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This is so crazy. Let's keep working on it. I hope that together we can come up with a way to handle this for people in the future.

Thanks for reaching out to me. Very interesting stuff.

Will probably be awhile before we know anything concrete but my guess would be the same strategies of 1.0 apply toward 2.0. I'd imagine they just widened the umbrella, so to speak.

We'll see! I've got a close eye on a few sites I'm curious to see what will happen to...

Yeah I remember a long time ago they said they were going to do this and then on a few of my SERPs it never took effect. So I complained here and EGOL convinced me that "if I can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Well turned out I couldn't join 'em either but I hate the concept so that's okay.

Anyway, for months and months these domains have had duplicate page listings on page 1 and beyond and it's been killing me. Today they're gone. So perhaps they just turned the dial up on the algo?

Well it's definitely not based on your anchor text profile for that keyword. Here's a screenshot showing why I say this. You will see that your number one anchor phrase is for your website by a large margin:

http://gyazo.com/ee24420ec14c9c8141169804d3d5ac23.png

I'm honestly not sure what to say. Is the page being updated or rebuilt, or is anything happening to coincide with these dips and peaks?

I can't think of what would cause it otherwise. If it were me, I'd keep building links and content and monitoring any edits I make to see what changes they have in my SERPs. Sorry I can't be more help right now..

Well then, if I'm understanding you correctly, you shouldn't need these specific pages indexed anyway. Instead you should be promoting/doing SEO for the pages that lead you to the listing portal. So the duplicate titles or titles shouldn't matter or be a question..

?

If the server isn't actually returning a 404 response then those links are still actively pointing at your domain. Just because you point them at a custom 404 page doesn't mean it returns a 404. In fact, in your case it's clearly returning a 301 which passes link juice.

A 302 does not pass link juice and might be the better option, but I'm not sure that even will be your best bet. Your best bet is to delete the pages in their entirety and re-create them with different URLs.

Well, your best bet is to remove the poison links but trust me I know how impossible that can be.

Anyway.. Hope this helps.

This is weird. Why would you want an iFramed version of a website..? Also, what difference does it make where the employees email addresses reside? They could be at dogsled.com for all anybody cares!

I agree with Chris yet again. 301 that bad boy and be done with it. REL=CANONICAL does NOT pass link juice. So definitely don't use that as a fix. It would help with the duplicate content issue and prevent any Panda penalties, but a 301 would do that while passing link juice...

Maybe you could elaborate on why a 301 is out of the question?

hey Tom,

So this is weird. I went ahead and looked at the page in question and I see what you're talking about. I would question OSE's crawl of your site and direct that toward the moz-staff. Here's the reason:

The Just Discovered tool is showing a buttload of links coming to your page.. like 8 pages worth or something crazy. The inbound links section shows 2 domains... not sure what's up there.

If it were my site I'd spend more time and cross reference that with GWMT and maybe grab Majestic and AHREFS reports as well. Also, take an OSE inbound link list of the subdomain and see if the just-discovered links from the page in question show up there.

These sites are silly i don't understand their popularity. I'd assume the fad will die off sooner or later as it is terrible from an seo standpoint.

This is incredibly interesting because I wanted to come here this morning and talk about pretty much this exact topic. So I'm going to try and piggyback on your thread so as not to have 2 separate threads about the same thing but please tell me to leave if it seems more like a hijack.

As I said I am facing the exact same situation. A bit more detail:

We have a primary targeted keyword, let's call it "main keyword" that is a service. This particular page had a ton of black hat work done for it in the past. So there were thousands of poison links pointing to the page "main-keyword.html" and what I did was after spending as much time as I could manually removing links, I finally gave up and changed the URL so that these links would 404. So now the page's URL is "main-keyword-services.html"

This seemed to work great at first. We hit page 2 of the SERPs about 10 days later and all of those poison links were no longer listed in GWT. That felt really good. But then the carousel kept a-swingin' and the main-keyword-services.html page dropped way out of the SERPs.

Now this is where it gets interesting: We also have a page on our blog featuring an infographic dedicated to these services. That URL is "main-keyword-infographic.html"

This page is ranking on page 2 of the SERPs and that's with very little link-building efforts. Of course these two pages are connected internally, so it'd be nice if both would rank. (I built this through EGOL's advice way back of trying to get multiple pages to rank for one keyword as my competitors were doing.) But right now I really don't want the infographic page to beat out the main services page.

All I can think to do is continue my link building efforts, and that's what I would have come here to tell you mr. bigbadwolf. However I feel like there's something I'm missing.

So I'm dying to see any input from the rest of the community. Sorry my post wasn't very helpful to you, TC, but perhaps together we will find what we're looking for. Unfortunately (or heck, maybe fortunately) I'm pretty sure all it means is we need to kick-up our SEM efforts.

It's frustrating for me because our competitors are outranking us with nothing but black hat tactics. Links from hip hop forums, fake tumblr and weebly accounts and stupid hair-removal blogs. It's a link service they are purchasing and they have been for some time, and it works for all of them. I refuse to stoop to that level but I can feel my boss getting close to saying "no, it works for them we're going back to buying links." I mean they've been ranking for like 8 months with these tactics. WTH!?

Okay thanks all

5 % keyword density would be a little higher than I'd like, but don't worry too much about these numbers. Honestly just focus on if it reads humanly or not.

In briefly glancing at your site, I gotta admit that the links on the right to the articles seemed stuffed to me and I didn't much love the way it read. I understand that each article is about "fake diplomas" (!! I didn't even know this was a thing, WEIRD!) but there's gotta be a better way to title the articles. It is quite clear what you guys do and not necessary to repeat that in the article's title.  Your domain is fake diploma.com... that does it right there. Call an article "How to Frame Your Masterpiece" or something instead. Make it fun, funny, and spice it up a bit.

Otherwise don't worry too much about this recommendation in Moz Pro. A lot of these things are simply that, recommendations but not necessities. You may skate by just fine without changing a thing. That said, it's probably indicative of a usability issue that needs addressing and I think you might be surprised at the success you can gain by re-wording things a bit differently.

Like I said, don't worry about stuffing your main keyword in each of the titles. Everyone is going to know that you make fake diplomas.

Good luck!

It will only pass the "non-indexed status" if the reason for index removal was due to a penalty. Specifically Penguin. You need to thoroughly go over the backlink profile of the domain and uncover the real reason that the site was not indexed.

Misuse of canonical tags is no reason for Google to de-list a site. They've said themselves that they tend to ignore improperly used canonicals.

Check your backlinks, check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages of unnatural link penalties, look everywhere you can to uncover why this site was de-listed. If those links knocked it out of SERPs then 301'ing them will do that to the next site as well. Bottom line is you need to know what happened before you make that call, but poorly structured site optimization is definitely not the reason.

While I agree you should address that issue, I don't think it would have much to do with the OSE indexing. I would definitely attempt to contact a moz staffer, I think your case warrants one. Surprised they haven't stepped in with an answer yet they're usually on top of these forums.

What makes you think they haven't crawled your site? From what I see, they most certainly have. For example, searching for your domain name shows your current META description (which IMHO is very weak by the way, you should consider making it more readable and less like a keyword-stuffing...keywords carry no weight in the meta description). Also, I grabbed a sentence out of the middle of your site and googled it and the page showed in the SERPs just as it should.

It's definitely indexed by Google... What is it you're looking at or for?

start with redirecting your non-www to the www version. get a 301 in place asap. i looked at this, saw it, and stopped checking. this is the first thing to do but i'm sure there are plenty more...

edit: although you do have a canonical tag so that's good. still it will help to do as i suggest as canonical does not guide incoming links only keeps you from getting panda penalties and guides Google to index the proper version of the duplicated content.

The anchor text you use internally doesn't really hold much weight. If you want to rank for that keyword then just use it as your URL and don't worry about the internal anchor text.

As for the meta description, yes you can keep the keyword in there but keep in mind that has no relevance to Google's positioning of your page. Your META description is simply used to entice the reader. Don't attempt to stuff keywords in there. If they fit in naturally (or by 'accident') then fine. If not forget about it. Just make that description read as awesomely as you can. This is what will convince the potential reader to click on your page so it is vital. (Same thing with Titles which are arguably even more important)

In other words, just market it and get people interested in it first. Forget about the search engines. They'll get interested in it if people get interested in it.

Hope this helps.

you have inbound links from only 18 different domains yet you have thousands of links. This is alarming. I'm not sure how you can rank well with such tactics in the first place.

How long had you been ranking well before this happened?

props to Matt! He nailed it.

Your assumption is correct. The disallows you listed are directories, not pages. Therefore, anything within the Plugins folder will be disallowed, same with the cache and themes folder.

So you may have multiple files (and I'm sure you do) within each of those folders.

Well this is going to be tricky because Google will always want to rank sites that are most relevant to what it thinks users are searching for. I'd have to bet that 99.9% of searches done for "convert media" are looking to... convert some sort of media.

That means you're going to have to try and trick Google which is always dangerous. However you can probably do this while staying within Guidelines.

For example, I'm looking at your backlink profile and specifically at your anchor text hierarchy. Typically a domain's anchor text should be varied between the domain itself, the brand itself, images and variations of the former. Your anchor text profile does not have any links built with "Convert Media" as the anchor text. This is definitely a big part of why it isn't ranking for said keyword.

I see the words "ben stein" as the number two most linked to anchor text... What the what?! Ben Stein? As in, win Ben Stein's Money?? Also I see "contextin" as having the most links so I'm assuming you recently changed your domain and brand.

Anyway, I think the best thing you can do is change those (you should also get rid of any spam links you may have..) to your actual brand and domain and continue building more organic links.

Good luck!