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Hi RefCandy first of all canonical tag is a recommendation to spiders not a rule, so google will probably crawl your page.

Moreover the canonical tag prevents duplication issues not crawling itself there are many sites which uses self referring canonicals so there's no issue on your crawling rate at the beginning. However when google discovers the duplication of that page with the other you've set up it'll end crawling that page with less frequency, so it will give less value to some links in there.

The only rule which prevent links crawl is the nofollow tag in the page .

I think that IP filters are the only way to go. If you want to be sure that those visits are bots you should look into your logfiles and see if they come from the same ip and in which time range (if they're all in a couple of minutes for example). If you don't want to add that much filters you can put a forbidden rule in your htaccess so whenever that ip tries to visit your website you'll be returning a 403 in that way the visit won't be tracked. Beware of doing this kind of things because if there are users in the middle of that ip range you'll be affecting their experience too.

Hi Bob, I can't see why this could not be white hat, the main issue I see is not on the bots side but on your own.

Having many sites in the same niche may be difficult to manage because you want to differentiate them enough to get the most of them, also it's hard and time/money consuming to build strong brands in a particular niche, branding nowadays is an seo factor too (not directly but it affects).

You're saying you're overlapping keywords, you can do that but consider that you'll have hard time to choose sites where build links for one and not to another, you then need three unique ips, and if you'll achieve results your client will complain due to one site cannibalizing the other, so actually the growth of one would be the loss of another.

Be wise, and try to understand the real needs of your clients and why he wants to build 3 similar sites at once in the same niche.

I think that fetch as google returns the performance it already has on the page last time googlebot went there, so if you have applied changes lately it could take a day or two to google bot to recrawl the page and get the changes you've done. When did you do the change? can you let us know if after a couple of days the issue was solved?

Hi! what about using cookies?

I mean, when an user reaches your site have a get php rule that appends a cookie to the user if their medium referral is cpc.

In your form you can add an hidden value which is cpc= 1 or 0. When the user send the form you can look for that cookie, if it exists set the cpc value to 1 if not 0. So you'll ahve a db stored information about if that user came or not via cpc.

your page looks very clean on user side, you're showing links in your navigational portion of the page to your inner pages (level 1) as needed.

What I don't understand is why you have links to level 2 pages (the further sections of level 1 pages) even if they're not clickeable. This is not a big cloacking issue but you're actually showing to users and bots different version of the page. If I were you I'll remove the links to level 2 pages and links to level 1 pages only from your homepage. The value to level 2 pages will be passed from the level 1 pages and then navigational links will make the juice flow up again to upper levels.

This seems to me very natural, I'll only remove those hidden links in the homepage so you'll be easily below the 100 threshold.

That's true gold Ryan. I'm trying to add more value to this even if it's difficult.

Probably you're making some confusion among the EMD algo, which reduces the value of exactly matching domains, and penguin which affects our linkbuilding strategy.

Waht you should try to focus is to create linkable assets and then spreading the word in the channels where you can achieve links.

If you're trying to achieve links in a product page (I prefer to point at product categories since product may expire or get out of stock) you may want to propose special offers or if it's difficult to find opinions on it, create an extensive review with a video maybe so users may find it useful and why not, maybe they'll link or share it!

Quoting Ryan with the best ending: "Stop building links, start earning them".

Normally if Google didn't send any warning of unnaatural linking to your site you're not supposed to send a disavowing request since this just raise the attention goole is paying to your site, however I unserstand you want to prevent any issue by acting before any warning message.

About the disavow request, if that've been received google should have take that into consideration.

You said that that page was an offending page so you want to 404 it. I think that if you're getting rid of that page returning a 404 you're preventing that (bad) value to be added to your domain. I think that this is a correct approach. Just be sure that those 879 links are all bad because you don't want to lose all that value. If there are good links pointing there just ask those webmasters to point to your homepage instead. Just be sure that if there was some good content inthat page it has moved to your home before asking a link to be changed.

as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.

An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.

Open site explorer you mean? If your site is young is possible that OSE hasn't crawled it before so it doesn't have any data about it. Also if you don't have any link pointing to it, is quite difficult that OSE will find a path to it in order to index it.

yes, there are many options, always depending on how well are you able to maintain the page load time efficient. I think that having everything in one page without making it boring or overwhelming for the user is the best choice.

About images be sure that you're uploading he images in the size you're using without scaling them with css, because a 10001000 image even if shown as 100100 always weights as a 10001000, so rescale it and upload it as 100100.

Completely agree with Tom, save your findings in an excel file, which may help you in the near future. Just because if those lnks may be hurting you you'll receive an unnatural link warning or a descrease in traffic. The disavow tool is helpful on removing links in a great scale, not for removing jsut a couple of links each week. Is good to prevent but as Tom said, better to not raise google eyes on your site, a manual review can only spot bad things; I've never seen a manual promotion after a review

Hi Howard, I think the best thing is to prioritize and contact all the sites in bulk to have those comments removed. If they don't answer disavow those urls, Then write arecon request to google to ask them to remove any penalty they put upon you because you were victim of some kind of negative seo attack. After having your rankings fixed try to understand from where that attack may be arrived although I don't think you'll find anything since the attack wasn't on your site

Hi Fablau, I'm still seeing you first with both your keywords, but in the google image results. It shows the first page of the sonata while the link to your html seems down to the 9th and 13th page.

It's strange to see such old and good pages (it seems they got high authority) going so down in the serps. A couple of things:

• have you done something since the change? Like affiliate promotion or heavy linkbuilding? I'm seeing 11 domains linking to the beethoven page but ~5k links. Many of them are from origenmusic.com it seems like they' linking a lot to that page. An affiliate? Maybe you can explain more but seeing so many links from few domains, seems the kind of things google doesn't like so much these days. In november I remember a couple of panda updates with one of them being quite aggressive.
• I'm seeing you having many tabs which are also different urls. Why not consolidate all those pages into the same one maybe using ajax to load the content so all the value remains in one page?
• Include your images in your pages, it seems that google like it since you're still ranking first with that, maybe you can use that value including that image into your main pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi Scott, when did you set up your 301? If you look at the supplementary index, you'll find both your pages the one ending with the / and the legacy one.

I'm seeing that google still have the cache of you non-trailing slash page in their index since the last time they cached that page was on March 2nd. I saw that you set up correctly the 301, so it probably will be just a matter of time that google will drop the old page and leave only the new "slashed" one..

I don't know who told you to remove pipes from titles since it has been a while seos normally uses them in titles, since they helps to separate sentences better than a full stop or comma.

Aboutthe order, you want your main keywords at the beginning of the title. I'll add the name of your site just if the two are true:

1. your title is still less than 70 characters long. If you add the name of your company and it's not showing, your just diluting the density of your title without achieving your goal (branding)
2. your company is renown. Having the name of the company helps to enhance ctr if the company is renown, but if you're not so famous, I'll choose to have more dense and focused titles without diluting their value with not useful company names

Hope that helps!

Hi CB. I think that keyword are the most important part, they're the base of everything you'll be doing then. So:

1. keyword research: make a huge bucket of keywords looking at adwords keyword tool or whatever tool you have and combine that with your competitors keywords, you can make it by putting the url in the Google keyword tool or better using a service like semrush. Build a huge list of keywords just like if you're building a ppc campaign. Then refine them and prioritize by difficult/volume you want the best relation between efforts traffic achieved.
2. then based on your keywords start creating your contents. at least not copied content in the beginning
3. base d on your keyword look for competitors and build the whole list. Try to imitate what they did good, jsut like social followers, sites bcaklinking to them and try to build a list of highly relevant sites potentially interested in your services. When yuor site will be good enough (the enoguh is defined by how good your competitors sites are)start contacting them after having built a relationship in social media, an d create assets for future backlinks.

Hope this helps!

Hi, actually you won't have any direct seo benefits by linking your G+ page to your website.

What you'll achieve may be +1 made on your site and your g+page will sum togheter and that your g+ page should appear for your brand name searches.

More than that there's no evidence you'll receive any kind of boost YET. However to have such features you'll need a g+ page instead of a profile and follow the instructions here

Hope that helped!

It's a tricky situation, it seems like you were making many changes to your site, it's always risky to put links with keyword rich anchors, and when they're too many and built in a short time period that's definitely dangerous.

First of all get rid of everything you made in a "dangerous way" like your many internal links, normally google has itsrict  parameters to check out a page and when you're above a certain threshold you get hit. However I think that to recover the threshold is even lower, it seems like, google is more strict with you since you've tried to game their algo.

Now these are just my ideas and nothing confirmed but I think that you should try to clean up all the new links first, then have a look at your pages, that way to create a lot of pages in such short time, seems that they're programmed pages without any valuable content so they may be toxic for your recovery. Try to make a step back, and restart creating them on a slower pace and maybe hope google to reconsider your position. However if you don't have any manual penalty you'll have to wait until you get recovered. Reconsideration requests won't help you at all.

Hi Vacbag, just one question, why do you have so many

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
[.................]</ifmodule>

First if you have the rewriteengine On (and you should, because if not your redirect won't work at all) at the top of your htaccess, you don't need it in every ifmodule.

If you use the rewritebase rule, use it on top so ti applies to all the rules, without repeating over and over. Maybe I'm seeing jsut a bunch of your code, but I don't see the added value of having so many ifmodules...