Welcome to the Q&A Forum

_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.

This is a 100% NO NO. Its black hat.

This site is selling links in articles to try to game Google, this will be flagged as a paid link by Google bot and possibly have a negative effect on your site.

Don;t do link building like this unless you want to end up in a Penguin penalty, it takes years to get out of a penalty. you have to fix your problems, then submit a request to Google once they release you. You then need to wait for the next refresh, so far its been just over 1 year since the last refresh!

If you are looking to do some link building I would look at outreach, Google it and learn how it would work for you there are some great guides around.

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.

OK well if you do a site:www.joomgeek.com in Google you will see that it shows the correct description, so there is no issue there.

This now comes down to Google for each query, the engine will decide what to show and what not and may choose to re-write, it is normally a good sign that perhaps Google does not love the description and me be worth re-writing.

When I took part of your description "Our webmarketing agency will help you to get the best ROI from your" and searched for it, it was on over 30 results, but your was nowhere. I would change it make it unique and submit it again.

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.

Hows this for a guide? http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors - Not sure they is any stone left unturned by Brian Dean in this report!

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.

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.

At some point the site will either get reported and it will be manually looked at, or the Panda algo will catch up with them. Making changes are hard to do when a site ranks well. So its really your call on that, but if you want to have a middle road, you could suggest building new pages and have them ready to go just in case they get hit by panda.

Google does not mind internal duplication and unless it is really extreme they will not penalise you for it, I have spoken to Google's John Mueller about it multiple times, including just this Friday. Google will choose the page it thinks is the best fit and show that.

There are no tools that I would recommend other than your own eyes. Look at the site from a customers point of view, if it does not make sense get rid of it. For the most part Google is better today than it ever was at ranking sites based on actually quality rather than making sure you have all 200 SEO signals ticked off and the site looks like garbage to a user. Which was only 2 years ago really.

I would be very surprised if they rank higher for a keyword stuffed list. Google does not pay attention to them it is more interested in content with links embedded in that content. I would look at other reasons, maybe better internal linking through content. External Links are still a huge factor, maybe they have better links or better content overall across their site.

But going back to your client, i would let them make the decision but I would make it clear to them what the risks are, if they make the choice then it cant come back on you either way.

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

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.

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?

All the sponsors on the right are dofollow links, do you have a huge linked network of sites or are you just selling links?

Either way I am sure Google is or soon will not be happy with that.

Apart from that I do not see anything that would specifically be wrong that would simply block the site for its domain/brand but still show all other pages. such as "pornakias video"

Have you been doing any link building? or anything black grey hat?

Google just ran a new Panda update targeting quality content.

It looks for words related such as synonyms and well written content. Over use of keywords will not help you it will harm you.

Google around a bit and read about Panda and quality content. It will become very clear that the methods you describe will only hurt you.

@sachin-sv also makes a very valid point that your content should be written with your users in mind. This will help with trust, if users thing your English is poor they may choose to distrust your product. A regular user has no idea why you would mention the word phone so many times.

Better ti choose your main key-phrase and a write a compelling sales paragraph such as

Our x Phone is [sales pitch] additionally we have durable cases in multiple colours available, replacement batteries, chargers and lots more..... (try using words like mobile/cell etc... and other synonyms where appropriate, the diversity will be good)

You could look for other well written sites that sell the same product and rank well in Google, take that a rewrite it with more detailed information.

This is going to work much better for you and will not get you penalised for keyword stuffing.

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.

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.

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

and that is precisely the reason for me asking John in that video about how to recognise things like this.

Its really bad that Google has removed keywords for referrers that use https (logged in to Google) as this basically makes it very hard for you to see what your customer was looking for when they landed on that page. Back in the day you could use that info to alert a user to a product page or some other clever tactic.

John also said in another hangout that they removed it because it was being abused and people were making millions of dynamic pages to scrape up traffic.

However I see no reason not to have it in WMT or Analytics, but it turns out that they don't want users to be able to do powerful keyword research. I personally feel that this is a backwards move on Google part.

Watch his advice in teh video above, its about 8 minutes long and he goes into detail about recognising if the page that you want to have ranking is the best option and how to make that happen.

Fact is this, they are paying for dofollow links that pass pagerank and this is a no no in Google's eyes. However it might be the only reason people pay for anything on the site?

Switching may see positive effects as you will be retaining much more linkjuice and distributing it internally also you will be avoiding a potential future penalty for selling dofollow links.

So the result could be that you gain rankings in Google due to better internal juice flow but lose all your paying customers if all they want is a dofollow link.

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?

Yes, actually John Muller at Google said this is a wise thing to do.

First ask yourself is there really any benefit in your users going to any of those pages?

Duplicate content is not a major issue and can be wildly ignored but many blogs go over the top with tags etc.. Making Google's life harder when trying to make a decision on what content to show for results.

I personally went as far as removing the front end of wordpress completely and coded a very quick and simple version of the front end myself, so it still gets managed using the wordpress interface like a content management system.

Works a treat and the response from Google SERPS was great. Also reduces the amount of pages Google needs to crawl over and over to look for changes. This will see Google returning more frequently to the key pages looking for updates.