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I'll be covering all these topics (and more!) in my Mozinar on June 27th, followed by a blog post. You can sign up at http://moz.com/webinars.

Thanks - joined you there!

Ok I understand now, are you probably under attack? I'm sorry for that. But if this is a negative seo activity by an evil competitor, is it probably that he will do the same for your new domain? By the way I think Chris tip is good, avoiding any redirect for now. You can restart your e-commerce on the new domain and simultaneously try clean your old web site with new content & gwt as you try until now (never give up).

Companies that spend more time building their brand are going to be trusted more than companies that spend most of their time on SEO. Companies that have well-known brands and high-traffic websites with hundreds of thousands + quality external links, an aged domain, lots of brand-related signals (e.g. searches for their brand) are going to be given the benefit of a doubt. The rest of us are S.O.L. until we can build that brand presence. You have to toe the line. Yes you can learn from the big brand sites, especially when it comes to things like upselling, cross-selling, brand building, email marketing... but having worked with a lot of big brands I can tell you that their SEOs don't typically know anymore than others. They also have to go through a maze of bureaucracy to get anything implemented. As such, I don't pay much attention to what they are doing SEO-wise. If something works for them it probably has more to do with the power of their brand and domain than it does with a particular tactic. Emulating them with regard to SEO is typically useless, at best, and often dangerous.

Thank you both for the answers. We do not have a manual penalty. I filled another reconsideration and within a week I got the response that even though there was a manual penalty, it has already been revoked. I was also hoping (based on some articles I read) that it might cause them to re crawl my site and see that many changes were made but I see no such effect (also in the GWMT). For example, the titles of our pages that are in the SERPS are still the ones from before the changes we did. NOT KNOWING is unbearable. I'm at the stage I don't mind a new domain but if it is simply a matter of waiting two more months then obviously we'll wait.

Beytznet, You may want to try this wordpress plugin to do you redirects.  If you haven't already read it, here's Moz's best practices for redirection.  And on this page is a link to a tool that can generate redirects for you.

Best way to get useful followers on G+ lately is have your people and the page active in communities and discussions.  You are much more likely to get interactive people adding than just going out and following a bunch of people - anyone with a decent following isn't going to notice or react to your adding them, as they probably get upwards of 50-100 new people a day adding them.  Most of whom turn out to be spam or fake accounts.  I long ago stopped caring who added me on G+, or even looking! Since communities, stream following and circle sharing matters less.  So get your page to join topical and relevant communities (and if there aren't any for your niche, consider starting one if you can cope with the overhead of managing/maintaining it - nothing more offputting than a dead community), and get active in them.  If your people are constantly active in the widgets communities, posting good quality info and tech help, you'll gain a lot of good followers. However, people who've made good/interesting/insightful/funny comments on threads I'm active in, communities are likely to be pro-actively added as I've decided they are worth a try in the stream. G+ can be a heck of a time-sink, but if you're willing to put the time in the right places it's more than worthwhile.

"Toshiba MODEL Laptop". I would like to them with the most descriptive & searched terms. I don't think its due to your internal linking structure unless its something really sketchy. You can PM me the link of the landing page and I can check it out if you like.

Thanks. I would rather not share my URL at the moment. We do not have duplicated content at all. All is original. What do you mean by orphan pages? We are an e-commerce website and some products that became obsolete are no longer linked to (orphans). Is that a problem? Also, these orphans have nothing to do with the specific problematic page...

As I said, that is what I would recommend doing. Zappos is not, and it could easily be due to limitations with their eCommerce or fulfillment systems since each color is probably a different sku. It could just as easily be due to the ability of these pages to rank better for each color, in which case they have an advantage over most other competitors because they can get away with it, as you have noticed.

The most important factor to social media for a business is the ability to listen. If you are not following your target market then you rob this chance from yourself.   I made an infographic on social media cycle, all be it a very simple one, it is to the point.  Social Media Infographic is here

I'm having a similar problem with a site that has popped up as a #1 ranking - all of the links in their profile are really spammy.  I've reported to Google webspam a few times and just focusing on a building better links for us. I think a "more" exact match domain has been at the root of this

Wikipedia updates content all the time and they seem to rank rather well. From google's perspective they would rather rank up-to-date content, so yes its got to be a good idea to update. An old page might have links to it, and history with google, so if it had up to date content its got to be better than a brand new page.

If you look at most of the Facebook comment implementations, they're usually embedded with an iframe. Technically speaking, that is making the content load from another source (not on your site). As we're constantly seeing Google evolve with regard to "social signals", however, I suspect embedded Facebook comments may begin to have an impact if they pertain to content that is actually located on your website.

Thanks for the assistance with a workaround Marie! This sounds like it'd be something good to write up for our feature request forum at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-SEOmoz-PRO-Feature-Requests, too. Keri

Thank you Irving and Matt, The previous companies were removed but their names and emails still exist in the history (they were given an Owner authority). Is there a way to remove them from there? Also, what authority should a company be given? Thanks

Hi BeytzNet, The answer to that question really depends on another question: Are you looking for a short-term solution that may or may not get your current penalty lifted, or are you genuinely interested in dealing with links that really shouldn't be there? If you're after the band-aid solution then you can try going with the arrogant suggestion from some Googlers that only links which offend Google at this point in time need to be dealt with. (Given Google's current propensity for adding to its list of what is "unnatural", their attitude borders on sadistic.) If you really want to get some control over your backlink profile and future proof your site in the face of changing spam targets, impending Penguin updates and whatever else may be coming down the line, you might find it useful to try this little exercise: Download backlink data from as many of the following as possible (free download limits for the tools you don't subscribe to will give you enough of a sample) Google Webmaster Tools Bing Webmaster Tools Open Site Explorer Majestic SEO ahrefs Raven Tools (pulls in data from Open Site Explorer & Majestic SEO) Open each csv, select all and change text color so that the data for each list is a different color. Copy and paste the content of each into one Excel spreadsheet so that all of the URLs are in one list. Deduplicate the list. Check out the different colored URLs left in your list...the takeaway is that every tool will bring you different link data. If you want a true picture of your backlink profile, you are now much closer to having it. Incidentally, Google is not the only search engine to apply manual penalties. Others just don't talk about it as much as Google does. You might also find it helpful to read this post from Ryan Kent about identifying the source of your link penalty. Hope that helps, Sha

Thanks. Its a great idea - I will try it. However,  I am looking for a company which specializes in content creation. Someone I won't even have to tell them what to write about and that I can have fluent work done - I'm not sure this can be expected from bloggers.

If the two guides are going to be written from scratch and have different information, then I don't think you have anything to worry about. If sections of them are the same, that's fine.

Agreed. My domain name is our brand name and doesn't touch on our products however that doesn't hurt us. Over optimization is usually just trying too hard to force keywords in where they aren't needed; like name dropping.