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First of all I must Agree with Moosa. I also ran some experiments like this and by the use of hyphens (for instance separating 2 words with a hyphen in de domainname). Even though my better backlink profile, my higher DA/PA and my better content (more actual, newer, more words, less links in the text) The website still keeps outranking me. But for clients of mine I've been running similar test which in turn show that it is very possible to outrank websites without hyphens, stopwords or The in the URL. That's why I agree with Moosa. Keep running the experiment in stages and maybe even use your information to write a YouMoz post about it. Could be a very interesting read. Jarno

Thanks everybody! Nice list

Interesting situation...and very frustrating for you, I'm sure. You mentioned this below: "I checked 'cached snapshot of page' in Google Toolbar for the pages that weren't being indexed, and it showed up as a 404 error. " This sounds like you had some sort of technical error.  But some things still don't add up for me.  It kind of sounds like your pages were not resolving for Google.  But, the odd thing is that if Google sees a 404 error, they keep trying for days, weeks or even months before they conclude that the pages should be removed from the index. I don't have an answer for you but the first place I'd look is to make sure that your robots.txt file is not blocking Googlebot in some way.  I'd also check server logs and perhaps check with your host to see if there was some significant down time for the site. If there was a technical glitch, and the problem is now fixed, then your pages should come back into the index without you doing anything. I'm pretty certain this isn't a penalty issue though.

I'll throw my recommendations in for videos:  One  of the most successful video series ever was the "Will It Blend" series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F (You know a video campaign has gone viral when it has it's own Wikipedia page that documents it.) Hope this helps... Jeff

Hi Yeah, lets say they use Xrumer. They hack your site, insert pages of their own, and links on your pages. They put those urls in text files based on their keyword targets/groups. They run the software, using those list with their link sources and using their auto insert random url template. So that pings a 404 to GWT so the 404 shows up there. If these are pros, they already know that the pages are dead by now, as they confirm links after each run. It just takes a bit more time for GWMT to get notified so you'll see them trickle in. So you'll see those 404 pages getting links from different dates. Hope that helps

Hi there, The only tool i know is http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ Hope it helps you.

Hi, I'm also dealing with duplicate content and searching for a proper solution. have you tried to use a canonical url for this issue? If only the url is different /releases/ v.s. /releases/index a canonical can help. Put this in the head here is more about duplicate content: http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

301 the domain over to capitalize fully but it sounds like you might want to keep both sites active. If you have content that you want to move over or is ranking, be sure to create separate 301 from the old url to the new url. The page that receives the 301 will benefit from that. In many cases, the new url will rank in the place of the old one. If they have pages that have great backlinks (like an about page or products page) but you don't really want to move them over and want to just delete them, then just 301 those urls to relevant urls on your site and you will benefit from their links. Hope that helps! Good luck!

That helps a lot. Thank you!

Thank you! I'll test it out!

I wouldn't use anything else for PR's! Best of luck with everything!!

Hi Andy I'm also seeing this on one of our own sites, as well as a lot of other websites in our own sector. From what I can see in webmaster tools, there was a big drop in the crawl rate around 21st of October for a few days and then the crawl rate picked up to normal levels within a few days. However, looking at the cache date of the homepage as well as other category pages, the date of 20 to 22nd of October seem fixed. But, newly added pages are being indexed. This is strange to say the least! Maz

I can only think of 2 real alternatives that would do you any good: Create separate pages that show only the content in your click-to-expand sections (being sure to add canonical tags where appropriate) and have those pages linked to from the footer, a sitemap, or whatever section you see fit. Place the content from the click-to-expand sections in alt-text for whatever buttons / images / etc. that you're using to guide users to the content. This should, in theory, still be crawled, and would act as any other alt-text does; meaning that it would allow those who can't view your content to still see a text version of it. While it's odd that Google would denounce click-to-expand content, they've always had a weird distaste for javascript and other useful codes on occasion. Whatever you do, I think it's always important to place the value of UX over SEO. But that's just my insight. Good luck!

#3 is a winner from my perspective, too. Nice feedback on this thread, everyone. Great to see!

Thank you!!

Assuming both are on different servers or if you can do the transfer for the whole thing quickly: 1. Just copy the content over, including the meta details, images etc. 2. Put a 301 from the old page url to the new page url. 3. Update both sitemaps and refresh them in webmaster tools. That's basically it. There can be other tricky things like if you decide to 301 the whole domain or if you want to leave both content on.

Yep.

My $0.02 is that javascript might work for your site, but it's not going to give you the benefits that 301 redirects will offer to you. According to Google's Official Webmaster Central Blog, as of May 23, 2014, Google is able to execute Javascript: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html That said, if you have your javascript or CSS in separate files, and are blocked with robots.txt, according to Google, they won't be able to execute it. And according to the post, they can't process all javascript. It's not a bad thing to have 404 pages for pages that you want to kill off and let die. If you do have important inbound links, though, it's better to 301 redirect them and keep 85% of the link strength. More backup on this: According to Rand Fishkin's Moz blog writeup, Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO? http://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo "When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page: A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this) B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach It's OK to let it 404." According to Moz's Redirection SEO Best Practice: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection ... you want to use a 301 redirect to indicate that the content has moved permanently. I hope this helps! -- Jeff

Hi Monica, It's almost certainly an issue related to the Backlinker plugin given that error message, though clearly it's not a straightforward solution. I found this post on the wordpress forum, perhaps this is your issue too (by member pee_dee): "Look in header.php inside your current theme and find this line: http://www.4llw4d.freefilesblog.com/jquery-1.6.3.min.js This server is no longer able to provide the .js file linked to your theme. I found it mine at: http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.6.3.min.js Get a hold of the .js file (or google the heck out of the .js file you need) and point to it on your server." Hope that works George