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Yeah, given that your brand looks pretty strong and you even have a Knowledge Graph entry, not ranking for exact-match brand terms (even in quotes, at least for me) is a very bad sign. When you asked about Panda, did you mean Penguin 2.1? It's definitely possible for a site as large as yours to be hit by Panda (because of duplicate content, thin content, etc.), but that would typically manifest in a loss of long-tail traffic, ranking dilution, and other more subtle or isolated signs. When you can't get your home-page to rank for brand terms, that's almost always penalty-scale and often link-based. Penguin is entirely possible, but Panda is very unlikely to cause this. However, since you've got a second penalty notice in play, speculating about Penguin isn't really worthwhile. You know Google has a problem with your link profile, and they're telling you flat out that you didn't clean it up enough. Honestly, you're going to have to be aggressive - being re-penalized could be worse, and if Google thinks you're playing games, or you just ask for reconsideration without showing a serious effort to cull bad links, they're going to only get more and more suspicious. Are you ranking for much of anything? I'm not able to find you for "cell phone accessories" and similar terms, either.

I agree with Chris.  I thought I'd add some personal experience here.  I worked on an unnatural links penalty for a site with a horrendous backlink profile.  After several weeks of work we filed for reconsideration.  Previously every time the site owner applied for reconsideration he had failed.  This time we got the same message as you. At first I felt sick that we had spent so much time (and he had spent so much money) trying to get rid of a penalty that had expired on its own.  But, I now know that if the webspam team revisits your site and sees that you have not done the work to clean it up then they will re-penalize you and that often the second penalty is worse than the first. Also, the backlink cleanup was necessary for Penguin reasons.

I doubt it. Google authorship has only been around for a couple years now, but everybody is tagging their older posts from years back. Author rank is really only speculation at this point, and the only impact that including authorship markup will have is displaying the author snippet in the SERPs.

Hi there, The best way to enable a new country version --in this case for Canada-- is: Enabling an international Web structure, ideally with a ccTLD for the country, in this case: yourbrand.ca and if this is not possible due to technical or resources restrictions, then do it through a sub-directory under your current generic domain: yourbrand.com/ca/ If at some point you need to enable additional language versions for a country, you can extend your structure like this: With ccTLDs: For English: yourbrand.ca For French: yourbrand.ca/fr/ With sub-directories: For English: yourbrand.com/ca-en/ For French: yourbrand.com/ca-fr/ When you use sub-directories you can register them independently in Google Webmaster Tools and geotarget them. You can always (whether ccTLDs or sub-directories) use the hreflang annotations to inform Google about your different pages language and country targeting. Make sure to translate and localize all the information of your pages: From URLs in the appropriate languages, to titles, meta descriptions, headings, text, currency, addresses, etc. Always link between the different country versions through a crawlable menu. Avoid automatic redirects, is far better to suggest the appropriate version as Amazon does here with their Spanish version. Build your new countries versions popularity, targeting locally relevant and authority Websites in your sector there. Take a look at this International SEO checklist I published some days ago at Moz with the most important steps you need to take for an International SEO process. I hope this helps!

Hey Thomas! Thanks for the response. We have an in-house team that focuses on on-page optimization, but of course, any agency we bring in would be encouraged to aid us in on-page optimization efforts as well. Because our focus has primarily been on on-page tasks, we are looking for more assistance in off-page efforts. Yes, I totally agree that quality content is truly the most white-hat method of link building but as we all know, it's incredibly time consuming. That's why we've been looking for an agency that can help in that particular effort. We've shopped around for content marketing agencies as well in the past but are leaning more towards a comprehensive and all-around solid SEO agency that can provide insight on both on and off-page improvements to our site. Thanks for the recommendation! Will definitely look into it.

You need to diversify your anchor text.  Only 10-20% of your links should have exact match anchor text in them, and of your 180 domains you have 50 with "unlocked cell phones."  Plus, you have almost no benign links such as "click here" or "website."  If you want to get rid of the penalty you need to either start building links, or start changing the anchor text on the ones you have.

After doing a search for "phone covers and faceplates" your website page for that category/tag comes up as #1 in Google's SERPs.  That page has a PR4.  I wouldn't touch it.... if anything I would create duplicate content and then do 301 redirects for all the old tags over to the new tags.  That will avoid penalty for duplicate content but keep the work load down. Payoff?  If you can get ahead of the upward trend in "cases & covers" then it could be really good... but make sure you do your KW research well.  Positive thing is that you probably won't lose much traffic as you'll most likely maintain your ranking for "covers & faceplates" for a while and then you'll start picking up traffic and rankings for "cases & covers." If that is too much work, then just do what EGOL suggested.

That's correct. We do this for all compatible products.

They actually do have a few high value links, but also some junk that any 12 year old site will pick up over the course of time. But things aren't as rosy for them as it may seem.  Based on the few pages I looked at and their semrush page, I'd guess they've got some partial Panda issues. Either way, it would be hard for anyone to tell you exactly why they do still rank well for some terms.  It's not just any one or two or even five factors. If i had to guess though, it would be because of those few high value links, and the fact that they've been around for so long.

Thanks Brent! I figured as much. Those articles are definitely helpful.