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Hi, thanks for the answers so far... Although i understand what you are saying - and why google would want to use the "did you mean" feature. I disagree that, in this case,  its simply google tryin to help searchers - Why? if it was just because our domains are so close - litterally just 1 letter different, then in theory if i did the same search but for the other website - it would say "did you mean: my website"? http://goo.gl/yphgxE but it doesnt... This to me, means there is some kind of problem - devaluation of my website - so much so, google thinks if you search my domain name, you have searched it by mistake? Can anyone shed some more light on this? any advice welcome

I agree with Richard, A little research shows that this website does not seem to have a whole lot of linking domains/back links. Being that is is such a small website I don't think Google is worried about penalizing them until they get a bit larger. In which case if they continue the same keyword anchor text practices they may run into trouble. On a good note: Seeing as they do not have a lot of high quality back links you should easily be able to beat this company rankings fairly quickly without having to resort to the over optimized anchor text practices. This should be a fairly quick project depending on your budget and desire to move up fast.That's great news for you ! Remember, sometimes when a website is ranking high for certain keywords, it's not always because the website and seo are done so well. Sometimes it's just they have no competition doing very well at trying to beat them. Which I think may be the case here. Hope that helps, Joe

Hi James, Yes I just meant to make sure there are no 302 redirects or no backlinks from the homepage of site A pointing back to site B. Also, be aware that Google also knows that you own both domains unless you registered them as private, and you also have both sites in your Webmaster Tools account. Technically, this shouldn't matter, as each site should be treated as its own entity, regardless of who owns it. The fact that those old 301 links are showing in webmaster tools doesn't mean much, perhaps their link indexing cache hasn't refreshed. If you've removed the 301, then those links are no longer pointing to your site no matter what any tool says. There is a good service called Link Detox Boost. You load up all of those old backlinks into the tool, and the tool forces Google to crawl those links again. The theory is that once they crawl the pages those links are on and realise that the backlinks don't point back to your site anymore, it helps to remove the Penguin flag (penalty) from your site much faster. It's ironic how this is achieved though. In order to prompt Google to crawl the pages those old links are on, they spam the pages your links are on with fresh new links. When Google visits the old link pages via the newly created soft spam links, it recrawls the page and adjusts the link index for your domain. Fighting Spam using Spam. This is why those links may still be showing in your Webmaster Tools for site B. Perhaps if you ran a link Detox Boost campaign, all of these links would be removed from your Webmaster Tools account. And perhaps the Penguin anchor dragging your site down would become a bit lighter. (By the way I have no affiliation with Link Detox Boost - although I have used some of their tools, and I rate them as excellent)

Took a quick look at the page, and nothing majorly technical jumped out at me as preventing or hindering page rankings. I always suggest making sure your site's set up in Moz Analytics and looking at the crawl diagnostics, which show a lot of common technical problems. (If you haven't already, of course.) I did notice that on your example, the title tag is too long and Google truncates it. For e-commerce, the big separator between leaders is content. The more you can create unique content about your products -- start with the most important ones -- the better off you will be. Make sure you have unique product descriptions. People love video. And people also love solutions or knowledge about how to use the product and what it will solve for them. You do a great job at listing the specs and features, but what's the value add? A quick look at the competition in the SERPs shows that your competitors, they aren't doing a good at this, and it would set you apart. Additionally, I also noticed that your site in general has a pretty low domain authority, and the product page in question doesn't have any backlinks. These will definitely affect your rankings. Before jumping on building links, I highly suggest reading our beginner's guide to link building, which will walk you through the pros, cons, and best practices to build links as you don't want to get into trouble with Google over links.

following on from my question above... If i have lots of filters to narrow down products - i can dynamically change lots of content on page with each filter, including things like the title tag etc... I am curious, if i had dynamic title tags depending on what filter was chose - how would that effect the page from an SEO point of view. Also, would google etc learn the different content for different filters? by that i mean it is a cctv system page, one of the filters would be for "IP CCTV systems", i could change the content for that filter so the title said "IP CCTV Systems..." if i searched IP CCTV Systems in google  - would they show the "IP CCTV Systems" title with URL showing filter selection - or would they show the generic title with no filters selected?

I believe you can get some historical rankings data from SEMRush's Guru plan: http://www.semrush.com/prices.html. With that you should be able to piece something together. But if you're just looking to see if specific competitors were ranking for your targeted terms in the last 12 months, the SEMRush Pro package would work. -Trung

Algorithmic penalties like Panda and Penguin will be re-calculated on the refresh of the update. This is the reason you see conflicting answers on whether a 301 will pass the algorithmic penalty: it depends. It depends on a lot of variables that aren't really worth going into right now. The point is, IF your penalty is link-based, the penalty will almost definitely pass with a 301 redirect because the new site has no authority and no visibility. If you haven't already, you'll want to make sure it's not something like Panda. It would be a shame to start over just to find that your UX and design were to blame all along. I've seen this happen several times because everyone just assumes it's the links. Leaving both versions of the site will result in Google selecting one. They'll almost definitely select the original version of the site unless you take it down. You need to make the final decision: take the value of your current brand, domain, and legitimate links. Subtract that from the amount you think it will take to overcome the bad links either by removal or counter-balancing them with real links plus the opportunity cost of doing something else. Starting over is generally the very last recourse, and I suggest it only if the are many links and the vast majority are heavy on the anchor text or clearly spam.

For what it's worth, I'm agreeing with Jeremy.  Having accidentally done this to myself and spent more than a few hours trying to figure out why all my title tags were messed up...  It turned out to be a WP plugin that had a template for a sitewide override (or something to that effect) where there were a bunch of %%something%%, %%date%%, %%blah-blah%% that I must have filled in at some point not realizing what I was doing. Took them out... and everything went back to normal. My screen looked extremely similar to yours.

Thanks for the info Sorina, i agree with you that Google decided the page is also relevant for the keyword cctv cameras... But i disagree with google.. lol.. i mean, we have a cameras page, the recorder page has nothing to do with cameras, there are no cameras on that page, it is recorders... Just seems a little odd to me... I will try lengthening the title as it is a little short (only 36 characters)... perhaps if its a bit longer they wont bother adding to it... Thanks again

Hello James, Why do these pages have "no SEO value"? Is it because they are AJAX pages or because you have them noindexed? Or both? To answer your original question, using an on-click javascript event to send a user to a page other than the URL listed in the href tag is borderline. It goes beyond the risk level I would feel comfortable with on an eCommerce site, but a lot of affiliate sites do this. For instance, all of their links out to merchant sites may go through a directory called /outlink/ so the href tag might look like .../outlink/link1234 and appear to send the user to another page on their domain, when actually the user gets redirected to the merchant's (e.g. Amazon.com, Best Buy...) website. Sometimes the user is redirected from the /outlink/... URL and sometimes they never even get that far because the javascript sends them to the merchant's URL first. It is not cloaking unless you are specifically treating Google differently. If Google doesn't understand your site that is their problem. If you have code that essentially says "IF Google, THEN do this. ELSE do that" it is your problem because you are cloaking. Make sense? There is a very distinct line there. The bottom line is if you want to show users a certain page then you should be showing that page to Google as well. If the problem is the content on that page doesn't appear for Google (e.g. AJAX) then you should look into optimizing that type of content to the best of your ability. For example, look into the use of hashbangs (#!) as in: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

Hi James, That will probably do it. If you want to avoid having to fiddle with the paging code etc check out something like (grabbed the first link I saw) http://www.jquery4u.com/function-demos/ajax/ Loading content with ajax/jquery is pretty straightforward

Hi, Just bumping this, as i'm still looking for any advice?

Hi James, I think you are on the right path with these three statements: Get as many as possible of the "directory" links removed Remove keywords from 50-60% of links and replace with branding Forget about whats been done previously / changing it will not help in anyway / and focus on branding in anchor text for any future link building? I wouldn't consider #3 to be exclusive from 1 and 2. If it was my site, I'd work on all of these. I don't know your website URL, but if you feel like it is very Keyword Heavy, I would also consider "de-optimizing" it a bit. Bascially- just make sure you've written page titles and copy for humans.

Hi EGOL, Thanks for the link, i went through the quiz, and a couple of things jump out at me... First it talks about "thin content" being lots of images then a little writing, or just a few paragraphs of text and lots of images on a page... The majority of my pages are like this, we're an ecommerce website, so all product categories have many images and little bits of text etc... I dont think there is too much i can do about that one, as i'm not about to try to pioneer a new way of designing ecommerce stores! lol However, another issue it pointed out is links from "blogs / directories" etc that have keywords in the anchor text... Well i have loads of these, i know my SEO company does link building for me, not too sure how much of it involves directories, but i'll have to speak to them and perhaps get them to stop (remove if possible) them... To be honest this has opened up a hole new can of worms for me lol, what a mine field SEO is ahh... Just looking at anchor text causing websites to drop in rankings makes me wonder, what about the links that are not on directories / blogs etc... do you get punished if they also use key words in anchor text? I mean, i appreciate google saying it doesnt look natural, but who owns / updates websites that hasnt heard of SEO and would not use a keyword as anchor text if linking to someone? I know if i link to a website, the anchor text isnt just the brand name. Also, what about if your brand name is a keyword, i heard before google was giving less weight to companies who use a keyword in their URL... but wouldn't this mean they have no choice but to give a little extra weight to companies with the keyword in their domain.... as now the anchor text can be their brand name... and a keyword... OK i'm straying... getting back on track... if the issue is being cause by this anchor text / keyword ratio... how can one go about fixing this?

hi all, sorry been away for a few days... no work was done to the site around that period...