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Agreed.  Great answer Highland.

I've seen this as well with sites buying or selling links.  Also, keep in mind that the Google toolbar PR and a site's real PageRank (authority) are two different things.  I've seen Google mess with people's toolbar PR before without actually penalizing them (manually or by algorithm), especially when dealing with paid links.

Without more info, it's hard to identify what the real problem is.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Mike and Tim have some  great suggestions.  I wanted to add to it that part of the social campaign you create can include a blog (as Mike suggested).  Some content you create for the social campaign may be best put on the blog and then pushed out the social sites.  Other content may be best distributed straight to the social sites (image memes, quotes, instagrams, etc.) but can also probably be used for content on the blog as well.  Blogging is a great way to put out new, unique content which can help to build authority for the site and you may be able to target keywords on that content as well.

Also, keep in mind that a lot of SEO, especially for smaller or newer sites, is about targeting longtail keywords that are less competitive.  Sure, you may not be able to rank for "buy sunglasses" today, but you may be able to rank well for "designer sunglasses for women".  It doesn't get as many searches, but it gets some.  You build up incrementally.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

I agree with Lesley for all three.

-Kurt Steinbrueck

Stephen,

Dropping in ranking because you loose links either from them being devalued by Google or the sites shutting down is quite possible.  It could also be a combination of lost links and a spammy profile.  But you've gleaned onto something a lot of people don't get about Penguin and spammy link.  People like to talk about "recovering" from Penguin, but what they often don't understand is that the link authority that was getting them their earlier rankings is gone.  There's nothing to recover to.  What's really going on is that their site's new authority level is lower and they are going to just have to build their site's authority level up as though they never had a higher authority site before.  So, it's not something where they can disavow a few links, get a few links removed and "Alakazam!" rankings have returned...but they seem to expect that.

If you had a lot of links pointing to your site which are now either gone or devalued, then it would make sense that your site lost rankings.  You just have to build the site back up with some natural link building.

As to your question about spammy directories, I wouldn't worry about the initially.  Focus on putting out great content and sharing it and see how that goes.  If, after several months, you find that you aren't getting any movement, then perhaps you go in and have links removed and start disavowing links.

And, yes, Google will eventually remove the old links from your profile.  It just takes Google forever and a day to do so.  The link list in Google Webmaster Tools is never up to date.  It's always months behind.

-Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Btrinh,

Social engagement is about connecting with people.  It’s about responding to people’s comments, asking questions, etc.  The point is to create a relationship with people or create a community of people.  It’s not something that has a direct connection with SEO, but rather an indirect connection.  By forming these relationships/communities, it makes it so people are more likely to consume your content and then link, Like, Share, retweet, +1 etc. when you push content out (the content still needs to be good).  They are also more likely to tell others about your organization.  So, it provides indirect SEO benefit as well as many other non-SEO benefits.

Good on-page optimization is a must, but link building is different today.  For link building, I think the focus today needs to be on doing a great job with your company/website, creating a good user experience on your website, creating great content, connecting with people personally and on social sites so you can push your content out and get people to respond by linking, Liking, retweeting, etc.

Most of the old link building strategies which focused specifically on getting a link, especially one with your target anchor text, aren’t of much benefit anymore.  Some can provides some value if done while also doing natural link building.  You might get some benefit from article marketing if you produce good enough content that people use your stuff.  You don’t get any value from links on the article sites themselves.  There is also value to contacting relevant websites and asking for a link, but that is best done by first forming a relationship with someone who works on the website and you are giving them a good reason to want to link to you (your company is good, you have good content, etc.).

The point is that Google has always wanted links to come naturally, either because someone likes your company/website or you produce great content.  Up until recently, they weren’t technically able to enforce that, so people were able to come up with unnatural link building strategies that worked.  Now, they’ve advanced their tech to where those unnatural strategies generally don’t work anymore.

-Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Jesse said what I would said.

I would choose one domain to go with instead of keeping content on two.  From what you've said, you don't really need two sites, you are just thinking about having two sites because of domain authority.  Just redirect one domain to the other and combine the sites.  If both sites already have the same content, then try to redirect each page to its corresponding page, if possible.  That will make for an easier transition.  Using 301 redirects will pass the authority from the redirected domain/pages to the other domain, increasing it's authority.

As for which domain to keep, I'd go with the one that's getting the most user traffic.  From what you've said, it sounds like that is the .info site.

By combining the sites, you won't have to worry about an approach for sending people to the "real" content.  There will only be one place for the content and it will (hopefully) all be real.  You'll also be able to focus all your attention to building up the one site instead of spitting your efforts.

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

No rankings ever remain consistent.  The search engines keep changing, competition is changing, your site is changing (hopefully), your link profile is changing, etc.  So, fluctuations are the norm.  That said, wild fluctuations like going from #4 to not in the top 100 back to #5 isn't so normal.

Depending on what the time frame for these rankings are, it could be an update by Google.  It was just a few weeks ago that they were updating stuff and people were reporting lots of movement.  According to some folks there seemed to even be an indication that partial match URLs were effected (among other things).  So, it's possible that your site was caught up in all that.  Afterall, the Code Red 7 page has "code-red-7" in the URL.  If Google did change how they are dealing with URL matches, then it would make sense that this page would be effected.

Also, how are you checking the rankings?  I don't see your site in the top 100 in Google for "code red 7".  Is it possible that you were using different browsers, perhaps even different computers, or that you were logged in when checking sometimes and not logged in other times?  Personalization can give the appearance of rankings bouncing all over the place, but it's really that Google is showing you your site high in the rankings because you go to it all the time and they may not be ranking your site high for anyone else.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

I agree with that Carl.  It's one thing if your worried that Google might penalize you, maybe you don't worry about the nofollows.  However, once Google has already placed a manual penalty on the site, it's all about showing Google that your not trying to game their system and you're working hard to correct the situation.  A bunch of links on spammy sites will still look bad to a reviewer even if they are nofollow.  I'd try to get them removed as well...though I may not put as high a priority on them.

-Kurt

Yeah, Google definitely wants to see that you've put some effort into removing the links and that you aren't doing it anymore.  It's also not uncommon for it to take several requests and several months.

In your request to Google, did you explain that you were not building these links and that it appears to be someone performing negative SEO on your client?

-Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Stephen,

A quick review of your link profile didn't actually look too bad, at least I didn't notice anything glaring.  You have some keywords that have lots of links, but those appear to all be internal links that are part of the navigation of your site which is normal.

I'd recommend focusing on building links rather than removing links.  Your site doesn't have a ton of links pointing to it.  According the the Open Site Explorer report you referenced, you have 434 links.  Even if there is some issue with an unbalanced link profile, it should take many good, natural links to balance it out.

-Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

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

Hi Serkie,

If they had duplicate content, then I understand.  Most category pages I've been on are not duplicate, so I hadn't though of that.

In regards to the link juice distribution, I wouldn't spend too much time trying to sculpt and control link juice.  You're usually better served spending that time producing content that will bring more link juice into your site.  It's not a problem to do it, you just may get more benefit from getting more link juice into your site than sculpting what link juice you already have.

Kurt

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

Hi Btrinh,

It sounds like your moving in the right direction and Pedram had some great advice.  To answer your more specific questions...

1. Effectively incorporating social media into your SEO can involve a lot of things, but I'd suggest you primarily focus on two things, sharing content (and having your content shared) and engaging people.  Sharing content yourself is easy enough, but getting other people to share it is trickier.  People need a reason to share something and the best reason is if it impacts them and they feel compelled to share.  Things that impact people are things that are funny, moving, very interesting, about a cause they like, and even sometimes if something is a great deal.  Beyond sharing content you want to engage people.  Ask for opinions. Ask questions. When people post on your account, respond.  Share other people's stuff, etc.
2. Natural links means people link to your site of their own desire without reward.  This usually means that either your company does a good enough job that people recommend/talk about you or that you produce content that is valuable enough to link to.  By the way, you referred to "alt tags", but I think you mean anchor text.  Alt tags are generally used with images.  Assuming you mean anchor text (the text of the link), you want a combination of branding, naked URLs, keywords (and variations), and random words (click here, etc.).  The thing is, that if you are getting most of your links by producing great content and doing a good job with your company/website, then this will happen naturally.
3. Keyword research is essential.  You need to know what keywords to target in your content and, to some extent, your link building.  On-page SEO is still very important, so using keywords in your content is important.  As for link building, I prefer a natural approach (as described above), but even with a natural approach you can target keywords by including them in content titles and things like that.  It's natural for someone to link to an article using it's title as the anchor text.  So, using a keyword in the title, can get you keyword-rich links naturally.
4. I like video content as well.  Done right, it can be very cost effective.  Video has two other great benefits.  If you are using people, you can create a stronger connection with people than they get from reading an article.  Secondly, Google uses a different algorithm for the videos used in their blended results.  So, if your site doesn't have enough authority to rank well with a page, it may still be able to rank well with a video.
5. I use Google Analytics.  It isn't perfect, but it's good.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Is there a reason you are considering option 1?  Option 2 is simpler to implement and doesn't chain the redirects.  Unless there's some other, non-SEO reason for considering option 1, I'd go with the second option.

If you are considering option 1 because you want to only be changing the domain and not also changing the subfolder when you do the domain migration, I wouldn't worry about it.  As long as you are setting up 301 redirects for each page to redirect to the new URL for that page, Google and Bing can understand that out just fine.

• Kurt Steinbrueck

I would think there has to be a better way to do that.  Sites detect IP addresses and deliver dynamically created local content all the time.  I would think there are some scripts out there which would do what you want without all the 302 redirects.  It would be cleaner and better SEO.  Unfortunately, I'm not a developer and don't have a specific suggestion, but I'm sure there's a better solution.