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Something to remember with Google and backlinks: changes take time, sometimes months.

Recovery is possible, and I am sorry you are feeling desperate in your situation. The fact is you are doing the right thing by looking into the links of your site and getting rid of any ugly linking domains.

Outside of links, have you compared your seo (on and off page) to the top ranking sites in your industry? A lot of people say that their website is informative and has well done seo, but usually that is because they are so close to their own site to see any errors. (can't see the forest for the trees) Informative doesn't necessarily mean well-optimized.

I would do a competitive analysis along with your link removals. What I would not do is sit back idly by while waiting for Google to put your changes into effect. Be proactive while you wait, and when they do come around and see you have made positive changes in all areas of your site you might get your old ranking back.

Question: what methods did you use to determine what links were bad or harmful?

If the majority of your page and back end seo is optimized around the subject and the area, I doubt changing the header tag to look more natural would hurt your seo. I understand what you mean, as we have done local pages for the majority of our clients. It is difficult to make it not appear to be what it is: a page designed around ranking for a local area.

On a sidenote, this may not be such a bad thing. If people are looking for PLACE, in CITY, and the first thing they see when they hit the page is PLACE serving CITY, state...might be that they say "This is just what I was looking for"

As an seo, its hard for us to understand what a consumer expects to see when they get to a webpage since we are so involved in the process of making it. I dont think most consumers don't look into it that far, and simply see a page on a site that offers what they searched for. This could change based upon your target audience, and intelligence level.

The MOZ tools are just that, tools. They offer a way for people to see basic optimization tips for ways their site can be improved. Don't take everything they say to heart, since they are just a guideline. We have pages that are a perfect A+ super 100% in MOZ tools that dont rank on page one. For more advanced seo practices, you could potentially hurt your ranking by changing certain things, based upon what you said your target keywords were.

Any paid directory seems like a bad idea. We used a few of the more reputable ones for a while, and saw literally no seo benefit. The issue seems to be with the page rank and weight, and the fact that Google is becoming increasingly aware of link directories. If you look at the home page of these directories, they are usually a page rank of 3-5. The top level categories or pages your link is listed on? Zero. This doesn't pass on any weight, and not surprisingly most links are no follow.

True it may not hurt their rankings but it probably doesn't do them any favors either.

If you want to submit to a few, I don't think it would hurt you now, but I wouldn't think it is a good long term strategy. If the linking site does ever get hit with a penalty, it could potentially affect your site as well. I would look for the most reputable sites that offer human edited submissions, and have a lot of history.

Can you show some of the code that the sitemap displays? I would think the tags have to exist on the page somewhere, in order for the sitemap to be pulling them in. Could it possibly be from a sidebar or module position header that is rendering the same H tags? Try running the different pages in SEO Browser, to see if the pages physically are the same.

After entering your URL, click simple:
http://seo-browser.com/

I would just make sure your planning and implementation is impeccable.

1. Make sure the person doing the redirects is organized and competant, especially if you have a large number of pages.
2. Make sure that your new sitemap contains all the new URLs, so you can get any new content indexed quickly as possible.
3. Try to come up with a "newsworthy" way of stating that you have made the change. Once you have a really nice article written about the change and how it benefits your consumer base, create a high level press release through PR web or the like for distribution.
4. Resubmit the home page and all linking URLs in webmaster under "fetch as google"
5. See how you can combine tracking data from the old site into the new, so you can keep track of mon-mon and year-year progress from the transition.

Thats a good place to start. Other than the basics, content and social shares are going to be what drives in new or additional traffic.

I think it comes down to a few things:

1. How many products are you going to offer?
2. How do people search for this product or service?

Personally, I like the "websitename.com/shop/keyword" format because it flows better. This is the same type of URL structure we use on a client that just joined. This also allows us to separate the normal site content from the store, as you can see from the top links. These do not include "shop" in the URL structure.

http://www.grandsierragloves.com/shop/mens.html

If the content is viewable on the mailchimp database, and is set to index then yes it could hurt you.

I highly doubt this is the case. Most likely the content is not set to index, and you should be able to post it on your site without an issue. Might even help, since users might search for that exact subject after receiving your email. Make sure to add in authorship info so Google can tell yours is the original article, not any others if there are any.

:insert animated gif from sandlot movie FOR-evv-err:

Seriously, it can take a while for the pages to get removed. One week is not going to see the bot recrawl all those pages, most likely 1-2 months. I would resubmit the entire site using fetch as google, and resubmit all linking URLs. Go through your top level menus and resubmit them as well.

First, why were you looking at the reports? Have you seen some type of ranking loss that you are trying to remedy?

Second, the moz tools are just tools to provide you with an oversight on where you are at, and potential areas your site can be improved. They work, but are not dedicated to any one type of website i.e. e-commerce vs static or content-based.

To get the unique pages you seek, it may be possible to use javascript to load content for variables of part numbers. As stated before, your site is getting seen as duplicate due to only a few things changing out per page.

Possible fixes:
1. Use dynamic coding to load part number variables, such as drop down menus for alternate versions or parts or models. This will allow you fewer pages to direct your backlinks to as well.

2. Have more top level pages based around the category, and focus on getting the category pages ranking rather than the individual part pages. Again, focus your backlinking efforts on these pages.

3. Use a plugin to apply rich snippet markup to the individual product pages, adding another layer of "uniqueness"

It would start with understanding what CMS you are using. That way we can give you the best advice on how to implement plugins or redirects. For the seo-friendly version, it would be domain.com/keyword-phrase. Simple for both a user and search engine to decipher. People use the internet for convienence and speed. By having urls that are harder to understand, you eliminate both of those.

Raventools is great, along with AWR. Both allow anlaytics integration, with easy to understand reports.

Yikes! Sorry to hear you are having this issue.

Site B most likely had something that was affecting it before the merger that caused it be be doing so poorly. I would begin in

1. Webmaster tools. Check for manual penalties, linking domains, crawl errors, crawl history.

2. Check your redirects to see if they are all working from site B to site A. make sure they are all linking to relevant pages, and not all to the home page. Google may get suspicious if you suddenly gain 1000 links to your site, from a domain they were possibly already looking at strange.

3. Look for differences in site A, and why it was successful. Could be that by adding poor quality items or links from site B is affecting site A.

4. "Weed out thin content and stick with the merger? " pretty much. You have already merged the domains, and undoing that would just confuse the hell out of the search engine. They would not know where to look, and for what. Reindexing can take a while, and fixing this issue will require some patience and due dilligence.

Check the prestashop forums, and see if another user has a custom htaccess rule you can put in place. Most likely this is a simple error that can be fixed using url rewriting. If you cannot set the items to redirect for any reason,  set the offending pages to no-index in your robots.txt file.

href="http://www.scientifica.uk.com/latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface" rel="canonical" />

How are your articles set up in Joomla? Do you enable URL rewriting along with SEF URLs?

Seems like you are using the blog category to quickly add in new articles, is this true?

"I would first offer a simple suggestion whenever someone says, Google doesn't or Google does... Ask them where they read it or saw it."

I agree with Robert here. Chances are the person you heard it from tried it and did not implement it correctly, and therefore because it didnt work for them, means it wont work for you. Lol.

"City" pages are one of the most effective ways to drive traffic for additional service areas. We have used these multiple times with great success. Having individual location pages with a exclusive URL, page title, content, meta description and links can help you rank in areas outside your major competitive areas. For example:

Lawn care guy serves St Louis. We set up pages for surrounding areas. Focus on St Louis for main site content, while mentioning the other areas. For the city pages, we only focus on that one area. All content is unique for each page (important) and we see how we can include certain details that are specific to that one area. Images, links, alt text are all named appropriately to that location. You can always include wiki info, maps, images or other media to help a user (and search engine) immediately understand what the page is about. Set up a variety of tracking methods as Robert stated to further help users decide that the service provider is "local". People will be more likely to call a local number for service showing their area code than a 800 or 855. Tossible digits has them for cheap, or you can use Google voice. As stated before DO NOT USE VIRTUAL ADDRESSES, or a UPS suite. You want to add to the value of your site, not hurt it.

Always link by page and subject matter. If you have an article about red widgets, you should link back to the page you have about red widgets. True you can build up your home page with a lot of links, but this hurts your user experience by making them have to go through the entire site to find what they came there for.

When you send all your links to the homepage, you are suggesting what page is the most important to search engines. This can often be seen where you have sites that never have any subpages ranking or showing up in search results, only the home page over and over. Sounds great doesnt it? But you can limit the exposure of your site in the long run. By directing links at your subpages, not only do you increase the chance that they will eventually rank higher, you also can get more specific with your linking text.

Direct keyword linking to the home page is more risky. With your subpage links, you can get closer or even use exact keyword phrase links because the content is more specific. In reality, use whatever link phrase that a user will click on. A bunch of keywords might not do that job as well as a conversion statement. If you are worried about getting people to your home page, change the way the subpages are set up on your site, so that users can go to the other relevant areas of your site with ease. It should be easy and simple to direct them where you want them to go using graphics or styled text.

This was my thoughts exactly. If every other mention shows the old number, this could have an effect. It will kind of hard to track, with the Pigeon update happening at around the same time as the profile changes.

So my question is, will hosting our site in Australia on a .au domain rank it higher than relying just on subfolders?

If it was me, I would. By having that extension you are stating clearly what your intended target area is. Additionally, this could save you money if you do run local country ads, due to the ads being of higher quality and relevance. Just be very careful that you do not have duplicate content index-able across multiple sites. Make it unique for each area and country

You can use the hashtags and query strings to display the content, just be sure to specify the URL parameters in Webmaster tools so you dont have multiple URLs getting indexed.

Go for the user. If you look at seo-browser's reports for pages that have large images or fullscreen sliders, it still renders out to a search engine bot about the same. People like pretty. People share pretty. We use a full screen slider for our home page, and still rank consistantly on page one.

Even better if your large images are conversion-focused. Might actually see an increase if done right, rather than a ranking loss.