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OK, I know what you're talking about now.  I've seen the same thing happen, where images DO appear to be indexed but WMT in the image sitemap file graph & counts look like it's not.

My conclusion:  GWT is buggered up there :-).  Really, though, I think it may just be a matter of time, certain processes that have to run, etc.

When I last saw this happen on one of my own sites, it showed nearly no images from my sitemap indexed for quite some time...a month or two, I think.  Now, it shows (with no changes that I could think of to affect this on-site) 1336 out of 1471 of the images in my sitemap indexed.

Hi Carl,

I do a ton of penalty recovery work, so I've got some experience here.  I would disavow those, whether there appears to be a penalty or not.  What's probably happening is that your client has a Penguin penalty for specific keywords...but, you don't really care, since you don't ever care to rank for those terms anyway.  But what you want to prevent is that mass of backlinks causing a manual review and then getting a penalty that takes time and effort and loss of traffic to get past.

What might have happened, by the way, is that the client's site might have been hacked at one point to do a redirect to a site that actually is selling replica watches.  The technique there is to take a site with a decent backlink profile and redirect a page on the site by injecting Javascript or a meta refresh into the source.  Then, building a mass of spammy links to get that page to rank because of anchor text and drive traffic through the victim site to the site that's selling whatever.  I've seen this done to WP sites (including one of mine...sigh) before.  Typically it's a short-run strategy, as pretty quickly the site owner realizes their site is compromised, and fixes it.  In the case of my site, there was a server in China that reran its hacking script to reinstall the redirect crap every 30 minutes or so.  So I'd fix it, and half an hour later, it'd be back. Took me a long time to figure out how to block the vulnerability they were exploiting.

You'll find that Google will keep retrying those broken links for months.  The frequency will go down, and eventually they'll stop trying.

In the meantime, the changed URLs undoubtedly made a mess of Google's calculations for internal link juice, and you should expect it to take about a month for that to settle back to normal as well.

Hello from a fellow (well, ex) BC'er!

I think your issue is simply a lack of backlinks at this point.  Did you submit an XML sitemap to Google?  That will help a bit.  Also, be sure to register in all of the local business directories--check out this post on the Whitespark blog to see the Canadian business directories that matter to Google.

Your site looks very nice, by the way.  Very professional and it looks like the images are yours (I presume Amanda Parker is related to your business?)

FYI, the "boost" sites get for an exact or partial domain match to the query seem to take a long time in Google--up to a year, last time I built exact-match sites (that was a couple of years ago).  Yahoo and Bing was quicker.

Cheers (Kokanee, of course),

Michael.

Hi Melissa,

Internal link anchor text DOES has some effect.  It's not huge, and not as important as the page title, by a long shot.  But what you're doing would be very, very common and really not a problem.

Michael.

Well, it's not going to pass link juice to www.domainlinked.com, that's for sure.  And I bet you're right about the tracking.

Yes.

Take out your existing link

[Google](https://plus.google.com/106866286474001265479<br />?rel=author)

And replace it with:

|   |
|   |   |

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|   |   |

I'd agree with Aaron's comments on click through rate.  I'd add that I'm still seeing a lot of boost in ranking from having the keywords in the URL itself, so I'd keep "shoes" in the page URLs.

Looking good, in general.  Note that you have an opportunity to get a ranking boost by adding rich, original content...things like large images, embedded videos, etc.

Consider shooting a 1-2 minute video where you talk about the various features of the boot, what you like about it, significant differences, etc., and embed that in related pages.

Consider taking your own photos of the boots.  Google most certainly knows whether you're using the same image the manufacturer has given out to all of your competitors.  A quick check with Google Reverse Image Search shows many, many sites with the exact same image.  If you want to make the Panda happy, show him both original TEXT and original IMAGES.

Hi Keith,

You need to choose 1 "master" sort order, use the pagination techniques outlined in the link Alex posted, and rel=canonical all of the other sort orders to the main page of your "master" sort order.

Michael.

Sure thing.  Presuming your main site's blog is in WordPress, there's this handy-dandy importer:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/blogger-importer/

There are instructions in the Installation section on how to export your existing Blogspot posts into an XML format that the importer can then read.

It's going to come down to just a couple of things:

1. How well the content is written--what's the reading grade level score, are there grammatical errors, etc.
2. How close the content comes to existing content on the web.

I'm not familiar with these two companies, but from what you say, it sounds like #1 isn't going to be an issue.  And most likely #2 won't be a problem either--even though realistically they're going to be looking up the raw data from somewhere (Wikipedia!) and doing their best to completely rewrite it....and that's always a challenge.

But the reason I don't think #2 is honestly going to be a problem is because right now, Google doesn't seem to be very good at spotting near duplicate content with even just light edits.  Or even WITHOUT edits, just with other content on the page.  As an example, search for this phrase (including the quotes) in Google (it's taken straight from Freebase, i.e. Wikipedia's back door):

"The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there"

Google finds and displays 96 YES NINETY-SIX pages before chopping it off and leaving it to the supplementals.

Will this go on forever?  Of course not, Google is undoubtedly working at trying to handle detection of this kind of thing.  Certainly it isn't in Google's quality interests to list 96 pages all that suck the description of something straight out of Freebase.  But, this paints a picture of where they are today in doing that....and that tells us that they're a long ways from taking a run at content that you've hand-rewritten from other sources....even if it's a light rewrite.

Hi Chris,

Yes, your text content looks good, and there's plenty of it.

And you're correct re: embedding the video.  I usually use the option on YouTube when getting the embed code to "use old embed code", which gives you an <object>etc.; I do this simply because it's not clear to me that Google pays attention to what's in an iframe (the "new" embed code on YouTube uses an iframe).  They might, but it seems to me that if Google (Panda) is mechanically inspecting your page to see what kinds of cool content you have, things that are easy to spot are embedded objects (which are probably interesting interactive elements, like a video or a virtual tour); I'm not sure that they'd go to the trouble to follow the iframe's link and then analyze what kind of content is in that iframed page.  They SHOULD, but that may be too processing-intensive.</object>

No.  The expires directive is merely there to tell the browser "this content is at least good until date X", so that the browser doesn't need to fetch it if it's got it cached.

So let's say you've got a dynamically-generated page called widgets.php, and it pulls a list of products, latest pricing, availability etc. from the database.  Let's say you style the page with an external stylesheet.css, you've got some awesome wacky UI stuff in Javascript in an external wackystuff.js, and your images for navigation on the site are in /img/nav (but product images, which maybe can change more frequently) are in /img/products.

You might NOT set the Expires header on your .php files and folders, as those should be considered to expire the second after the browser fetches them.  You might set the Expires header for the CSS file to a week out; same with the JS and the /img/nav folders, as those only change with a major update to the site.  You might set the Expires header date for the /img/products folder to maybe an hour or two, so that if a person is flipping back and forth between pages, the browser will use the cached product image for a little while before forcing a refetch of it.

Make sense?

2 years back....that's going to be right in the middle of a lot of Google algo changes, both Panda and Penguin.  It might be just a coincidence that your traffic drop was around when the hacking happened.

Have you done a backlink analysis?  It could be that the hackers also planted a ton of crappy links in the hopes of short-term getting your site to rank well for whatever they're trying to inject into your site and sell.

Sounds like you're doing the right thing with the URLs though.  To do a double-check on the duplicate content side, you could run Screaming Frog against it, and check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.  If your pages are getting spit out with multiple URLs, you'll see them all show up with duplicates.

You're very welcome...and don't underestimate the boost rich content can give a site.  Do a Google search for "bmw m1 at monterey" and see who's #1 in both the image results and the organic results...with a super-weak link profile (it's just my own personal photo gallery site)...ahead of the big car magazines who covered that car

You have two options:

1. Set it up in IIS Manager (best option, least overhead for the server, need no coding skills)
2. Code it in classic ASP in a global include file that all pages reference before sending content back to the browser.

Here's a great article that walks you through the IIS config option.  For this, you need access to IIS Manager:

http://www.proworks.com/blog/2010/02/11/adding-a-301-redirect-in-iis-for-individual-pages-with-non-aspx-extensions/

Sounds like that option is unavailable to you however.

For the other option:  your site probably has a file or two that's included at the start of all web pages.  (If not, you can add it).  In that file, you'll want to check the URL passed in like this:

Dim sThisPage                = Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")

If (LCase(sThisPage) = "/oldpage.aspx") Then

Response.Status            = "301 Moved Permanently"
        Response.AddHeader        "Location", "http://" & sThisServer & "/newpage.aspx"
        Response.End
End If

There isn't a fixed, known answer to your question, but perhaps I can offer some guidelines.

First off, repeating your keyword over and over on the page is very unlikely to fool Google any more, and boost your ranking.  On a page with 1000 words, it might be natural to see the primary term the page is about repeated a dozen or so times; if it appears 100+ times, Google is very unlikely to decide that makes the page MORE relevant for that term, and more likely, Google will see that as an indicator of spam.  My advice: write naturally, and don't try to inject the keywords...just make sure they appear once or twice.

In page titles, the answer is in the SERPs themselves.  Do a search for a reasonably competitive term, e.g. "Nikon D5200".  None of the page 1 results have the term in the page title more than once.

Donford's answer looks right to me, but I'd test it on your particular server as well.

My experience with .htaccess is that the various test tools don't always perform exactly the same as the server itself; also different webserver software (even different versions of Apache!) seem to have different results for the same patterns.

So...it's not always even sufficient to test on your development server.

I would update the pages to reduce the keyword stuffing.  You run the risk of getting penalized (and not knowing it), basically because Panda's evaluation of the quality of the page is likely going to suffer.  While we don't know exactly whether or not measuring keyword stuffing is a part of Panda, I believe it's extremely likely because:

• it was a heavily used spam technique for so many years
• it's really easy for Panda to measure algorithmically

As well, conversion rates for real customers who land on the page will do better with un-stuffed pages.