Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I know it's probably matter of curiosity and frustration.  You just want to know why.  In the end, however, we know what tends to win out over time, a good site that is well optimized and created quality, new content that is remarkable and getting that content in front of people.  Oh, and doing an awesome job with your business.  So, just focus on what you need to do to grow your own company/website and don't worry so much about your competition.  It usually just wastes your time and makes you mad.  Not worth it.

Good luck with your site.

Hi Anthony,

It sounds like your on the right path.  Make sure the site has good, quality, optimized content.  Analyze the link profile and deal with the issues you find.  Create new quality content that is remarkable and get it in front of people via social networks, guest blogging, etc.

It's not a quick process, though.  It sounds like the site you are working on was in pretty bad shape, dealing with both Panda and Penguin issues, including spammy links and over-optimized anchor text.  It's a lot to fix and Google doesn't just bounce you right back to where you were.  First, Google wants to see that you are really back on the straight and narrow and aren't going to try any more spammy stuff.  Secondly, the rankings the site had before weren't legit.  The site had them because of manipulative strategies which are no longer working.  Think of it this way...

If I weighed 250 lbs and I wanted to lose weight.  If, instead of working out and eating right, I decided to lose weight by adjusting the scale and I adjust it to the point where it says I weigh 200 lbs. The scale may indicate I'm losing weight, but I'm not.  It's fake.  If someone then comes in and fixes the scale so it can't be adjusted, I shouldn't expect that the scale would still say I'm 200 lbs because that wasn't real.  It'll say I way 250 lbs (or may more).  In a similar way, if you manipulate the search engines to give certain rankings instead of getting those rankings by creating great content and getting links naturally, then when the search engines change so you can't manipulate them anymore, you shouldn't expect to keep those fake rankings.  You'll be back to where you were at the start, possibly worse off if you get penalized.

So, you are on the right path, but you (and your client) need to have the proper expectations.  You may have more issues to deal with and you probably need to be creating new, remarkable content so people will share/like/link the content and build the site's authority up...the right way.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

It sounds to me like you don't want the search engines to know that your moving the content, but rather have them think that you have dropped the pages from your site because you don't want the search engines associating those pages with your site, correct?

If that's the case, then you do want to keep the noindex on the old pages and setup 301 redirects as well.  The redirects are for real users who happen to use any links/bookmarks to the old pages.  By keeping the old pages noindexed, then hopefully the search engines won't crawl them and won't follow the redirects.  I'd also remove the pages from the Google and Bing indexes in their webmaster tools for good measure.

If you are linking from your site to the new location of the user content, you may want to nofollow those links or, better yet, create the links in javascript or something to hide them.  If all the links to the content just shift to the new location, Google and Bing may still associate it your site with the new site.  Then again, if all the content from the old pages is all the new site, then they may figure it all out anyway.

These types of reports, whether it's the Moz DA, Majestic SEO link report, or even ranking reports, are tricky.  They tend to fluctuate quite a bit.  I'd recommend trying to get the client off of focusing on these types of reports and get them focused on either traffic to the site or (ideally) conversions.  These other reports are really just tools.  They are indicators to help you do your work.  After all, would the client be happy if you got them a DA increase of 30 points if at the same time their conversions dropped by 50%?

Vince,

There are different kinds of manual action that Google can take on a site.  In some cases, it's necessary to clean up the offending links and in others it's not.  It's not quite as black and white, however, as to which manual actions do not require clean up.  I've seen some sites that received the same message you did where there was no noticeable effect on their rankings.  For them,  there really wasn't any need to do anything.  Other sites, however, there was a noticeable effect on their rankings and it appeared that the manual action Google had taken was not just to ignore the offending links, but Google was actually penalizing the rankings of sites for certain keywords.  For those sites, it was advisable to clean up the bad links.

So, if your rankings have been effected, then go ahead and clean up the links.  If not, it up to you, but I'd agree with Patrick that it's probably still a good idea anyway.

Lastly, note that Google's examples may not be the only type of link that is causing an issue.  They are just a couple of examples.  When you request reconsideration, you may find that Google denies it and gives different examples as to why.  Just a heads up that the issue may be bigger than you think.

Good luck.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Serkie,

Is there a reason you want to noindex your category pages?  I don't know of any SEO benefit you would gain from this.  I guess if you don't want people going to those pages or finding them in the search engines, then you can noindex the category pages.

Setting up schema is good.  I'd recommend you do that.

It's also good that you are spending time focusing on user experience.  Getting traffic to a site that has a bad user experience can actually be worse than not getting traffic at all.  People remember bad experiences...and good ones.

As to your main issue, no traffic, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. You are in a competition for the rankings of relevant keywords.  If your site is only 6 months old, it's not going to be very authoritative and, considering that the pet supply industry has some pretty tough competition, it shouldn't be surprising that you aren't getting much traffic yet, especially if you haven't done much SEO work.
2. Links are still very important for SEO.  On-page optimization is important, too; so you should do that, but on-page SEO will only get you so far.  You need links and social shares to build up the authority of your site which will allow you to rank for more competitive keywords.  The best way to get links is to do a great job with your company (and have a good user experience on the site) and then produce interesting, quality content to share with people.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hmm.  I'm doubtful that a PPC campaign would knock you down like that in the organic results.  When did the drop happen?  Google has done several updates in the past few weeks, including a Penguin update, that may have happened at the same time.  I noticed that in Open Site Explorer you only have two "external" sites linking to the page, cnsmosaic and cnsgroup.  From the links on the hut3 site, I'm assuming these are all part of the same company.

It's possible, however, that Google sees the links from those sites as external links.  Since it would appear that the links to the penetration testing page are sitewide accross the cns sites, I wonder if Google is treating those as external sitewide links, all with targeted keywords, and has penalized you for it, either manually or by algorithm.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

To answer your specific question, I'd target different keywords.

That said, why do you have two different websites selling the same products?  If you are just trying to get two rankings in the top ten or rank for more keywords, I'd suggest that you are better off just having one site and building the authority of that one site up instead of trying split your efforts.  If there is a legit user-based reason to have two sites than I would think the two different target groups may have their own search phrases and way of speaking which should determine your keywords and the text on your site

I'm guessing that "public webshop" and "trade webshop" indicate that you are targeting the general public with one site and people working in the industry with the other.  You'll need to familiarize yourself (if you aren't already familiar) with the terminology that the two groups use and have that guide your decisions.  It's not something you'll be able to pick up on from keyword tools since they would just give raw data not indicating which group was searching for what keywords.

Even if you are targeting two different groups, I wonder if you couldn't just have two sections withing a single site instead of two completely different sites.  I'm not saying two sites is always bad or anything, there are good reasons to do it in some situations, I just think that when building the authority of websites, it's almost always easier and more effective to focus on just one site instead of two or more.

Hope this helps.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

That stinks that those publishers did that.  I'm a little suspicious that this would happen from a single press release.  Usually, it takes Google a bit more than that to trip a manual action.  Are you sure there aren't other links, maybe other press releases, that are suspicious?  I only ask because Google usually responds to a pattern of manipulation, not a single action.

In regards to your actual question, natural links typically aren't "tainted" by a previous penalty.  In fact it would probably work in the exact opposite way.  With manual actions Google thinks that you are trying to manipulate them.  In order to get the manual action removed, Google is looking for you to clean up the old links, apologize, and demonstrate that you have changed your ways.  So, getting new links that are completely natural demonstrates that you have changed your ways.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Sometimes it takes a little while for the disavow tool to remove links.  So, you may need to give it some time if you just did that.  You can always include the disavow request in the documents for your reconsideration request.  Beyond that, I'd take a closer look at your other links to see if there are other links causing an issue.

Looking in Open Site Explorer, I'm seeing several suspicious links in the report.  These are links from sites that have nothing to do with medicine whatsoever, all with targeted keywords in the anchor text.  When I click to view the page and look for the actual links, I'm not seeing anything.  So, it seems the links are no longer there.

If the report from Open Site Explorer is correct, it looks to me like someone was purchasing links and has now removed them.  Did you purchase links?

Some of the suspicious links are:

• afghan-network.net/Bookshop/persian-books.html
• learnscratch.org/resources/why-learn-scratch
• www.tiltshift.com/

If these links are also in Google's link profile, I could see why the site is penalized.

As long as you have the redirects in place, I wouldn't expect there to be much effect for the other branches.  Depending on how you redirect the pages and how many inbound links they have, you may actually be able to give some other branches a little boost.

The only ways I can think of that there would be a negative effect for the other branches would be if...

• There's some crossover of traffic between branches.  So, not getting traffic to the one branch's pages (the one moving) would mean that none of that traffic moves on to other branches.
• If the branch that is moving is particularly good at getting inbound links, then you would lose that ongoing increase of links.

I'd be more concerned for the branch that is moving off site and for the user experience.

Let's call the branch that is moving "Branch A."  For the user experience, if you redirect all the pages that are currently hosting Branch A pages to other pages on your parent company site.  All those people who are trying to get services from Branch A that would have landed on one of those pages end up on an irrelevant page.  That's not good for Branch A (or probably the parent company).

For the Branch itself, assuming they currently are getting traffic to the site and have built some level of authority in the niche/region, they will lose all that if they go setup a new site.  They will be starting from scratch.  They'll have a new site with no rankings, no inbound links, and no traffic.  Maybe in the long-run they can improve on things, but in the short-term.  It's going to stink.

For both of these issues, the solution would be to redirect all the Branch A pages on the parent site to the new Branch A site.  That way the user experience is good (users land on the pages they expected to) and Branch A has a site that, from the start, already has authority and traffic.  The down side to this, is that the loss of authority to the parent site by redirecting all these pages, could hurt the other branches.  It's hard to say how much without knowing how many branches there are, how many links are going to the various pages, etc.

Just some things to think about.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Rob,

I understand what you're trying to do and why; however, you need to understand that it's something the search engines (Google in particular) don't like.  Creating a bunch of duplicate pages to try to target different, similar keywords is considered manipulation, even if each of those keywords are relevant.  The search engines want unique content for different pages.

In regards to the canonical tag, the pages don't have to be completely exact to use the canonical tag.  After all, it's recommended that if one site uses content from another, they use the canonical tag to give the original site credit.  But there will be lots of different content on the two pages since they'll have unique headers, navigation menus, footers, and possibly title and description tags.  However, using canonical tags the way you are suggesting will defeat your own purpose.  If you have 5 different duplicate versions of the page and setup canonical tags on each to point to one of them, Google is only going to consider that one page.  The others will most likely be disregarded.  Thus, you still won't get the rankings boost for the optimized title and description tags on the other duplicate versions.

It seems to me you have two options that don't run afowl of Google.

1. Create different pages for each silo and have unique content for each of those pages.  Not only does this give the search engines what they want, but you have more opportunity to optimize the content for the keywords you are targeting.  Of course it will take a lot more work.
2. Have only one version of each page, but optimize it for each of the targeted keywords.  This is probably less effective since the optimization will get diluted by targeting so many keywords in the content, but it will be a lot less work.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

The canonical tag is telling Google to treat that canonical URL as the URL you want them to consider for the content.  It can be used to give credit when you use someone else's content, point Google to the page you want them to list when you have duplicates of your own content, or assist in moving pages from one URL to another (adding a 301 redirect later)  Honestly, I've never heard of someone trying to do what you are suggesting.  I'm not sure exactly how Google would treat that.

As to whether Google would consider what you're doing as spam, it's a matter of degrees.  If you're doing it a lot, then it's possible they might apply a manual action.  If it's not enough to warrant an action, they may just disregard all but one of the duplicate versions of each page.  Maybe nothing will happen and Google won't notice.  What I can tell you is that they would consider it manipulation if they notice it.

The simple fact is this.  You could just have one version of the supporting pages and link to that one version from each of the relevant main pages.  There are only two reasons you'd want different versions of the supporting pages.  Either you want to hone the content to get the best conversion rate from users, in which case each page wouldn't actually be duplicate, or you want to manipulate the search rankings by creating a bunch of duplicates of the exact same page to target different keywords.  Clearly, since you don't want to work on the content of each version, you are solely doing this to manipulate the search rankings when the same user experience could be achieved with one copy of the page.

Please also understand that this isn't personal.  I don't have a problem with what you're doing.  Just be aware that it comes with risks.  If Google discovers it, they may treat a bunch of your pages as duplicates and may even penalize your site and you be back in the forums in a few months asking how to deal with the fact that your rankings just disappeared overnight.  You just have to decide if your willing to take that risk.

If the content is originally yours, then you can add canonical tags.  It's not a guarantee that the search engines will follow those tags, but it's a start.  You could also try to report the competitor site to Google and Bing and tell them they are stealing your content.  Keep in mind the search engines usually take a while to respond.

If your site stole the content, then you just need to remove it and create your own, unique content.

• Kurt Steinbrueck
  OurChurch.Com

The indochino site has is a high authority site and has built up a brand.  Content on a site is only one part of the equation and, like many equations, if you increase one part of the equation, you can decrease another and get the same results.  For example, 2 x 6 = 12, but so does 1 x 12.  I've seen sites, especially decently branded sites, that had no readable content on their website but were ranking very well for competitive phrases in their niche.  It's because their site authority and brand were strong enough to over come the lack of content.  I'd say the same thing is happening in regards to your question.

I don't believe there's any difference from a search engine standpoint between hyphens ( - ) in vertical bars ( | ). It's pretty much your own preference. You may also want to consider how visitors to your site will respond seeing pipes versus hyphens, and which produces better click-through rates.

Personally, I like to use pipes to distinguish between two concepts and hyphens to connect two concepts. For example, if I have a company that produces auto parts, I might use a hyphen in their title tag, e.g. "auto parts-the company name" if I'm trying to connect these two. On the other hand, if I'm trying to distinguish two ideas like auto parts and auto repair, I might use the pipe in between them because I'm trying to distinguish the two ideas, but that's just a personal preference.

Here is a short video from Matt Cutts a few years ago where he says that hyphens and pipes don't make a difference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2_7PTio3Qc

That's what should happen in theory.  Your telling Google an Bing that the original content is at the new domain with the canonical tags.  They should essentially ignore the content on the old site and only care about the content of the new site, since it's the original.

There's two caveats, though.  First, is the Google expressly states that they treat the canonical tag as a suggestion.  So, there's no guarantee that they'll treat the tags the way they are intended.  Secondly, if the new domain has already been hit by Panda, then you have a bit of an uphill battle.  Google has already decided that they think the real source of the content is the old domain name and you are trying to convince them they have it backwards.

Even with the caveats, though, canonical tags are the only solution that fits the situation and the client's wishes (to still have the content on both sites).  The only other suggestion you could give is to redo the content on the new site so it is unique.  That's a lot more work, though.

Yes, internal links can be over-optimized, but wouldn't worry about it too much unless you are going out of your way to over-optimize the links to a page in order to manipulate rankings, things like the footer links Ruben mentioned.  Google is usually looking for a pattern indicating manipulation.  You can always test it and see what happens.

As for the page that has only one link, no there's no risk that it's over optimized.  Think about it.  No matter what text you use for the link, that text will be 100% of the anchor text to that page.  So, it's impossible to avoid that...unless you use an image, I guess.  So, don't worry about that page with it's one link.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Good question BeytzNet and good answer Schwaab.

High domain authority comes primarily from quality backlinks and, to some extent social likes and sharing (I think the strength of the social signals will continue to grow more important as time goes on).  So, the question really is, how do you build links and get social shares with a site that has no text on the site?

First, you don't need text for people to have something they think is compelling and worth sharing a linking to.  There are plenty of other forms of content that people link to.

Beyond that, there are really 3 ways to build links to a site:

1. Create content that is valuable to people and post it on your site.  You can get social shares by posting things on other sites (Facebook, Google+, etc.), but that usually doesn't lead to links to your site.  As noted above, the content posted to your site doesn't have to be text based.
2. Do an awesome job doing whatever you website/company does.  As an extreme example, Apple doesn't need to put out any content to get links at this point.  People link to them because they like the Apple products.  When they release a new iphone, even if they just put a product product page for it on their site and they would get tens of thousands, if not millions of links.  This works for smaller companies, too, though usually on a smaller scale.  Just do a great job, offer great products, etc. and people will link to you.
3. Do link building strategies.  Most of these, if not all, are now against Google and Bing's guidelines, so these are pretty much all black hat now.  But black hat can work...at least for a while.  Personally, I recommend people stick with options 1 and 2 above because I think the risk is too great with the linking schemes.  However, I mention this because, when investigating how other sites are ranking well, this is always a possibility.