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Hi Jane, I really appreciate your taking the time to go over all this with me. Thanks, again! Cheers... Darcy

Thanks will check out the post.  To be very honest the affiliate sites were very iffy in quality. They had little in the way of unique content and were more a working test of Matt Cutts' notion that if you put lots of differently sourced duplicate content on one page then the page won't be treated as unique. It appears I was wrong! I'm not fussed about these sites, they made a bit of money but their main purpose was to test the content theory as we are considering adding a few affiliate type products into our proper magento site. I think it's safe to say that the working hypothesis that lots of different bits of duplicate content = one unique page is very much disproved, hehe. Lesson for next time...if trying to get a site banned by google (which was pretty much the aim of the test). do it on a different server to the proper websites. Time to buy a new ip for the magento stores just to be safe

I have the same thing but at a larger scale. 122k clicks according to facebook, 1450 visits according to Omniture... and no sales. That's the less optimized 2.5k€ I've spent on a campaign

Hi There Few things; They are no longer ranking for me on "caliber signs and imaging" set to Irvine, CA. I think they are ranking still for "caliber signs and graphics" because it's an exact title match, and the domain is carrying a large part of the ranking Their site is really messed up - like phenomenally messed up - looks like they still exist as of last year on facebook but they either don't use their site or it's just not updated. I don't think there was anything malicious, it's just bad. The blog - strange! The "author's" profile IS in fact "martin" - I wonder if it somehow got hijacked. I think it DID get hijacked actually. All the posts 2011 and prior are real (like this one) - then the spam starts. Now, if the word "caliber" is not commercial (like a "caliber sign" is not a thing, right?) - then they are still going to rank very easily for things like "caliber" despite their bad site and geographic location. So essentially, they are ranking because they are super low-competition terms, they actually haven't done anything malicious on their end - and now we know Google can process iFrame sites

I'm meeting with one of the Q&A project leads this afternoon, and will show them this question. For monitoring a thread, if you click Email Updates, you can get an email each time there's a new post on the thread, without having to make a post yourself. We don't have a way to show you which threads you've visited, but we do show you if a thread has new answers when you're browing the list of questions.

Hemblem, Although you're redesigning the site, I actually don't recommend using a 302 redirect during the 'redesign' process, as it can have disastrous effects on search engine rankings. I would prefer that you keep the current website up and running: and then 301 redirecting the appropriate pages when the site is ready to go live. I realize that you want to do, but I have seen too many websites have problems getting things straightened out with the search engines to do what you're suggesting.

Thank you Gordon.  I enjoyed reading your reply and can relate to it. Since Google has changed so many things about the way that they rank websites, a lot of the advice for improving your rankings that was given just two years ago is now deadly to the health of your website.  And, there are some SEO forums today where an awful lot of the advice that is given is really bad in general and often inappropriate for the question being asked.  (Moz Q&A is generally pretty high quality IMO and part of that is because the Moz staff keeps an eye on it, participates in some threads that are jumping the track and uses endorsements to highlight good information.  There are a lot of forums where bad stuff persists and grows.) I am sure that I have given a lot of bad advice simply because of my beliefs and understandings are different from how google works - or I might not understand the person's question.  And, that is where a forum works well.  Since nobody knows many things about Google we answer questions that start an argument and many times being wrong advances ultimately advances your knowledge and understanding. For years I have read most of the questions that have a title like.... "Wah!  My traffic dropped".... or "Wah!  My site fell out of Google".  Those are the most valuable to understand and when my traffic dropped from a Panda problem, I had a really good idea why and how to fix it.  If I was not watching those threads I would have been wondering "What happened?" and not realize that something can be done about it. Q&A is where you can keep your ear to the ground.  And if you are helpful here, people will really be extra helpful to you when you ask a question.  Thanks to all who have answered questions for me.

Did a 301 fix things?

Hey Jay, Can you tell me, how you found the incorrect html? I am having the exact same problem, as you did back then, but I don't know where to look. I am having two sites, both Wordpress and build over the same theme, but one has a lot of 404 errors according to Moz and Webmastertools. The other one doesn't. It's it driving me crazy! Thanks!

Thank you all for your response!! It's very appreciated! I took all your point in consideration! After studying the data from google analytics, i think the main problem is on my registration page spped! Thank you again!

Thanks Don! I'll look into that

Great thanks for that donford. I've noticed a well ranked competitor is using 302 redirects to do what i'm after. Would this benefit me at all?

Hey Tom, Can you confirm that there has been no penalty on your blog domain? If not, you should be careful because penalties are known to hop 301s and JohnMu recently revealed that penalties will follow content without a 301. That said I would prioritize what you redirect based on what has links and shares. There's no reason to set up redirects for page that no one is visiting or linking to. Go with your first option, but 410 them to get them out of the index faster. -Mike

No, it doesn't need to be unique when doing this. Google understand that a product doesn't change, just because the location does, and is how they suggest avoiding duplication issues in these circumstances. -Andy

Talk about nice timing. Marie has posted about this very issue today on Moz: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase I recommend that read to everyone who has doubts similar to mine.

Hi Conor, First off you may find this video from Matt Cutts helpful, he mentioned about blocking the Google mobile bot from your none mobile site. You can also use the rel=alternative and canonical the mobile to the desktop version.  you may find this page super helpful - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details#separateurls Annotation in the HTML On the desktop page, add: <code><link< span="">rel="alternate"media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></link<></code> and on the mobile page, the required annotation should be: <code><link< span="">rel="canonical"href="http://www.example.com/page-1"></link<></code> This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required. The canonical tag only affect search engines and won't affect users so if you're sharing the same content canonical to the desktop. You may find having a URL structure like  m.example.com/product better for organizing the two sites. Hope that helps. good luck!

Do you have audiences in each language, are you going to engage with them? There seems little point in having a few FB pages not used compared to one main page that has good engagement and is used. I would look at it that way which way will help your audience and thus improve the brand.

Hiya, If you've not got a penalty technically you don't have to worry but if you wanted to be proactive you could do some of the following: As you mentioned disavow some links you feel are not great and don't add to your sites portfolio. Get in touch with some of the webmasters ask the links to be changed to your domain instead of exact match. along side the above you could look into getting some more links to "out do" the links as a percentage but i wouldn't recommend it. Hope that helps you out a bit.

Do "/houses" and "/houses?page=1" have exactly the same content? I'd definitely want to see rel=canonical on the "page=1" version - those are just duplicates. Google has expressly said that they don't want you to canonical pages 2, 3, etc. back to page 1. That doesn't mean it never works, just that it's a bit dicey. As Chris said, rel=prev/next is another option. Theoretically, it would allow all of the results pages to rank, but let Google know they're a series and not count them against you as thin content. In practice, even my enterprise SEO colleagues have mixed feelings. There's just very limited evidence regarding how effective it is. It is low-risk. The other option is to go a bit more old-school and META NOINDEX anything with "page=", and just let the original version get indexed and rank. This can help prevent any dilution and would also solve your "page=1" issue. The biggest risk here is if that cut off PR flow across your site or if you had links to the paginated results. In most cases, that's unlikely (people don't link to or tweet page 17 of your search results), but it's a case-by-case thing. Unfortunately, the "best" solution can be very situational, and even Google isn't very clear about it.