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@ruth

I urge you to try the hreflang solution sometime as a test.

"but it's not something I would test unless you actually do have different English-speaking audiences."

You can Always set the old domain to "x-default" and the new one to "EN" so that all English search results switch to the new site, this is great for sites not willing to wait up to a year for a Penguin refresh or affected by other SERPS suppression. Both sites can be identical and will not cause duplication issues. hreflang is amazing tool for testing.

My site got a revoke in May 2013 and took until the refresh in Oct 2014 for it to show recovery in SERPS

One way around this is to use hreflang and set your main site to x-default and create a new site that targets your main language.

Basically set your new domain to hreflang "EN" and you should see an instant recovery!

"Plus, your H1 should be the first thing on your page, not after your

."

Not sure I agree 100% with that, there are top and left nav elements and various other structual and design things that logically appear before an H1.

However it does make sense for it to be on its own line and above the content it is a header for as close to the top as possible.

Otherwise I agree with everything else you mentioned.

Your H1 should stand out as a solo tag and not be put into a line of code only used for SEO purposes.

Remember that H1 tags are used by Screen Readers and other such technology, read more here about the effects of screen readers and H1 tags here:
http://www.maxability.co.in/2013/06/html-5-headings-behavior-with-screen-readers/

As Google has suggested in the past, if you are doing it just for SEO and not for the user then its probably not a good idea.

Hi Jay,

I do everything online for my company YourCityOffice.com a Virtual office and office space provider with guides for business startups.

I would be interested to see how this new tool could help with the promotion of our content.

Thanks
Gary

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.

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.

For me the one thing that will send it crashing and burning into flames is the spam issue.

No matter what common software you use spammers have written robots to crawl signup pages and create accounts. Some have written them so that they bypass those pages and directly post to the signup success pages avoiding many checks etc..

Do you very best to create a custom sign up process that cannot be easily filled in by a robot. Something totally unique to your site. Remove all signals of any software you may be using, logos specific html code that is easy to identify etc.. all these are things robots look for and they they NEVER stop hammering your site.

Its almost worth creating a custom build. As these xrumor link building schemes still work in Google. Others use them to build negative seo links. So basically your site will be used as a host for bad links. Go above and beyond to protect yourself.

Hope that helps.

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.

See if the changes correspond to the Feb 4th update

http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Its possible that the algorithm update was the reason for your drop and will give you a starting place to investigate.

Also it would be worth disavowing any undesirable links such as porn just to be on the safe side.

Also I expect this to be rolled out country by country, a previous algo update was rolled out in the UK first. So its not always google.com

Until it rolls out we wont know how hash Google will be, they have to find a fine line between demoting sites and still producing a quality list of sites.

However they were very harsh with Penguin and as a result many SERPS results are still bad to this day.

So sorry for the delay getting back to you, its been a crazy week and didnt notice the response.

"Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes."

OK, just to let you know, once they lift the manual penalty, you still need to wait for a Penguin refresh. my penalty was lifted in May 2013 the vast majority of crap links had not been crawled and took a very long time for Google to do so. For the disavow file to take effect it needs to crawl each of those pages with your disavow file in mind and change them to a nofollow. Once a healthy amount is crawled you will then be in good standing when the Penguin algo is run. If Penguin runs before you have an acceptable level of healthiness you will not be released form Penguin and will have to wait for the next. So it took us until Oct 17th 2014  for us to finally get released. This was WITH John Muellers help!

My advice is don't be too picky with what you keep. Go through everything, mine was 20,000 Referring domains with 250k links! We had a 10 year history of business online and at one point also attacked with negative seo. So was a big job

"Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch."

Yes, create a report to show the work you have done, whats removed, who you have contacted, who did not respond. I did an Excel spreadsheet, one domain per line, with a few fields like, last contacted, date, removed etc..

There are lots of programmes out there that help with this now. Not so easy when your the first and there are no tools for it!

Also its best to do domain instead of links, how many links do you have pointing to your site?

you say "We would like to link my client's site to these articles"

How do you mean? Please explain a little more

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

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.

Have you been doing lots of link building recently one it?

I see www.claydip.com/airbnb_features.html ranking for those keywords in about 300th position. This can indicate a dislike for the actual page in question, maybe link related or in your case possibly content related.

I recently talked with John Mueller at Google and he said that Googlebot can have issues with lazy loading content when it comes to indexing. All your content is lazy load content and when the hummingbird algorithm checks to see what "IT CAN SEE" on a page its possible it will not see that content and consider it to be unimportant compared to what it can see. This can cause lots of ranking problems with the quality algorithms.

Googlebot does seem to be able to index your content, I tested some snippets of text but I think lazy load is a bad idea personally.

The fact that another page is indexed but also is a lazy load also leads me back to the possibility that you have done some link building that Google does not like?

There are a few options, you can also implement the noindex no follow on those pages. John Muller at Google has repeatedly said there is no internal duplicate content penalties. However it will need to determine the best page to show, so clear signals like the canonical are good.

You can also look at the "URL Parameters" section in webmaster tools if you are confident you know what you are doing. This can be used to inform Google about query strings you want it to ignore.

There is nothing wrong with query strings, in fact Google has recently said it likes them instead of very long keyword stuffed url's.

John Mueller at Google has confirmed there are no internal duplicate content penalties of any kind, Google will determine the best page to show based on its algorithm. Let Googlebot do its job or you could go into webmaster tools and use the "Fetch as Google" tool to submit any pages you are concerned about or want to speed up. There is a limit of 10 pages per month so its best to submit the top level page and tell it to crawl all linked pages.

You have the new analytics code and the old one there.

The first one is the new "Universal Analytics" code and the second one is the old style one.

hreflang is 100% the way to go, however you must consider the x-default as well.

If you have clients using google.ae (UAE) to find you and they use arabic to search they will not find you. As google will not show your results in that search engine. Many people in UAE search in arabic but are happy to read english or many other languages, this is the same for china, russia and many others. So if you have customers from other countries not searching in the languages you have set then you should have one site set as x-default, this will tell Google to send all other traffic to this location and show your website in all search engines.

I have used hreflang multiple times and frequently speak with John Mueller at Google about it. Its a great tool and once implemented you will start to see results in just a few days.

Here is a great guide https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en