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Do not try to slow down the crawl rate, that would be bad for your site and not a good strategy. Investigate what pages are not jumping around. pages i have experienced to jump around are algoritmic penalty kind of jumping. (over optimized or duplicated content or low authority)

Thanks Andy, This is very interesting, regarding editorial earned content vs self posted content, its self posted content although its vetted by moderators prior to going live so its not an 'article submission site'. The majority of the sites range for pr7-4 and its not uncommon for the actual article or profile pages to have a pr2. Regarding finding additional link opportunities, this is only a small part of our outreach and along side this we have lots of earned editorial on our projects, although that too is often re used content as we are in fortunate position that our content is often very well received, often republished 100's of times due to a mixture of outreach and from there it going viral within the niche, which makes it hard to scale to every piece of content being unique. Is it the consensus that Google can evaluate wether a site is purely editorial or user submitted content ?

Yeah - it doesn't seem to match known updates, but it's certainly dramatic movement. This isn't some seasonal shift or cyclical thing - these are clearly steep climbs and drops. We don't know the dates of most of the Panda data refreshes, but we do pin one at Sept. 23, 2014, so even that's not lining up cleanly here. Are you seeing a lot of losses in the long-tail? The site doesn't seem to have much authority, but you've got 10K+ pages indexed, and I strongly suspect that many of them may look thin to Google. It feels Panda-like, for lack of a better word, even if it isn't quite Panda (maybe just a very strong filter). Meanwhile, if the links you have our problematic at all, you could be hitting a double-whammy. It might not be a single update, but you could be getting hit by a number of different changes over time. The trend-line certainly isn't promising. My concern is the individual definition pages, like: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/barrio/ While it looks to have a lot of content, the definitions come from online dictionaries (or, at least, are shared with them), and the examples seem to be drawn from publicly available web pages. So, it's very possible that each element on these pages looks duplicated across the web to Google. With a strong link profile, it might not be a problem, but if you're struggling on links and with content, the odds could end up stacked against you. Truthfully, you may have to see where your strongest ranking pages are (are they top-level or long-tail) and consolidate. If you've taken losses on individual word pages and most of your traffic is coming from pages like this: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-a/ ...then you might want to consider not indexing those lower-value pages and focusing on what's working. This could help concentrate your link equity on a stronger offering. It's a difficult choice, but I don't think you're looking at a technical problem here or a clear, single-shot penalty. I think you're looking at a systemic problem. Looks like you've got a chunk of 404s in your category pages, too, such as: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-z/10-letters/ Not sure what's up there - if you're trying to de-index those, or if there's a technical issue. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a complex, multi-layer problem and there probably isn't a single solution. I hope I'm wrong, but that's my gut feeling at a glance.

Thank you for pointing me to that resource – it tallies with our experience on root domains, etc., as well.

Hi Jac! Are you concerned about the category pages themselves being indexed? If not, you can block crawlers from accessing them with robots.txt. You might even try adding "noindex, follow" to them, to ensure crawlers move through their links without indexing the "duplicate" content.

Excellent stuff. Glad it helped -Andy

Hi Massimilano, Whoa, I've never heard of anyone creating a separate URL for every type of phone. There aren't that many differences between iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone browsers, so I'm surprised you're putting in the time to create one of each. If you don't mind me asking, what made you decide to build your site like this? In terms of SEO, though, here's what I'd do: make the iPhone version of your site the rel="alternate," since Googlebot calls itself an iPhone. When Google sends mobile visitors to the iPhone version of your site, just redirect them based on their device type. Hope this helps! Kristina

The SERP did link to the correct (canonical target) domain. If the canonical tag is on domain1.com/product-a, the SERP was correctly pointed at domain2.com/product-a. Because the page on Domain 1 is supposed to be de-indexed, I was expecting not to see the page at all. This is my first crack at cross domain canonicals. It's an interesting way for Google to handle it. BTW, from a rankings perspective, the cross domain canonicals were extremely productive. Domain #2 got some huge rankings increases. I've been tracking the results closely. I should publish the results when I get a chance. The most important result is that the keywords (+/-700) associated with the canonicals  improved by an average of 22 positions over the higher position prior to the canonicals being implemented. What I mean by that is for a keyword (ex: "widgets"), Domain 1 was Ranked 46, and Domain 2 was ranked 57, our average improvement was to position 24, which is 22 positions better than the higher ranked domain (in this case, Domain 1). Rankings improvements for keywords already on page 1 or Page 2 increased by an average of 2.5 positions over the better ranked domain. What was really cool was that when we canonicaled in the "wrong" direction, where the keyword ranked higher on the domain that was getting the canonical tag, the results were indistinguishable from the results where we canonicaled in the "correct" direction. So, in this case, if a keyword ranked higher on domain1.com, and we canonicaled to domain2.com, the average ranking increases (from the higher ranking position) were almost identical to using canonicals in the "correct" direction (from the lower ranking position). These are both ecommerce sites with DAs of +/-40. What was also interesting is that Google accepted the canonicals in cases where our product descriptions were markedly different.

I noticed some big drops in the sites I monitor this update as well, yet rankings and traffic are business as usual. Patrick's link is helpful as are other's comments. The other thing I'd suggest is to monitor traffic, rankings and webmaster tools to make sure nothing is seriously wrong. If nothing arouses your suspicion, wait for the next update. This one was smaller than the last, root domains down by almost 10%. If you have a site with few incoming link sources, you're going to be more susceptible to sampling fluctuations.

Thank-you Patrick, good information. I appreciate your response.

My advice here is to get a good strong Scotch, a pack of headache tablets and settle in for the night - it sounds like one holy mess! The only thing I can really suggest is to just try and tackle one element at a time. The fact that so much has gone on with the sites, would suggest to me that Google has lost track of where it is all up to. Start at the beginning (wherever that is!) and work through sorting one issue at a time. -Andy

Looks like our host solved the problem. They mentioned they were blocking the rogerbot crawler. Anyone have an idea of how long we have to wait until the page grades and other info updates in our dashboard?

If you have a very small blog, with a limited number of posts on a narrow topic range, this perhaps doesn't apply. If you are bigger than that and cover a range of topics, a multilevel structure keeps things organized, for you, your readers, and for search engines. You can also take advantage of internal linking, organizing sub-topics under topics both so that readers can find related articles that might interest them and so that search engines can see how your posts are related, and what concepts are relevant. [A post titled "Shingles" would mean one thing under health-news, and another under building-materials.]

Hey, thanks for getting back in contact. Yeah, we were contemplating doing that. It does seem to be further diluting the emphasis on people making a purchase however which was our real concern - If someone does a search for a DX4050 printer then it seems relevant to just yield a list of products rather than loads of additional content that is unrelated to their purchase. I guess pretty much anything we do is going to potentially detract from the user experience in the name of giving the possibility of people linking to us. Making something that is truly relevant and natural while at the same time adding to the user experience and attracting the possibility of external links would appear to be the challenge!

Hi Lisa, Unfortunately, I can't find any authoritative documentation from Google (or from anyone else) on this since the rebranding of GWT. It sounds like both you and William are seeing the same thing - your pack rankings don't seem to be reflected. So, that's a start, but what I can't come up with is an answer as to whether the tool can somehow be configured to reflect these. I would suggest that you write to Google about this and see if you can get an official response. If you do, it would be super nice if you would share what you learn with the community here, as these are early days and everyone is still in a learning phase with this. So sorry not to have a clear answer for you on this good question!

The spam score is just MOZ's algorithm based on some known factors, but doesn't mean that your site is actually being seen as spammy by Google. Rand recently explained a little about how it works... Remember that spam score doesn't indicate whether something is necessarily spam in Google's eyes - it just tries to show features that are correlated with things we've seen Google penalize/ban. So, a Spam Score of 9/17 means that we saw ~72% of sites with that many triggers get penalties/bans in Google. But, that also means 28% of sites we saw with 9/17 flags had no penalties. -Andy

Cool, Many thanks Andy I will check out Buzzsumo to thanks again Pete

...as this would then make the blog perform better in search results No, this wont make the article rank better, but it does make sense from a usability point of view because you have both a news and blog sections. Are you running Wordpress? Do you have the Yoast SEO plugin? Key to being ranked well is how good the article is, backlinks and some debate over how much impact social signals are having. -Andy