Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey been a long time Moz customer but have also used Raven Tools as a complementary system. We've liked using them because they are useful for small clients pulling out a report that pulls Google Analytic and Adwords into a simple report, something the Moz reports didn't have the capacity. Recently they changed their pricing structure and without warning charged all their clients based on a usage tier system. Really left a bad taste in my mouth.  Anyone have a good tool they use for running basic Analytics reports at an inexpensive price? We will probably transition to Data Studio, but was curious if anyone else has a tool they love.

So there are two types of penalties, manual ones as you have dealt with and algorithmic ones.  So clearing a manual penalty won't necessarily clear the algorithmic one if there is an issue. If I was going to find a smoking gun it would be links like www.juryverdictalert.com that have what look like a banner ad to the site but haven't put a "no-follow" to the link. It looks spammy to have hundreds of links on low word count pages all point to you from one domain.

The other things. You rank #1 for "Verdict Videos" so that doesn't look like it is algorithmic- it could just be bad targeting. I get that is your title tag, but I didn't see the keywords in anything more than an h3 and I couldn't find a single anchor text backlink that is live (I used Ahrefs). Not that you want to go crazy with that, but you would expect it somewhere.

So yes it would be easier if you had Gmail- those would be 100% available because Google can identify right away the user's behaviour when logged in. The issue is all the other emails, Google has to be able to associate those emails though Google accounts (Google Apps, possibly by using an email as a recovery email- though don't quote me on the second one, ect)

So narrow down your retargeting, don't just use visitors that come to the site, try to identify ones that meet specific metrics- visits to certain pages on the site, time on site as an example and keep your geographical modifier tight. I would also look at Youtube for your retargeting. It has a low CPV and will get your content with rich media and Branding in front of prospective clients.

So also as an overview I would look at what do I want to accomplish, am I trying to get branding in front of the decision makers or am I trying to reach them when they are looking to make that change. If it is Branding I would say YouTube and Linkedin. You aren't going to be able to get granular enough on Facebook and my hunch is your target audience isn't there behaviorally.

If your goal is to get the right people when they are looking for Real Estate, stick with the Search Based Ads, but really look at two things. First find the right keywords. The $30 dollar keywords might not be the right ones, look for very specific searches that your target would be looking for. Don't waste your money on "commercial real estate" as an example. And the second part is make your landing page really tight. Look and experiment at Lead Capture for PPC. From my experiment with Real Estate the Funnel is very long- you need to be able to nurture them, so if they are coming in on an Awareness stage search, lead capture their so you can quantify if they are your target  early on. Just some off the cuff thoughts.

Just echoing Dmytro I would noindex, also this can help resolve duplicate issues as often the "Tag" and Search pages can create duplicates or pages the spiders have trouble with. If you are using Wordpress Yoast has a nice feature to help automatically care for this task.

I would recommend using it as a bid modifier in the same way you would use retargeting for search. The drawback is though you have a list of 2,000 historically only 30-40% of those will be discoverable by the system. Also with that you have to hit them logged into that account while searching for your specific keywords. So they may use their name@company.com in the list you have but you will lose them if they are logged into their personal gmail (and Google can't associate the two) and are searching for your services.

I would suggest using it in tandem with retargeting lists- especially when you can identify internal pages on your site that are very specific to your client base. I would also be very vigilant to negative keywords, writing high quality adcopy, and landing pages when you are in such a competitive CPC environment.

Normally I would advocate moving whatever possible to a subfolder, but I'm a bit confused by the .shop. Did you mean shop.mywebsite.com?

I would use canonical tags in this situation.

Have you tried removing them in Search Console?

We have an e-commerce client that is launching a new site. In setting up for it they decided that they want to change their navigation on the site and url structure. So everything being even, the new site will have appropriate 301 and it's built on Magento so the product pages are all structured as website.com/product-A but the category pages will now be deeper than before. So before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category. Hope that makes sense. I'm not as worried about the 301's or specific products but I'm worried the category pages dropping a folder level will hurt page authority. Any thoughts, am I being overly nervous?

Thanks for taking the time and looking at this Russ, been pulling my hair out so any help is appreciated.

Having the rich snippet is not a guarantee Google will use the information. We see that all the time especially with author tags. Providing the information to Google is just telling them it's available, as they tweak their results it tends to move around a lot. It sound like you checked webmaster tools to see how your mark up is perceived with Google.

Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.

I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.

So yes it would be easier if you had Gmail- those would be 100% available because Google can identify right away the user's behaviour when logged in. The issue is all the other emails, Google has to be able to associate those emails though Google accounts (Google Apps, possibly by using an email as a recovery email- though don't quote me on the second one, ect)

So narrow down your retargeting, don't just use visitors that come to the site, try to identify ones that meet specific metrics- visits to certain pages on the site, time on site as an example and keep your geographical modifier tight. I would also look at Youtube for your retargeting. It has a low CPV and will get your content with rich media and Branding in front of prospective clients.

So also as an overview I would look at what do I want to accomplish, am I trying to get branding in front of the decision makers or am I trying to reach them when they are looking to make that change. If it is Branding I would say YouTube and Linkedin. You aren't going to be able to get granular enough on Facebook and my hunch is your target audience isn't there behaviorally.

If your goal is to get the right people when they are looking for Real Estate, stick with the Search Based Ads, but really look at two things. First find the right keywords. The $30 dollar keywords might not be the right ones, look for very specific searches that your target would be looking for. Don't waste your money on "commercial real estate" as an example. And the second part is make your landing page really tight. Look and experiment at Lead Capture for PPC. From my experiment with Real Estate the Funnel is very long- you need to be able to nurture them, so if they are coming in on an Awareness stage search, lead capture their so you can quantify if they are your target  early on. Just some off the cuff thoughts.

Here is my thoughts based on experience.

First the links don't disappear from Webmaster tools. You will still see them there. A reconsideration request only helps if you got hit by a manual penalty not algorithmic ones. If your traffic dropped after the disavow list was supplied it could be that you told Google to kill some valuable links and now you are missing that link juice. Though with that the  flip side from mantra of causality and correlation that Rand preaches. Google has been rolling out some changes so your traffic drop could be unrelated.

I would go back to the disvow list though and see if they put some links in it that shouldn't have been flagged as spam and resubmit the list.

My suggestion is to ask the owner to make them a non-follow. Technically for a Banner Ad that is the Google's recommendation.

My thought on seeing if you were penalized. Use webmaster tools to see if you have any manual penalties. If not I would go back to Google Analytics and filter Organic Search and look at the traffic for the last three years if you have the data. If there was an algorithmic penalty you should see a drop off in traffic. If there is I would also look to see if there were other changes made to the site during the period to rule out on page issues.

Yes,

Resubmit the total file with the "good links" omitted. It takes a little time but Google will start giving you link credit again for them.

I think the second is probably the issue more than the first. I would format the markup in your footer to match the format that Google Lists as well as a thought.

The other suggestion is the recent negative review might have some temporary negative weight.

Gregory summed it well, my only add on to it in setting when adjusting the geographical settings also adjust the intent. So if you have a German in Berlin searching for "my service in Newcastle" they won't be served the ad if they out of the actual area, if you don't want any non UK PPC visitors.

No there was no response from Google. From what I've gathered from research on the issue, if the issue is an algorithmic penalty there is never a response. You are just altering your site's profile and when the search engine choses to use that information it affects your health in the index. If you receive a manual penalty with an email to your webmaster tools, it's more severe and you need to also send a reconsideration request through the web master tools.

It's always a good practice. It also depends if you are using a CMS that has an automatic 301 for the WWW vs the non for the site. For simple sites that's the only real reason that you would need it. I still like to have the tag, the major search engines have been recommending it and I usually do whatever makes Google happy if I can.

You can see if you have duplicate content if you subscribe to Moz in their campaign tools. If not there are a few free tools that will allow you to as well.