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Hi Chris,thanks for the response.

However you say "I would assume your link would have to be re-crawled" and that is the only bit I needed a definitive answer for LOL.

I have looked everywhere for an answer but so far not found one....

Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain.

Here is what I would like to know....

When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen?

1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one?

2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain?

3. or something else?

Very common.

There are a bunch of simple solutions.

First you can look at putting some php at the top of the page that looks to see if "cat" has a value. if so then put an if clause in the meta section. if cat not empty show meta noindex etc...

Another option is for you to go into webmaster tools and change the "URL Parameters" in the "Crawl" menu. Select the option that best fits.

I have had to do this for many sites and seen great results once sorted out.

You can also use the "Remove URLs" tool under the "Google Index" menu to remove large sections quickly if they all fall under a specific pattern or path.

So you have multiple clients all in the same field that each have the same content on their sites?

What links are on those articles that require a nofollow? or do you mean that you should noindex the content?

Re-writing the content is a good idea and will remove any Panda de-valuations you might have as a result of duplicate/shared content. It will be hard to compete with that content if it is distributed to so many places.

It might be a good idea to take references from each article and point nofolllow links to those articles. and surround those references with some unique content.

Please try looking at "First Click Free" by Google

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en

I think this is along the lines of what you are looking for.

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?

We decided that it was worth a large investment as we would own the content ourselves and not worry in the future about anyone claiming ownership to the content as google gets stricter. So we re wrote half a million words!

You have two issues here.

1. Interlinking site sis never a good idea with a dofollow links, so I would look at that. But it is not an issue if its nofollow.

2. Googlebot only crawls from the US and will only every crawl the US site if you send all US ip's to the US site. I would use hreflang on your site.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Otherwise you will confuse Google and possibly get a cloaking issue on the site.

Also look at the canonical tag

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394

AND

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en&ref_topic=2370587

In addition to everyone's comments, I would just like to add that Google's latest algorithm updates are taking a hard line on dofollow links from both those sites and many other PR sites. Penalties are being issued as a result even on naked  dofollow url links.

If you are going to use them, be very wary of this and do your press releases without links in them or find another method of link building.

This is a Panda issue.

Google has said many times with affiliate sites that use the same content that if they do a better job than the original site it will rank them. So its not all bad when you look at it from that point of view.

However, Google loves unique content and will do its best to rank sites first that have the unique content. I have a business in the office space industry and a few years back we used to aggregate office apace listings which were shared amongst 30+ sites. The display of these listings would be different for many searches but the content was the same as all the other sites. This slowly put us in a PANDA DEVALUATION (there is no panda penalty).

After re-writing them with our clients we saw a significant change once the content had be re-crawled.

So it can have a great effect. If Google starts to see that large parts of your site are duplicate content it will start to question the authority you have in your industry.

Could you offer and incentive to your customers to write something unique? And also maybe inform your users not to copy and paste their own content on your site as this could affect them negatively in Google?

If you are an authority could you tell users that if you want to be listed it must be unique? Or if its a paid service have an ad on service for a few bucks where you write a professional description? Might become a nice additional income?

Just a few ideas

Send me a private message with the link to that site, i will take a look and see if there is anything you can do about it. Google is good at reacting to people like that.

I don't have an example off the top of my head but what I will say is that the way software sites do comparisons of packages is great like avg or something like that.

3 columns, Gold, Silver, Bronze

Then down the left a list of all services you offer and then under each column a tick if it is included in that package.

Does that make sense?

It gives people a very clear understanding in one page what the differences are, rather than having to scroll up and down or flick between pages and scanning sentences.

It will likely help people choose a higher package and spend more money with you.

A bit like McDonalds asking if you would like fries with that for the small additional cost of X

I would say you are correct, I have had this happen many many times. Sometimes things are not correct to begin with and you make some changes and Google just treats you like a new listing and you have to start again.

My theory is this:-

1. Your listing has a set of details

2. Google has a list of sites with citations that match that set of details

3. You make changes to your listing and now they do not match the citations you have out there.

4. Google re-crawls your citations over time and as they start to match again your result return and because of those changes your results are stronger then ever before.

That's my theory of why this happens.

I would love to hear if anyone agrees with my ramblings

Oh no not at all, I had a few more things wrong on my sites back then, I just wanted you to be clear on what CAN happen.

Its horrible I know and like I said I have been there, but your sites are still ranking for stuff and I would have hope that you will benefit from those changes and worst case anyone looking at it manually at Google will not be able to pick holes at you for it now.

Some page rank on your sites with a few earned links will help you get back to where you want to be.

I am confident things will turn out for you if you make the right steps going forward. You have a great base.

Well spotted on that link Ramus

OK here are the issues, stop using hyphens (-) and stop using pipes (|) these is seen as an attempt to stuff words in just for search engines. Google thinks that this will not be a good read for its users and will rename them.

Also please keep in mid that Google does change title tags based on the search query sometimes to give you a better click through rate. They are testing things all the time.

Also make sure your meta tags are the correct lengths for best results, some you have are very short and just one word not great for SEO and others are too long.

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?

It really makes very little difference to be honest, if anything you have more chance of ranking for both with the hyphen in place. How is your site performing for those keyphrases?

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.