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I have a preliminary very serious concern about how you've set things up on the site.

Of course, without a full understanding of the entire site, this is JUST preliminary. Yet even at this point, I found issues that say "not likely to get true, sustainable 1st page rankings".

http://www.redrockdecals.com/austria-european-license-plate-sticker-different-sizes-and-materials

http://www.redrockdecals.com/belgium-european-license-plate-sticker-different-sizes-and-materials

The URLs for these are EXTREMELY over-optimized.

The page Titles, bold text atop the content area, H1 headline, product descriptions, size options, and "tabbed" description and features on these are identical.  The ONLY difference is the country name.

If this is an issue across a significant portion of the site, you definitely have a problem.

While search engines do their best to understand similar products are going to have similar descriptions, on scale it's more glaring.

Note how Mat Bennett specifically stated "As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles." as his concern?

Yeah. There's a reason for that.

So - can you truly justify having one page for every country for your various products?  Only if you can come up with ways to add at least SOME uniqueness to every page.

If not, you need to consider a redesign where all the "License Plate Sticker" pages are consolidated into ONE PAGE, with a dropdown menu for people to select their country.

(I don't want to come across as mean-spirited, however it is vital for you to understand the potential roadblocks to success your site has, and since I found that even in a very quick review, I only wonder how many other major crisis type issues the site suffers from)...

David,

Welcome to the intriguing, daunting, sometimes overwhelming world of SEO!

I applaud you for wanting to now be proactive in your site's success.  However I caution you to be careful in hoping to find easy, quick answers. While many people may be able to offer valid suggestions, many others could just as easily offer what "appear" to be valid suggestions, yet where those might be overly-simplified, or even downright incorrect.

This happens often in our industry. Sometimes its unintentional. People mean well, yet they themselves don't have the level of experience necessary to be directing others in unique situations.  And sadly, sometimes it's myopic - some people just get full of themselves and offer guidance as if they're experts when they have other motives.

So - what's a site owner to do?

First and best recommendation I can make is to start with the Moz Beginners Guide to SEO.  It's a brilliantly crafted and well laid out resource that I encourage all newcomers to read, re-read and truly absorb.

From there, you can ask more nuanced questions here in the Moz Q&A forum. Pay attention to who's providing answers - are they themselves new / green? Or are they at least a regular contributor here?

Beyond that, there are many other resources to consider, however these are excellent first steps.

Just to pile on with the challenges, those links you have on that page? Yeah they're a real problem.  Go to URIValet.com and enter in https://www.protoexpress.com/about/ (the link at the code level for your "Corporate Datasheet") and see how it redirects to https://www.protoexpress.com/content/overview.jsp - links within your own site should never redirect - that delays search engine crawler efficiency and harms overall SEO as a result.

But then also note other links on the page also redirect. Which means more inefficiency.

Let's go further:

All your navigation already exists in the main navigation bar. What's the purpose of this page? It's not helpful. It's excess linking and does not properly communicate trust.

A quick speed test on URIValet.com for https://www.protoexpress.com/pcb-assembly comes back at thirty-six seconds to process using the 1.5mbps data (a fair representation of what Google sees for users accessing your site via DSL).  A separate test using WebPageTest.org (Dulles VA, Chrome DSL emulator) came back at over 20 seconds.

Google expects between one and three seconds as an ideal target.  Even if my test represents only intermittent speed problems, that's dramatic and harmful to user experience and overall SEO from a quality and trust perspective.

At the code level, you have multiple INCORRECT redirects (some 302 redirects which means "temporarily moved") when, as I stated initially, internal linking should always be direct, with no redirects.

Also at the code level, that page has multiple images referenced that result in a 404 not-found error.

I'd suggest based on this information, you have much more critical and valuable tasks to be working on rather than attempting to get a glorified links page to rank.

What would you expect this page to be found for in a search? It's just an html sitemap.   There's no valid highly important phrases such a page should deserve to rank for regardless of what you do.

If you can come up with a phrase or phrases you think properly identify this page such as "Sierra Circuits web site navigation map" or something along those lines, sure, you can come up with various ways to do SEO to get it to rank for that. But to what end?

At the end of the day, every page on the site is either important for people doing a search at search engines, or its not. And if its not, attempting to artificially force it to rank for something else is not a sustainable SEO goal.

Screaming Frog is my go-to crawler.  One of the many data points it provides is page level. Level 0 is home page, level 1 is one-click from the start, etc...

It's an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to check on a vast range of crawl efficiency and SEO factors.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/tabs/

I'm going to reinforce what Erica has stated.

Even a quick 30 second check reveals your main site and your http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ site are competing for the same focus.  That is both cross-site cannibalization (meaning Google would have to figure out which of the two deserves higher ranking through their imperfect multi-algorithm environment) and in direct violation of Google policies where you are attempting to have two sites rank for the same phrases.

Now - having said that, there's no way to know if THAT issue is the sole cause, a main cause, or even a contributing cause to your current problems.  SEO is vastly complicated and involves many different signals and factors.

However you can be sure that the current multi-site approach is extremely toxic.  The best practice solution would be to take those individual focus sites and 301 redirect all of them to their appropriate main site pages. But ONLY if you don't also have toxic links pointing to THOSE sites.

And if there ARE bad links to those, just kill those sites dead.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and vomit because of the fact that some genius SEO company foisted a horrific ranking "method" on your unsuspecting business.

I agree with @adamxj2

Parallax DOES cause problems for SEO when you're only serving one URL that can be optimized. In your situation, you're running independent URLs, and going directly to them you can see at the source code level that the page Title is unique to that page.

Because of that, I am pretty confident that as @adamxj2 said, it's an issue attributable to the separate issue of where Google changes page Titles and meta Descriptions that are being displayed based on their algorithm's assessment and the belief that method is better for the searcher.

This is a great question - except it's impossible to know what's happening if you can't find the mention (mentions can be links or they could just be that - a mention of your domain without the link).

Have you examined the source code of the examples you've seen?

There have been times when I've been auditing a site and discovered links buried in a widget contained on a page but where just viewing the page as a human would, couldn't see the links.

In some cases, even looking at the initial source code didn't reveal it either - trickier cases exist where a widget rotates out links based on various criteria and where those links are "stored" in a script - one you may not even be able to access if the script is run from a 3rd party server.

As for intent - that too can be a range of possibilities.

I've seen cases where "intent" wasn't even in play - a site has a widget that pulls "related" content from around the web (similar to Taboola or Outbrain type functionality) and other sites just get caught up in that sweep of the web.

I've also seen it where links are discoverable in the source code but hidden from human view through scripts or style sheets.

In all of those cases, the best practice is to disavow them if you can't find them, and you know they're not out there based on any valid referencing purposes outside of SEO.

Yeah it looks like you just have a lot of work ahead of you to boost your ranking signals.

When I did a Google search for "DPF cleaning commercial remapping" (not using the quotes), you do show up in the #4 position organically. So Google knows your site is there. And it has 8 pages indexed.

So the questions to ask include:

1. Do you have enough overall content across your entire site to properly compete against other sites that might have extensive content specific to your targeted market?

2. Even if the existing site's content gets a top grade as it stands from basic SEO signals, how strong is each page itself, in comparison to any other pages on other sites specific to that single page's primary topical focus?

3. How strong  is your off-site signal footprint compared to those competitors?

Until and unless someone directly from Google chimes in, it's always guess-work because we don't have access to their many algorithms, let alone the database that shows how an individual site is assessed by them.

In your case, it MAY be a Penguin issue, however if you're seeing a steady decline, that's not likely to be Penguin. Penguin is most often seen as an immediate major drop over a single day or a very short time-period.

On the other hand, I've seen countless sites that have had ongoing declines, and in every case, that's been due to a cascading trigger effect situation.

For example, if a site is weak overall, and then an algorithm update (one of their many algorithms, including but far from limited to Panda, Penguin, Above the Fold, EMD...) might flag a site as "deserves to have ranking drops".  Then once that happens, as the full spectrum of their other algorithms then get updated, that "now flagged" site is more vulnerable to those other subsequent algorithms that get refreshed.

If you go back far enough in the Google Analytics timeline for Google organic visits, you can often see where a decline first began and pinpoint it to being "near enough" to a known Google update as that "trigger" point. Yet you can't always because they make hundreds of updates every year, and most are not announced or given a name.

Google's multi-layered multi-algorithm system has come a long way in being able to "figure it all out", yet at the same time, falls far short of always successfully "getting it right".

Robots.txt files are no longer an absolute directive.  They're now "just another signal", as are canonical tags, meta robots instructions, and their own Google Webmaster URL Parameters system.

Because of this its critical to be consistent across all signals.  If you've got the robots.txt file set to not index pages, but also have inbound links from affiliates, that's a prime example of where inbound link signals can override the robots.txt file's instruction if they're not nofollowed links.

While they technically SHOULD not index them after discovering them off-site (because the destination says "index this other version"), that's part of their confused multilayered system.

I have a question though - from what limited information you've provided, this example is based on a url parameter of ?ec=

When I search Google using site:http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/ inurl:ec

I see only three such pages indexed AND where those pages are "fully" indexed.  All the rest (over 1,000 additional URLs), are in the Google system, however every one of those others has a meta description of "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt - learn more."

What that means is they are NOT fully indexing those pages - there is no worry to be had about duplicate content for those. Google is simply tracking that those URLs exist.

So - is that the only URL parameter you're worried about? If so, it's not a major problem on your site. Except for those few exceptions, Google is doing what you need them to do with those.

What is the relationship between site A and site B? Is it a "legitimate" "owned by or managed by the same company" relationship that would exist even if SEO didn't exist?

If so, it is valid to link from one site to another. If not, those links become more questionable as to "why are these here?" understanding.

Even if there is a legitimate reason outside of SEO, what is the overall signal? If they're keyword based links and not just using anchor text that shows the name of the destination site, they're more vulnerable to suspicion.

Even in those situations where there is a legitimate "we're just providing links to another property we own" links, and they're not using keyword anchor text, there is still some "slight" vulnerability, however it's minor compared to keyword anchors or "not here for reasons outside SEO" issues. Because of that, the best practice is to nofollow them just to be "safe" in the age of Penguin and manual reviewers who might mistake a legitimate linking reason for an attempt to over-optimize inbound links.

I have extensive experience auditing sites of all types, including with and without unique URLs.

I can tell you for a fact that if you fail to include a unique URL for each "unique" section, slice or "virtual" page, you will suffer regarding SEO and that will directly hurt your ability to have those "unique" variations of the site being found in search engines.

Best practices dictate that if you use "infinite scroll", "window shading", multiple tabs of content within a single URL, search engines need to also be presented with the alternate "individual URL" version of each in order for them to properly identify the complete unique focus of each.

This includes not only having a unique URL assigned to each "view", but also the related unique page Title, unique H1 headline tag and clickable navigation methods to reach those.

How you implement this will determine whether you get more visibility in search results or harm your own efforts on-site and off-site.

Here are some key points:

Never duplicate the full content across multiple sites if you can avoid that. Duplication of entire entries just forces Google to "figure it all out" and they often do so poorly.

Two solid methods that can both work for your overall needs:

1. Create a "Press" or similar section in your site. Each time a new article shows up in a trusted off-site location, add it to your press section.  Either just the Titles and a unique snippet explaining what's contained in the off-site article, or with more info, as long as the info is almost all unique, and not copied from the off-site version.

If you generate a lot of these, be sure to use proper indexable pagination in your site's list of outbound press links.

2. Write full blog articles on your own site that link to those articles, but where you go deep in your own content - make it mostly unique and only do so if you are sure it's a quality piece in its own right.

Either way can work - the 2nd version is more likely to get both the off-site and your own piece indexed most of the time, however if the "press" versions are also robust, they can rank as well.

Here's a screen-capture of how I did that for one of my best articles a couple years ago. The 1st entry is the original article, the 2nd entry is my own site's page about it.

HolyGrail3Pack.jpg

Using the noindex,follow combination is a form of advanced page sculpting, which is not truly an SEO best practice.

Here's why:

If you deem a page not worthy of being in the Google index, attempting to say "it's not worthy of indexing, but the links on it are worthy" is a mixed message.

Links to those other pages should already exist from pages you do want indexed.

By doing noindex,follow, you increase the internal link counts in artificial ways.

As I already communicated, these are issues that MAY be causing your problems. Without direct access to Google's algorithms, there is zero guarantee that anyone could absolutely say with 100% certainty exactly what impact they are having.  And without a full audit, there is no way to know what other problems you have.

Having said that, proper SEO best practices always dictates that any major SEO flaws that you know exist should be cleaned up / fixed.  So - if two thirds of your listings have thin content, the best suggestion would be to work to add much more content to each of those (unique, highly relevant, trustworthy and helpful), or to consider a "noindex,nofollow" on those specific pages.

The problem then being if you noindex,nofollow that many pages, what do you have left in terms of overall site scale that Google would find worthy of high rankings?  How big are your competitors?  Taking away very thin pages helps reduce "low quality" signals, yet if there isn't other "high quality" volume of content you still don't solve all your problems most of the time.

200-250 words is NOT considered a strong volume of content in most cases.  Typically these days it's around the 600 words + range.  However that also depends on the majority of the competition for that unique type of content in that specific market.

And site speed is also something that best practices dictates needs to be as efficient as possible so if it's slow even intermittently, that would be another thing to definitely work on.

as someone who does a lot of auditing, I need to say I'm confused by this somewhat.

"The link to "http://www.xxxx.com/old-page/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.xxxx.com/new-page"

That's only one hop. Which is perfectly valid.  So where are the "unnecessary redirects" that report is referring to?

By all means, if you have problems on the site, fixing them is always the proper course of action.  I only wonder whether you really do have a problem.

Also, for the record, the claim "Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop" is NOT true.  While more than one hop can be harmful due to slowing Googlebot's crawl, and where multiple hops can slow user experience, which are OTHER, related possible problems for SEO, as long as the hops are kept to one, two, or perhaps three at most, you are sill going to be able to get the full individual page SEO value passed.

Note that this is true only if the new destination page has all of the same SEO signals the original page had.  Because you can't magically pass SEO value from page A to page x just by using a redirect.  Even if its just one redirect. If page x is significantly different than page A, that's going to change the trust score for the passed value.

Also here's a video from Matt Cutts regarding multiple hop redirects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

thanks for the GA data - so - there's very little traffic to the site so Google isn't able to get accurate page speed data consistently every day.

Note however, that back around July 6th, the site-wide average was almost 40 seconds a page. That's extremely slow. Then on the 17th, it was up around 16 seconds site-wide.  So even though the little bit of data the rest of the month shows much faster speeds, those are definitely not good.

I honestly don't know however, given the very small data set, what impact site speed is having on the site. And there's just no way to know how it's impacting the site compared to other problems.

Next - thin content pages - what percentage of the listings has this problem?  When I go to a sample listing such as this one I see almost no content. If a significant number of listings you have are this severely thin, that could well be a major problem.

Again though, I don't believe in randomly looking at one, two or even a few individual things as a valid basis for making a wild guess as to exact causes.  SEO is not rocket science, however it is computer science.  It's complex and hundreds of main factors are involved.

It would require a developer to examine the structure of the site, how pages are generated - to do an inventory audit related to pages generated, then to match that to the sitemap file.  If there are a large number of pages that are duplicate content, or very thin on content, that could be a contributing factor. Since there's less than 1,000 pages indexed in Google, I don't think 175 would be enough by itself as a single factor.

There are many reasons that could be causing your problem.  Overall quality is another possible factor.  In a test I ran just now at URIValet.com, the page processing speed for the home page in the 1.5 mbps emulator was 13 seconds. Since Google has an ideal of under 3 seconds, if you have serious site-wide processing issues, that could also be a contributing factor. A test of a different page came back at 6 seconds, so this isn't necessarily a site-wide problem, and it may even be intermittent.

Yet if there are intermittent times when speeds are even slower, then yes, that could well be a problem that needs fixing.

So many other possible issues exist.  Are the property listings anywhere else on the web, or is the content you have on them exclusive to your site?

What about your link profile? Is it questionable?

Without a full blown audit it's a guess as to what the cause of your visibility drop problems are.

If the client is not open to consolidation you're left with a difficult challenge. Not atypical of site owner thinking though.  Sometimes SEO is just not given the trust value to be able to implement a best case solution.

So - in this case, I'd suggest it comes down to resources. Are there enough resources to devote to three separate blogs consistently enough with enough content unique to each site to justify three? Likely not.

More likely, a single blog would be best.  This way, content can be created for all three locations as needed, and any "generic" content that doesn't apply to a specific individual location can all be kept on that one resource.

I would then link to the blog from each of the three sites as a main navigation link - make it the last one to the right in top nav. Or a footer or sidebar link on those sites.  And then on the blog, I would include links to all three location home pages on the sidebar or in the footer.

Caution is needed to ensure no problems with link penalties (algorithmic or manual).  So no keyword stuffing of links back and forth.  And ideally, I would even consider a nofollow attribute on the navigation, sidebar or footer links to be absolutely sure.