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Where the domain is all about apps, I'm not sure you need an apps sub-category. I'd also put videos and reviews about apps in the category of app that you're reviewing. You can use a tag for video and review if you want, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

My logic here is that "iPhone reviews" doesn't have the intent of looking for apps - they're looking for reviews of the phone. "iPhone videos" is the same - mostly people looking for videos about the iPhone. As you can see by the top results, Google understands this. "iPhone app reviews" or "iPhone app videos" aren't very high-volume terms, and certainly not the type of hierarchy that users would find useful. Whether the app has a video or not is definitely secondary to me as a user - the first is the type of app. In other words, I might brows productivity apps, but probably not random video apps.

I'm not going to get into a full keyword audit, but just make sure the home page describes broadly what you do. "Reviews of the Best iPhone Apps and Android Apps" seems to describe your site fairly well, but I'll leave that up to you. I will say, though, that you should have a regularly updated post for top app types on the "best ___ apps" in that app type.

Hi Muhammed,

When you mention a link network, people immediately think about sites like BMR that have been thoroughly penalized. I wrote about them here:

http://moz.com/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice

It's a risky strategy, and definitely not my favorite. That said, I think you can inter-link your sites if you do it correctly. For example, you can link to content pieces from one site to another when the topics happen to overlap. I've linked from a philosophy site I own to a jewelry site when the jewelry site got deep on what jewelry means to us.

What I wouldn't do is create 12 sites on the same topic and build a link wheel. I'd also advise you not to cross-link on a site-wide basis just because you own the site. It has to make sense to a reasonable user. Otherwise you'll get caught, re-penalized, and end up wasting a bunch of time that could have been spent actually gaining real life attention.

You can certainly add as many sitemaps to your robots.txt file as you want; however, the references in the sitemap should refer to the resources on the domain in question. For example, you won't want to include a sitemap reference on example.com's robots.txt that refers to URLs on example.co.uk.

If the sites have all the same pages, you can just include the same sitemap with relative URLs. You can also just add the correct sitemap to the correct domain in Google Webmaster Tools. Hope that helps!

Thanks, I appreciate that I was saying that because most of your content seems to be app reviews or articles about new apps (there's not a hard distinction in customers' minds) you could structure it like this:

Platform >> App Category 1 (E.g. Books & Reading)

Platform >> App Category 2 (E.g. Games)

Reviews and videos would simply live in their relevant categories. You'd then optimize the category (e.g. Games) to include the terms. For example, "iPhone Game Apps - Reviews, Videos, & Guides" or something. The sub-category Arcade would be optimized with the title "iPhone Arcade Games - Reviews, Videos & Guides". Again, I haven't done in-depth KWR so I might be a tad off on the titles, but this structure makes a lot more sense to me and I think it should be easier to maintain.

Sorry this took a while to address! I would definitely not noindex a URL that is canonical. Rather, make the organic version (the version that can be reached by navigating the site - don't try to rank with a very similar page that floats outside the standard site structure) the canonical URL. It's fairly standard practice to noindex, follow PPC landing pages, and it works fine. Unless the PPC landing pages are somehow being linked to, there's not really any need to add canonical tags or internal links.

If the PPC pages do have links, it's usually because they've found their way into the primary structure at some point. In these cases you can 301 consolidate the pages or use canonical tags for exact duplicates. Again, it doesn't really matter except in the very rare cases where PPC pages have valuable external linking domains.

Firstly, please don't assume that you've been hit by Panda. Find out. Indexation count is generally not a good basis for assuming a penalty.

• Was there a traffic drop around the date of a known Panda update? Check this list. https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change . If the date of traffic drop lines up, you might have a problem. Otherwise it could easily be something else.
• How many links does your site have? Google indexes and crawls based on your authority. It's one area where it doesn't really matter where the links go: just having more links seems to increase the amount your site is crawled. Obviously the links should be non-spammy.
• Do you have a site map? Are you linking to all of these pages? It could be an architecture issue unrelated to penalty.

If it is a Panda issue: generally I think people take the wrong approach to Panda. It's NOT a matter of page count. I run sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs indexed, useful pages with relatively few links and no problems. It's a matter of usefulness. So you can decrease your Panda risk by cutting out useless pages - or you can increase the usefulness of those pages.

When consulting I had good luck helping people recover from penalties, and with Panda I'd go through a whole process of figuring out what the user wanted (surveys, interviews, user testing, click maps, etc.), looking at what the competition was doing through that lens, and then re-ordering pages, adjusting layout, adding content, and improving functionality toward that end.

Hope that helps.

Sure, let's get a coffee! Feel free to PM me when you get here.

Hi there,

Google's official policy is that you should try to have the links removed before disavowing. I'm assuming you've sent out some emails and tried to have some links taken down, but you haven't mentioned link removal yet - only disavow. I'm just making sure.

You say you disavowed links 6 times - did you combine those into a single file? Google will overwrite your previous disavow, so make sure you're combining the disavow lists.

Finally, if they were ranking well based on bad links, they can't expect to simply regain their former standing without those spammy links. The spot checkers on reconsideration are always a little arbitrary, so you just have to deal with that. Your only option is to decrease the odds that they'll find bad links by either increasing the proportion of good links or decreasing the bad links.

This is a little hard to talk through without seeing it, but I think I see where you're coming from. You have content on the current canonical page that third-party affiliates are also using on their sites - is that right?

Is the content different enough that you can't just canonical the SEM pages over to the organic page? In any case, I think your solution is fine as long as the organic page is the page that can be found through navigation. If the SEM pages don't have external links (I don't know why they would) it's really not a big deal - even adding links is probably unnecessary because it's not going to help much from an orphaned SEM page with no link equity.

If you have a lot of links that you can control the anchor text on, that's a pretty sure sign that you should remove them. These aren't the links that Google is going to reward or ignore in the long term. Whether you're currently being hurt by them would require a very thorough review on an expert's part, but I'm sure that links you place manually are links Google doesn't want to count.

There are thoughts that Google is using its "link churn" patents to use the rate at which anchor text or links change as a part of rankings, but it's not known exactly how the mechanism works. Regardless, if the links are spammy and you're subtracting spammy links rather than adding, you won't get hit by any mechanisms designed to flag artificial rank manipulation.

Do try to remove links before you disavow them. Disavow is a last-ditch option, and Google still won't accept it if no effort has been made at removal.

If the links are toxic, your firm is correct in that it's important to start the removal process. That said, I don't see any reason not to start optimizing pages for your terms. These aren't dependent tasks in any way. If the links were built by you and are toxic and your pages are not currently well optimized, you should definitely be working on both of those things.

If it's time that's the issue, think about what you can do on your own. There's no need to have a paid firm gathering contact info from the linking sites when you could easily be doing that yourself. Make sure you're communicating with one another so that they're helping with things you need help with

If I'm not mistaken Magento has canonical tags on category pages by default, so you might be trying to solve an issue that doesn't exist. Take a look at the source code on faceted navigation to confirm. Or you can send me the site and I'll look over it.

Yes, the bots will crawl the pages, but they will not INDEX them.

There is a concern there, but mostly if the bots get caught in some kind of crawl trap - where they're trying out a near-infinite set of variables and getting stuck in a loop. Otherwise the spiders should understand the variables. You can actually check it in Webmaster tools to make sure Google understands. Instructions for that here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en

Ultimately Google will definitely not penalize you for having lots of duplicate content on URLs through variables, but it might be an issue with Googlebot not finding all your pages. You can make sure that doesn't happen by checking the indexation of your sitemap.

You could also try to block any URLs with the URL parameter in robots.txt. Make sure you get some help on the RegEx if you plan to do this. My advice is that blocking the variables in robots.txt is not worth it, as Google should have no problems with the variables - especially if the canonical tags are working.

Googlebot at least is smart enough these days to know when to stop crawling variable pages, so I think there are more important on-site things to worry about. Make sure your categories are linked to and optimized, for example.

If you're really worried about indexation I think that's a fine solution. It's definitely easier to manage, and it'll also be easier to track pageviews in most analytics platforms. The only downside is that if someone emails or links to a category page with filters applied the recipient won't see it. But generally people share products and not category pages, so it's not a big deal. I'd probably go that route.

Also make sure that your category pages still update the URL when you go to page 2, or that page 2 is somehow also being indexed. You don't want products that don't get indexed because categories can't be crawled.

Magento will generally canonicalize correctly by default. What I'm guessing you're seeing are category pages that have variables for faceted navigation - again, a pretty common issue in Magento. I've seen and even "fixed" this issue for past clients with no noticeable results.

If you ARE having problems getting your pages into Google's index (check indexation status in Webmaster tools and look for exact product/category URLs to check) there is a plugin that will remove the variables for faceted navigation on category pages. The main downside is that someone who emials/shares a link will not share it with the filters/sorting attached.

Generally I recommend leaving it alone. If you're not having indexation problems, though, it should be fine to leave alone and let Google figure it out.

I've been watching some large sites, and I've seen some pretty crazy things around the 14-17th, with most sites seeing the biggest impact in ranking drops on the 16th. It was clearly an update, but I can't find reliable info on what exactly it was - probably because it affected a small niche of sites. Does your site receive a lot of traffic for local terms by chance? My working theory is another update to local search results. (Trying to show more companies that work in that area, possibly with more local packs.)

The reason I'm thinking local is because it was the biggest shift in rankings I've seen in a long long time, and tools like Mozcast didn't pick up a big change. There are so many possible combinations of local terms that it's nearly impossible to track even a small set of keyword + city terms.

Anyway, I've seen about the same as you - a big drop for some key local terms, followed by a slow and steady recovery. The results looked pretty bad when the update was first made, so maybe Google realized it wasn't a good update and has rolled some of it back.

Of course this is all just speculation. I'd love to hear what other types of terms people have seen ranking decreases on.

1. Just to add to this, I'd look at the backlink profile and see the ratio of good to bad. If it's nothing but terrible links, I'd kill the 301 redirect. Though honestly at this point any damage that's done has probably already been done. Do you see any notice of penalty in WMT? If so definitely kill the 301. If not, and there are some good links, probably just move forward. If there are any pages with particularly good/bad ratios, you can do page-level redirects rather than domain-level redirects.

If you have no reason to believe you're under penalty, it's probably best to simply move forward. Try to have the worst of the worst removed, build or re-build links to the .com, and work on getting legitimate links going forward. It's all very hard to say without looking at the site or the links, but hopefully this is helpful.

2. Keep the disavow on the .com as long as spammy links are still more-or-less pointing (albeit through a 301) to your site.

Thanks for the update, and good luck!