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The calendar isn't in a Wordpress installation, it's in a custom CMS. What was happening was whenever you click a date, category or date range, you'd get the same URL with parameters (calendar.html?year=2014&month=10&day=23). We've modified that template to be canonical to the main calendar page, so hopefully that will address duplicates there. When you click a specific event title, you get an event page with an event ID parameter (event.html?evid=1960). We've modified that template to display the date and event title in the <title>tag and a truncated description of the event in the meta description, so hopefully that will treat each event as a separate page with its own content.<br /><br />But we really do need to separate the subdomains from our reports, as the wordpress installations are throwing up duplicates for a lot of items, attachment posts, etc. This will be fixed with relaunches of those subdomains, but for the time being it sure makes hunting down actionable items on our main domain difficult.</p></title>

thanks so much

Hi Jen! Yes, this thing IS on. Have a great day!

This is a known problem with YouTube's safety mode filter but there is not much information about it. There is no official appeals process but you can report it on the support forum thread where one of the community volunteers, Epontius, has been helping to escalate some users false positive reports to YouTube's staff. You could report the false positive there and ask for Epontius help. Hope this helps.

You aren't alone!  I have a client that just lost all of his 1-5 rankings!  About 20 in all.  Taking ubiquitousinnovation 's direction, and creating a disavow file for the spammy links that were created before our firm started working on the site.

It's tough to speak in generalities, but in almost all of the cases where I suspect negative SEO was in play, there was an inherent weakness or problems in the link profile to begin with. If you add those problems to a domain with a questionable history, your risk is going to be fairly high. If you were a new site in a completely different industry with no history (or a good history), then the history of that domain might not matter. In your case, though, I'm hearing some alarm bells. Also keep in mind that unless you're going to start over cold-turkey, and not 301-redirect any of the old site, you'll carry any link-related problems with you. So, re-launching on a new domain is definitely a big decision and will probably take months of work to rebuild momentum. Granted, waiting for the next Penguin refresh could take months, too, so I understand your dilemma. If you're going to take this step, though, I'd put the time and money into a domain with a clean history. You can't afford to do this twice.

Looks like everything's in order. Though for general SEO and accessibility help, it would be great to provide transcripts for your videos.

Hi, That should be enough to stop the search engines crawling and indexing the test site. Remember to take it off when you go live though.

Hi Sam. I would advise you to move on with safer SEO in any case! As Chappers states, Google won't notify you of algorithmic penalties. If changes in rankings/traffic coincide with know algorithm updates, that is your clue. Things may change a bit in the days to come as things settle but might as well clean up those backlinks now! Hopefully the next refresh will not take so long. Sorry!

That about liability is what I should think of. About on-page, I actually didn't use it anywhere except in title of tags on some pages with short title tag and it is still ranking good for those keywords even without any single mention of "top" or "best" Anyway, thanks for response. Will try to get some links from bloggers' top lists

Erica this is fantastic - thanks for the link - great blog!

2 of my sites hit yesterday and they are not showing anywhere on google. They are still indexed but there is no manual action on webmaster. i think they are not coming back.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm happy to see that my site benefitted from Google refining P3 or that a Panda refresh potentially helped rankings. Either way, it was a great learning experience that resulted in me improving the back link profile while improving the onsite user experience. Thank you again for all your feedback.

Hello! I know when you are first getting started you really want to set obtainable goals and benchmarks of acceptable link building volumes - don't focus on this. Instead, focus on realistic timelines to launch exceptional content. Launching this content will make the link building exponentially easier, but NOT automatic. I'm not talking about just another blog post, top-XX list, or infographic here. I am talking about something that is so cool people will want to talk about it. If you are in a boring niche, think parallel niches. If you are in a narrow niche, think broader. For example, I am in the East TN travel niche, but my team recently created a cool digital asset for the whole country that had good success. Once you build the content, you should also set realistic outreach goals. Don't reach out to TechCrunch, HuffPo, etc. unless it is the type of content they regularly post. Instead, look at who is linking to similar assets (use OSE, AHREFS, Majestic, etc.) and start there. Personalize pitches for each site and make the pitch as irresistible as possible. Depending on the asset type, it may be possible to involve some of the influential site owners/bloggers in creative process. At the end of the day numbers and quality don't matter as much as creating high-quality, exceptional content on a regular basis. You will have some strike-outs, but you will also have some home-runs. The process for content creation and the promotion of that content is what you need to focus on not the number OR quality of the links (initially).

Thanks, Marie. That post is really helpful. Just to clarify one point. I've read that google may take as long as six months to recrawl a website. Does that mean that many of the links on our disavow list uploaded in Sept might not have actually had the (invisible) nofollow tag applied yet, and in which case may still be harming our website as far as penguin is concerned? When I read that google was processing disavow requests with the penguin update, I thought that that meant that the usual wait wouldn't apply, that everything would be recrawled with the penguin refresh, if that makes sense. I'm trying to convince myself that our work on removing/disavowing links hasn't fully taken effect yet, and that we'll see a bounce in our rankings with the next penguin update, whenever that may be. I'd rather not take the lack of improvement we've seen this time around as a sign that we're never going to make a recovery. I certainly can't see how we can do much more work in terms of removing links. We were pretty thorough.