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They will need to take control of the domain themselves, if you have removed all the content and have no involvement in hosting / the domain register anymore you need not worry. The responsability is all on the new owner to validate their new ownership with services like WMT.

Anyone else has any idea ?

There was a similar question yesterday which was answered by Moz staff that might apply to your situation: http://moz.com/community/q/missing-campaign-after-billing-update "We found a bug that is preventing archived campaigns from showing up in the UI and have a fix deploying that should resolve this soon, but I do have a workaround for you in the interim. After you log into Moz, type in: pro.moz.com/campaigns in your browser navigation window. This will take you to the archived campaigns. From there, just click on the Activate button next to the ones you want to bring back."

Hey there, Not sure I'm seeing the same SERPs as you... Okay, for "terminology management" you rank 1st in the Uk https://www.google.co.uk/search?biw=1366&bih=683&q=terminology+management&gl=uk&pws=0 and #3 for "translation memory" https://www.google.co.uk/search?gl=uk&pws=0&q=translation+memory Notice that I use 2 additional parameters in the search URL, pws=0 removes personalization and gl=uk tells Google I'm searching from the UK. No offence to Maximillion here, but hreflang is not the right choice for you at the minute. If you start losing ground to UK based websites for these generic English terms, you can follow the previous advice but you'd have to make some really clever/complicated adjustments. From the current situation, you're in very good shape and you shouldn't need to do anything else.

Sounds good.  Thanks for following up and letting us know.

Hello All of our pricing and subscription levels are listed here: http://moz.com/products/api/pricing We actually do not offer a developers license but can set you up with a 30 day trial of the Low Volume package.

I agree with Vadim. Authorship is normally for articles while ratings are for reviews. Having a rating on an article is not as useful as having it for a review.

Hi there, I'm just checking in to see what the current status of this issue is. Please let us know, thanks! Christy

I agree, rank checking is only one metric you need to follow in order to know if your on track in reaching your goals. You should also track the website goals and business goals you achieve with your organic search results. Your goal should never be first rank but optimized ROI from organic search. So rank checking is only the first layer you need to keep track off.

I agree the strategy is ill-conceived. Either it was executed by an incompetent company, or one that is into "churn and burn" tactics. By the time Google catches on,  it will have moved on to the next client.

I've got clients who are seeing penalties appear recently with backlink profiles like this, where the same content is published on a ton of subdomains of really weak sites. Those backlinks will be seen as spam, guaranteed--the only question is, how long will it be before it hurts your site via either an algorithmic or manual penalty? Any time people are creating a strategy like this, and selling links on all those subdomains to lots of people, it's only going to be a matter of time before it gets on Google's radar.  It might be that some other website gets tagged with a manual penalty, so a Google spam engineer looks at their profile and sees a pile of links from these same subdomains, and says "whoa, Nelly, better add this to our list of Really Bad Places"...and then a month or so later, everyone who has a pile of links from these subdomains gets an algorithmic penalty.  Or, it might happen that 100 other webmasters all disavow links from all of these subdomains, and maybe 100 is the magic # of disavowals that Google uses to determine domains that are most likely spamming. Either way, I'd say the clock is ticking on these subdomains, and if it were me, I'd disavow now, even before the penalty happens.  Remember, you'll need to wait a few months after the disavow is uploaded for it to have an effect anyway....so ideally, you want your disavow to be read just before you get penalized.

Thanks again for all the help. I'm trailing things slowly. I don't want to change lots of things again and not know which actually helped. I'll post my ranking ranges again in a week or too and let you know what I found to be the solution. Thanks again to Miriam & Peter.

I sometimes put noindex on category pages too, because I have the manual excerpts also present on the blog index pages (the pages that list all blog posts in chronological order). But is really a decision I make based on the type of website. There are websites where category pages present much interest then the chronological post listing. On these I don't use noindex, but I also do something to prevent duplicate content - I add some static text to the category pages so that they don't contain only the post excerpts.

Unfortunately, there's a lot about Hummingbird we don't know right now. I think Danny Sullivan's FAQ piece is the closest we have to reliable information, but that still leaves a lot of holes: FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm Google claims that Hummingbird is a substantial rewrite of the core algorithm (more than just your typical update), and yet we haven't seen large-scale movements on many client rankings. So, what's going on? A couple of things, I think: (1) As Peter said (and this seems to be pretty well confirmed), Hummingbird changes how Google interprets some queries, especially natural language queries, and attempts to find relevant results based on a more complex, semantic analysis of phrases, and not just keyword matching. It's unclear how this practically impacts your average query today (especially head terms and the "chunky middle"), but as voice-based searches become more common and people get used to natural language queries, the impact will increase over time. (2) Hummingbird seems to have increased Google's ability to use historical information to personalize queries. This extends a long-term evolution and means that any given person might see a different result for an ambiguous query based on previous queries. Even now, searches like "weather" bring up local information, whereas they used to bring up generic information (like weather sites). Practically, we're not seeing this personalization impact affect a ton of queries yet, but we will over time. There are ways to check ranking using context and limited personalization, but it's technically very difficult. This is certainly a concern for rank-tracking tools, including ours (and something we're thinking about even now). (3) Finally, I suspect Hummingbird laid the groundwork for an expansion of Knowledge Graph, not only in its pairing to more queries, but in how Google extracts data from the index to create answers. I'm seeing many examples in testing where Google is pulling answer-like information from websites beyond its current data partners. This is speculation, and it may not be connected to Hummingbird, but these changes are definitely coming. (1) and (2) impact rank-tracking directly, whereas (3) impacts how we view ranking and signals the need to go beyond just counting blue links. We take both trends seriously, but getting from here to there is a gradual process, not just for technical reasons, but because our mindset as SEOs has to evolve. From a competitive standpoint, you won't see huge changes in the short term. If a change impacts any given query, that impact is felt for both you and your competitors, in most cases. There may be isolated examples where a re-interpretation of a query means that you or your competitor rise or fall in ranking relative to the other, but our tools would see that and I expect that's a relatively small amount of searches right now. At this point, we're keeping our eyes open and trying to predict where Google is headed. Now that Moz Analytics is launched, we're working hard to be more agile and iterate new functions in smaller chunks and at a faster pace.

Hi Nwext, I want to be sure I understand what you are describing. I believe what you are describing is that only one local business is being shown as a local result for the term you are typing. There is an ongoing issue with this right now. Typically, Google shows 3-7 local results for local-type searches, within the organic results, but right now, there are a bunch of terms for which Google is oddly only showing a single organic result (termed a one box). I recommend you read the following on this topic to see if it matches what you are experiencing: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/10000-attack-bad-google-local-one-boxes.html http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/09/28/hummingbird-local-knowledge-graph-shitty-search-results/ This rather lame phenomenon appears to have something to do with the Hummingbird update, and it is definitely not creating a good user experience. Just the other day, I was looking for a hotel in a major city, and Google would only show me a one box. Clearly, this does not represent the diversity of hotels that exist in the city. Not super on Google's part! If this is not what you are describing and you are simply asking how businesses appear in the local pack of results, then the topic you want to study is Local SEO. It's quite a big subject! If you're just getting started, let me share an article I wrote for beginners: The Rudiments of Local SEO. Happy reading!

If you can give us some context as to where you've seen it used, we can help better explain what it means in that case. It could actually mean a lot of different things.