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Though it appears her website is targeted at Spain, and the Farmer/Panda update was aimed at US sites at that time, so that may not be the issue.

Can't reply to myself so will edit and correct. I should have said that the update was targeted to users in the US, not sites in the US, so she would need to see if it was just visitors from the US that dropped off to see if it was this update.

Good to hear that all your rankings have recovered. How have things gone the past couple of weeks, do you have anything you can share here? Or maybe even for a YOUmoz post?

And if their documentation doesn't provide an answer, you can also try a search to see what others have said. Let us know if you need a hand with the canonical tag or can't find info from the bookmark provider.

Do you use a third-party bookmark button? Are there possibly some options in their settings to help with this?

You also want to block any admin directory, plugin directory, etc. Are you using Wordpress or a specific CMS? There are often best-practice posts for robots.txt files for specific platforms.

It's probably an "it depends" answer for the ratio, and that's if we actually had access to the algorithm. In the case above, the guy was (and still is) removed from the index.

Someone else may come in with studies they have done to give you more of an answer based on their experience in their niche, but there's not going to be one magic number that serves as a cutoff for every site.

You want to avoid copying and pasting stories, period. Last week, there was a thread in Google Webmaster Central Help about someone having his rankings and traffic disappear because of copied content. A summary of that thread is available at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-copycat-13172.html.

Relevant to your situation is this quote from a Google employee:

One thing that is very important to our algorithms is unique and compelling content. In general, it makes little sense for us to crawl and index content that is copied, rewritten, automatically translated or otherwise automatically processed -- we assume that our users would much rather want to find the original source. With that in mind, I would strongly recommend removing all such content -- should you have any -- and making sure that all of your content is of the highest quality possible, and really unique and compelling, in short: something that users will want to refer friends to.

How many pages are on your site? I'm seeing over 500 indexed on Google. Trying to get a feel for how many pages aren't indexed.

Do you use a sitemap file at all? If you have one in place, and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools, it will show you how many pages are in your sitemap and how many of those pages Google has indexed.

A secondary note though that some of those pages are Ajax File Manager pages, which you probably want to exclude from being crawled via robots.txt.

Many reasons. You don't want the admin pages of your site indexed, for example. You may not want all of the search queries that people perform on your site search to be indexed. You don't want or need your cart checkout being indexed for an ecommerce site. You don't want a print version and a web version of the same document indexed, so you exclude the print version from being indexed. Your site is in development, and you don't want it being indexed before it is ready.

For robots.txt in particular, some search engines now respect wildcards and you can exclude some session IDs via robots.txt. OSCommerce is real bad about creating session IDs and getting those indexed, then you have tons of different URLs indexed for the same page.

http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/ is a post that explains some of the reasons to use robots and no-index on a Wordpress site.

I haven't heard that one from a developer before (only redirecting deeper into a site), and I do see online people being able to do the redirects. I've used ISAPI rewrites on IIS servers before just fine to handle this, though with a different site architecture.

Just one URL for each page is the best practice. However you redirect, make sure that you use a 301 (permanent) redirect.

I see that the ISI Chargers article is also out there on the web in a couple of other places, including this article directory at http://www.articlefield.com/7473/isi-chargers/.

I agree with James Shaw that you should remove the CSS that hides the links, and remove the links that just don't make sense (which may be all of them).

Do you use Google Webmaster Tools? If so, log in there and see if Google has any messages for you about your site. On the plus side, at least it's not malware, and it's something that you can easily fix.

In addition to ranking problems, direct copying of copyrighted articles can open you up to legal repercussions. I second what Pashmina says -- quote only a small portion of the article, and add in commentary about why you feel this is important and why your readers should go view the entire article.

I personally have had less of a problem with robots.txt not being followed by Google than I have had developers muck with the robots.txt file. In my particular case, they would update the development site with information from the live site (as we were adding more content to a database on the live site and they were syncing it). They'd copy over the live robots.txt as well, and suddenly the development site was being indexed.

I use Code Monitor for all of my robots.txt files, live or development, so I can be notified when they change. https://www.polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/

I suggest verifying the development site in Google Webmaster Tools. From there, you can request the content to be removed (after you've blocked in robots.txt or used the meta noindex), and you can also use their robots.txt tool to see if there was possibly an error in the file.

There is an SMX Advanced conference in London in May. http://searchmarketingexpo.com/london/agenda. They have one track for advanced SEO and one for advanced paid search.

Another way to search for conferences would be to look up a couple of favorite speakers or experts in the field and see if they post their upcoming schedule.

I'd add a caution that number of pages indexed isn't the same as number of URLs indexed. If your site has 100 pages, but 700 URLs indexed due to URL parameters or other issues, that's a bit of a problem that needs to be addressed.

Thomas,

What country is the employee in? Judging from your name, I'm guessing it's not the US, so the first idea of SMX Advanced isn't probably as appropriate as something closer might be. I'm not that familiar with European conferences, but someone else should be able to chime in with some suggestions.

I don't know of a better source for long-tail keywords (though I sympathize, there's not a whole lot of traffic data out there for rc model warship combat related keywords!). Would love to see anyone chime in.

There have actually long been complaints about the accuracy of the Adwords keyword tool. For some interesting discussion, see http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-adwords-keyword-tool-the-difference-explained.html and the previous posts he links to. A speaker on AdWords at a conference last year said that the AdWords Keyword Tool should be on a Fiction bestseller list somewhere.

There were several sessions at SMX West 2011 on Facebook, and also some at SES NY (happening this week) regarding facebook advertising that might offer some insights as to how to advertise effectively.Outspoken Media and Bruce Clay, among others, are covering the conference and their blog posts can give an overview of some of those sessions. Also, check out aimClear for some of their posts on how to use Facebook demographic targeting.

http://outspokenmedia.com/blog/

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/

http://www.aimclearblog.com/category/facebook-demographic-research/

I had problems getting redirects for URLs with spaces in them working correctly on my own site, and ended up using the Redirection plugin as well, and it's worked like a charm.

The other thing I like about this plugin is the ability to see 404 errors and to set up redirects straight from that 404 list. If someone has linked to you and accidentally did a typo in the URL somewhere, or a comma got included in the hyperlink, you can see it in the 404 list and fix it right there.

Are the listings indented when you view 100 results per page?

This is from 2007, but I don't believe it's radically changed. Take a look at this article, and let us know if that's maybe what you are seeing, or if it's something different.

http://searchengineland.com/deconstructing-grouped-google-results-11633