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I am about to move my Thailand-focused travel website into a new, broader Asia-focused travel website. The Thailand site has had a sad history with Google (algorithmic, not penalties) so I don't want that history to carry over into the new site. At the same time though, I want to capture the traffic that Google is sending me right now and I would like my search positions on Bing and Yahoo to carry through if possible.

Is there a way to make all that happen?

At the moment I have migrated all the posts over to the new domain but I have it blocked to search engines. I am about to start redirecting post for post using meta-refresh redirects with a no-follow for safety. But at the point where I open the new site up to indexing, should I at the same time block the old site from being indexed to prevent duplicate content penalties?

Also, is there a method I can use to selectively 301 redirect posts only if the referrer is Bing or Yahoo, but not Google, before the meta-refresh fires? Or alternatively, a way to meta-refresh redirect if the referrer is Google but 301 redirect otherwise? Or is there a way to "noindex, nofollow" the redirect only if the referrer is Google? Is there a danger of being penalised for doing any of these things?

Late Edit: It occurs to me that if my penalties are algorithmic (e.g. due to bad backlinks), does 301 redirection even carry that issue through to the new website? Or is it left behind on the old site?

Yes, it's a strange one. I don't understand what advantage they get from scraping my logo and headings. I have disavowed their entire domain as there appears no reasonable way to contact them. I doubt they'd reply if I did. I did a full backlinks report this morning and found four more similar sites (similar URL structures) linking back to me, although none of them appear to be working.

If they end up getting better SERPs than me, I'll be wanting to know why!

I have noticed just this week a lot of new backlinks from a site called handmadearea.com - for example http://handmadearea.com/url/hp-printer-software-zpe-center/. It looks like the site is somehow stripping my content structure and inserting spam where my content goes.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Should I be worried about it? The backlinks are not showing in Google Webmaster Tools so I can't easily disavow them at this point. Are they likely to be doing me harm? What can I do about them?

If these are going to be all separate sites with no relationship, I recommend using businessname.domain.com. I don't think you need to add city at all unless there are likely to be duplicated business names.

At PubCon 2013 I notice Matt Cutts mentioned Panda softening and I wonder if anyone who was there has any greater insight into what they are thinking? Is Google finally responding to the overwhelming number of webmaster complaints about Panda? What sort of issues might they be responding to?

"We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we've got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree."

All I am seeing on the discussion forums so far is more blah blah blah...

What's really bizarre, Gary, is that Moz reports that I rank at 16 for "traveltipsthailand" on Google US, but looking at it today I couldn't find an entry anywhere in the top 100.

I have another connected domain "asiantraveltips.com" which also does not rank but has not manual penalty notifications. I say connected, because they cross-link to each other.

I know it's not a server-wide penalty or C-block action because I have other sites on the same shared hosting account that are ranking OK and holding PR2 or PR3.

My only recourse now would seem to be to migrate all my Asian travel content onto a new domain, kill the old ones and all links and start again. It really is getting that desperate. But I'd still like to know what I did wrong to deserve this mistreatment by Google. FYI I rank bloody well on Bing, for what that's worth. On the phrase "traveltipsthailand" I rank #1 and on "travel tips thailand" I rank #2 and on "thailand travel blog" (my other brand term) I rank #5. So it's purely Google that hates me.

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I've just been comparing search appearances in Google Webmaster Tools with organic search traffic from Google and found that the two do not correspond at all. Why would this be?

GWT says my appearances in search crash-dived around the second week of September (does this correspond with a Google algorithm update?), but my organic search data in Google Analytics for the same time period shows that search visits actually increased.

Anyone else seeing anomalies like this?

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Although Moz does a great job of tracking keyword rankings within the "top 50", a lot of the time with new sites and new content we are trying to track improvement in performance way out beyond that (just trying to get into the top 50). Although Moz tells me that a keyword has moved up or down outside the top 50, without knowing the actual position it's hard to reconcile that in terms of improvement.

Is there a tool out there that will do what Moz does for the top 200?

Thanks Richard, I will look for your direct reply.

Hi Gary, that's been my concern all along. I have actually asked Google twice about penalties and both times they have responded that I have none.I am running Cloudflare CDN on my site to speed it up, but having trouble with some critical plugins (like Wordpress SEO) when I run full compression. Still tweaking.  My links are mostly "travel tips thailand" or "thailand travel blog" and I don't really rank for either. But I do rank well for my domain name.

I'd like to get some input from the Moz community about the domain name I use on a travel website I run as a hobby. I got heavily whacked by an update in September 2012 which some have said was because my site is an EMD. Others said it was because I had poor quality backlinks (but in fact I hardly had any). With the benefit of hindsight, I'd love to know what really happened.

The website is www.traveltipsthailand.com (now www.asiantraveltips.com) and the "brand" I use is "Travel Tips Thailand.The traffic penalty I incurred was around 80% and despite a LOT of work overhauling the site and trying to build some better quality links, I don't believe it has really recovered much. It ranks for non-competitive, low-traffic key phrases (which means it's not penalised as such), but struggles to rank anywhere meaningful on any phrase likely to drive traffic to the site.

At this stage I really just want to know whether to persist with the site (it's heartbreaking, to be honest) or drop it an build something new from scratch. I monitor the site's progress using Moz Pro, so I can see all the search ranking, authority and backlink data.

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For anyone who's still interested, my SEO ranking for "bachelor hotels phuket" and "bachelor hotels IN phuket" has now equalised. Both now rank #1 on Google, but neither send very much traffic my way. Still, an interesting exercise.

How do non-business websites think about exact match domain names and branding after EMD and Panda? What is an EMD and what is a "brand" when there's no business or commercial brand involved? And does it impact your SEO outcomes?

I have a Thailand travel blog which is a personal crusade of mine. I like Thailand, I love travelling there and I like sharing my experiences and knowledge. I don't have a business name, so when I started the blog I just used the best phrase I could find that was available as a domain name - at the time it was "bangkoktravelthailand.com". Late in 2011 I thought this sounded a bit spammy, so I found a new domain name "traveltipsthailand.com" and 301'd across to that.

All went well and traffic grew consistently thanks to good writing and some basic SEO, until in late September 2012 the site got 'whacked' by Google - possibly due to EMD, but I think more likely due to Panda and some accidental poor quality backlinks (I posted a reply on another travel site, pointing back to my site, but it ended up becoming 100s of low value backlinks because of the way that site managed it's "latest comments" widget).

Since then I've been trying very hard to rebuild my traffic, but it's a tough gig. I am now averaging better than I was in Sept 2012, but nowhere near where I was on trend to be by now. I have a small social media profile (800 Twitter followers plus Google+, Facebook and Pinterest) and I am slowly building some supporting pages on prominent Web 2.0 sites and seeking out quality guest post opportunities.

But I still worry about the domain name. Does Google see it as an EMD? I don't use the domain name words at all in my page titles (I use xxx | Thailand travel blog) and I try not to use it in anchors either (I tend to use "Thailand travel blog" or my own name. But I still have a few old backlinks that say "Travel Tips Thailand" and I use that phrase as my brand when talking about the website.

So how should sites like mine think about "brand" and "EMD"? Is it an issue or not? Is my domain name holding my site back? I have others I can use like "1travelthailand.com" and "thailand-travel-blog.com" but I'm just sitting on them, not sure where to go. I also have "asiantraveltips.com" and a long term view of rolling this site up with other blogs I'm slowly developing about China, Cambodia and Vietnam. But again, not sure where to go any more.

Anyone care to share their thoughts?

Still not convinced. Here's an example of a Penguin 2.0 traffic drop graph from 22 May. Much sharper drop away than yours.

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This attachment shows what happened to one of my sites that was hit by a Penguin update. This is what I would expect to see (I've seen similar graphs from many others who were also hit).

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I still don't see it. Can you post a graph showing just the two weeks either side of 22/23 May? Penguin traffic drops are, in my experience, usually pretty steep. This still looks too gradual.

Can't say I'm any kind of expert, but I have been dealing with Penguin penalties on a couple of sites and I can tell you that your traffic graph looks nothing like the Penguin penalties I've seen.

If you had been hit by Penguin back in late September you'd have lost 80% of your traffic over two or three days. Penguin penalties seem to apply very quickly.

This looks to me more like progressive slow discounting of your site in the search rankings (have you been tracking your keyword rankings?) which would be more likely to be cause by bad backlinks or association with spammy sites (by being in the same IP range). I think these are Panda rather than Penguin.

However, I have not seen the impact of the most recent Penguin "tweaks" that Google has been rolling out this year. The easiest way to check is to overlay the dates of the Penguin and Panda updates on your traffic graph. Any impacts will usually be seen within 48 hours of the update (when Google next indexes your site).

I did a lot of work to one of my sites last week and eagerly awaited this week's MOZ report to confirm that I had achieved what I was trying to do, but alas I still see the same errors and warnings in the latest report. This was supposedly generated five days AFTER I made the changes, so why are they not apparent in the new report? I am mainly referring to missing metadata, long page titles, duplicate content and duplicate title errors (due to crawl and URL issues).

Why would the new crawl not have picked up that these have been corrected? Does it rely on some other crawl having updated (e.g. Google or Bing)?

Thanks for the detailed comment. Appreciate your time in doing this. I don't think I am "obsessing over the wrong metrics" at all, just trying to understand what I am getting from these premium reports. The bottom line for me in reporting is that if you can't understand the report, you either need to know more or there's something wrong with it. And in this case, I can't understand the report. So are you saying the report is flawed?

As a matter of interest, I have been using this data to experiment with Google long-tail SERPs over the past few weeks and I learn something new every month. I have actually eliminated the difference the word "in" made in the key phrase and now rank equally well for the phrase with and without "in". But using the Moz keyword ranking report to analyse why this has happened reveals very little.

So I'm still struggling to really understand the keyword rankings reports I get from Moz Pro and what actions I can take from those reports. Here's an example:

I am looking at a keyword ranking history for the key phrase "Thailand scams". I have a post about this which appears at #46 in the Google USA SERPs and I'd obviously like to improve that positioning (I now have nearly 20 key phrases in  top 50 positions, but few are really valuable - this one potentially is).

So I read the ranking report and it says keyword difficulty is 37% (achievable) and I am on the rise at the moment. How do I capitalise on that? The post that's listing in the SERPs has only 1 linking domain and a Page Authority of 14. My overall site authority is around 27, so I guess I can improve my PA by careful cross-linking from some other pages that have higher PA? And, of course, I can try to get some quality backlinks for this key phrase to this post.

But as I look at those ahead of me in the SERPs for this phrase, they are not necessarily doing those things. So what gets them ahead of me? The listing at #5 has 1 backlink and a PA of 19. The page at #29 has one backlink and a PA of 15. And the page at #40 has one backlink and a PA of 14, just like mine. What makes those pages list ahead of mine in the SERPs?

At least in this instance all the pages ahead of mine are actually about the same topic! Good for you Mr Google, you got one right. But how do I learn from this report?

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