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Thanks for replying, I have been using a CDN (up until a week ago) and no there haven't been any issues that I can put down to this, I just hadn't seen a message like that before and wondered if it was significant.

Hello,

In google WMT my site has the following message.

<form class="form" action="/webmasters/tools/settings-ac?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&amp;siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&amp;hl=en" method="POST">Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.Why would this be?A bit of backgound - this site was hammered by Penguin or maybe panda but seems to be dragging itself back up (maybe) but has dropped from several thousand visitors/day to 100 or so.Cheers,Ian</form>

OK thank you both

Thanks for that, so if I put

http://www.example.com/>

into the head of the http://www.example.com/index.htm page?

Will that fix it even though they are physically the same file?
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Hello,

The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages.

Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it?

Thanks

Ian

Thanks for that.

Using what you suggest my site comes in 3rd for prom hairstyles (prom-hairstyles.org) is everyone else seeing the same?

Also if I go to normal google the site drops to 450 or so, why such a huge difference?

Ian

Hi,

I seem to be making progress in recovering from penguin/panda. (maybe)

However I get vastly different results if I search google in different ways for example if I specify the geographic location as US (I am in the UK) for prom hairstyles ie http://www.google.com/search?q=prom+hairstyles&gl=us (which I believe gives the SERPs for the US or at least it used to) my site (prom-hairstyles.org) comes in at number two or sometimes on the second page.

But if I just search google.com it comes in at 450 or so.

My question is do you get the same and why such a big difference?

Thanks,

Ian

OK thanks for that.

Ian

Thanks for replying.

It looks like it's better to set a preference one way or another but which way?

I won't be using subdomains. I don't need extra charactor space. I have always used www in the past (just in general not in relation to this) but newer browsers don't seem to need it so just example.com gets used increasingly.

Anyone care to vote? we have 1 each at the moment.

Ian

In GWT it gives an option to do the following but which is best? and why?

If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we'll consider both links the same.

| <label for="no_assoc">Don't set a preferred domain</label> |
| <label for="use_www">Display URLs as ** www.example.com**</label> |
| <label for="use_nowww">Display URLs as example**.com **</label> |

Thank you for your response.

There are no links from anywhere that I control to it. The first I was aware that you could even access the site in this way was when the utility on this site reported it.

It causes no problems to the sites operation. The only links to the /~username pages are from other /~username pages except an obscure search engine links to a few pages.

I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages and in WMT it says "Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search"

So in this case do I ignore it and the 404's will stop once it realises the other pages aren't there? (except links from external sites) or do I need to do something because its an SEO problem

Hello,

The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors.

Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse?

Thanks,

Ian

Yes thats how I tried to contact them.

I haven't recieved a message from WMT but the drop first started in April and google only recently said they sent messages for 100% of MANUAL penalties by August or so and haven't ever said EVERYBODY with unnatural links got a message.

I think it's clear that the linking structure LOOKS unnatural. question is, assuming I can't get them to remove the links, do I disavow?

Hi,

sorry I forgot to mention I've tried to contact them. Whois won't work because its a subdomain.

Hello,

One of my sites has a strange link profile; it has 40000 in bound links but 30000 of them are from the site http://ourlipsaresealed.skynetblogs.be/ with the anchor text "haarstijl (2)" which is dutch for hairstyles. I haven't paid for or even asked for these links and I don't think its negative seo. I think they just set up a template with hundreds of links they thought were useful to their visitors and produce several pages a day.

So the question is do I use the new google disavowel tool? I've held off so far because A. they link to a competitor who haven't been anywhere near as affected as we have although they seem to have been affected to an extent by a drop for some reason and they have a much better link profile overall than mine. and B. in the video Matt cutts goes on over and over that this tool is for people that have done some dodgy link building in the past but I haven't.

Thanks,

Ian

Just a first impression and I'm not by any means an expert here but there are quite a few ads.

Hello,

My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared.

Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so...

www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as

www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor

I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it).

But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please?

Ian

ok, maybe I'm not getting something or not explaining myself properly.

When I say things like "30000 times", "every page" and "it is the majority of the content" in the context that I have in my head I'm saying its not a trivial thing and I have looked into it at length.

If you thought there was some verification needed to answer the question the information is there to have a look.

Complex things are made up of lots of uncomplex things.

How strong is this site? Up until April I'd say very strong, it came in at number 1 for several high volume keywords (still does in bing and yahoo)

As I said in the original question I have decided to redo most of the content on this site anyway so whether this whole issue is an issue or not isn't an issue.

The original question was how do you prevent it happening again? Is rel author rel-publisher and g+ the answer?

or what about this? http://www.cloudflare.com/plans

1. Google doesn't seem to know this and has penalised my sites for something.

2. It is the majority of the content. Its pretty much all of it, upto 30000 times.

3. I've lost 70% of my traffic via recent Google updates. That is THE over whelming concern which is why I came and joined this site.

I arrived at this point by asking this question http://www.seomoz.org/q/penguin-issues if you disagree with the track I got sent on can you suggest a different one?

OK but the snippet is an exact match (in speech marks) and there's 30000 of them that's not just monkeys typing Shakespeare. Every page (300 or so) on that site has unique content and more or less each page has upto 30000 duplicates, most a lot less that 30000 but a lot more that 1, which it should be. If there was a couple of coincidences, fine, but there's not.