Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem.

Glad you managed to sort it out.

Matt.

No problem.

Hi Guido,

I think I have gathered what you are trying to do here.

I would avoid passing the link to page that will just redirect the link as this will result in you losing some of the link juice (i.e. it will be worth less).

With regard to your second question:

"what's best? and second question what's the way to keep the page on this adress ( www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.it ) but show poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it as url?"

Could you give me a bit more information so that I can understand what you mean by it?

Matt.

Hi Guido,

I think I have gathered what you are trying to do here.

I would avoid passing the link to page that will just redirect the link as this will result in you losing some of the link juice (i.e. it will be worth less).

With regard to your second question:

"what's best? and second question what's the way to keep the page on this adress ( www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.it ) but show poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it as url?"

Could you give me a bit more information so that I can understand what you mean by it?

Matt.

Hi Colin,

No you can archive as many as you like. What I do sometimes, is if I want to dig a bit deeper into some of my accounts then I will make them active for a few weeks, then archive them and make a different one active. This is because I don't need to track all of my campaigns at the same time, but I like to keep a hold of the historical data.

Matt.

No problem Gary, good luck.

Matt.

Hi Gary,

I would assume that this is the root of the problem. Google themselves have said the following:

"If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search."

Once you have addressed the issues, go into Webmaster Tools and go to your website. Then click on 'Health' then 'Fetch as Google'. Fetch your homepage and then click on 'Submit URl and Linked Pages to Index'.

Only do this once you have rectified your server issues though.

Matt.

I think that a lot of people are in the same boat as you so don't worry, many sites have began the road to recovery after the recent updates.

To de-index a URl from Google, go into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, then go to 'Optimization'>'Remove URLs' then type in the old URL and Google will remove it from the search engine completely. This mayy take a couple of days though.

I would also then create a new sitemap once you have done the new pages and submit this through Webmaster Tools also.

Matt.

Hi Gary,

Yes that sounds like a server error. If you are getting a lot of 500 errors then Google will punish your website for this as they will assume that it isn't functioning correctly.

Take a look into the pages that are getting 500 errors and have a word with your web hosting company to see if they can look into the root of the problem with the server.

Once you have managed to sort out the issues with your server, go into Google Webmaster Tools and ask Google to fetch your site using Googlebot, then if there are no errors, re-submit the site to be crawled and indexed.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

What I would do is to delete the old page and then create a whole new page. Because the old page is no longer on the server it shouldn't be punished for duplicate content. Just make sure that you ask Google to de-index the old URL and index the new one.

Bear in mind though that this is really a last resort method. But if you are having no luck at all with recovering from Penguin then this method could be more effective than just waiting it out.

Let me know how it goes and if you need any more info then just let me know.

Matt.

Hi Gary,

This could be for a number of reasons, bearing in mind that there has been a shed load of new algorithm updates from Google recently! The first step to take is to try and identify the rough date that you started to lose rankings.

This way you will be able to understand which update may have affected your website. Go into your Google Analytics and have a look at the organic search traffic coming to your website; if it is showing a dip around the end (24th) of April, then you may have been hit by the Penguin update (like a lot of us).

The Penguin update punished a lot of websites for their linking methods, i.e. having a lot of the same anchor text on links back to your website, having links in the footer areas of websites, duplicating links across single domains many times, linking from link-network websites, etc. If you think that your website may have any links like these then you may be at risk.

Take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools as well as http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and take a deeper look into your linking profile to see who is linking to you and how they are linking. If you start to see a pattern emerging, contact the sites and see if you can get those bad links changed.

If you think that everything in terms of links looks good then let me know and I will try to help find what else it could be.

Matt.

Hi There,

I have been having trouble with the same thing and have found some good advice throughout the process of recovering.

One method that I have heard people suggesting was to change the URL of the page that is affected and then set up a redirect to the new page. From personal experience, I can tell you that this doesn't work. It is simply a very short-term fix (i.e., a few days if your lucky), then Google will start punishing you for the redirected page.

If it is only specific pages on the website that are being affected, try to pin-point the exact aspects of those pages that could be deemed as black/grey-hat. If it is the case that some of your webpages are ranking then you can take solace in the fact that your whole website hasn't been banned. So there is still hope to recover.

Try using OSE to check out all of your different anchor text and links, as well as looking through webmaster tools. If you can, contact these websites to have your link completely removed because at the end of the day, if your not ranking because of these links then they may as well be removed completely.

You could also attempt to remove your old pages that have been punished and create new URLs completely (don't redirect the old pages, simply delete them altogether) and just use the old content that was on them. This way you will get rid of all of the links to the punished page, and start a fresh new page with your old content. Re-index the pages through Google and slowly but surely, you will eventually start ranking again. Obviously this is not possible for your homepage, so maybe use this methods for some of your other pages and then put most of your effort into sorting out the linking profile on your index page.

I hope this has helped slightly and good luck!

Matt.

Hi Jay,

We have recently done a similar thing for one of our clients.

There isn't really a limit on the number of 301 redirects that you can have. Google will not punish you at all for having these in place. If you run on a CMS like Joomla!, the best thing to do is to get a plugin that can automate all of the 301 redirects (this will save time and will make sure you don't miss anything).

The pages shouldn't loose any authority in terms of PageRank, however, you may see you movement in the SERP listings (most likely in a positive way) due to the new URL syntax.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Shaz,

I have also started noticing that this is happening over a couple of my accounts. I think that it may have something to do with the recent Google update (however, I could be wrong).

Hopefully this is just a glitch from Google. If anyone does have any info, I'd really like to know as well!

Matt.

Taking from a recent blog post that I wrote today, here are a few tips:

• _Make sure that your webpage titles make sense and are relevant to the webpage content. For example, don’t have your webpage title as ‘New Shoes, Running Shoes, Sports Shoes – Sport Shoes Ltd’. This kind of title looks spammy in itself and will certainly not help with your click-through rate. Try something more along the lines of ‘Sport Shoes Ltd – High Quality, New Running Footwear’. You will have got in pretty much all of your keywords there but without the chance of being penalised.
   _
• _Check that the links on your webpages are relevant and that you don’t have too many. No webpage should have more than 100 links, and even that is pushing it. I would say that a total of 70 should be the most that you use. As well as this, make sure that the anchor text isn’t just a blatant use of an unrelated keyword; Google will notice this.
   _
• _Find out who is linking to your website to ensure that they have not been punished for carrying out ‘black-hat’ activities. This will only drag you down with them so use a utility like Open Site Explorer to check where you are getting links and check them out.
   _
• Make sure that you aren't keyword stuffing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have your keyword in your content 100 times (which would be a very obvious instance of keyword stuffing), but it can also be much more acute. With the use of more specific, long-tail keywords, try to refrain from putting them into text when they are not relevant, or just hiding them under image ‘alt’ attributes.

Hope this helps guys,

Matt.

Hey

These are the top social bookmarking websites that I use:

Twitter
Digg
Stumbleupon
Tumblr
Reddit
Inbound.org
Pinterest
Buzzfeed
Delicious
Fark
Slashdot
Newsvine
Burpalicious
Technorati
Blinklist

That's just to mention a few! Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Georg,

It really depends what the link directory consists of.

From what you have said, as they have their individual page with all of the information about the website, title, etc, then this seems like a very legitimate directory.

What I think your task should be is to police the information on the individual pages. Look to see if there is use of the linking website's keywords on there, and if so, remove them. Keep only content that is relevant to the website that is being linked too.

You could add on the 'nofollow' tags to the links if you like, however, I think the most important thing is to just manage all of the pages to ensure that they are serving their purpose as a directory and not just a link network. If this is done then it should be perfectly fine.

Hope this helps

Matt.

Hi,

Very interesting. I've never really considered pinging much at all to be honest!

I would probably say from reading the article and what I know about pinging from the past, is that it is more about having just a couple of sites you ping that are of a high quality.

I don't have any lists that work particularly well but would certainly be interested in any that anyone has!

Thanks for the info again

Matt.