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I think many of the commenters have good points here. It's really tough to make a call like this without a deep knowledge of the situation, and for any of us to tell you what to do would probably be irresponsible. Generally, I don't think Google transfers penalties across IPs like they used to occasionally do. With IPv4 space running out, sharing IPs is just a lot more common than it used to be. Google also has other cues, like domain ownership (they're technically a registrar, so they have access to a lot of data) to go by. To be safe, you could isolate it and get a new IP. I'm not sure it's necessary, but if you're going to go so far as to start over, you might as well do it as cleanly as possible. The question is whether starting over with a new domain will solve the problem. If you want to avoid the penalty transferring, you can't 301-redirect the old site, which means that you'll lose all of your link equity and leave past visitors stranded. That's a huge loss to take, and it's going to take time to rebuild (as Michael B. said). Will the content be the same? There may be other aspects of the site that caused you problems, and if they're related to the content or site structure, they could just come back.

Yes a toxic domain will infect a new domain if 301 is implemented. I would lean towards cleaning up the existing domain.  Even if you end up disavowing every linking domain the existing domain is likely to have created more trust than starting from scratch. If it is a manual penalty ensure you document all steps to try and clean up so you can detail in the reconsideration request.

Thats great thanks Phil !

I also reference the Moz guide that @Chris mentions above. That and (less frequently) this one - b-s.ee/149L8Cv. A how-to from stateofdigital.com for mobile websites. I followed @Eli's suggestion and Googled "seo audit filetype:pdf". It's a great template.

It seems that the URL you asked me to run at OSE's home page should not be the back-link but the my site's link whose back-links I want? Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. It could be that you are seeing only links pointed to the URL. Be sure to use the filters and drop-down to choose "pages on this root domain"  (see the attached screenshot) Otherwise feel free to shot me the URL and I'll be happy to take a look. One note: different indexes always list different URLs, even Google Webmaster Tools doesn't list a complete set of links to your site. Moz's index could be considered "medium" size. It doesn't contain every link to your site, but it contains the majority of the important ones. 9pkVWtu.png

As usual, a good answer from Chris Menke. Santaur, you asked: "Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? " I say "Yes". If it helps usability, as sub-category pages often do in this type of situation, you should keep them. You can add content to sub-category pages to help them rank better for phrases that will bring in the RIGHT customer from the SERPs, even if they don't know yet what specific product they want. For example: "Overstock Ski Jackets" or "Discount Ski Jackets" would align with your client's value prop, target high-converting keywords, and bring in the right visitor to the right page.

Just checking in here. How have things been going? Just wanted to add some info; did you actually receive a "manual action" from Google? If not, a reconsideration request is not needed, it's an algo not a manual penalty Hummingbird will not do this. The "date" of Hummingbird is not really a specific point in time, and it's definitely not the day Google announced it. The Hummingbird algo didn't act like Panda, Penguin or any other penalty. Disavowing links can take up to six months to have an effect. This info is straight from John Muller at Google. Google has to actually crawl the websites that are listed in the disavow file before applying the disavow. It's not good enough to only disavow. Google wants to see some effort to remove links as well. You may not bounce back unfortunately (tough to say without seeing the site). But if you were artificially ranking too high with bad links, now you might be ranking where you should have all along. Overall the best thing to do is remove and disavow as much as possible and work on moving forward as best possible to acquire new links and make the site better overall.

Thanks everyone, you've helped solidify my position on this. Link building is extremely difficult and there are fewer and fewer "safe" activities, and unfortunately we don't have an active blog on this particular domain, but ideally I would rather they wrote 1 high quality article for our own site than 4 low quality articles for syndication. Chris - I definitely agree that even if these articles don't hurt us in the short-run, they won't help us much in the long run, so I think I'll push back and get them to come up with some more ideas.

Awesome! this actually worked for one of my accounts. Unfortunately one of my accounts wont let me do this, or unlink them so I can do this. From what I am reading it has to do when and how the Youtube or Google+ profile was created. This was very helpful. I am going to keep playing with my owners/managers, and logging in with different users, and info to see if I can eventually get this to work properly. I am debating deleting the unwanted Google+ profile, and seeing if it will then allow me to attach a different google+ profile to the youtube channel. I am afraid that deleting the unwanted Google+ Profile will also delete the attached (wanted) youtube channel.

I disagree, actually: one thing I have learned from my friends outside of our online or development world is that most people see URLs as a vaguely incomprehensible string that they copy exactly. There is a tendency to add "www" if there isn't one to the beginning of a URL, but generally visitors are just going to copy and paste whatever is in their address bar when sharing. So, I would just make sure that any "www"s are 301 redirected to their non "www" version of the URL. Good luck!

Hmmm, this is a weird one. My guess is, since Google originally found those links (maybe before your site launched, but the pages were linked to and live through the IP address?), it keeps returning to them and finding them. In that case, not much you can do, but keep those canonicals on. Canonicals really can save you from duplicate content problems: I've had clients with multiple versions of every page based on the path you take to a page, and canonicals have allowed them to rank well and avoid penalties entirely. As long as you're doing everything else right, hopefully this shouldn't be too much of an issue. Sorry this ended up falling on you!

Wow, that was like an hour of digging--trying  to track down the linkscape crawler.  I think I've got it now.

Charles its very difficult for me to respond to this question unless i have the url and the search queries . how the pages are optimized the g+ page where is it linking to for more information about the venice update check out this post on moz http://moz.com/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update

That's great, thanks David!

I would use the keywords, imagine if you just had the title to go by what that would say to both the user and to Google's spiders.

Hi Kevin, Good thoughts from Kevin Ramirez regarding content development and Richard Horvath regarding ensuring that the content you develop is unique! The challenge here is that Google is biased toward physical location. Thus, an SAB (service area business) must typically plan to go after local pack rankings for its city of location and organic rankings for its location-less service cities. The type of content you will be developing is typically known as city landing pages. You can read more about this here: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

Hi Purple Indigo, If I can, I'll try and actually telephone the person I want the link from - this way they can't bin my enquiry out-of-hand without reading it! It is much, much easier to get the link you want if you can speak to the person (if the person runs a business local to me, I'll try and meet them for coffee to ask!) If I can't speak to a link prospect, I will email them. These have a lower success rate than the ones initiated by phone. We haven't created any link bait for our sites. This is mostly down to a lack of resource. I can't ask for a designer/writer's time for something that may not work. But, having said that, we do create a ton of regular advice articles (I work for a mortgage broker specialising in landlord mortgages) and these get linked to naturally (but there is no control over these links, but they are still very nice to have!!!) What are your preferred methods? Amelia

Google is not really a big fan of redirects to find your sitemaps, but of course you can generate them on request instead of hosting them publicly. So if you directly would submit: mypage.com/sitemapxml/ then Google would have no problem with doing this.