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Also make sure all your page titles are unique. While descriptions don't matter that much, titles should be unique or at the very least descriptive and targeted for your keywords.

Sounds like you have a good handle on it. As Mike recommends, focusing on the more category-style pages is definitely more appealing to a user looking to browse the site. At the end of the day, beyond SEO, the end-user is really what you care about. Another suggestion might be to make the single card pages more like category pages. Show cards from the same category, suggest similar cards or categories. Related links are one of the best ways to promote pageviews and get both the end-user as well as a googlebot interested in "crawling" more pages. That's a bonus on all fronts.

Meta descriptions won't get you penalized for duplicate content so there's no need to worry about that. The descriptions are really just what you see in the Google Search. Users are more likely to click a link that has a nice descriptive description that leads them into the content you're looking for. Of course a custom description is always best for each individual page/product, but in some cases the time isn't worth it.

I'm not sure what you mean with clear links on B, but A is a perfectly fine solution if there are just too many pages. A good options might be to create a generic description that uses the product name as a variable. ie: "My (Car) is red", "My (Cart) is red", etc.

Yeah it's generally a DNS setup. If you're hosting with a company the best thing to do is open a ticket and get them to walk through it with you. Most providers will have their own admin panels.

There might be a link or something directing the crawlers to your site's IP address instead of the original domain. There is potential for getting flagged with duplicate content but I feel it's fairly unlikely. You do want to fix this though, it would hamper your backlink efforts. These steps will correct this issue.

1. Setup canonical tags on all your pages. This lets Google know that 1 url should be linked for this page whether they're on the IP or domain.

2. Set your host up so that anything that directs to the IP is automatically redirected to the domain. This can be done with your hosting company, or through .htaccess, or through PHP. I suggest you do it with the hosting company.

3. Check through your site and make sure no links point to the IP domain. If there are no links pointing to the IP, the crawler shouldn't follow.

There's no penalty for running a website on the subdomain. That's perfectly fine but all the redirecting might be confusing for regular users. The most important part for any website is to make it simple for the end-user. If it's simple for the user, Google won't have a problem with what you're doing. You'll also want to take a look at any backlinks. In terms of SEO, Google will pass a tiny bit of juice but for the most part, they treat a subdomain as a completely different site from the root domain. www.xyz.com is not the same site as subdomain.xyz.com, and both domains will need to be individually handled. They can work together but your backlinks will be split between the 2.

Since you lost those backlinks, you probably won't be able to bounce back to exactly where the site left off before those penalties. Did you get a manual action or was it done by the crawlers? Also, did you get a partial or full site penalty?

First double check your Google Webmaster Tools and see what the status of the penalty is and make sure that's removed. There's a Manual Actions area they added in the last few months which lets you see the stats and details of actions taken against your site by Google. If everything is resolved there, start improving your content and get back to link building. Since a good number of your old links are gone, they'll need to be replaced with better quality links.

A Google Update by the name of Hummingbird came out and has been moving it's way across sites. This one isn't meant to penalize like the Penguin and Panda updates but rather change how Google displays results. Double check all your keywords and see which ones declined in traffic. Then do a search and test to see where you rank and if you dropped from when you notice a decline in traffic.

For your questions:

1. If it's a straight link like this http://domain.com/page/?affiliate_id=123, yes that will pass juice

2. If you're using variables in the url string like this ?var=123, Google will ignore the ?var=123 and treat the link as a URL without the variables. You can apply special tags that let Google know that the variables are important if they are necessary.

3. No adding an affiliate ID or variable to a link won't reduce it's value as long as you don't rewrite the link and use some sort of fancy redirect. Many affiliate program software use a link schema to track links that they generate.

If you're an affiliate program and you have links pointing to your site, the links shouldn't pass any SEO juice. Google can treat that as a way of purchasing links and penalize your site for buying links. What you can do is setup a sort of redirect for links by using affiliate program software to handle tracking or using a subdomain redirect that stops the juice from flowing from the website promoting your products.

It's hard to diagnose the problem without seeing it. Does the Fetch As Google results show any errors or report anything but "Success"?

The report just shows you what Google is seeing so look for anything missing from the page. Usually if it can fetch, then Google can see your site. Double check there isn't a noindex added into the meta somewhere.

Would you be able to post the domain for us to look at?

If the site has been "down" or unaccessible by Google, it's natural for them to deindex the site. There's a grace period for server issues but a couple months will definitely get your pages removed. That doesn't mean every single page is deindexed, but some definitely will. Bring the site and servers back to good standing and the pages will flow back into Google's results.

If the new website is related to the old website, redirect as many individual pages to the new site as possible. Match up the pages and that'll create the most seamless way of moving the site from the old to new. All your old traffic will end up in the right place on the new site. Benefits there include any SEO or inbound links will pass pagerank over to the new site as well giving you a bit of a boost.

If the old site has nothing to do with the new site but it's your new brand, company, or project that you want to draw attention do, just do a straight 301 redirect and explain that it's a new project somewhere on the page. Any existing traffic from the old site will follow through and learn what you're currently up to on the new site.

If the old domain has no traffic, no SEO, no inbound links, and really doesn't have anything to offer, keep it parked.

Old post but for anyone that feels that waiting for Google to penalize someone will take too long or not work... here's an example of a major competitor of ours getting hit on the last:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/therichest.org

It took about a year and a bit. We even offered $XX,XXX to purchase their sites, and after discovering their techniques, just waited it out to see their huge decline.

When it comes to link building, take what you can get. Whatever people deem link worthy, focus on that. Start with Category pages and see if websites pick those up. In my experience, content pages are easier to link build for and create great deep links. If you page breadcrumbs or some sort of navigation passing the user back to your homepage and category pages, those content pages will pass pagerank so it really doesn't matter what pages you build links for, just build links.

Remember, stay white hat if you want you site to stick around. Google will eventually detect black hat links - forum/comment spam, forum signatures, links in social media profiles. You want good links from reputable sites.

nofollow won't help much in this situation. The outgoing links will still be there and if you're nofollow'ing your own site, it could hurt the site. Honestly, nofollow should never be used, if it's a useless link, why link it?

First simply go through and remove as many links as possible. Anything that's not needed, remove it.

Next remove duplicate links. If you've linked to it once, you don't need to do it a second time.

From there just use your discretion and clean up any links you can. Looking at the site, you're linking mostly internally to brands and offers. That's ok in my opinion. Sure you might have too many links on some pages, but they link to relevant topics.

There's nothing to worry about. All Google is saying is that the image no longer exists and it's returning a 404 for that specific link "http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg". When Google tries to fetch the broken URL, it's getting redirected to the 404 and it's saying that it's ok. We detect a 404 page and that fetches ok. However, the actual URL it was trying (the broken image) is not there. Google will automatically remove the 404s over time and there will be no negative impacts from this.

An article we wrote a while ago with a few examples. It's my site but answers your question:

http://buildforsearch.com/googles-worst-penalties-and-what-happened/

Anything with "Windows 7 activation code" will eventually get hit by Google whether you decide to report it or not. It might take a day, week, month, year but Google will eventually find their links spammy and do something about it. That's really the gamble with black hat. How long will it take Google or someone to kill the project? The idea with blackhat though, is you burn the domain or burn whatever the project is once it's no longer profitable. If you plan on working on the same brand for a long time, whitehat is really the only way to go.

They'll see a short boost now, but once they get hit, it'll be a huge hassle to fix everything.

Short answer: No

These will affect SEO:

New servers are slow and affect site speed
IPs flagged as spam/bad IPs
The new IPs are in another country

1. I would first try and see why the users came to the site in the first place.

Where are your users coming from?
Are they looking for products or information?
Are they actually interested in buying anything?
Can they find your products elsewhere on a more reliable site?

2. Fix any broken images and work on building trust:
http://www.vrtack.com/crusader-fly-mask-standard-p-1212.html

• First link I clicked into had a broken image
  Build trust by including things like your shop address. Clean up the logo and make it a clean crisp image. Encourage your existing customer base to interact with the site, then build on to the site to improve ways for customers to interact. Customer reviews, testimonials, or just an image of your shop location so they feel like they're buying it from the real world.

The Internet is a competitive area where many retailers can sell the same products and services as other retailers. The only way to succeed over the long term is to make your product and website more targeted for a specific niche (making you the authority on the subject), or offer something unique that your competitors don't. People can shop anywhere. The main question will be why would someone want to buy something off your site and not someone elses?