Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Hossam

This kind of thing is tricky without a URL but lets quickly examine what you have stated above:

1. not hit during on the specific panda dates
2. lots of duplicate page titles
3. Google Webmaster Reports no major problems

The Google Webmaster Tools & SEOMoz tools do not scan your site for duplicate content problems, it would be a great addition if they could but it would require cross referencing all the pages against each other and then the rest of the internet so I imagine it would be a bit of a challenge to do so (Rand - you guys love a challenge, right? ;)). The offshoot of this is that you can ignore the SEO advice from SEOMoz and the recommendations from GWMT in relation to your problem.

You state that you have lots of duplicate URLs yet you claim this is not the problem yet I would beg to differ. If there are duplicate URLs is there other weak or duplicate content? Do you have product descriptions that are used on other sites or on multiple pages across the site? Do you have lots of content that is repeated on multiple pages across the site?

The kind of loss of traffic and ranking whilst still maintaining visibility for brand queries smacks of one of the more aggressive duplicate content filters that I have seen at least two cases of recently. These tend to kick in once the site has been crawled so do not stick to any specific date and the result is that you are buried for popular search terms but can still rank for terms with no competition and brand related queries.

Link devaluation was mentioned above but if the drop has been sudden and severe I would suspect a penalty is far more likely rather than a slow slide over x weeks, months into the doldrums.

Without a URL we can only theorise up to a point. To do some more in depth analysis and hang some meat on this theory we need to see your web address but from instinct and the information currently supplied,  it sounds like you have a duplication penalty.

This could be remedied by the following measures:

1. canonical urls for any internal page duplication
2. remove thin or weak content pages from the site (delete or noindex)
3. remove or replace any content that is not unique to your site alone (generic product descriptions etc)
4. identify any other sites that have stolen your content and request that it is removed & follow that up with DMCA request for any sites that will not play ball

Generally, review the quality of your site and it's content specifically with an eye to make sure your content is unique, not repeated internally, there are not duplicate URLs and that your content has not been stolen by other sites (google sentences from your site in double quotes for a simple check, use copyscape for something more indepth).

Happy to take another look if you can supply a URL.

Regards, 
Marcus

Hey Felicity

In an ideal world, you would have the blog on your main site and then when you win links to the blog they link popularity is being passed into the main site instead of the gardenbeet.wordpress.com domain.

That said, the gardenbeet.wordpress.com blog is well indexed and can be used to build links to your main site so it's not a total disaster to keep it separate and it may allow you to get better index saturation by ranking pages from both sites for your targeted terms.

If it was me, I would move the blog to my own host and manage just the one site and ensure that it is correctly redirected (301 as suggested below) so that you maintain any traffic and best transfer any search rankings.

There is a some details covering the technical aspects of moving your blog here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/

Additionally, Wordpress offer a guided transfer system where they will move your blog to your new host, set it all up, configure any plugins and then support you on the new host for 2 weeks to overcome any initial problems. As a business owner, I would imagine you are pretty busy so as a business owner and SEO I can't recommend this service enough to make sure  everything is done right and without a major impact on your time.

More details on guided transfers here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/guided-transfer/

Additionally, the people that will move your blog are called Happiness Engineers and for some daft reason that makes me want to use the service even more.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey Roger,

In the posting etiquette it states that users should 'find out if someone has already posted your question before adding it' but we all know that is never really going to happen.

So, we tend to see the same questions asked again and again when there are already top class answers in the Q&A.

So, could you not implement some kind of suggested answer system? So, user posts a question, you analyse it, list potential answers that may provide the answer based on the content of the question itself. If nothing matches, the user can then go on to post the question but in many cases, they would get a top notch answer instantly.

I have seen this on other sites and it would certainly cut down on the amount of duplicated questions and the suggested answers could all be hand picked to some extent (good answers, lots of thumbs up etc).

So, the Q&A would have less duplication and users would get directed to the best possible answers for a given question in a shorter time frame. Good for those that do the answering, good for the people who have questions - everyone is happy.

Just a thought,  my tuppence, 5 cents, etc.

Marcus

Hey, great advice, many thanks. The hosting provider is a great idea, allows us to go in via the back door, I like it.

Hear, hear! I have personally spent an hour on a response, solved someones problem pretty much and they did not even bother to thumb up. Sometimes SEOMoz staff are on point but really, more often than not, it's not the case.

Q&A can be fun, it's good to share, but it's nice to get a thumbs up for your effort. After all, I would rather be at home with my kids than answering a strangers question so... it really should be encouraged to say thank you, it's only polite after all.

My own theory is that often, people ask questions, and whilst you give the right answer, it is not what they want to hear so they don't thumb up, or mark as a good answer as it was not the 'right' answer.

Really, the Q&A needs more admins to reward the people who put the effort into help others.

As a suggestion, a 'you need to leave feedback' type system could help educate users on the etiquete required to drive the Q&A.

Hey, I read about this somewhere previously and Google has a policy of no PPC for what it considers Bridge Pages:

From: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company

Had a bit of a dig and this was the post I read a while back, sure of it:

http://www.curtsnow.com/googles-bridge-page-policy-dont-ask-dont-tell/

Hope that helps buddy. 
Marcus

Hey Stacey

It all depends on how these tag pages are used and whether they factor as landing pages or are just a tool for people to view related content once on the site.

Are you using WordPress? If so, WordPress features a bunch of taxonomies, tags being one and where you have posts by a single author they may be duplicated on the homepage, date archive, author archive, categories, sub categories and tags so you can end up with a lot of pages that look pretty much the same.

This is fairly straightforward to resolve though and if you just install the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and then noindex any pages that are really just for users to browse you can ensure your important pages remain indexed and there is not lots of duplication or competition.

Really, it is more than a technical problem and it comes down to how you organise your posts and content on the blog and a default blog root and specific indexed category pages (ideally with some additional, unique content) can work best (but again, the specifics depends on the blog and the content).

Anyhow, it is an easy change, try no indexing the tags, date archives, author archives etc and using some smart category organisation and see if it moves the dial at all for you. You can always put things back if you don't find it helps.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey, you have pretty much answered this question yourself - "we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected". If this is the case, then, I would not worry about the toolbar page rank.

Also, you have a raft of other problems, but you seem to have a handle on those. I would spend your time constructively focusing on getting your new site up and running and resolving all these duplication issues and not spend another minute worrying about your loss of page rank.

Hey Andy

There is no real concrete answer to that question so you need to play it by ear. Set up the redirects and watch them over time. Query the to ensure that the additional sites have all disappeared from the search engine result pages. You can also check the web logs on these domains to see if they are picking up traffic from search at all and if so, continue to leave them as long as it takes.

I would be prepared to leave them all for at least 12 months and then review them all and make your decisions.

Additionally, try not to worry about the 301's too much and concentrate on the new main site. Start building up some good links and if possible see if you can get valuable links pointing to the old sites all pointing to the new site. Get some great content on there as well and start promoting that and this will all help the new site supersede the older sites.

As an aside, I have never 301'd fifty sites into one so it would be interesting to hear if anyone else has any experience of combining so many sites into one.

Hope it helps & be prepared for a bit of wait.

Marcus

Hey

1. Does it work? Maybe, maybe not, a little bit, short term type of benefit.
2. Does it keep working? Nope
3. Will you be trapped in a cycle of building low quality, short term links? Yes
4. Does it get less useful very quickly? Yes

This is not the way to go about things. You will end up putting in maximum effort for minimum returns.

Your time would be better spent elsewhere and these articles are a good start:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/advanced-link-building
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z

Don't succumb to the dark side or forever will it taint your destiny - Yoda, master link builder.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Mof3kz,

In my experience, a sudden drop like this is most likely an indication of a content problem on the site itself. The fact that you mention that this is an ecommerce site only furthers this opinion and if you are using the default, manufacturers product descriptions for your content then you could have been slightly filtered due to weak or duplicate content.

If you would like to post a URL I would be happy to take a look for you as I have some experience here, alternatively, you can message me the URL if it is sensitive.

I would suggest reading this post from Dr. Pete before you do anything else:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

You can also check the likelihood of content problems with the copyscape plagiarism tool:

http://www.copyscape.com/

Copyscape will show you pages on your site that similar to pages on other sites and it ranks them by likelihood to be causing a problem so again, it can be more evidence that you have been flagged as a weak result and are being buried in the deep, dark result pages.

With anything like this, it's hard to be completely sure and at best you can only be fairly confident about certain things. The job here is to identify any and all problems that MAY be causing the issue and start to work on the problems. From experience, content is often the best place to start so I sincerely hope this helps.

Post a link though, happy to take a look as I am sure many others here are two (with many eyes, you will get much valuable feedback).

Hope this helps!

Marcus

P.S. If you have a content type problem, there is no need to 'ask' for forgiveness, just get rid of the problems and the great and merciful google will cast down a blessing!

Sounds like you could have been caught up in the latest panda update or you have some other quality related issues. As a quick check I ran your homepage through copyscape.com and it came back with 10 or more matches and I tried googling a chunk of your text which came back with more than 100 other matching sites:

Google this in the double quotes to see what I mean:

"Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!"

You have uniqueness issues for starters so looks like you have been filtered my friend. I would give this a read for starters:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Then make an honest appraisal of your site and your content. A batch crawl with copyscape would be a good idea and then just remove or rewrite the weak or duplicate stuff and you will make your way back into the rankings if everything else is straight.

Hope it helps

Marcus

Hey, it's a nice thing to have, desirable for sure, but consider it something to do for new pages and articles rather than something you desperately want to change on existing content. I would always avoid changing page names if at all possible and where you are ticking 35 out of 36 boxes as above this is not going to bring big rewards.

An exact answer, would always depend on the specific keyword, page, case etc but as a general rule of thumb, I sincerely would not lose any sleep over this one!

Hope this helps! 
Marcus

As David said, as long as the redirect is done properly with a HTTP 301 permanent redirection to the main (existing) address then there will be no implication or penalty from doing this.

To be super compliant you could always set the preferred domain in Google webmaster tools as well.

Clients eh!

Hey Jom

Problem is, from a search engine perspective, those are four duplicate pages & from a linking perspective, they are four different pages that you could see your link popularity shared between. Neither of which is ideal.

I would certainly deal with this but it needn't be an arduous task.

1. Set up a rewrite rule to change all URLs to lowercase and 301 any non lowercase ones, something like this in your htaccess should do the job assuming you are using a LAMP environment.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

2. Add an automated lowercase canonical to all of these pages so they canonicalise to the lowercase version.

3. Try to replace the links so they all use lowercase. If this is a dynamic site it should be easy but if not, you could still do a string replacement across multiple files. You could write a little script to automate this if it is a huge job from the sitemap (of lowercase URLs of course.

---

Certainly worth doing and should not be too difficult with a bit of smarts applied.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Hey Corey

It certainly smells like a penguin type penalty against that one keyword but you can certainly do some digging to determine if whether it is that or if it is something else or if there are more keywords that are effected and you have just not noticed. I have also seen a few sites penalised on the brand name where it was an exact match so say the URL is http://www.exact-match.com then they are getting penalised for too many 'exact match' anchors. This seems easier to fix and I have had a couple of sites bounce back from this for the brand keyword without too much effort.

First thing I would do is examine to see what date this happened and whether other keywords were effected so we can identify a list of possible problem terms and problem anchor text.

1. Filter by that keyword in google analytics and determine the date this happened and see if it is on a known penguin date or date relating to any other search algorithm update - check against this list: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

2. Once you know the date, if it looks like a penguin problem, then check to see if other keywords are affected. To do this select a two week period in analytics starting at the day you had the problem and then select the compare to past option below the date to view the two weeks before and after.

Browse to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic to get a list of all keywords and you can see the percentage that these have changed. Scroll through that list and see if there are other keywords that have lost traffic. (If you have some good rank checking you may  not need to do this but it's likely you will find more here if it is a penguin issue).

Once you have done that you can get a list of terms together and attempt to determine if you have problematic links. You can import your link profile from seomoz into a free tool called Link Detective that will allow you to filter the links easily by anchor and get a new spreadsheet for each anchor text (or you could divvy it all up in a spreadsheet but link detective gives us a few more details like the type of link).

Then, you can go through the manual task or reviewing the links to see if there are any problematic ones for that term alone.

There is a few more details of how I would go about this here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/

Without a few more details it's hard to know exactly what the issue is but this is a very broad term yet that is a huge drop but if you follow the instructions above it should let you determine if this was a penguin type issue or something else entirely.

Also, there are sometimes fluctuations, so I would not panic too much. Your link profile looks pretty well okay to me, the linking sites (from a very quick look) seem okay and generally, it does not look like you should be punished for manipulative practices.

There is a lot of talk of a reshuffeling of the deck with no specific updates around the end of september so possibly, have a look, see if you can find anything fishy but also, hold fire, this may just resolve itself. http://www.seroundtable.com/september-2012-google-report-15652.html

One last thing, is this a good keyword? Does it convert? What is the value of traffic? Do they stay? Have the results moved around at all for other people as well?

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Hey Jonathon

Google can follow these links, but it is not ideal.

In the webmaster guidelines they state:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

So, if these are your only links then it may be a problem but you could just get around this with a sitemap or some such but I would prefer to lose those or add a secondary text based nav. You could likely achieve the same look and use text for the links as well with some jazzy CSS.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Ref:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Hey Mark

In simple terms, the canonical URL exists as a suggestion to Google that a page may have various URLs or that various URLs may contain similar or near duplicate content.

For instance:

Lets say we have a list of properties in Birmingham, UK and that we have 3 pages showing that list of properties - the first by date order, the second by price high to low, the third by price low to high.

• http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php
• http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php?sort=hightolow
• http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php?sort=lowtohigh

This is a perfect time to use the canonical URL as the content is the same, it is just jiggled around a little so all of these would set the default page as the canonical.

default page: http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php

So, all pages would have this tag:

Then, Google knows that from a search and indexation perspective, they can return the one main version of this page and the others are just the same thing jumbled around a bit.

This is also a good, solid overview with a video and a basic explanation:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Paul

Hmmm, that might work, but really, that is far from the ideal approach here and it might make sense to try and understand what is causing that page to rank over the homepage.

Have you checked

1. keywords targeted on each page
2. optimisation of pages for keyword
3. internal anchor text (navigation + pages)
4. External links

Planning and consistency is just so important that I would recommend trying to get a handle on why one page over another is ranking rather than just trying to put a hack in place to try and redirect folks to the right page.

Canonical is really for clearing up any uncertainty regarding different URLs for a single page. So, if you have.

www.yoursite.co.uk/blog
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/index.html

You could set the canonical to the one your prefer and then any links or search results would be allocated to the correct varation. It is not really for saying one page is really a copy of another but it can be used like that if there are near duplicates but really noindex may be a better solution for non search based landing pages that are very close in content to another page.

As ever, there are lots of moving parts and without an example it's hard to say but in principle, I would try to figure out what is going on here and adjust the pages + set up canonical as they should be used.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Some useful references
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps 

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Hey Diane

From a quick look at things I would say the rankings for 'lifestyle magazine' were predominately based on the link building done for the site as we have some heavy usage of 'lifestyle magazine' as the main anchor.

Links on pages like these:

http://brownsvillebankruptcyattorney.com/resources.php?cid=8&page=7

http://brownsvilleaccidentlawyer.com/resources.php?cid=8&page=8

None of which are currently indexed are doing you any good and looking at the general ratio and type of linking sites, it is lucky you have not fell foul of this before now.

On a plus note, you don't seem to have a penalty for these terms (from the briefest of looks) and it seems that you are really just seeing the result of the devaluation of lots of your linking pages / sites.

Ultimately, you can't rely on a single keyword as your traffic strategy for your site and you would be far better focusing on a wide range of lifestyle related keywords with your blog content. It seems you are a magazine with lots of content so I would make this your focus and try to bring traffic in via a wide range of pages.

Ultimately, you need to flip your strategy on it's head.

• focus on content and building a readership
• build traffic via a wide array of content items
• bring people back to the site by generating social sign ups and seeding your content
• Be careful with regards to quality and who you let guest post on the site
• do a small amount of triple A guest posts on big sites with the intention of generating exposure with a bonus link (rather than a link with bonus exposure).

Really, you just need to focus on making your site great, forget about  these very general and vague keywords and set some real business related goals and track those rather than rankings and you should be good to go. A well ran content strategy will outperform a well optimised single keyword tenfold with enough time and effort behind it.

Hope that helps!
Marcus