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I noticed a while ago that Google was hitting sites that pipe keywords, I would change that page for instance to
"1099 E-File Software & Electronic Filing"
You are not repeating words that way.
When I type your url into google, it changes the title anyway to "1099 Pro Enterprise - 1099 Pro, Inc." this is a sure sign that Google does not like your titles.
Try it on a few pages. Also your meta descriptions are very keyword stuffed and make sure any keywords used are also in text on that page.
OK so here is the deal, I have spoken with Google's John Mueller about this multiple times.
Your content will indeed be indexed, however Google bot is not as basic as many people think, there are multiple things happening when the bots come to look at your site, one of them is related to the humming bird algorithm. The bot takes a snapshot of what is actually visible on the page and will give THAT content more preference in search. It will also look what is above the fold for customers. So it is advisable to not have a large logo at the top and for some content to be visible without scrolling.
So just because some content is not visible does not mean it will not be indexed but it may be given far less weight than text that is immediately visible.
I hope that answers your question?
Those are know as "Sitelinks"
Here is the official page from Google about them, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en
"At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future." Google
Having a good linking structure that is clear on your site, will help promote that. However you will also only get sitelinks when your site is an authoritative source for that search term.
Hey Don,
I have found a few serious issues with your sites. I looked at your profile page and saw a link to your Google plus page and that had a list of all your sites in your about -> Links section.
Let me start by saying you really have done a great job, the sites are high quality for content. I have been around for a long time and had many many sites over the years dating back to 1995, I have been through every algo change and tested out many different sites that have different strategies whilst working for web agencies.
You have a link at the bottom right hand corner that links to a master site that that is dofollow, they all do the same. That site then links back to all the other sites with dofollow links. This is seen as Google as a content/domain farm. Interlinking like this is a bad thing and you get penalties for it that do not show in web master tools. Trust me its happened to me and some of them never went away despite fixing the issues. Each site will bring the next one down just a touch, there used to be penalties -30 -50 -100 etc... they target your main keywords and generally you are left with long tail traffic and can never be the authority for the main keywords.
All the sites are on the same B class ip's and the whois data is all public and the same showing the same owner. If you have tons of authority and are a massive company these signals do not affect you however, your sites have little to know pagerank and authority and this all combined is dragging your sites down.
If I can see all that in 5 minutes then I am sure the robots can easily too.
As I said before your sites are in good shape content wise etc.. Maybe the look is also a bit cookie cutter and distinctive of affiliate sites. There are some great free css designs out there.
Remove all association with the sites.
John Mueller has said in the past that affiliate sites sometimes do a better job of selling a product in a niche environment so they do not target them and penalize like many people say they do.
Hope that helps?
In multiple conversations with Google's John Mueller we have discussed this matter. There is NO penalty for internal duplicate content, if its unique to your site then you have nothing to worry about, especially if it is there for genuine reasons.
What John suggests is to focus on top level pages and try to cover the main details on those pages creating on great page to capture the traffic and funnel them down to other pages if need be. If that works you could effectively noindex the other pages.
There is nothing wrong with the way you have it if its genuine and serves a purpose and works in Google. It is always good to add more useful content if you can.
If however its dup content from other sites then I would really make sure you have your own unique content to add.
Is it the the url on your profile? If so I just took a look at the code and you have 1600 lines of code before the first line of text, why is there so much code on this page? It should all be put in a style sheet and js files.
Google will favor better optimized sites, especially when its as bad as that. The site on the surface looks great.
Its not about the quantity of links but the quality, a good link is worth a thousand crappy ones and the weak ones can even hurt you.
Until we can look at your site and know for sure what one it is and then understand a keyterm your talking about for us to analyze it will be too difficult to answer your needs.
Without knowing a lot more....
The current state of Google would suggest you keep both sites. Do you interlink them? If so DON'T.
It is easier to rank for niche results with a niche site, however you will have a more powerful site overall with once main site that you can focus all your time on.
Is it possible to rewrite the product descriptions for one of the sites? This make the site more powerful and independent from the other?
Anyone at Google would say combine them, but a penalty is just one small mistake away from you having no business over night. Keep them both (re-write the content)
The fact that you have higher conversion rates on the niche show you that it is easier to rank and easier to show your customers you are an expert in the field. I would not mess with that.
I have the ultimate answer for you and you will not find this elsewhere online.
I have been through this process and it was a huge pain the a$$
I spoke with John Mueller at Google for years trying to resolve our issues until one day we spoke about hreflang. At which point John said to me that it would be OK to use it. So we played with it and it turned out that we recovered IMMEDIATELY from penguin for a new domain that was hrefland linked from our original site.
So basically this allowed us to keep our original brand name site up while traffic was going to our new co.uk site (in your case .net)
Let say for instance your client is US based. Take the .com site and set it as x-default, then set the new .net site as "en" or if you want to be more specific "en-US".
All Google traffic in english or english from google.com in the US will now start flowing in your non penalised site. the hreflang simply does a swap in those search engines but it happens before the penalty is enforced. So your rankings will return right away depending on where you would now rank after the penalty is lifted and your new content will also be back to their rightful ranking positions. Basically all the suppression is gone.
Dont worry about duplicate content as hreflang handles all that. Its very common for sites to have just a few small changes such as $ to £ or a few spelling changes like color and colour. There is no downside.
If you are clever with the way you code your site you can make it a seamless transition without having to maintain code on two domains. Only took me a few hours to code something up.
The best thing is it opens the door to targeting multiple regions of the world with other languages. (When you are ready).
Hope that answers your question.
Also FYI, when did your manual penalty get revoked? It can take up to a year for your site to be ready for the refresh to consider it OK to lift the suppression. Based on that you may have not been ready for the OCT 2014 refresh and may be waiting for the next one which could be a long way away.
This is correct, Googlebot crawls from the US and will see your site in dollars if your code is serving up currency based on the users location.
In an ideal world you would want to use hreflang for this, you could setup a co.uk for the UK and the .com for the USA. Point the domains to the same directory with some clever code by detecting the TLD and swap out a few basics like currency. (you could also use sub directories or sub domains)
I run a company with the headquarters in the UK with large sales in the US and across the world. I would also consider a US phone number to boost sales and really give the customer more confidence in your company.
A $ currency symbol is a good indication to Google what your target audience is but at the same time your site does have a UK address at the bottom and your contact us page has a UK map etc... So I would not be surprised if Google can figure this out as its been a common issue for a long time and an unknown issue for may website owners.
If you feel that your UK rankings are being affected by this then you do have those options above.
FYI, DO NOT change your code to show £'s just for Googlebot, this can be a sure way to get a penalty.
Have a good read of the MOZ hreflang guide below, they mention Currency and other useful aspects of a site like yours.
I had a frustrating chat a little while ago with a Google Employee regarding a site of mine that was in a manual penalty.
I was forced to look at every link coming to my site and determine what was natural and what was unnatural in the eyes of a Google Web Spam team Reviewer.
Links that were simply low quality and clear as the day is long that someone else had created much like the links you are talking about were deemed my problem and for me to remove. There were people linking to my site in forums that clearly had hundreds if not thousands of posts some not saying positive things about my company (very very rare but there is always one.) and I was forced to include those in the disavow file or have them removed. Madness
The level to which you need to keep an eye on your links right now is totally out of control and all though the links you speak of are not a problem now, the way Google is going they will be in the future when they find something else they don't like about you.
Question is how much time do you have on your hands to monitor this kind of stuff all the time.
If you want some middle ground, prepare a disavow file with links you are worried about that way you can submit them it at a moments notice.
I took a look at your site and I see some issues with what your doing.
John Mueller at Google has confirmed on many occasions there is no duplicate penalty issues and I myself have a business that has a similar issue where geo locations overlap for services/content.
However what you do not want to do is create pages to try and rank them before you have content for them. I noticed all your state page are indexed but with the same message at the top with no content. This is a bad signal to the Panda Algorithm and will show thin non quality content that will affect the entire site. Noindex the pages you have no content for or its going to hurt you. Trust me I have been there on multiple sites.
Once you have done that Google will try to work out what page is best to show out of your duplicate content pages, so the best thing you can do is try to make each page unique with some additional information, maybe about the area or something, this will aid in those pages being ranked for the terms intended.
The order of elements in any tags do not make a difference.
Also you can have rel=nofollow without and quotes and Google will still recognize it.
Google will decide what title tag to show for your site, if they feel that your title is not compelling enough they will try different options. They do this mostly when a title tag is full of keywords or phrases and not a readable sentence.
This was actually brought up yesterday in a conversation with John Mueller yesterday.
Many recent experiments show that the Title tag is still a big ranking factor.
Watermarking can have an advantage in Google images. If you have lots of images your brand will show up often and people will get to know it, without ever having visited your site.
I would use the hreflang tag, I implemented this on a few sites that have multiple local based versions and it works wonders and you do not have to worry about cross domain duplicate content in any way. I have a site in US dollars and one in UK pounds all the content is identical and both have been checked by John Mueller at Google and he has confirmed this is a perfect use for that scenario.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
If however they are all in the same country, then I would use the rel canonical https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Your 301's if setup correctly will work fairly quickly in Google and should see results for your main pages within days sometimes hours depending on the sites popularity/crawl rate.
pagerank has not been updated since last november according to John Muller at Google and will not ever be updated again. It is still an internal metic used by Google but the latest data is no longer available to the public. So your pages will likely never have visible page rank again.
What date did you start to see the drop in rankings?
I see you ranking with inner pages on page 5 for a few keywords.
Have you checked webmaster tools for any warnings? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Look under Search Traffic -> Manual Actions
My personal opinion is that the site may need an update. I am unable to comment on the quality of your content as its not my field.
Also I would remove the meta keyword tags as Google no longer uses them and can be seen as an attempt to keyword stuff.
Some of your H1 tags also look a little spammy.
Without knowing the dates and if you have any messages in webmaster tools that's all the advice I can give you right now.
Always use hyphens instead of underscores, There have been numerous test that show the underscores are not a good signal for a separate word. This has also been mentioned by a few people at Google in random videos in the past from what I remember. However Google's John Mueller has said recently that the URL does not even matter and they don't use it as a signal, I call BS on that for now and would 100% go the first one.
Also imagine a situation where you may need to take action on a whole directory for some reason. I would make sure your url looked like the first one so that you could use robots.txt or GWT services to remove or make changes to a specific set of pages all in one go.
I actually just asked Google's John Mueller the very same thing and additionally a question about finding pages that do the same thing that may have been missed.
Check out the video clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew&feature=player_detailpage#t=2343
My thoughts are there is so much going on before the title tag that you give the bots to much of a chance to fail reading the site before they get to it.
Put it above the keywords meta tag, and if I were you I would remove, Google has been rumoured to use this tag as a negative sign for keywords your trying to rank for but don't have content for on that page.
Is there any reason you do not have all that javascript in a js file? making the user download it with every page load is a real waste and multiple things like that are really slowing your site down. Your site is slipping into a possible page speed algorithm issue and also will deter the impatient.
So my thought is that if anything is rendered incorrectly before the title tag (and there is a lot of code for that to happen) then it may not find the title tag as a result.
Also try this tool and consider some of its recommendation.