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Working on it. Thanx

| 445  Submitted | | 398  Indexed | Theres the pages on the website. I will have to look into google plus, I was reading up on google plus and authorship.  This seems like something we should be getting on, more active google plus account and authoring our blogpost with a author account. Thanks so much for the advice so far Victor

I doubt you are being penalized for links on forum sites. If it makes sense for people to be mentioning your site on those forums, then it makes sense that there is a link. On the other hand, if it is clear that the link placement was manipulative and added manually for the sole reason of getting the link, then you might have a problem. If you don't mind sharing your site url, I'd like to take a look in opensiteexplorer!

I've tested both and the logic looks fine. However, as always with .htaccess changes, I'd recommend testing to verify this has been set up properly once you roll these out (easy enough with a quick ping / page load).

If they're all pointing to one url and you've 404'd the url then you've got nothing to worry about.  These links will not count. Here's more info: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website

Hi Edmond, Chris is right.  I haven't notice anything in the past couple of days and I haven't seen any buzz from anyone else.  Usually, if someone in Google sneezes, the SEO news outlets go nuts. I wanted to clarify something Chris didn't touch on, though.  You seem to be referring to the Google Toolbar PageRank update that happened a few days ago.  I wanted to clarify for you that the update didn't affect rankings.  The Toolbar PageRank is just a general indicator of a site's pagerank in the context of Google's current index.  It's just an indicator (and an unreliable one at that), not something that causes anything to happen. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

OMG how could I did not think about this ! Tks !

Felip3, Thanks for the response. I agree - it's too easy for spammers to attack and destroy brands. I especially agree, and have always been proponent, of diversifying traffic sources. Of course, when the majority of website traffic is coming from Organic (as it was for us) and then drops off, it can still leave a bruise. Thanks, Mike

Thanks everyone, you've helped solidify my position on this. Link building is extremely difficult and there are fewer and fewer "safe" activities, and unfortunately we don't have an active blog on this particular domain, but ideally I would rather they wrote 1 high quality article for our own site than 4 low quality articles for syndication. Chris - I definitely agree that even if these articles don't hurt us in the short-run, they won't help us much in the long run, so I think I'll push back and get them to come up with some more ideas.

Samuele- Sorry to hear that the server was down for five days.  That's not a lot of fun to deal with. Here's a great link to an interview by Matt Cutts about Website downtime and how it affects Google rankings: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2281151/Matt-Cutts-Short-Website-Downtime-Wont-Hurt-Your-Search-Rankings Basically, if the server is down for a day, you're fine.  More downtime than that, though, and Google sees this as a signal that the user experience might not be amazing. My recommendations to prevent this from happening again: 1. Back up each site to at least two locations.  In the case that a server like this goes down, you can migrate the sites to a different host quickly.  Make sure you have the database + the site contents backed up.  I recommend backing up locally to a hard drive, as well as another cloud-based site, too.  For a critical site, it may be worth having a "hot" backup site that can be pushed live via DNS quickly and easily.  For a site with 100+ sites on it, make sure you have a list of all of the sites on the server, and order them in importance of what is most critical to work on first. 2. Make sure that the DNS doesn't route through the server with 100+ sites on it.  Use the DNS controls at your domain name registrar, instead.  That way you can quickly re-route the DNS to go to a new hosting platform, and not have to wait for the server to come back up. 3. Consider moving to a different hosting platform that has more uptime / reliability.  100+ sites on a server is a lot of eggs in a basket.  (Note: I've done something similar in the past, and it's not worth it to have all of those sites sitting together on a shared server.  Better to break them up and put them on several different servers if possible.) Finally, once the site is back up, I'd try to bolster the importance of the site with additional relevant content, inbound links, social media, etc.  I might suggest a permission-based email campaign to past customers to bring them back, and let them know about the site outage. Hope this helps... -- Jeff

Hi Linda Do NOT redirect - If you set up a redirect you will pass the penalty to the new domain and you will have the exact same results. I suggest you clean the profile and once you see your traffic picking up then do 301. Try to think why you got penalised. Go to webmaster tools and download your latest links - there is a tab and you can select it. Since you were hit with the latest update I would start to check links within the 2 update dates. Disavow those links or try to remove them. I am sure you will pick up. I can have a look for you if you want should you give me the web site url on a PM. Best of luck!

Hmmm.. seems to be a very common issue. How about creating script that fires the map load on a div that loads a static map image instead of the iframe by default? Then using a simple function switch that image to the iframe of the map. That should do it for the "sorry we have no imagery here" problem. If it doesn't, you could try using some kind of internal catching to get the static image and save it in your server to serve that as the "1st" image, you can then load the iframe. Hope that makes sense

Hi TheGoatMan, This is an interesting topic. My guess is that you're asking this question because you know about the EMD penalty of recent times. Curiously, this penalty did not appear to affect local business rankings as much as virtual business rankings. That being said, the EMD penalty did indicate to all business owners that Google is not a fan of optimized website URLs being coupled with low quality websites. If you are just starting a new business, choosing to name it with your service/geo keywords in mind is a smart idea. So, instead of being The Back Relief Doctor, your might name your business Boston Chiropractic Center (provided that doesn't already exist, or course). Thus, your domain name could be bostonchirorpacticcenter.com and both your business name and URL would be an authentic representation of your business. If, however, your business already exists, it wouldn't be my first choice to go with an EMD domain that doesn't reflect your business. I'd rather have The Back Relief Doctor reside on backreliefdr.com than on mybostonchiro.com, simply because I feel that all of Google's moves in recent years have been towards authenticity. You'll find differing opinions on this, but this is mine What you must not do, of course, is to misrepresent your business name anywhere by adding keywords to it. Use your legal business name or DBA at all times - on the website, building citations, social media, etc. Finally, there is the option of re-branding a business, if you feel there would be significant benefits in renaming The Back Relief Doctor 'Boston Chiropractic Center'. However, this is not a choice to be made lightly, as re-branding of a local business requires a massive citation cleanup campaign to edit all existing references to the old name so that they reflect the new one. This can result in temporary or long-term ranking loss and other problems, so this is a choice that deserves very careful consideration. Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Thanks for the help George!

IF all you are doing is changing a graphic image banner, and if that is done solely based on country of origin evaluation there would be no negative SEO impact.

Sitewide links are not the ideal, even if their are good. I suppose the links in the good blogs are from a blogroll in sidebar, and that location for a link may sound suspect. Said that, I would maintain them at first,  concentrate in cleaning the toxic links you have detected, do a reconsideration request (and eventually uploading a disavow). Just in the case the penalization is not quit, then I will consider the idea of asking the blogs to move the link from a sitewide situation to an editorial one (maybe creating a page: "The site we like", which should not be just a list of links but also give an explication why the blogs like those sites. That would be helpful also for the sites themselves, because they will get rid of any suspect of manipulative link building from their side.

Hi, The two most popular cacheing plugins for WordPress are probably: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ and the w3total cache one you mention. Although they both have the same aim, the way they go about it is quite different.  Depending on your technical knowledge you may find Super Cache easier to set up and manage than w3total. For what it's worth I doubt you'll find a plugin that is better than these two, but you may benefit from experimenting with both to see which suits your host better. I'd suggest that if either plugin working on a standalone basis is not making a difference, then you may have issues with your host that need addressing.

I don't think nofollowing lots of links would be unnatural, as it doesn't strike me as a quick "hack" to boost your rankings. If nofollow was taken off lots of links then that might be something Google would pay attention to as PageRank would then be passed to these links. If you can't endorse / trust the links then nofollowing them is what Google recommends: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375 If you want to be extremely cautious then you could add nofollow to the links on some of the websites, and see if anything bad happens before doing the rest. George

Hi Peter, I manage a site called www.theremovalistsguide.com.au and l'm always looking for webmasters in the industry to work with. Please feel free to contact me on rob@theremovalistsguide.com.au I'll look forward to hearing from you.