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We had two different product sites that ranked number 1 in google for their respective keywords. They basically had the same outside seo co strategy applied to both. Right before penguin we did a site wide makeover. Noticed some articles were duplicate or too similar and removed the dupes and applied 301 redirects. Also added the htaccess code for non www to www. Penguin comes along and wham. One fell like a rock, the other is still ranking strong at number 1.
Now how can that be? They have almost same number of pages, similar inbound links and linking footprint.
The co that did the seo work has closed down over night. So I am now left with having to try and contact tghe questionable inbound links and try and get them removed. other than that I cannot see why one flourished and the other dropped. ???

Have you updated all internal links from old to new shortened title page? Double check that first then resubmit sitemap to see if you can get re-indexed faster.

ZenCart is a popular shopping cart system as well and its free open source. Ive been happy using zencart and virtuemart for my shopping cart applications. Virtuemart Ive only used in conjunction with Joomla CMS websites. Not sure if it works as a stand a lone.

I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9.

As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles.

The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc.

Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page.

I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings.

AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table.

Thanks for any advise on this.

Thanks alsvik,

Im kind of surprised as well how long it takes. My site has maybe 50 pages, so 3-4 days seems like along time to wait to see if you cleared out all the title and duplicate content issues or any other errors. Pretty disappointing to have to wait that long. So if one slips through the cracks its make a correction and wait another week to test and see results. I just cant see how this is practical in today's fast paced seo evolving world.

Being new to seomoz Im not sure if I understand the crawl test completely. You setup a campaign, enter all your info, rogerbot goes out and crawls your site and gives you results as to what your doing right and what is wrong or could use looking into.

So once I get my results, I make edits to my site pages. In my case Im getting lots of duplicate content and duplicate titles. So I go back and make adjustments and then submit a crawl test to see the change results.

In other tools Ive used in past I was able to re run crawl immediately and fine tune results on the fly. seomoz crawl test is still pending after three days. is this normal? or is there another way to make changes and run reports to see results instantly?

If your working on many sites and making changes, having to wait 3 or more days to see how your changes were received seems like a long time.

Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.

I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.

So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?

Thanks again for your feedback.

A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.

Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?

Or do you have a better suggestion?

Thank you for the feedback and help.

I have looked up url removal in webmaster tools and it states that the page must be removed from the site. If I remove index.html I wont have a home page. Am I understanding you correctly? Heres what google states on url removal.

To remove a page or image, you must do one of the following:

• Make sure the content is no longer live on the web. Requests for the page must return an HTTP 404 (not found) or 410 status code.
• Block the content using a robots.txt file.
• Block the content using a meta noindex tag.

Please clarify when you get a moment.

I would have thought the htaccess 301 redirects from www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com would be enough.

Thank you in advance.

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => Date => Tue, 08 May 2012 13:44:26 GMT Server => Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS) Location => http://www.domain.com/ Content-Length => 330 Connection => close Content-Type => text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

I have a site that was recently hit by the Google penguin update and dropped a page back. When running the site through seomoz tools, I keep getting duplicate content in the reports for domain.com and domain.com/index.html, even though I have a 301 rewrite condition. When I test the site, domain.com/index.html redirects to domain.com for all directories and root. I don't understand how my index page can still get flagged as duplicate content.

I also have a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com.

Is there anything else I need to do or add to my htaccess file?

Appreciate any clarification on this.