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Did the layout of the header area change significantly?  If, for instance, the header area went from 1/10th of the "above the fold" area to 1/3rd, that might run the entire site afoul of the "topheavy" part of Panda.

For starters, I'd add the NOODP NOYDIR meta robots tags to your pages.  That tends to do a pretty good job of keeping Google in line (i.e. using your meta descriptions and page titles in the SERPs).

Recently I've noticed that Google will often attempt to extract your company name and prepend your page title with it. e.g. if your page title is "Purple Widgets - ACME Inc." and your URL is www.acmeinc.com, Google will show "Acmeinc: Purple Widgets" in the SERPs for your headline.  This seems to be new as of a few months ago, and NOODP NOYDIR doesn't seem to stop it like it used to.  But I'd try NOODP NOYDIR because it does USUALLY still seem to have the effect you're looking for.

Why bother trying to clean anything up?  If somewhere out there there are links to your domain, and they're 404'ing, just 301 them to new pages on your site!  Capture that link juice, don't let it run out

Hi Stephan,

Presuming the expand/collapse thing is done properly, it should be golden.  You'll find a lot of sites use this approach when they have multiple pages of content, e.g. a product page with specifications, reviews, technical details, etc.

I do this on my travel website.  A great way to test to see if the initially-collapsed content is being seen and indexed by Google is to take a block of text from the collapsed section and search for it in double-quotes.

Here's an example:  search for "At the Bora Bora Pearl Beach Resort you can discover the sparkling magic of the lagoon".  You'll find my site there at #3 (Visual Itineraries), along with the other 1000 websites who've also copied the resort's description straight from the resort's website (yeah, I really shouldn't do this).  So much for Google's duplicate content detection when it comes to text chunks...BUT I DIGRESS.  That content you see is on the More Info tab.

Now, on to what "done properly" means:

• each tab should be in a separate div
• assign all divs a class which has style="display:none;" EXCEPT the currently selected tab
• have onclick handlers for the tabs that set all of the divs' classes to the display:none class, and then set the newly selected tab's div class to one with display:block or display:inline

And not done properly would mean something like changing the text of a div with Javascript onclick()....because Google won't see that text in the Javascript.  It's got to be in the HTML.

That's about it.  Not so tricky, really.  And works well both for usability (no roundtrip to the server, not even an Ajax fetch!) and for SEO (lotsa yummy content on a single page for Panda).

I'd say the answer is:

Possibilities:

1. The layout of the product pages for the new shopping cart is pissing off Panda.  If that's the case, the traffic to the home page shouldn't have changed much, but the product pages will have dropped.
2. Panda now sees the pages in general as having less content than before, perhaps images aren't getting loaded in the pages in such a way that Google sees them whereas they were before, something like that....and Panda now thinks the entire site is less rich in content.
3. It often seems to take Google a month or so to "settle out" all of the link juice flows when you do a bunch of redirects, have new URLs, etc. I would expect that the link juice calculation is iterative, and that would be why it would take a number of iterations of the PageRank calculation in order for entirely new URLs to "get" all the link juice they should have.
4. Their backlinks were moderately dependent upon a set of link networks, and those link networks have shut down all their sites (so that neither Google nor Bing still see the links from them).

Those are the ideas that come to mind so far.

Sort of.  It's per page, not per website.

I don't think you'd run afoul of Google by doing this, as long as you kept it to one (or a small handful, say, less than 10) satellite sites.  And if those sites can rank on their own for terms, and "feed" leads (not links) to the commercial site, then that might be a good strategy.

But the question really is, I think, is it worth the effort for the link juice that eventually trickles down to the commercial site, right?  Think of it this way: how much would your rankings change if your commercial site got 1 link from the city newspaper's site?  It'd probably make a difference, sure...but probably not massive (unless that was the only decent strong link you had).  Now....how much content marketing and link-building would you have to do to get your satellite site to have the same domain authority as the city newspaper's site?  Ummmm....a lifetime's.   Well, probably 10-20 years anyway.  So the answer really comes down to this:  you can do a TON of work on the satellite site, and you're never going to get as much benefit from that work as you'd get from getting your local newspaper to do a story on your company.  Or get quoted by a reporter in it (speaking of that....check out HARO...as long as you just respond to real reporters writing for real publications).

My question would be:  why do you want to use schema.org markup for attributes that Google doesn't currently show in the SERPs?

The answer might be: because I think that Panda might see schema.org markup as a good quality signal.  And I'd tend to agree with that....but, if that's the case, why not use schema.org/Organization or schema.org/LocalBusiness for your company info in the footer of every page.  You're giving Panda a happy little tasted of schema on every page, and don't sweat the regulators or blazing the trail on new schema attributes

FYI you could also mark up any blog posts or articles you write for the site with http://schema.org/Article as well.

I presume the other countries are using the same language--if that's the case, then the next question is: is anything on the page going to be different for countries #2, #3, etc.?

If the answer is "no", then you can use rel=canonical on the pages for countries #2, #3, etc. pointing back at the version at your site for country #1.

If the answer is "yes" (e.g. the price is different, or the currency is different, or shipping price shown is different, etc.), then set the rel=canonical to point to the URL for the current country's page.

In both cases, you'll want to use rel="alternate" hreflang= tags for ALL of the countries....on ALL of the pages.  The idea here is that you're telling Google, on every page, what the other countries' versions of the pages are.  Included in that is the page for the country you're looking at now.  So, let's say you had www.bananas.com and also a version of the site in the United Arab Emirates, www.bananas.com.ae.  You've got pages www.bananas.com/peel.php and www.bananas.com.ae/peel.php.  BOTH of these pages would have:

For more info on this, check out Maile Ohye's video here.

I would update the meta descriptions, page titles, meta keywords, and the body content to eliminate the stuffing.

You shouldn't see a drop in ranking by removing extra keywords from the page titles.

While I agree in general with what the others  have said, I would say that the new MozLocal is worth pursuing for this, at $49/year.  Presuming you have your G+ page set up correctly with your business address, a local phone number, etc., it'll take you just a few minutes to make the CSV file and submit it.

Very strange.  I looked at the redirect chain with httpfox, and all looks correct, with a single 301 to psg1.com.

I also looked at the source for www.psg1.com/ and all looks fine, including your rel=canonical.

I checked your robots.txt to see if maybe you had somehow disallowed your home page or something like that--but no, it's clean.

Makes me think you have a penalty perhaps on your home page?  Is there anything in Webmaster Tools?

It's definitely a Google-only issue, as I'm seeing psg1.com come up in Bing.

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.

For the schema.org markup, you'll find Google's schema tester here.

I would use schema.org/LocalBusiness but you can see an example of how to do the markup on one of my sites.  Start at line 447 of the source where you see schema.org/Corporation, and use LocalBusiness instead of Corporation.  I think most of the other fields will be the same, but refer to the link to schema.org/LocalBusiness above to be sure.

In my example, I've used a CSS class schemaorghide that's got display:none in it, as while I want to include a bunch of these fields in the schema I show Google, I don't necessarily want to show all of them in the footer (and note that some of the fields are elements of multiple entities within Corporation, so I don't want to show my phone number twice, for instance).

Pay attention to all of the places you see itemscope or itemprop.  And it's all done where you see the comment:

Oops, good catch Paul, you're correct!

Caroline,

REMOVE THE DISALLOW LINE.

I am concerned that that line will match all URLs on the site, and disallow the ENTIRE site.

Michael.

Definitely put your address and phone number in your footer, and use schema.org/LocalBusiness to mark up those bits as well.

My advice is to go easy with robots.txt--it's a bit like dynamite, powerful, but can take your leg (or entire website) off.

I like this checker:

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

If you look ok after running that checker, then use the built-in Google one.

Note that robots.txt syntax DOES NOT have wildcards.  Apparently this doesn't stop a ton of people from using wildcards in them (to no effect, and clearly they didn't bother to test!).

Another reason to avoid disallow in robots.txt is that if you disallow the engines from looking at a page's contents, then you're ALSO stopping the link juice that might have flowed to other pages it links to.

So let's say you have 100 pages on your site that you're currently blocking with disallow in robots.txt.  If instead, you put a meta robots "noindex,follow" in each of those pages, then every page linked to from those 100 pages (i.e. everything in your main menu) would get an extra 100 internal links worth of link juice.

I'd be really, REALLY careful about a disallow statement like that: you run the risk of disallowing your entire website.

FYI I'm not sure putting a crawl delay in your robots.txt file is the right answer.  I saw an example a week or so ago where Google (I think, but maybe it was Bing) explicitly said somewhere that it had ignored the crawl delay in the robots.txt. I would specify the crawl delay in Webmaster Tools instead.  It's hard to find, but it's there

• in Webmaster Tools, select the site you want to set the crawl rate for
• click the Gear icon in the upper right
• you'll see the option there to set the crawl rate