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thanks all!

These are often hard to diagnose, but you have a few options for digging out the source of these links. First of all, you want to make absolutely sure they aren't coming from your site. Unfortunately, most of the time we usually miss something when removing old pages, and our own site is the cause of the problem. 1. Check Google Webmaster Tools - In the same place they list the 404 errors, they will often tell you where they found the page under a column named "Linked From" Here's a screenshot: https://skitch.com/cyrusshepard/8jrqx/webmaster-tools-crawl-errors-http-truefabrications.com Clicking on the pages listed will often uncover the source of the link. 2. Try Screaming Frog or Xenu to crawl your site and see if the RSS feeds or links appear. 3. Or one of the SEOmoz crawlers, such as the PRO web app or the Custom Crawl tool. Unfortunately, if the pages aren't coming from your site, (they could be coming from old feeds that others scraped a long time ago) then about the only thing you can do is file a removal request with Google. This can be a slow and tedious process if you have a number of pages. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

It sounds like it's been a while since you demoted those pages. I think this sounds more like a bug that it's not happening. You could go to the Google Webmaster Forum and submit a request there or if it's urgent and the following solution is doable, you could try blocking those 3 pages via a noindex tag or via robots.txt and see if they get removed that way. Once the pages have been removed using that technique, you could remove the noindex tags or disallows in robots.txt unless you would prefer to keep it that way and you don't want those 3 pages to show up anywhere...period. I hope that helps.

Hi Dylan! So I'd definitely say that having people +1 a specific page is going to be useful because it will show up in the SERPs if it's relevant to the query. However, check out this post from Rishi: How to Get a Celebrity to Endorse ALL You Products on Google. He shows where Aaron Wall shows up as +1ing the UK ebay site, but he never did. He did however +1 the US site. So Google is showing his +1 for essentially any page on the subdomain. Major takeaways: He DID plus eBay.com, and NOT .co.uk. Google merged it to the .co.uk domain. He later REMOVED his plus. Google ignored the fact. He plussed the root domain. Google indicates that he plussed  the SPECIFIC Ad Page. Its false endorsement, manipulated by Google. In other words, it may not even matter! Hope this helps. Jen

Hi Dylan, Wow, I totally should have read your question before I posted one  of my own. First of all, no hard evidence on this..but it appears to me that Google is giving a page a rankings boost when a video is embedded on it...and in my case, these videos are hosted a variety of places - not just YouTube (one on site, one on a product manufacturer's). Conveniently enough, they also give you a chance to gain more of the SERP by pulling out the video within with a thumbnail. In my case, the two pages became visible in brand searches for my company, though those pages were NOT optimized at all for our brand terms, and have nothing but internal links to them. Investigation is on-going - I haven't checked if they rank for what they're optimized for, but this is probably moot since they ranked well before. Anyway, takeaway for me appears to be Google is giving more love to videos as quality content & ranking factors...and hosting platform doesn't matter...but my evidence is minimal at this point. Also, all searches were performed Universal Google..not on Youtube.

Unless the page is over-optimized for the term. @Dylan What's your percentage of exact keyword match?  How long has the keyword been down?  When was the last time your site was indexed?  Have you searched for duplicate content on the web?  When is the last time you updated the page?

Hi Dylan - I'm pretty sure they can be influenced, but to say precisely how is tough. For those who are curious about what these are - this query currently shows some under the first result: https://www.google.com/search?q=site+explorer I'd say they're likely triggered by some of the same things that make sitelinks happen on a broader scale: User/usage data showing navigation from that page to other subpages on the site Link connections from folks who link to the main ranking page and subpages Relevance overlap of content between the pages Link popularity/importance of the subpages Some inclination from Google that this particular site/set-of-pages are potentially a navigational result for the query (i.e. the user is searching specifically for that stuff, not necessarily in discovery mode for broader results) Hope that helps!

If webmaster tools likes the old one then I wouldn't rock the boat. I don't think you are going to have any problems with having 2 site maps. But I've never toyed with this one.

I just don't know. Would you mind putting in the URL to your homepage. I am just going to scan the code for anything unusual. I once had some strange code show up on every page of my group of personal websites. I somehow got hacked. It is a shot in the dark but I don't mind doing a quick scan. You may also want to post this on the Google Webmaster blog as well. Also, if you do any paid advertising with Google.. ask your account rep.