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I wouldn't worry about whether a link is dofollow or nofollow*.

I'd look at the blogs who might be reviewing your product to see if they're likely to send paying customers to your website. Do people engage with the blog, for example? Do they leave comments and share the content? Has anyone mentioned buying a product on the blogger's recommedation? Does the blogger have many Twitter followers who interact with them? In other words, Is the blogger influential?

I wouldn't miss out the smaller blogs though - if you see a great-looking/well-written new blog, the blogger will probably be overjoyed with a free sample and appreciate your support. Who knows where that could lead one day?

*A caveat or two - just don't do anything to excess. It might look unnatural if 99% of your links are from blog product reviews. So try to keep a varied link profile. And don't ask for anchor text - these days it's best for anchor text to be the URL itself or company name.

Hi Carlos,

If the blogger is giving the links because it's their own editorial choice then it shouldn't be a problem, but by saying "I have been actively pursuing bloggers for my site in order to build page rank." isn't that a violation of Google's terms on link schemes?

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines."

These two videos are related and might be worth a watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGieiNe6RL4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSEqypgIJME

In 2011 Matt Cutts said there isn't a limit. 500-600 sounds A LOT. If I was in this situation I'd just 301 the domains that have the most traffic and best links.

Are you redirecting each page on the other websites to the matching page on the chief website?

Google now class subdomains pretty much as part of your main domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk - so you will be getting some of that rank juice.

I'd think that the major search engines wouldn't have a problem knowing that an HTML version of a page is preferred over a PDF. However, you can use canonical HTTP headers to make sure there are no problems with duplicate content: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

If you use Google Analytics you will be able to track the subdomain. You can do it as part of your existing profile or by setting up a separate one: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite (ensure this is the version of Analytics you have installed).

There's a short guide here on getting more data about PDFs through Google Analytics: http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-track-pdf-traffic-links-in-google-analytics-open-site-explorer

Some companies/websites have already used open data to great SEO effect. If some interesting data can be presented in a unique and interesting or useful way it has a great chance of attracting interest.

I clicked on the Chile link and these ideas came to mind immediately:

• Data on traffic accident statistics - perhaps a car insurance firm or road traffic safety campaigner could present that data on their website, with further research into why certain locations are accident hotspots and what could be done to improve the safety.
• "Consumer Prices of Fruits and Vegetables" - a travel website could present this as a guide for backpackers visiting Latin America - for new visitors to a country it's always difficult to know what you should be paying for products.
• "Polling stations in Santiago" - a political candidate looking for votes and increased publicity could have an interactive map for voters to find their closest location.

I did have a link listing some awesome presentations of public data but it seems to have disappeared. Here are a couple of cool uses I remember:

• Live London Underground Map - Page Authority 64, 231 referring root domains, 6000+ Facebook likes, 5600+ Tweets. You can track worldwide flights too - it's scary seeing how close so many planes look over major cities: http://www.flightradar24.com
• Hills Are Evil phone app - Overlay Media created an app to help people with "restricted mobility find the best and easiest route between two places" - it overlays gradient and even surface (e.g. cobblestones) data onto Google Maps.

There are lots of good Google Maps Mashups using public data - Google [google maps mashups] to see!

Cool. It's advisable to add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs too, if you can.

Adam - remember that PageRank was only updated every few months (these days, even less) - can you be sure if those earlier links were already taken into account before the Wikipedia link was added? Also, maybe followed links came from websites that scrape or otherwise use Wikipedia's content?

I agree that Wikipedia links can be valuable though. It's an edited resource, and it's likely your content will be linked from a page that's relevant to your content, which helps. I've seen decent levels of engaged traffic from Wikipedia links.

If all you do on Wikipedia is add your own links though - you could end up getting banned from it. Rather than just adding links you should be adding value to the page content as a whole - pieces of your research could be really helpful to readers of the Wikipedia page and lead to more traffic to your website. It will also look less suspicious if you add other trusted links and make good contributions to edits on a number of pages. Wikipedia doesn't like biased content either.

I wonder if a Google Panda penalty has removed your pages. A lot of your content is showing as duplicates across other websites: example 1, example 2

Looking at your links, Penguin could have had an impact too. You have lots of "low-quality" links from pages like this: http://www.zobyhost.com/crear-nueva-cuenta.php - some of which are also responsible for your duplicated content.

However, there was no Penguin update reported in June 2013 - the closest is May 22nd: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Finding the reason

Are you able to identify an exact date that traffic dropped in your Google Analytics account? Is it only organic traffic that had a big fall-off? If you can identify a date, does it match any algorithm updates here moz.com/google-algorithm-change ?

What to do

If your website was demoted due to an update of Google's Panda algorithm, you'll need to make sure your content is unique and high quality, amongst other things. There's a guide here: http://www.ventureharbour.com/panda-recovery-a-guide-to-recovering-googles-panda-update/

If it was demoted due to certain links (possible Penguin-related), there's a guide to spotting low quality links here (Step 3): http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

You could also take a look at Google's Quality Guidelines (there is some duplication with the above links) to see if your website complies with them: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en%233 ?

To add to this, Google have a good primer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

There is some good info e.g. "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google".

For one e-commerce website, in place of the proper meta description, Google is showing a 318-character-long mix of snippets from the homepage content for the domain search (e.g. [example.com]). A brand search returns the correct meta description - as do the keywords the homepage ranks for.

I know Google changes the meta description if it doesn't think it's relevant, but this one (there is only one) is and has (as far as we know) shown until now, and I've never seen such a mix of text in the SERP, and so many characters - it's picking up random text from bits of anchor text e.g. "privacy policy", title attributes from links, labels from radio buttons and more.

The home page W3C validates apart from a couple of basic things like missing alt text. The only things that might be related that don't are some custom meta name tags added by the CMS - but I wouldn't think this would make any difference to whether a meta description is displayed properly or not?

I've recommended we wait until tomorrow to see if Google fixes this on recrawl, but does anyone have any ideas if it doesn't? The homepage doesn't feature much standalone text, so I was thinking if we add a few extra words it might encourage Google to pick from that if it doesn't want to use the meta description. The text would have to be useful for users and fit in with the design of course, which could be awkward...

twitter.com is recognisable enough, but keeping the www. makes a URL more recognisable, especially if you're using a domain extension that people aren't familiar with e.g. one of the new gTLDs:

example.photo
or
www.example.photo

Some CMSs and forums automatically linkup text when it has the www. prefix, so you might be slightly more likely to get clickable links if you keep the prefix.

Advantages to not having it - shorter URLs, and programming-wise it's unnecessary.

Often it's down to personal preference - do you prefer the prefix or not? If you'll have subdomains it might look nicer if you keep the www. prefix for your main site.

To avoid duplicate content issues make sure you 301 redirect your non-preferred domain to the preferred, or canonical to your preferred domain if 301s are not possible. You can also set your preferred domain in Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

I've just bought a new .uk domain and haven't decided whether to www. or not yet!

The last two points seemed a bit drastic:

• Requested removal of links from sites in the Netherlands that were linking to the old website
• Disavowed all links from the Netherlands that refused to remove links to the old website

The US is a much bigger market than the Netherlands so it's more difficult to rank for anything. Your issue could just be that.

You seem to have covered most things but you haven't mentioned the rel hreflang tag: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Is your server hosted in the Netherlands? I'm thinking out loud, but it shouldn't matter if everything else is set up correctly. How about a US-based phone number? Every signal you can send should help. Are there any customer reviews on the Google page?