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We have the same issue with our site HelloCoin, its pure ajax/javascript so we make a second no javascript version for every page for googlebot to crawl it, we just make it as much as possible similar to the original (user version). Just don't hide anything and show everything as it is, some functionality might not work but its not an issue, google just want to see how it looks for the user not how it works.

Hi,

Share your thoughts about Your Top 5 Backlink Types for 2013, what's the best this year and what will be worthless.

Hi Robert,

First of all big thanks for spending time on our issue. I will go through the timeline in more details:

The site went live on May 2012 and started doing SEO from June 2012.The main pages are index page which we target for all main keywords 'coupon codes',' promo codes', 'online coupons' and 4 store pages which are macys, kohls, amazon, barnes and noble. After doing SEO for 2 months we got all these pages with PR2 and barnes and noble page got even PR 3. You are totally correct about ranking for index page, it never ranked for us as the competition is tight on that and requires time to get into, but we started to rank on all store pages with barnes and noble fluctuating in 11-20 position, macys 3 page, kohls 3-4 page, amazon 9th page (also very competitive one). Also we saw that plenty of other store pages started to get some visitors and ranked in page 1-2 which are less competitive ones. It stayed for few weeks like that and suddenly everything dissapeared up until now for ~2.5month.

During that time we found many issues for inner seo and rectified them all, with few worth to mention:

1. There was a duplicate of JS code in footer content on all pages so we moved this whole JS part to external JS file to avoid duplicates as now google seems to read some parts of JS.

2. We found that somehow over 120 pages including index page got a duplicate of 50.22.226.90/pathway indexed which started to appear on search queries so we put canonical on index page and 301 redirect to all pages and now IP addresses are down to 15 in google search. By the way this IP is our dedicated sever IP address.

3. We found that there was some parts which goole saw differently than the user in store pages and index, we corrected them all as well and now the content is identical to google and user.

4. Did a sitemap for google so it could crawl whole site easier since it has 900 store pages and plenty of categories.

Also you are correct about the issues with top stores and top coupons pages, we still didn't rectified the issue with these pages but they are not very important at the moment.

Also another person stated that 'You appear to have a slightly but not significantly different take on an old business model which search engines tend to dislike, not least when not part of a site based on unique, vibrant content. As it stands, don't think you will see much support from search. Other marketing, or a change of model may be needed. As for making the model good for users, not with your current popup/modal system.''

How near to reality this can be? Since we offer good savings content for people who are looking to save money which I consider a very healthy and good niche for consumer.

We are really confused which road we should continue to look for the issue, is it that we should continue building quality backlinks to the site or look for inner seo issues.

Thanks. The reason we did this is because our site is full ajax and parts of the site was not visible for google bot once we launched. We will rectify that and make the very same texts for google and users. Just the question is could we get a penalty for that since we are not receiving any traffic from serp but we do have all our pages indexed and reindexed regularly. Also webmaster tools doesnt show any message of penalty.

We have the same issue with our site HelloCoin, its pure ajax/javascript so we make a second no javascript version for every page for googlebot to crawl it, we just make it as much as possible similar to the original (user version). Just don't hide anything and show everything as it is, some functionality might not work but its not an issue, google just want to see how it looks for the user not how it works.