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Panda does not affect links, penguin does.

Panda is a "quality content" related update.

Penguin penalizes both pages and/or entire domains, even to the point of completely removing the from the index.

Under your Google Webmaster Tools, "Manual Actions" you can see the type of penalty the site has (if any) and what it is impacting.

"Sitewide" means that the entire site got the hit, while "Partial Matches" means some parts or some links.

Anyhow, if you have a manual penalty, you won't recover by just creating new pages. Although penalties expire, you cannot know which ones were hit.

You have to consider if the Website is worth saving or you can just start again fresh. If you have a Website 3 years old or more, and generating income, with a client base, then you probably start working on saving it. If your Website was new, not real client base or value, you rather start fresh.

Don't make the same mistakes again!

Exactly.

Let's do some cleanup

To redirect everything domain.com/** to www.domain.com you need this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That's it for the www and non-www redirection.

Then, you only need one line per 301 redirection you want to do, without the need of specifying those rewrite conds you had previously, doing it like this:

RewriteRule ^pagename1.html(.*)$ pagename1.html [R=301,L]

That will in fact redirect any www/non-www page like pagename1.htmlhgjdfh to www.domain.com/pagename1.html. The (.*) acts as a wildcard.

You also don't need to type the domain as you did in your examples. You just type the page (as it is in your same domain, you don't need to specify it): pagename1.html

Keeps logging me out too. I already raised this question (http://moz.com/community/q/problems-staying-logged-in-again) but following the suggested procedure didn't work.

100% agree.

However, I think they already parked the URL. Did you?

As if you did, it will start loosing its ranking (if it didn't already).

Do you have the penalty in available in your Google WT? What exactly does it say?

Most penguin penalties I've seen are partial matched and affecting only some incoming links. Removing pages won't help as you don't know which ones are affected.

Doing a link cleanup by going link after link asking for removal and then requesting a reconsideration may remove the penalty (in conjunction with the disavow file), but there's been several polls online and over 80% of the people who did this and got their penalty removed didn't see their rankings back. This is obviously true, as probably those manipulative links were the ones causing your high rankings and now gone you need to get some REAL, EARNED links to gain positions.

Truth be told, no one can tell what will happen, and you can only try.

The ultimate question always become: Is it really worth it? Or do I just start fresh (new Website, unrelated to the old one)?

I wouldn't put a noindex meta on them, instead I would consider using a canonical tag pointing to the page that lists all the villas.

Anyway, what programming language are you using?

There are a few solutions you may try.

1. Try asking for a crawl manually: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
2. Remove the campaign and create a new one, if you have open slots, just create a new one instead of removing the current one to avoid data loss.
3. If you are still getting old data, then you should contact Moz's support at help@moz.com

Hope that helps!

I would go with another solution tho. I will start analyzing the pages where you have the highest CTR, then on those the highest bounce rate. Are those visitors leaving because the content is useless or because they finished reading the piece and there's nowhere to go? Consider all variables and try improving the content pages to include links to related posts kinda "You may find this articles interesting", or "Related Articles", etc. Try improving the site navigation, if you are getting CTR from search, then do whatever you can to keep those visitors there, by improving user experience and navigation.

Hope that helps!

Agree with Jeff.

I noticed, however, that using some king of markup to let Google know your "most accessed" and important locations increase the chance of getting those pages in the sitelinks, ie: HTML5 tags like

<nav>.</nav>

From my point of view, there's nothing you need to worry about. Do the sites offer different content for each Country? If yes, then you don't have to worry about those links, plus you should add the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to all your pages pointing to the corresponding site in the different language/location, as explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

If you want, and that's up to you as I don't think that could lead to any penalty, you can also add a rel="nofollow" to the links that point to the other Countries' sites.

Hope that helps!

I really hope they were able to find a way to take down that SAPE link network, which apparently they were working on it.

I see hundreds of quality sites outranked by those link buyers, and all of them go back to sape. HATE THAT!

Claudio,

Alright then you have it right (the www/non-www thing).

First go over all your shady links and try to have them removed or no-followed. There are online tools that can research contact forms, emails, etc from those links, like Link Detox from LinkResearchTools (I think it is).

Run a full report and include all the links that are downloadable from Webmaster Tools, and those from OpenSiteExplorer. By doing that, it will analyze every possible link you have. Then filter all the shady ones, and send an email (a template of course) to each webmaster (if there's no email, try searching for a contact form). Point them where's the link that should be removed in their sites, make their job easy so they actually do it.

Once all have been contacted, wait a couple of weeks for the results, run the report again and create a disavow file with all those links that were not removed.

Wait a couple of weeks.

Get on the reconsideration request (same for both www/non-www); again send them proof of your work, share the spreadsheet you created while removing the links, the emails, some responses, show some removed links, etc.

It could take a while to get your rankings back if the reconsideration is approved, but unfortunately I've read cases where their rankings were never returned.

Why would you create an image tag if there's no image to put? If the reason is just to put some words, then yes, that's stuffing, and you could be penalized.

Is is widely known that manual penalties do expire. If you have fixed the issued, cleaned up the backlink profile + disavowing those that were impossible to remove, then perhaps the penalty just expired and as you are no longer in violation to Google quality guidelines you haven't receive the penalty again.

If on another scenario, the penalty expired and you didn't do the cleanup, then most likely the penalty will be back to bite in the a***.

I always heard that penalties do expire but no one was able to tell how long it took, I think you are the first one that can verify that penalties do expire and don't come back unless you haven't fixed the issue

Anyways, after a penalty is revoked/expired, it will take some time, probably month to see the changes.

From my point of view, you are in the right direction, building content to earn backlinks, that's the way to go.

Hope that helps!

Yes, basically you will get the juice from the new domain to your old domain. However, have you made your research? As the domain may have a penalty that an also be passed to your old domain by 301 the new one.

I would suggest you do a backlink assessment, add the domain to your Webmaster Tools and look for any manual actions that the domain might have.

If your research results in a bad backlink profile, or a manual penalty, I'll suggest you don't make the 301.

Hope that helps.

Google suggests to link to the REAL author, in this case you. Articles are written by persons, then if you are writing an article, research findings, etc, I would go with linking to your personal profile as the author "rel=author".

If the article is related to your business, and you do not want any personal attribution, then set the author to your page.

Hope that helps!

Some pagerank is diluted over a 301 redirect. The same as if you had one link to HenryJewelers.com from Henry.com.

It will certainly be better to use the actual domain. But not going the other way around? Is HenryJewelers.com an established website with lots of value? are all the links pointing to Henry.com? why not going with Henry.com as the main address, it clearly makes more sense user-wise.

It's the same thing! Both result in a 301 redirect...

The only difference is probably a little faster at the registrar level (unnoticeable), and the need of a server for the htaccess option. Besides that, there are no SEO benefits on any.

AdSense uses another bot to read your pages content and then serve ads based on the content. That's why you are getting a higher crawl rate when you have adsense installed and the drop when you remove it.

Within that robot.txt file on the CDN (which one are you using?) have you set to allow Google to index them?

Most CDNs I know allows you to block engines via the robots.txt to avoid bandwidth consumption.

In the case you are using NetDNA (MaxCDN) or the like, make sure your robots file isn't disallowing robots to crawl.

We are using a CDN too to deliver images and static files and all of them are being indexed, we tested disallowing crawlers but it caused a lot of warnings, so instead we no allow all of them to read and index content (is a small price to pay to have your content indexed).

Hope that helps!