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...and check the last reply in this http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-determine-which-pages-are-not-indexed.  I have not tried but it looks promising.

This may go some way to answering your question - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366

I've had some varying advice on here regarding the best way to proceed with [i'll PM the URL] which was hit by Penguin 2.0.  There were previous issues with the homepage and before the 22nd had started creating new decent links.

Some have suggested to ditch the domain and start again.  There are several reasons not to and branding is the deciding factor at this stage.

I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow.  I would really appreciate another pair of eyes taking a quick look to see if i'm missing anything other than a dodgy link profile.

i'd try disabling all plugins and test.  Also ensure in General >> Settings the URLs are including the www (I assume this is Wordpress). There seems to be some internal configuration causing this.

no - chicfamilytravels.com/ is do follow.

Please refer to - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html

If you look in OSE >> set Show 'only follow' Links From 'external' >> hit  Filter >> scroll down and look at the links showing (img alt) (img) [No Anchor Text].  These links are not no-follow.

There is some social activity under the non www version in OSE.

At  a glance the page authority of the competitor is slightly higher and they have more social activity.  You may have more linking domains but they have some 301 redirects coming in.

Personally I would not focus on this and continue to build a sound link profile.

I would also double check your banner links are set to no-follow!  

For sure you don't want the company name at the front of the title tag.  The title should ideally start with the main keyword for that page. Google truncates at around 65 characters so if the keyword is long just stick with that.  The title and meta should all be about being interesting and relevant to the visitor.  In many cases unless it is a well know brand having the company name in the title can waste space.

Agree with Tim.  The key is that a 302 redirect is universally accepted as a temporary redirect header response - that link will (should) not last.

For all new content it is important to get indexed fast.  There is the scenario that if your site is crawled infrequently another site may get that copy indexed first and by default is viewed as theirs.  So with any new content I would post on social media as quickly as possible - G+, Twitter etc to get noticed and to mark as yours. G+ author attribute will help.

That last rule is the Wordpress default rule slightly trimmed:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule>

I would try this version and revert if no good.  I'd also install Fiddler and watch all the header responses to see if there is a clue.

The thing is the site is not losing traffic, else I would agree.

Historically the homepage has never ranked well for the main chosen keyword - highest I think is page 2 or 3 previous to migration to Magento when it started to drift.  Overall organic traffic to the site has steadily risen since the beginning of 2011 and the homepage is ranking well for some longtail variations of the keyword.

I'm not sure that is a viable option.  We have not had a manual penalty and doing all we can to clean up the link profile. It seems to me the 301 redirect was to blame as of course the rubbish it carried was welcomed to the site and in our control.  That has been stripped out now. Should we sit and wait for another algorithmic update - continuing with new content and link development?

...just to add, fresh new content is also regularly going on the site.

I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage.  We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6.

The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links.  This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links.

Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible.

At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared.  Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile.  This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it.  An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were.

Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor?  So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?

I've thought about this idea to get rid of bad links from specific referrers.

I agree with the comments Ian has made but when it is the homepage it's not always possible to follow those steps.  Has anyone else had any experience/information?

I have understood the length of the URL to be calculated post http:// unless it's https://.

Just the way it is displayed in the results.

I look at it like this -

1. Redirects are an overhead and mass redirects with redirects are inefficient.

2. Absolute pure link value is not passed on so further redirects have a little more clouding effect.

3. Bad housekeeping.  Imagine the root htaccess has a redirect to a URL that is redirected in a sub-directory.  It starts to be rather messy.

Perhaps you set the link to mydomain.com rather than http:mydomain.com and your setup has prefixed with the domain.

ScreamingFrog is good.

Hi Cameron

you can find Fiddler at http://fiddler2.com/  It provides each and every header response cascading through the page load.

It can be very useful in sniffing out exactly what's going on rather than a single header report test.