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The one I was looking at on the bottom of the page was the H1 tag.

You don't want to over optimize your home page. My suggestion is to make those h2 tags h1 tags on the category pages they belong to.

For example, take the h2 tag off of Garden Tools on the home page, and make it the h1 tag on the Garden Tools page.

The links on the home page are just convenience for the user. It isn't really what the home page is about, so I would leave the h2 tags off completely. You can make your h2 tag simpler on your home page by using a secondary keyword selection instead. Your h1 is "National Tool Hire" So maybe make your one h2 tag something like "Convenient DIY Tools Available Now"

Your h3 and h4 tags appear to be in good places. Getting rid of some of the h2 tags, I think you will be ok leaving the h1 tag on the bottom of the page. With stuff being so far down on the page it could be possible that it gets missed on a crawl or 2, especially if you have a lot of coding behind that page.

I would log in to GWT and look at your 404 errors under crawl errors. In there you will see where the links are still linked from. If they are pointing at external sites, I would redirect them. I don't know what platform you are using, but you should be able to do this in the admin section of your platform.

If they aren't linked externally, you should probably still redirect them. I know the Google says that 404 errors are harmless, but if you have dead links on your site and someone clicks on it, it most likely results in a lost searcher.

Hope that helps!

404's can reduce your ability to rank highly for keywords when they effect your bounce rate and lower your impressions. Consider it giving your website a bad reputation. Again, it takes a lot of them to do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

This is video by Matt Cutts that gives some great advice. My goal is always to redirect them, even if it is back to the main article category page or even the home page. I hate the thought of losing a potential customer to a 404 error. This has to be your decision though.

Errors are not good, no matter what kind of error they are. Best practice is to remove any error you can. When your bounce rate increases you lose ranking power. When you have broken links, you lose searchers. That is the simplest way to put it.

Theoretically a 404 error is a deleted page. To get rid of the 404 error you have to redirect the broken link, or deleted page.

To my knowledge, Pinterest is a very high quality linking source. Having several links back and forth should mean that you have an equal amount of images, products and/or pages. No matter how good the source is, when you over use something it doesn't look natural.

From what I understand, Penguin 3.0 really targeted linking "neighborhoods". This means that you could see an effect because of link associations that your linking sources have. That could be Pinterest, but my gut tells me that it is probably some other source. These social media sites are pretty safe and usually have ways to prevent bad associations.

Have you used Open Site Explorer to compare what you have in GWT? I would just take a look and see what the quality of your links are and if there is any low hanging fruit you should disavow. You want to find high quality linking sources, these are the safest. I would try to eliminate links from low ranking domains with not a lot of root links behind them.

You might be suffering the effects of someone else's bad links. Have you received any manual notices in GWT?

In my opinion, this is highly unlikely. User reviews are the holy grail of on page content.

I would check GWT to see if you have had a decrease in CTR organically. This can temporarily effect your rankings. What other changes have you made to these pages? It could just take another week or too for the page to be crawled and indexed properly. When is the last time these pages were cached?

I disagree with these two. I have 3 SERPs currently for one keyword in positions 2,3 and 5. The more repetitively you show in the SERPs the higher your CTR will be. I don't believe having two results is preventing you from being on page one. I wouldn't 301 redirect one of them either, since they are both relative to the key term. Obviously the pages are different, or Google would only show one of them and not both.

I don't believe these pages are in competition with each other. My advice would be to take a look at who is on page one and the differences in your metrics. Is it a link thing? Do you need to add a little bit of content? Compare the metrics for the other sites, not the two pages on your site and see if there are few tweaks you can make to get those results on page one.

Keep in mind that there was holiday week in there too. The trend usually includes a decrease in search traffic the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other major holidays. If you get a large amount of traffic from the US the change in your rankings could just be due to the decrease in traffic and Google shaking the rankings up a little bit because of the change. Your CTR might have been lower because of the position change, but if your SERPs were still getting clicks at position 20, then you should see your results pop back up. Those clicks tell Google that your SERP is relevant to the searcher and could cause them to go back up.

I say add the day, city and state of where the reviews came from. That is very important.

Since this is related to content and not to any nefarious link building, I would look at the Panda updates and not Penguin. If you really think it could be Penguin then check your GWT account for any jumps in links or messages from the spam team.

It isn't uncommon after you make a change to see your results go backwards. I think that if after this week and possibly next week you don't see any progress, you should remove the reviews, wait a couple of weeks and see what happens. If your rankings go back up, then the problem is the reviews. If not, there is something else going on.

That isn't true in this case because the reviews themselves are clearly seen in the source code. It can be fully crawled by robots, therefore it is being indexed.

I would create a new webmaster property instead of trying to change the address of two sites. Are you setting the new site up as HTTPS? What are you doing with the old domains? I would make sure you keep the registration active on them so that no one else can buy them.

Aside from refreshing content and HTML data, creating a new Webmaster property, monitoring performance and verifying that the dynamic 301s are working I can't think of anything else really.

The bad links have been disavowed but have any good links been built? Refresh some of those links with good, high quality, relative links. Share some of the pages on social media and add a couple of videos if you can, from Youtube. All of those things should help you.

Kate,

I honestly do not believe that there is anything to worry about here. It sounds like there was a decrease in search traffic and that is all that has affected your rankings.

Do you know how to find a cached copy of your page? It will tell you the last time it was crawled. Before you do anything else, see if you can add the date and place of origin to the reviews.

If you had a manual penalty from Penguin 2.0 or 2.1 the 3.0 update should have removed any negative effects if the clean up was done properly. Since this update is rolling out at snails pace, it is possible there was a small change that affected your rankings.

After your disavow and link clean up did you build any new, quality, relevant links? Do you have a social presence and allow people to share your images and pages socially? Can any of your existing links maybe have a no so clean link profile? 3.0 really targeted link neighborhoods, which means you could be guilty by association. Take a look at GWT and see what the links to your site looks like. Use OSE to see if there is anything new you may have over looked.

Your on page optimization looks pretty good. If you haven't refreshed your link profile with new links, or, aren't using social media a lot, you could suffer the same amount of rankings loss. SEO isn't successful unless both the on page and off page op are working together.

If a URL is labeled a 404 it will not be crawled again unless there is a reason to, you mark it as fixed, or you edit the link in some form or fashion. Mark it as fixed and see if the error comes back. There is no harm in doing this.

Can you get to the page on your mobile device just by clicking through your site? If you can, that is good, it will eventually encourage a mobile bot to crawl it. If you can fetch and render as google, then I would just give it some time. I am not sure if there is a string of code you can add to the head of that page telling the robots that it is a mobile only page. I don't know how that works.

I would just mark it as fixed right now and see what happens over the next couple of days.

Depending on the platform, your client might already have access to an m.domain mobile site. Some of the older platforms, like Volusion, haven't even offered responsive designs yet, which is part of what makes them so expensive for their customers. They basically have to pay a company for a complete template redesign.

In my opinion, the responsive design is best practice for SEO, but an m.domain site would improve user experience which can lead to higher CTR and higher conversions. If your client cannot afford to move just yet, then the m.domain is the lesser of two evils. It will improve customer experience and hopefully conversions, and then maybe moving to a responsive design in 6 months would be an option.

I just went down this road with the company I work for. We were in Volusion and just simply out grew it. So we moved to Big Commerce. With the size of our site, it cost us about $1400 a month. The responsive designs were free, and they handled the entire migration for us. At the end of the day, the sacrifice of changing platforms didn't cost us much more than we were spending with Volusion, and the benefits of improved SEO and User Experience will pay for the swap within months. I am not sure what your current situation is, but if you haven't looked into Big Commerce, I would definitely try. It can't hurt to present all three scenarios to the client. At least they will be able to weigh the pros and cons of everything. Staying where they are without an m.domain, staying where they are and adding an m.domain, or moving to a more advanced system like Big Commerce with a fully responsive design.

Hi there,

Your H3 tags can absolutely be links, but they don't have to be. The H tags are used to establish a heirarchy on your page. Think of them as the highlights used to layout the outline of your content. If your h3 tags link to other pages that it perfectly ok. SEOs do this all the time. Typically the only h tag you wouldn't see a link with is an H1 tag.

If you no index the pages they will never rank. The bots will not be able to crawl them so they will essentially be useless.

Are these product pages? The best way to get content on these pages is through user generated reviews. That is the best way to accomplish adding content without spending a ton of time writing copy.

Redirecting the old URLs with 301s is the best way to carry over SEO value. You will transfer most of your link juice and help get traffic to your new pages.

As far as the PHP vs HTM, I don't believe it matters that much, I will say that your new URL structure is probably a little better than your current structure. The more information you can fit naturally into your URL is important, so having the product and the name is better than having just the name.

Sounds like someone doing off page optimization created a subdomain for the purposes of increasing domain authority by posting a ridiculous amount of social posts through a subdomain. This is extremely black hat and that is why it is on a subdomain, to protect your root. I have come across this issue on blackhatworld.com.

I recommend you shut down the subdomain immediately and ask whoever is handling your off page optimization what in the world they were doing. I doubt it is an older subdomain because this is a fairly recent practice. I would recommend getting rid of it fairly quickly and making sure that there are not many links between the sub and the root domain.

Panda and Penguin, every SEOs best buddies...

I work with a company called Orion Group LLC. They are a great firm for off page optimization. I myself am not a great link builder, mainly because I am not a good sales person. I technically know the aspects of it, but have never been great at implementing it. I would give them a call.

I would say that if you want to decipher between Panda and Penguin you will have to go down the list of Content Vs. Links to really lay it on the line. If you have not seen a manual penalty then you have a chance to get things in order before the next update.

For Penguin:

1. Do you have links that don't generate traffic or have really keyword dense anchor text? Anchor text that is so repetitive you are basically keyword stuffing your link profile?

2. Do you have links to Payday loan stores, tobacco sites, porn sites or any other website with a low online reputation?

3. Do you have a lot of links that return 404 errors?

4. Do you have enough reputable links to outweigh any negative link juice? For example, a link to a DA of 100 (Pinterest, Youtube) compared to 10 links to sites with a DA of 10.

5. Is your link profile diverse? Do you have links in content, footers,blogs, links to industry related sites, links that send social signals (FaceBook likes and shares, Google +1s, twitter retweets)?

Panda questions:

1. Is my content uniquely valuable wherever it can be?

2. Do I have any User Generated Content?

3. Do I have any ads above the fold?

4. Is there any engagement on the pages that I am targeting keywords with?

5. Is my site easy to navigate and understand? Am I conveying my message clearly?

6. Do I have a ton of links in my content, whether internal or external?

7. Is my overall user experience pleasant?

I hope that helps you try to narrow down the pesky P named animal that is causing you trouble. I am sure with a Big Commerce template your UX is doing well. I hope that you figure this out soon!

The only other thing I would look at is mobile search traffic to see if that is having an effect. As well as the overall seasonality of your business. Is it possible that this is just a slow time of year?