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probably the one that doesn't syndicate articles. seriously, why not just use Wordpress and then text-broker tons of fresh new content?

Hi Martin,

First off, thanks for the great information you provided in your question - saves a lot of time when there is stuff to work with

1. The reconsideration request should have little to no impact if Penguin was the culprit. Penguin is algorithmic and does not require a recon request. Did the client get an unnatural links notice?

2.  If it was Penguin, you will need to do some link removals to clean things up. There is a great SEOMoz post on a case study regarding link removals and Penguin here.  There are also both services and tools that assist with bad backlink removals.

3. Determining whether to start anew is always difficult. My gut instinct is normally to start a parallel site (maybe the .org version of your existing domain). Go ahead and start working on that site while you clean up the other one. Eventually, you should be able to get out of Penguin's grasp, but there is no reason to put your entire web business on hold until that happens. Of course, you can supplement your traffic with increased adwords budget, or using local and products to your advantage.

What she said.

I see no problems. I just ran IIS Site Analysis Report and it had no real spidering issues. Everything was read correctly.

I have never seen this work very well. My guess is the impact would be neutral. Your better bet is to create content that is useful and then engage directly with your audience via social networks to promote it.

Rand recommends a pre-emptive reconsideration request if you really don't know the source of the bad tactics.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday

Not really. There are some ways to get at those numbers but none of them are going to be exact. If you had fairly steady rankings for that term over the last 2 years, you could extrapolate search volumes by looking at your analytics and estimating CTR. If you run Adwords you can use impression numbers.

Hi,

A couple of questions/thoughts:

1 -- It is difficult to imagine adding title tags would be impossible, though I could understand there may be some challenges.  Is it that you are opposed to moving to a different system/platform for managing this content?   This is an important challenge that needs to be overcome.

2 -- Are the old help pages still relevant?  If so, it might make sense to move those to an "archive" directory, and update all of the existing URLs with the help content for the latest version. e.g.. http://kilgray.com/memoq/latest/help-en This way your aged URLs always contain the latest help content.   On each page, you could simply have an option list of the links to the section/pages for the various older versions, and have the most recent version selected when the page loads.     While you address #1 above, you can look into having placeholders created for canonical tags so you can reference the most recent version from the, assumed to likely be very similar, older version pages.

Yes, if the page doesn't lead to a new page view, then GA will count is as a bounce.

Since you are using ajax, there are some ways that you can simulate a page view on the content load so this doesn't happen...  For example, you can fire    _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/url-of-ajax-content']);  when the new ajax snippet loads to simulate a new pageview.

I would proactively disavow those links and let Google know what is going on. Google needs to know that Penguin has created a market for malicious negative SEO attacks.

Google's host-crowding features seem very out of whack, sometimes causing a single site to control 80% of the first page. I assume this will be fixed at some point by Google, but for the moment you just have to deal with it and try to beat them out.

My first thought would be to simply canonical the pages to the preferred version you would want a visitor to find in search results (I'm guessing the mini-site versions b/c of the UX benefit of someone searching a specific procedure/condition)..

This will tell Google that you know it is a copy, and indicate where all authority should be passed.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization is a great resource you should check out on the topic.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

This is actually more common than you might think, though you probably don't even realize it sometimes.  I've only seen this with forums, blogs, multi-language/geo sites, etc.. that are hosted with different technologies on different servers (Cart on IIS, Blog on LAMP, etc..) and the SEO/Dev team has agreed this is better than a subdomain path.

The biggest challenge will likely be in ensuring the load times aren't affected, but this can generally be easily overcome by hosting the different servers in the same datacenter, caching elements on the master server, etc..

Cheers,

Jake

Do you know what the redirect type is (301 or 302)? If it is a 301, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is a 302, I'd try and get that changed. Either way, it is unlikely to make a big impact on your site.

To my knowledge, Bing does not officially support Google's ajax crawler implementation at this time, there is still question over whether or not Bing correctly handles cross-site canonical tags as well.

That being said, Bing's long-tail traffic, especially in the UK, will represent such a small percentage of the traffic available to your site that I am led to believe that Google's implementation would be sufficient for NetMovers. Google handles these URL's just fine (as long as your implementation is correct).

Not sure, but you could try Microsoft's IIS tool to spider your site. It is possible that your site has issues that make it difficult to spider, hence why SEOMoz's bot isn't working. You could also try something like Xenu Link Sleuth or HTTrack.

For your "main question":  I think the chances of this are slim if you maintain a quality site. Content review and moderation should be enforced in the forum to avoid any types of issues with low quality UGC... the migration is a good time to review the content you are copying over.

Regarding what your developer says, yes there is some risk of issues because of the forum, but if you do a good job moderating this shouldn't be any type of issue.  Lastly, I wouldn't expect any type of "penalty" carrying over to the other sections of your site as G has gotten pretty decent lately at separating wheat from chaff when assessing site quality.

As a suggestion: I would set-up each of those subfolders independently within GSC so you can monitor for any traffic/impression fluctuations, higher profile pages, etc. independently.

-Jake Bohall

Disavowing the shopify site would not do anything, as disavow is used to indicate that you do not wish to receive credit for a backlink from a domain, and that you have made sufficient effort to have any links removed.

I understand the question to be more along the lines of ... "How do we leverage the social integrations of Shopify without creating duplicate content problems with our existing ecommerce site?"

If you will be maintaining a mirrored database of products, etc.. the "easiest" way would be to map all of your pages on the shopify site to corresponding pages on your current ecom site, and utilize the rel=canonical link on the shopify site pointing to your current ecom site.  This essentially tells Google that the page and all its value/credit/etc.. should be directed to your current ecommerce site.

E.g.   The page:  shopifysite.com/product/a  would have a canonical tag:

If you find that you do not actually need the shopify pages to be accessible to use the tools to display within the social storefronts... meaning that someone clicks on the link in your pinterest store and does not need to go directly to shopify, you could consider set-up 301 redirects vs. using the canonical tag for each of the product pages, etc..

Hope this helps!

1. Add tags to each article that link off to related content (an easy way is to just have it link to your site search results for that tag)

2. Increase internal linking in the content of your articles to other pages on your site to coax users into reading more.

3. Include "related pages" or something similar at the end of every piece of content published on your site.

4. Add "popular pages" to the sidebar to catch people who might simply find your most popular information interesting.

Hey John,

Shoot me a message directly and maybe we can figure something out that is beneficial to both our companies. We do extensive work both with the SEOMoz API and Google API (I assume you mean Google Analytics, but we have also worked with several of their other API options as well).

Russ