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I'm not sure I understand.. where are those pages linked from within your site and why?

^ This. Ever look into an affiliate tracking program like Has Offers?

well apparently it did end up hurting. There are ways to make it optimized for keywords while still retaining it's humanity. An SEO person would/should be good at this. If you want to learn and do it yourself, you totally can. Honestly, it's a full-time job. So I would probably hire it out if I were you.

But it's up to you of course.

yes. definitely. make a new page, title it the keyword, build the page for that keyword. done and done.

To further stress EGOL's point, this is definitely a Penguin problem if related to unnatural link detection. But that's simple semantics which are definitely relevant when searching for information/help in this matter.

It honestly should be pretty easy to figure out what spammy links there are. For example, you sell dresses, so if your website has links all over underground hip hop forums then it's probably unnatural.

What paid link services have you used? Can you contact them for submission reports? Most will provide this upon request...

--just a couple thoughts

I'd like to just add that a 301 redirect passes the same amount of page rank as a regular link would.

Pretty much there's no reason not to use a 301 in your htaccess. Go for it!

Basically I'd add to the already helpful comments here by saying - is it possible the redesign has bad content? Have you researched keyword density and on-site optimization for the keywords you are targeting? Using a tool like ranks.nl, figure out what changed in this regard.. Surely you have backups of the old site to compare to but if not use the Wayback machine.

It might be completely focused on the site's new content and have nothing at all to do with redirection or link juice. That would be my first guess, but as everyone has said it could be any number of things or all of the above.

No it is not redundant as they are essentially two different things. You absolutely  need to do redirect in htaccess via 301.

Canonical tags are used for duplicate content, not redirection. Google does not consider the canonical tag a directive but instead choose it to be a "helpful hint." If you have two pages at entirely different URLs with the majority of the content identical, that is when you need that Canonical tag.

For non-www to www issues, you really need to use a 301 redirect. Don't feel nervous about doing so. Every site does. Or at least, every site worth a darn does.

@ Christopher -

Excellent advice and I've thought about doing something like this for awhile now. I've been told conflicting things about those .ca addresses. Some say it matters, some say it matters not. We do already own the .ca of our domain and so far it's not pointed to anything... Do I just point it to our server and canonical it or develop a new site geared towards Canadians? As it stands, we have a few pages with Canadian specific content that are ranking well on Google and driving in traffic.

@Supple... It sounds like what you're saying is exactly how I interpreted the Tweet.. Google displays personalized results and factors IP address into that query, sure. So then it does matter that our server lives in Canada, while the majority of our business comes from the US? This, I guess, is my main concern. Thing is, I'm not too worried about it because we get a TON of U.S. traffic and are ranking incredibly well for our target keywords and only improving each week.

Just curious about how this all works.

Thanks for all the input guys, very helpful. Love this community.

So I just read an interesting Tweet:

#SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web

This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results?

For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server.

Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Hard to say really and I would judge on a case-by-case basis myself.

I would look at several factors, including: what search terms are bringing viewers to these pages, which pages viewers are landing on (from google) more frequently, etc.

My guess would be the latter URL would be bringing in a wider array of keywords due to the "expand your sales" and "going global international markets" portion of the URL, but I'd have to see GA to really know for certain and then check out the keyword tool to figure what terms are being searched more frequently.

Somebody else might have another way of looking at this, but that's how I'd go about it. I didn't actually look at the pages, but if it is feasible the best possible scenario would be to 301 one to the other..

Not necessarily inevitable. Without seeing your site and backlink profile it's hard to say. And even if I could I wouldn't say anything definitive when it comes to Google and their spam team. But I would say your gut might be telling you the chances are high, and you should listen to your gut. That's what I did and sure enough here we are... I told everyone here that it was inevitable and we were screwed and to expect a huge drop off in traffic any day now and less quote requests. None of that happened and I think/hope it's due to my efforts to rectify this issue.

It is a huge job. The good news is I get paid for it and it wasn't my doing in the first place so I get to come out the hero (if I continue to succeed). You can do the same!!

Good luck! Like I said, keep us posted.

Rachel,

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me and I've been dealing with it for about 6 months now. FIRST, I want to refer you to a Q&A I posted regarding this: http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-unnatural-link-penalties

Next I'd like to say this - Find the service which was used to purchase these spammy links and contact them. For my company it was a site called "Submit Edge" and I was luckily able to login and download lists of articles published for us with usernames and passwords. Using these excel sheets I removed a good 300 links. That still wasn't enough and I wasn't able to remove the social media and directory links for the most part, but I knew where they were.

Use this list and attempt to contact webmasters and keep track of emails. Simply using the disavow tool will not be enough if you find you have been penalized manually. Google will want to see that you've worked hard to undo all of this.

It sounds like you haven't received a manual penalty message yet (make sure you check your GWMT daily to be sure) but there's still a chance it could come. I discovered and began trying to remove the spam links for my company's sites in late December and wasn't notified of penalty until mid-March. Luckily I had been tracking most of my efforts and am still putting together a re-inclusion request. (strangely, we have yet to see results of penalties so i'm admittedly dragging my feet a bit.)

There's also talk of a new Penguin update coming which could hurt your site when done. So the earlier you start and better you track your efforts the farther ahead you will get, I'd say.

Takeshi's advice is good. Just make sure you can show Google that you've tried really hard to identify this and fix it. That will prove to them that you know what your company did wrong and that it won't happen any more.

Good luck, keep us posted! These types of things are very interesting to me as it's what I'm dealing with daily.

They are saying the pages on your site have duplicate content. Those two pages you linked are a perfect example. The content is exactly the same minus two words, which is more than enough for Google to register it as duplicate..

What I don't understand is what's wrong with a simple canonical tag in this instance? Do you really need both of these indexed?

+1 to Brad here.

Personally I would do both. Have a blog relative to your site's content with great information that readers will want to link to on your website. That is a wonderful way to build links organically and if you do it right (some great infographics or unique perspectives) you will really take off.

But make another blog as well for the more redundant blogs and other content that may not fit quite as well. Wordpress is a great free blog site and there is plenty of value to doing that as well.

Anyway Brad's advice is spot on. Good luck

I'm only slightly familiar with IIRF (I also am on a IIS server so I have looked into this) but don't actually use it. Is there a chance it's just not functioning correctly?

Looking in OSE, are all of your links passing through to the new domain as you'd expect? Looking at something like ahrefs tool, do you see a sudden drop off of backlinks around the date the switch took place?

And last but not least, just to make sure, have you received any notifications in GWMT or are you comfortable with your link profile?

These questions might help get closer to an answer... Or somebody else might know better than I.

Good luck!

I know it I've had much higher traffic spikes than anything I've seen recently and still they sent this message. It's bizarre! But definitely not one that worries me. I'm like you, I do not get excited when I see a message in that inbox...

Anyway just thought it fit because it was so strange and seemingly unnecessary.

Well I got this message recently:

Search results clicks for http://www.---------- have increased significantly. 
This message is not indicative of any problem in your site. It is simply to inform you that the number of clicks that one of your pages receives has increased recently. If you have just added new content, this may indicate that it has become more popular on Google. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates.

I found it strange because everything looks about normal. Sure we had a bit better of a day than usual but just barely.. Nothing I'd even blink twice at.

It's strange because this is only the second time I've ever received a message in GWT. But hey, I'm not complaining about this one.

Probably unrelated to what you're describing but just thought I'd share.

Good luck!

check back Monday, it should be up by then.

uhhh... i'd delete the wordpress.

why not?