same physically. Having said that and my own experience (we manage website with millions of pages) managing this using HTACCESS script is NOT a good idea. You will be limited by what you can do and maintaining will be quite challenging. I strongly suggest consider moving to a CMS (like drupal) and store all you content inside a database and the CMS script takes care of HTACCESS plus gives other goodies. There are several tool available to get your content from disk into a database.

Alpha, Is the domain authority the same for both sites?  How similar are their back link profiles?  Is there other interlinking going on between them and other sites? If all else is on the up and up, my feeling is that Google wouldn't be seeing them as a single site but that as the algorithm evolves, Google's understanding of the relationship between the two sites is being more clearly defined. But then again, if you think in terms of "entity", (rather than "sites") maybe Google does see them as "conjoined twins" : ), with one being stronger than the other and a searcher finds one, it will certainly find the other. Maybe it's time to start experimenting with redirecting things to a single domain.  You could start a single page or category and see how traffic or rankings change.  I wouldn't bet that it would bring you more traffic but maintaining a single domain vs. two interlinked ones could save time and effort.

Resolved! Thanks for your replies everyone. The strange thing was that even though the www version of pages did seem to 301 to non-www version (I checked headers were indeed 301), all our pages had disappeared from Google index and rankings too (exept homepage). The resolution came after we had our host reset the domain to www version on the server to the original state. Within days of changing that, all our deindexed pages (the whole site) jumped back into the original ranking positions in Google with www version and are re-indexed like nothing had happened. Hope this helps someone else.

Thank you Mick.

No it isn't.  As I said - RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] This is saying that the condition is off - so non HTTPS URL calls then have the rewrite rule to switch to HTTPS.