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From my experience, not all penalized sites get their penalties passed. It could also depend what penalty it was.

My best guess for this issue is that they might also be using a lot of other non penalized 301's that already have good standings.

Hi!

I would look at the source of the traffic first (they have to be coming from somewhere) or IF the site has injected codes.

I've seen this happen before. Injected codes (invisible or not) then they spam you with links and traffic from different countries. Some country specific traffic gets more visibility hence more traffic from there.

I hope it's not but it's better to be safe and check if you were hacked.

I wont point at the competitor yet as that's a very minimal thing in terms of SEO. It just messes up your stats though.

It doesn't matter.

PS. If I really had to pick a way for G+ to really work for SEO, it's getting people to actually share it instead of just +1s.

I would stick with what you have then optimize. I would also remove the english articles and come up with a separate content strategy for that. Itll save you time and keep things within a strategy so you can track performance better (but youll have to check if those articles already get traffic and links first)

Other options i could think of will need more time and a lot of changes (and cost)

You can just noindex those sub pages in Yoast under Titles and Metas

Hi

Yeah, lets say they use Xrumer.

They hack your site, insert pages of their own, and links on your pages.

They put those urls in text files based on their keyword targets/groups.

They run the software, using those list with their link sources and using their auto insert random url template.

So that pings a 404 to GWT so the 404 shows up there.

If these are pros, they already know that the pages are dead by now, as they confirm links after each run. It just takes a bit more time for GWMT to get notified so you'll see them trickle in.

So you'll see those 404 pages getting links from different dates.

Hope that helps

I would go 404's (and let them die) as I dont think those have any good content on them since it was just generated.

Redirecting them wont really do much.

Probably lost some links? Some might have dropped based on the latest returns for Moz's database.

I didn't see much changes from what Im monitoring. It's normal to see this changing and bouncing a few points up and down.

There was an algo update at the end of october that wasnt really reported on. About 3 days before the end of the month.

If it started there, then I dont think that's penguin. That's something else.

I can't really help with that if it did happen within that time frame. I don't have enough data to say what to specifically check so be sure to do the usual onpage audits/speed/links and go from there. If it happened to your subfolder, then I would worry about the whole domain. I would however, check the whole search results for the affected sub+keywords, what changed, where the competitors are, were videos added, are there more "authority" sites showing, were those ranking and linking to me affected and so on.

Good luck!

I totally understand what you mean, especially with keywords like that and the nature of searchers looking for that.

Switching to a page doesnt really matter. Just move over the content and try to use the same permalinks. If the url structure right now of the post is impossible to replicate, you have some choices to do. 301 the url or worst case, canonical+nofollow.

Don't sweat it, it's going to be the same content. Just be sure to remove the post once you've moved it.

Good luck!

I have a different opinion for this.

It's just one domain for me and it's not a million pages. Both are yours. Just leave the link alone. Either way, you can always remove it anytime.

If I'm really bothered, I would just make it a link on one page of that domain.

It's like all those sites having blogrolls, nothing really happened to them. You can look around other blogs, SEO guys, accountant, mommy bloggers, etc. They do that all the time.

That is, unless they were multiple artificial blogs from their own private networks specifically to boost their SEO/game google.

Hi Dave,

Just add the https version to webmaster tools.

Then wait. That'll fix all your issues.

The collected data from the old http though wont show in the new one. It's completely normal for that to happen so dont worry.

Hope that solves your problem

Since those URLs are already gone after you cleaned it up, you can just mark those as fixed. GWT usually is pretty late with picking those up. I've handled my share of hacked sites, some with invisible links.

If they appear again, then you'll need to find where they are getting through. It's a pain but you have to fully check your files for scripts and encrypted codes.

Aside from those, it's just time. Google will eventually stop showing them.

Good luck Andrew!

PS. You might want to look at some of your pages using Google's cache result. You can see invisible links using that. Just in case you haven't done this part.

301 the domain over to capitalize fully but it sounds like you might want to keep both sites active.

If you have content that you want to move over or is ranking, be sure to create separate 301 from the old url to the new url. The page that receives the 301 will benefit from that. In many cases, the new url will rank in the place of the old one.

If they have pages that have great backlinks (like an about page or products page) but you don't really want to move them over and want to just delete them, then just 301 those urls to relevant urls on your site and you will benefit from their links.

Hope that helps! Good luck!

Assuming both are on different servers or if you can do the transfer for the whole thing quickly:

1. Just copy the content over, including the meta details, images etc.

2. Put a 301 from the old page url to the new page url.

3. Update both sitemaps and refresh them in webmaster tools.

That's basically it.

There can be other tricky things like if you decide to 301 the whole domain or if you want to leave both content on.

I encounter sometimes that with my clients. The basic thing to do is just to add a canonical since they are already noindexed especially for themes that utilize certain pages within a page. Crazy sounding but some themes actually does this so you can't remove the duplicate page, so noindexing it then adding a canonical is already good enough.

But since you mentioned these are just tags, then simply noindexing them is fine. (I'm assuming these are just basic wordpress tags)

As for your pagination question, use a canonical to link to a URL where all the posts are shown. That's the basic rule for that situation and it's somewhere in Google guidelines about pagination

There's really no way for them to enforce that policy unless a lot of people squeal about it.

I know here at Moz, it's really something like a Taboo, but it's really not. Big companies do this daily and they do it in bunches.

I would suggest though (since you mentioned that it's just a bitly link) that you just go for it IF the price is right and if it's targeted enough.

Look at it at the standpoint of getting traffic. You mentioned that it's a good site then it probably has a good spot for your link so it can bring in leads. If you can optimize to capture these leads or just get them to your sales funnel, then it'll be worth it. You'll get more links down the line.

It's pretty much like guest posting or paying for a best of the web spot.

Check out RevCom's answer.

Then check this out:

• Did you get affected in the middle or the last week of the month? Check your traffic.

If you were, then you got affected by the algorithm updates during those times.

You MAY or MAY NOT have been affected by it. Maybe the links pointing to your were affected, maybe something changed in the keyword/niche rankings, maybe it's showing other new things now that pushed you a bit lower.

Now you can check out Andy's answer and do a link audit to see why you got affected.

As for the www. non www -> be sure to add the current one to webmaster tools as well.

I haven't actually seen a way to upload CSV's on Bing yet. (Weird I know)

I've always had it done one at a time...unless they magically added a button recently but it's been one at a time ever since.

Hi! Yeah, that's what i said. I would just ignore it and mark as fixed. Just be sure you crawl the whole site so that you dont have the old one linked on some page on your site.