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Just wanted to clarify (for the sake of others who may read this post) that the question was in regards to Penguin and I think in your situation, you're dealing with manual penalties.  With Penguin, there is no reconsideration request.  You've got to clean up the best you can and then hope that things improve when Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm. It's still up for debate whether removing links (as opposed to disavowing) is important for Penguin.  My current advice is that if a link is easy to remove then do it.  But, otherwise I disavow.  While you're right that it is important to show Google your efforts in regards to link removal for a manual penalty, no one is going to look at your work for an algorithmic issue. I asked John Mueller in a hangout once whether disavowing was as good as removing for Penguin and he said, "essentially yes".  However, because there are potential problems that could come up with the disavow tool (such as improper formatting or taking too long to recrawl to disavow), if you can remove the link that's not a bad thing to do.

Hello, The canonical looks fine, also you should be ensure your internal links which should point to the canonical version of your page, also the external links count (they should link to your canonical version). Also you can include the robots clause on your short version as NOINDEX,FOLLOW. It will resolve your problem Hope it helps Claudio

Thanks, that answers the question and you raise some good points... slow and steady versus a find and replace.

Hi Peter! This metric is located under the analyze followers tab. Are you not able to access this feature?

Thanks Wes Those 2 articles are spot on for what i am looking for! Ash

In many cases, it is easier to start over than to clean up.  But, no one can really answer your question without knowing a lot more facts. In general though, I would recommend attempting recovery if either of the following are true for your site: -You have a good base of truly natural links to your site -You have a lot invested in your domain name. But, if you're not married to the domain name and there aren't many natural links then starting fresh might be the best option.

Hi Jonathan, While this should not be affecting you locally, yes, there is some chance that this could be affecting organic results if these searches for this person are popular. So, on a local front, no don't worry about this. On an organic front, this is one of those weird things where there are similarities or even synonyms from which Google is drawing incorrect intent.

Hi Jonathan, Can you please give an example of the discrepancy to ensure that you receive a good answer?

May you update me when we are able to control the crawled pages?

Thank you for the info, Nick. The link is the logo in the header, so mousing over it brings up "Home." Most sites don't bother with the ALT tag, but since it is being used, we might as well make it a bit more informative with the company name. The company name isn't well branded, so little things like this can only help.

Thank you EGOL and Chris Menke. Very helpful. Much appreciated.

Hi Chris, Definitely no stupid questions here, and your question is an excellent one. I have to start by saying that I have pretty much zero faith in keyword tools these days. Neither Google nor Bing's KW tools work well for local keywords. It's depressing. Moving on, local searches are typically much more refined than what you are describing, in that they center on city names, not state names. Google will return local packs of results for queries that they determine have a city-based intent, whether or not the searcher includes a geo modifier in their query. Of course, there are instances in which someone might be searching for a statewide object (like National Parks in Colorado), but are you certain this is the way people are searching for what your company offers, or could it be that they would be looking by city names instead? This plays into whether you feel you need to compete on a statewide or city level. So, I guess I'm answering your question with another question! Is the business model truly local (city level) or is it a statewide business and perhaps, even, a virtual business?

Hi there! If you are looking for a consultant or agency, you should definitely check out the official list of Moz recommended companies Michael mentioned. If you are seeking to fill an in-house SEO role, you may want to consider posting the job listing on Inbound.org - http://inbound.org/jobs. Best of luck! Christy

After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found. Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword. Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive. Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own.  This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly. I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task. My Ultimate Advice: Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!

For product pages, I would canonical the page with the most descriptive URL. For category pages, I agree with you, I would noindex them. I think I just answered my own question!!

Is this available now, 4 years later. I need at least 1-2 years data going back in order to create certain reports. We do not have all reports going back on file tbh, but we need that capability. Do any of your plans offer this at this point? I want to be able to compare 6-12 months of performance to the previous 6-12 months.

Thanks Michael. This looks great. A very similar tool to Buffer. Regards Gary

Hi Gregory, Many thanks for this, i gave that a go instantly, made perfect sense. Sadly though it still wasn't liking it I tried removing the /b/ Then i also used a new browser to view the page as a completely new user. As you said this gave me the URL without any extra letters etc but it still did not accept this. Would appreciate any other ideas you might have, that one sounded like a winner, i'm not sure why it wont accept the url as displayed on the page.

Hi, The gains and losses is compared to the previous week but we did just launch monthly reports. So you will be able to compare monthly now. You can also have things like Ranking History emailed to you. You can do that by clicking the button on the right side in the Keyword Rankings section. You can also set up Custom Reports that have you choose what reports you would like and can get them weekly or monthly. The previous reports are kept so you can go back and compare them later to more recent reports. Cheers, Steffany