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I've seen this happen several times.  What probably has happened is that your penalty has expired.  All manual penalties do expire.  For some it can take months and for others it can take years.  When it expires you get no notification that anything has happened other than the manual spam actions viewer shows no webspam actions. You still want to make sure that you have done as thorough a job as possible.  If you happen to get another manual review and you still have unnatural links then you'll get penalized again and often the second penalty is worse than the first.  Also, if you had not done enough cleanup to pass previously then it means that there are still unnatural links that could affect you with the Penguin algorithm. Now, one other possibility.  I have seen a couple of instances where there is some incongruity between the manual spam actions viewer and the messaging system and one changes a day or two before the other.  It's more common to have it happen the other way where you get the message that your penalty has been revoked and then it takes a few days for the viewer to show it rather than having the viewer show no penalty and the message appears afterwards.  But, I don't think this is the case for you guys as it sounds like you were not waiting for a response from Google.

Hi Erin, Thanks for your response. I understand that seomoz will not retroactively generate reports for me and that I need to do this in my own capacity, or at least set up the report myself - what I was asking is can I go back and access old data in order to generate a report? Unless this is not something developed my seomoz yet. Thanks

From a not local perspective, redirecting based on IP is generally not the best idea. Early on at Distilled in Seattle, our I{ address was in Washington DC! IP Addresses are not reliable in the United States. There is that problem, plus the fact that Google only crawls from California. Therefore, depending on how the redirect was set up, they might just see the San Jose area content. Therefore, I am glad you decided against the redirect. I think your idea of letting people define where they are and find a new provider is perfect. The people in your area get the right content and others that happen on that page get to find a preferred vendor.

Thanks Dan I really I appreciate it. All the best, Tom

If your site is new(er) and / or simply does not have much trust from search engines yet (do not rank well) I would strongly encourage you to use similar keywords on page as long as it does not compromise user experience. Ideally also get those keywords in your H1. As your site becomes more trusted you can get away with more (less keywords on page) and still rank. It sounds like you may have a site where I would not recommend such approach yet.

The Penguin refresh comments, on my part, have been entirely speculative. It's hard to believe Google would go that long without some kind of data refresh on something with such wide repercussions. On the other hand, the data so far seems to suggest that that is what they're doing. I have no credible evidence, other than my own disbelief, that a site hit by Penguin can escape Penguin outside of a confirmed update. I hate being at Google's mercy for knowing when updates happen, and I do believe that Penguin will be more tightly integrated over time, but I also am fairly sure that Penguin had wide-ranging collateral damage that Google didn't entirely foresee. I think they're still trying to wrestle the Penguin update themselves. So, for now, the best evidence I have is that the only Penguin updates are the ones we know about. I can't prove it either way. I definitely don't think it's like Panda. I wonder if they occasionally do smaller data-only refreshes on Penguin, but I can't back that up.

I think Miriam nailed it. Smart advice as well using a home address is not a bad idea at all. Think of all the fantastic companies that started it either in the garage Which Google would consider their home / place of business. If you have a legitimate local listing your all set as you grow and acquire an office or whatever type of facility it is that you need to do business in you will have no problem with Google when making the change. Sincerely, Thomas

The site does have and has had ranking issues since the first Penguin and has really had problems the last few months. And other than some minor things low quality links are really the only problem with the site.

I would definitely go for a combination of descriptive for users and descriptive for bots, in that you're not losing valuable real estate in your title tags but you're not misleading anyone as to what is on the page. In general, you can create very well-optimised titles for SEO purposes without compromising usability - a title tag that simply reads "The Boston" isn't nearly as user-friendly as a title that says (for instance) "Modern black leather sectional Boston sofa with bookcase" (totally made up example using your title from above). The second is better for SEO and for human users - it's actually remarkably common how those two things are one in the same, given that Google wants to return results that are best for users

I noticed this as well but then some registrars do ask for special requirements. Check out the requirements on www.travel.travel: http://www.travel.travel/index.php/authenticate-register/industry-segments/

Wow, okay. Yeah, there they are. Thanks! Ruben

Hello Ben, Have you already made the change? Every product I looked at from that page had only one size/color/material, etc... What is the purpose of the change? Will the simple products AND the grouped products to which they belong all be indexable on their own URLs? Grouping products is one way to reduce the amount of product pages on the site by allowing shoppers to choose options from a single product page (e.g. size, color, material...) that would otherwise be listed as its own sku. If your goal is to allow shoppers to view each as its own product then that's fine as long as you're willing to write 100% unique, useful copy/descriptions for each of those pages. If not, it would be better to keep them grouped. As for the category page, I don't think it matters much what products are being featured there in terms of how the category page will rank. It will affect the pagerank being distributed to product pages though, so rankings could drop for your grouped product pages if you are only linking/showing simple products on category pages. Without a little more detail about how you group products and what you're trying to accomplish it's hard to provide a great answer.

So here is your issue run a review, start removing and disavowing all the bad links. A lot of penalties went out in April, e which is why Mozcast was so volatike, there wasn't a major update IMHO.

Using Majestic historic link function

Thanks for your superb help walking through this. I am thankful for the random error as I learned more valuable information about the Moz platform.

That would point the most authority at the home page, but isn't the best user experience. Our concern is that Google monitors how people use 301s in terms of how it affects user experience and whether the redirection was done purely for SEO purposes. However, if you can do that without confusion, it would be a good option.

The date on that post is 2010-- a lot has changed about Adwords since then! Here is a more recent post, hot off the presses: http://www.business2community.com/marketing/google-updates-adwords-keyword-planner-tool-advertisers-need-know-0861602