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It would be good to keep the existing url structure if you rank well. Word of caution while using plugins : If you are using pages on wordpress .html extension at the end should be ok but if you are using the blog element and categorising and tagging content . It would be a good idea to check if the category pages and tag pages look ok. At times they might end in a / ( depending on how its setup ) and if you force to add .html at the end it might look odd EG : example.com/category/name/.html example.com/tag/tagname/.html

You could move them all to one page and add some text content around them.

Improving your speed will help more from an SEO perspective as Google likes to count it towards the 'visitor experience'. Country specific really makes little difference these days, especially as many businesses use content caching such as Cloudflare - which could be based anywhere.

It turned out that it was caused by Google Page Speed. They told me that it was fine and nothing to worry about but I just disabled it due to server issues and I guess that is what made the code disappear...

W3 Total Cache is what's adding these URL parameters, Jill. It's done so that you can expire the long-term cached version of those images quickly and automatically should the image need to be updated. (This can be controlled in W3TC's settings) And no, in my opinion there's no way this could be the cause of a rankings drop. There have been some major fluctuations in search rankings around 7,8,9 May. Is that about the time frame you saw the sudden drop? Many are speculating that Google applied another Panda algorithm update very recently. Paul

The keywords you are trying to target are a bit competitive and you don’t have enough authority to get this page ranked in search engines. The idea is to get some high quality domains inlinking to this so that this page can rank for the desired keywords!

Hi Jill - the thumbails linked to the full size image is fine. A Wordpress gallery would simply be doing the same thing for you.

If they're going to link to a URL on your domain because of the content in the iframe, why not go for it. Are they really going to link to you though, is the question.  As far as getting people to link to you, there's not that much difference between what you're describing and inserting a feed on your page. Technically, of course there's a big difference, but as a means of getting links, you still have to do the outreach, the curation, the unique-ifying (if it's content that's been taken from somewhere else on the web), the audience building, etc. . It will always be  a struggle for you--and what happens when the license on the app runs out or the sites with the pages serving the iframe go out of business? Because it's not a long term solution, we call stuff like that black hat. If you don't have a high tolerance for risk and you're not looking long-term, no biggie, go for it. If you're going to get easy back links from respectable sites from it, go for it.  If you think it might be a tactic that your peers may not respect you for, you might think otherwise.

Hi Jill Every so often I hear from someone who gets this sort of ambiguous reply.  It's not that helpful, but here's what I can tell you from past experience. If there was a manual penalty: the Google reviewer has not mentioned that it is still present.  To me this suggests that any manual penalty that you may have briefly had, if any at all, has now been lifted. Usually, when you get a reconsideration request that explicitly confirms this, it says that you may need to wait a while until your status is restored. Because this is also omitted, it leads me to suggest that you may have an algorithmic penalty on your site that is present.  We haven't seen a penguin algorithm refresh for a while, so it may suggest that your site may be suffering from duplicate content and/or Panda issues. If you scroll to near the end of this article http://www.seowizz.net/2012/10/the-disavow-tool-works-real-sites-real-recoveries.html it features your specific reply and also draws the conclusion that there is no manual penalty, but there is an algorithmic one. I think it may be a Panda issue, you can cross reference the time of your penalty with the Panguin tool for analytics, which is really helpful.  If one of the last Panda refreshes matches up with your dates, it at least gives you a starting point. Hope this helps