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A penalty is something google will have to manually remove and you will be able to see that in webmaster tools. A devaluation is when you are adjusted by the algorithm and lowered as a result because each thing that google does not like acts as points against you but you can quickly change and see your results return. Does that make sense?

Sorry been mega busy

First of all, never hide content from Google if a user is unable to view that information. You will get slapped for it. Even if the algorithm does not pick it up, someone will report it at some point. That is a bad foundation to start from.

What you are trying to do is complicated to get the full picture in my head hence the lack of response from others in this forum I think.

You need to describe exactly what will be on the page and why and what will be on others and why those pages need to be indexed. This way we can work out of the strategy you are taking is even the right one. There is likely a better way to do it.

WAIT!

Just so that you don't run into trouble. Its clear to me you already have a 301 redirect in place.
Also you can check with tools like this
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

If you make changes you may put your homepage in an infinite loop! "home.asp" will redirect to "/" and then back again.

Make sure you look at your index.asp or other index files and also your htaccess, for the code that redirects to your "home.asp". You will need to remove it.

Also just a helpful hint, when I look through your code you have a TON of embedded javascript. Try to put it in a JS file if your technically able to.

What are you trying to achieve?

It is possible you may be reading to deep into this?

"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"

This means that you might have:

widget-miami.htmlwidget-New york.html
widget-Chicago.html

All these pages have teh same content but with the location swapped out. Just to try and rank for those pages without having any real content for them.

It is not a problem if you have good content and something unique to offer.

After a pretty long conversation a while ago with Google's John Mueller, we tok the plunge and developed mobile version of our site.

We then went on to discuss how Google ranks mobile. He mentioned that it works like a swap, it will look at the content on your desktop version and determine from that what page to display in Google mobile. So a page could simply have little to no text but rank in mobile for the text that is on teh desktop version. Its al bit of a flaw in some ways.

However a big thing taken into account is if your site is mobile optimized, if Google was unable to index your pages it would not be able to determine if you had optimized for mobile and would decrease you ranking opportunity.

Duplicate content is not an issue, especially if its marked as alternate/canonical

As the alternate works like a swap it the social is also not an issue, in fact you are better in some ways having all social and all link building going to one place.

For example my co.uk has no links social shares etc.. its all on my .com, when a user searches for my site in google.co.uk, Google looks for what site ranks best and then looks to see if there is an alternative it should swap out in its place.

So if you had some shares on one and some shares on another it would be less powerful than all on one site combined.

Hope that makes sense?

How about doing it the same way online help/chat boxes come up.

So in the bottom right hand corner it opens up after say x page views or x seconds. Says "catchy message" just pop a few details in here and I will be right back with you.

This kind of interaction and prompt is very effective.

If they choose not to respond, then they can minimize it and are now aware of where and how easy it is to contact you.

I found your site through your profile,

To be honest, you don't want to confuse people and you want to make their experience a good one. Removing it or changing the name could result in less page views.

Also the navigation links are not the greatest signal for Google, concentrate on good internal linking within text, the benefit of changing your anchor text on the home button is so low.

As Justin said above, you could remove it and have your logo click through with alt text, but then you have to be sure that the people coming to your site are web savvy, many are not.

Years ago I tried to do the same thing and Google Trashed all my sites.

So tread very carefully, use nofollows if you are going to link to them or interlink between them.

It is something not often done and very few will be able to give you a definitive answer.

One thing is for sure, people on Google help forum do not understand owners of multiple businesses and will tell you to merge them under one site. Or question why you own more than one site and how you are able to successfully mange them at the same time rather than give you an answer of which they also do not have the answer for.

My best suggestion is to ask John Mueller from Google in a hangout he will give you the best answer, view upcoming dates here https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours

Interesting, I found your site via your linked in account and was able to test what you were saying.

Interestingly I see that you rank as expected in all Google search sites except google.com?gl=us

When in the Google US results your site comes up in 48th place for your careers page. Not your homepage, this makes me wonder if Google is just doing some re-indexing of your homepage. How long have you noticed this? Sometimes with excessive link building or marketing it can cause a page to temporarily disappear for some keywords.

On the subject of keywords, you are using the the keywords meta tag, considering you have such little content on your homepage it is not wise to keep this tag and Google has said for many years now that it is not used and has been thought to be used negatively by Google bot.

If your ranking has disappeared for just a few days then be patient for a few more.

I noticed your name is not a madeup name it means army in Polish and it is also a Polish punk rock band. I do wonder if there is some confusion there when you look at the other results showing. But my instinct is that your homepage is just being recalculated for some reason. I see this happen all the time to my site when my rankings are about to change significantly in a positive way.

I would also look at putting your contact information on the homepage into rich snippets to help Google identify you correctly.

Also your blog has not been updated for 1 year

Also I see that your social media buttons on the bottom of your site do not go to the correct sites, it looks like it points to the social media site of the websites template creator?

I hope some of this helps you.

Google has always said and very recently repeated that internal duplicate content is not an issue, Google will simply decide on what content is best to return results too.

If you are concerned you have a few options instead of what you are doing.

Use the meta noindex so that Google does not index the data. If you cant do that because of wordpress then this can be set externally Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag

Hope that helps. Personally I would keep the page up because Google is used to dealing with wordpress and would punish thousands of sites if this was really an issue.

The only thing I can think of is that Google's John Mueller has said in the past that they only show a sample of links not all the links which has been a giant pain for many trying to do clean ups, however they have also said if it is not in WMT latests links then you need not bother with it as part of your disavow.

However if you are aware of a link and you think it is a poor one that you want to disassociate yourself with then I would add it and make a note about it if you are also in a penalty that needs a reconsideration request. It shows you are looking further than the bare minimum.

More than anything that code is killing your site. Google recently really started to come down harder on sites that have errors, I honestly have not seen one this old with this many errors in a long time. I am sure you work very hard on it but it is very dated and does need a good overhaul. Its not a big task and can be done by a decent coder in a matter of hours. A good coder could fix your main problems in under 20 mins.

Not only that but sites are also being rewarded for their sites being coded well and for mobile optimized pages. So you lose out twice to these sites.

The content is great on the homepage because each property has a ton of extra info on its own page. The problem with many sites is you want to land on a page that has results right away and your homepage does that. You could always create a listings page and free up the homepage to sell your brand a bit better. Google will pick up on those changes and redirect users to a well optimized new listings page. maybe use this one http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/Whitby-holiday-cottages/ this way the keywords are in the url as well.

That page looks like its from an old design? Google looks at every page indexed and runs the whole site through a quality algorithm called Panda, issues like this can start to mount up, you must be aware of every page Google has indexed of yours and make sure it should be live and if so should have some consistency for the users sake.

I see 184 pages live on your site. (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.endeavourcottage.co.uk) Go through them all.

If I were you I would think about moving over to something like wordpress, dreamweaver is not a great tool anymore for noncoders compare to some of the others. Google is used to wordpress sites and they are built to be easily crawled for the most part and there are plenty of addons to do almost anything. I think it would be a good path for you and you would never need a code to do anything for you.

VERY IMPORTANT!!!!

IF you make a big move, design changes etc... Make note of EVERY page url, make sure that you do 1 of 2 things. Either build the new site/ design and KEEP the page names the same OR ask a coder to use 301 redirects for each url to the new url.
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, your pages have a lot of history, links pointing to those pages etc.. if you change the page names you will lose all those signals that Google uses to rank your site.

Hope that helps

Google's John Mueller said many times that reporting a site does not mean you will see immediate action. The penguin algo has not updated for over 1 year!!! So immediate action implies 1 year or more sometimes!

What they do is gather lots of data and use it to factor in to a new algorithm update. This can take a very long time and as I have argued many many times, is a very infective approach as by the time they are rolled out the guilty sites have a new tactic in place already.

Doorway pages are frowned upon and will eventually get hit by some algo.

_Firstly what type of tool are you using which shows up the errors in site code? I would like to check the site myself for these errors. _

I have been a coder since 1993 before most browser lol. I look at everything with my own eyes and just see it immediately.

_It would be maybe a lot of work to change the entire site in one go etc. _

Nothing wrong with doing it bit by bit. Google algorithms will however take a look at the site as a whole for additional ranking signals, so I would look at extracting that data and dropping it into a new template at some point. It is also very confusing for a customer to land on that page only to click on a link and have a totally new site layout.

Do you think initially it will be a good idea to get a coder to just look at the old site and fix any errors?

Yes the errors will likely all be the same or similar and should not take long to fix.

From customer feedback they seem to think it looks okay for the products old cottages

That is always a good sign, however that may be a very specific audience and you might be missing out on a much larger audience who may hold less trust in a site that looks dated compared to other sites. Its all about first impressions.

_I have run a test _

Plenty of tools out there to look at things however they wont reveal too much detail just the standard things its looking for that most people get wrong. I assure you that the coding issues you have that need fixing are not the same as others. Even down to the broken google plus code you have in the top left corner. They will be pretty unique to your site.

if all pages are 100#5 not indexed then I would block it in robots.txt, Google's John Muller confirmed to me that Googlebot will continue to crawl every link to check to see if a nofollow or noindex has changed status.

So as a result we blocked our pages with robots.txt and saw a great increases in index/crawl rates on pages we want Google to pay attention to. It also reduces waste in server resources.

However if there are any pages that are index, if you block them in robots.txt then Googlebot will never be able to crawl the link to determine that it should be noindex. This means it could stay in a permanent stage of indexed.

I hope that answers all your questions?

I took one look at the code and was amazed by how much is inline. Most of it should be in js and css files. I noticed the solutions pages many of them don't even have title tags! What's going on there? That needs seo attention and is a big no no for coding. This leads me to believe the code needs very close inspection. It surly cant take that long to strip a whole bunch of that code out of each page or template.

If a page is slow to load or pulls in external js files as well you can have scripts try to execute before the required code has loaded. This is probably what is happening some of the time and would explain the inconsistent nature of it.

Run the site through a bunch of validators. I am sure you will find a bunch of stuff.

Https was confirmed by John Mueller as a signal being used to rank sites sites higher in organic rankings however there have been issues reported lately, including one by Barry Schwartz where the sites are getting very poor results from switching over to https.

So exercise caution right now as its still early days. But https will be the future when they get the teething issues sorted out.

Sorry I have to disagree,

There are many sites, specifically directory sites that list websites and as more sites get listed they push your link to page 3, 4, 5. It looks like the link does not exist but it does on another page.

Some sites are that are crappy also have poor connections/bandwidth etc... So they go up and down and overload all the time. Just because its down now does not mean its down later when Google crawls it.

When I did my now famous! link clean up these were both issues that came up when I got help from John Mueller at Google.

It sucks because its just a hell of a lot of work, but based on how long it takes for a penguin update to come about, I would make sure you get it right FIRST TIME or you could wait more than a year to see returns.

Feel free to ask me anything.

Best of luck

Gary

One quick suggestion: On your blog you are not taking advantage of internal linking.

That being said before I get deeper into it. I looked ate other sites that rank in the top 10 such as thedenverroofingco[dot]com

I ran all the sites through Majestic and some of these sites like the one mentioned are shockingly poor at external SEO.It may be worth doing some digging on sites like that to see what they are doing as it would seem something onsite is working for them.

You may also have some issues with Panda, Page 5 also know back in the day as a -50 penalty was common for on and off page issues. You may need to look at stripping everything back to find any issues as a worst case scenario.

Did you look up the site in https://archive.org/ ? you should be able to recover lots of the content that was deleted!

Its even possible that some was curated across the web as well, if you need some help looking let me know.