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long time ago I saw that on a client website - as german we could block bingbot in robots.txt with no risk to loose traffic. I don't know why but the server was highly stressed by bing bot.  So yes I saw something like that - a little bit more than a year ago - but I wasn't interested in the "why?" - I just blocked the bot.

In this situation it shouldn't be an issue as it isn't a purchased link.  However to be on the safe side you may be best to make the site wide link a no follow. You could place a non site wide link somewhere else on the blog that points back to the main site if you would like to pass some link juice. You can find a discussion on site wide links here: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2340986/Are-All-Sitewide-Links-Unnatural

Thanks, Marie. That post is really helpful. Just to clarify one point. I've read that google may take as long as six months to recrawl a website. Does that mean that many of the links on our disavow list uploaded in Sept might not have actually had the (invisible) nofollow tag applied yet, and in which case may still be harming our website as far as penguin is concerned? When I read that google was processing disavow requests with the penguin update, I thought that that meant that the usual wait wouldn't apply, that everything would be recrawled with the penguin refresh, if that makes sense. I'm trying to convince myself that our work on removing/disavowing links hasn't fully taken effect yet, and that we'll see a bounce in our rankings with the next penguin update, whenever that may be. I'd rather not take the lack of improvement we've seen this time around as a sign that we're never going to make a recovery. I certainly can't see how we can do much more work in terms of removing links. We were pretty thorough.

This technique is famously known as the toggle effect. According to Matt (in recent video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtRY), It's pretty common on the web for people who want to be able to say okay click here and then show manufacturer details, show specifications, show reviews. That's a pretty normal indium at this point it's not deceptive, nobody's trying to be a manipulative. It's easy to see that this is text that's intended for users and so as long as you're doing that it should be not an issue. But certainly if you were using you know a tiny little on that users can see in there's like six pages of text area and there is not intended for users and there is keyword stuffing then that is something that Google possibly could consider hidden text. If you just doing it for users than you are in pretty good shape. Here is the ref link- http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-hidden-text-using-expandable-sections-youll-be-in-good-shape-167753 Hope this will help!

thanks for your responses and clearing this up.

Thanks, I have sent an email and hope to get this resolved soon

Thanks Keri for your help. All working now. You was correct, turns out I was clicking on a button which shouldn't be there. Again thanks for your help

Yes I have recently done something similar 2 times. One time for a local company which had a SEO targeting an geographically unsuitable service area for my client. It is a traffic school operating in a large city situated next to an even larger city. The SEO took a new domein xxxcity.nl and focused the keyword strategy on this as well. But how do the instructors pickup and drop off students in city A north and city B south within a hour or 90 minutes. Never going to happen 8 times a day on time. And it doesnt convert well either because people now this when the see an offer. But I undid the city in the url part by copying the website enterely and placed a simple php script in the WordPress index.php file in the root. This replaces the domain for all request and redirects with a 301. The destination domain is the domain the client previously used. // Permanent redirect of all PR from A > B // Get http request headers for requests on old page   $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; // Get the path after the old domain to redirect to corresponding page on new   $url_path = parse_url($uri, PHP_URL_PATH); // drop the city from the url and go to new location   $location_new = 'http://www.xxxrijschool.nl' . $url_path; // send 301 and load destination url   header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");   header("Location: $location_new"); exit(); ?> The above script I place on the old domain A but only after copying the whole website to the new domain B. If it's a 1-on-1 copy then this script is places on A. Thats all. It will cost some PageRank to move 2 times for 1 page but the transfer starts in a few days and will be noticeable in 2 weeks or so. After 6-8 weeks it will mostly be moved and normalize from there on. If in between we optimize on-page and aquire good backlinks then it will turn the decline of rank and can outperform the old site in a matter of 8 weeks. For larger and large site it's recommended that the time to live for DNS records is set to 5 minutes at least a week in advanced, This is recommended by google somewhere in the guide for transfering domains in webmaster tools I believe. Hope this helps/ Gr Daniel

thanks, got it working with the advice. Looking forward to have the issue fixed.

Nice work getting to that participation level, Andy! Paul

To start I would make sure you have your current site structure well mapped out and that they are working with the designer to make sure pages aren't being dropped. A great tool to use is Screaming Frog for this. We find with larger sites and ones with extensive blog content that is the biggest issue that any potential 301's are in place when the new site rolls out so as not to lose rankings from broken inbound or internal links. I'd also make sure the site maps are updated and ready. You may also want to make sure the architecture of the site hasn't changed dramatically for major pages. I would look to see what are your top pages for landing pages in Organic search and make sure they aren't being buried deeper in the site for no reason. So a page may have been mysite.com/awesomelandingpage and with a redesign it gets moved to mysite.com/genericfolder/subfolder/awesomelandingpage and it could lose some of it's link authority. Just a few thoughts....

Tags are basically lists of posts with a common theme - some sites automatically create tags, but commonly bloggers would add these into the CMS. Ideally, tags are kind of an extension of "categories" and often are similar to these in the way they are presented, but while posts appear on one or two categories, tagged posts can appear on many tag pages. As such tag pages could result in a lot of duplicate content on a blog, and for many years now I and others have been advocating noindexing tag pages (good SEO plugins would do this for you) and to no follow links to tags - which sounds like the type of implementation you have. Unless you are 100% sure that your tagged pages dont create too much duplicate content, I would leave them nofollowed, as I have seen them do more harm than good.

I have released 10's of thousands of pages at once on many occasions on multiple sites and never had an issue. Why should there be an issue? If the content is good then Google wants it. If its poor low quality content then you are feeding Panda and it will take an overview of the total quality of the site and then slap you. So decide how useful all of that content is and why you want it all indexed. You could even deploy all the content at once and set some categories to noindex and change them bit by bit to see the effects. I think Panda runs about once a month right now so you will need to be a little patient to see overall results.

Hi, Going to agree with Fuel Interactive here - the best practice is to redirect page-by-page if you are combining sites, unless you are set on deleting / consolidating content from the merged sites into one smaller, tidier website. In that case, it's still best practice to redirect to the most appropriate page if one exists, rather than just to the home page. It can be a real pain to go through a consolidation / redirection process like this, so only do this if it's really necessary and will likely cause a big uplift in either performance or your ability to manage each area of the business. Dave is right that IIS can do a URL by URL redirect for you, or you can do this in your .htaccess file if you are using an Apache server as opposed to a Microsoft IIS server.