Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You explained pretty much everything on what happened and your reaction to that update since last year. You have done quite an extensive work on design and content but penguin update usually refers to the links that are pointing back to your website.

I quickly get in to your link profile and found tons of links that are coming from blog comments or article websites. Here are few of the examples…

-          http://www.science20.com/news_articles/3500yearold_mummies_prove_ancient_origin_heart_disease (Keyword used: the therapist)

-          http://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft-to-revamp-msn-portal-to-fully-integrate-bing/11263/ (Keyword used: the therapist)

-          http://www.fatmanunleashed.com/weekly-check-in-31-body-fat/ (Keyword used: the therapist)

What you should be doing?

-          Remove as many links to irrelevant sites as possible

-          Try not to get link with exact match anchor text

-          Say a big no to links that are coming from Blog Comments, Forum Signatures, Article websites and more.

My advice here is to audit your link profile in detail and see how many bad links you can remove and at the same time build as many quality links as possible. Submit the Reconsideration request to Google and you probably will be get your rankings and traffic back.

Hope this helps!

If the target is to get the URLs out of the search engine index than there are the few solutions can work for you:

1. The one your mentioned: I think it’s bad to add 1000+ URLs in robots.txt file its make sense for your business.
2. Adding meta no-index tag to the pages (if pages physically exist).

Also in order to quickly remove them from the index you can update robots.txt file and then go to GWC and use remove URL feature.

Just a thought!

If you are interested in knowing the value of your visitors and why they are not converting then probably you should consider moving towards KISSmetrics as this is one of the best tool that can tell you about the value of visitors and how fixing things can help you increase your conversion rate!

Hello Marshill,

If you ask me I would say Yes, this could be one of the reason why your rankings are dropped and not coming back even after the extensive efforts you have put on the content. My advice here is to remove as many of these kinds of links as possible, submit the rest to disavow file and send it to Google for reconsideration request (now as you have mentioned that you have a manual penalty, you have to do this!)

Once Google will look in to your effort they most probably will lift your penalty and then good links will slowly take your rankings back. Incase Google reject your reconsideration request you have to go through the removal and disavow process again.

Hope this helps!

Theoretically, if the URL is blocked  by  robots.txt it should not appear in the index results no matter if they are in the sitemap but I have seen URLs indexed that are blocked by robots.txt but are in the sitemap and have good links pointing to it. If you want to block pages that have good links pointing to them, my advice is to remove them from sitemap. #justathought.

About URLs from multiple domains, I personally create separate sitemaps for different subdomains and link to main sitemap and I see better indexing that way.

Again, these are my personal experiences and not rules so please do keep that in mind as things can be different fro them.

Category, you can block it, if you see they are creating duplicate content to the website.

Read More: Why block this? I mean it is link to your post and this is very much ok so I personally will not recommend you this!

Author Link: Hello No, Infect making it more interactive can allow you inspire new readership!

Joomla SEO is indeed a tough game mostly because most of changes that you need to make on the website require development skill to an extent.

If you are in to Joomal SEO here are the following things that you should consider as important.

-          Choosing the right Server

This is not really important for Joomla but any kind of website if you are not on the right kind of server you might see some big fluctuations in rankings as soon as your server goes down and all. The best idea in this regard is to choosing the right kind of SEO and go from there accordingly.

-          WWW to non-WWW redirect

Especially with Joomla but true for other CMS as well you need to choose one preferred version and redirect all the URLs so that there will be no duplicate content issue on the website. Make sure your website is displaying one kind of URL that is either with WWW or without WWW version.

-          URL Rewriting

When using Joomla set YES to “USE URL rewriting” in order to create Search Engine friendly URLs as by default the URLs are messy and might not understand by Google which have a direct impact on rankings.

-          Include /images/ in Google index

When using Joomla as your CMS, usually the robots.txt excludes images from the search engine index. Make sure you are removing /images/ from the robots/txt file so that your images can include in the Google image index and rank accordingly.

There are many other factors. Mark writes a detailed post about that on Moz.com that you can find here. http://moz.com/blog/seo-your-joomla-website-in-11-super-easy-steps

I would recommend you to use Marks post as a checklist and make sure that you are on the right track when it comes to search engine optimization.

Hope this helps!

As far as my info goes, Google can read ajax as well as iframes maybe not as good as normal content so saying that you are going to add content in iframe so that Google can’t read that, I believe Google will still be able to read the content within the iframe to an extent.

Google consider two pages as duplicate when content on the two pages are completely identical or good amount of content on both pages are exactly similar if this is the case, adding more unique content to product pages can help if only the customer reviews are identical, I personally don’t think its an issue.

Just my 2 cents.

I believe there could be two or three reasons why this is happening... and maybe not all are in your control!

This kind of actions usually happens when your hosting company is having a problem like they are not been able to provide you a 100% of uptime. Please check and if this is the problem the only recommendation is to change your hosting server!

May be your link profile or on-page areas are weak, if this is the case try to get some solid links... this has happened to me in the past, I had a client with risky link profile (but not too risky to get penalized by Google) and he was keep bouncing up and down in rankings. If this is the case then you probably know your plan!

May be Google is testing things with your niche related quires (this is happening with your website only or with other results as well?) If Google is up to test... then there is nothing you can do about it! J

Hope this helps!

Ok as far as I understand your question, you are saying your website is ranking but for some keywords not the preferred page on the website is ranking.

I will answer as per the best of my understanding…

Ok this usually happens when you didn’t setup your website navigation and structure correctly. I would prefer to give another look to your internal linking strategy.

Another thing you can do is to get some quality links with anchor text around your keyword to your targeted pages.

Get an internal link from the ranked page to the page you want to rank in search engines against your key term.

I am not saying this will work 100% but most of the times it works for me…

Very Detailed answer y Thomas!!

If I have the similar kind of situation the first thing I would do is to audit the current website and will make sure the area that I am going to redirect have what kind of links and what impact they are producing to the website whole website.

If the section, I want to redirect have a major impact on rankings, now I have to make a decision. Can I afford a dip in ranking? And how users will react and respond to the new separate website.

I will recommend you to do your analysis and as there not much in your hand make sure what you want to achieve and what you can put at risk, make a back -up plan and start doing it.

Hope this helps!!

I don’t think it is important to change the content if you only have Google in mind but if you really think that the content is stale and it hurts your audience there here are few ideas that will help you generate new content with less effort.

-          HQ Images

You can take high quality images and replace it with the current one with better and SEO friendly names. This will help you get better rankings in Google image search and if they will be more attractive you will see audience, links and conversions from it.

-          Reviews

I do understand that there are less people who actually respond to reviews but if you play some campaign that evoke users to review to your products, chances are you will get good reviews that will again help potential buyer with their buying decision.

A competition or contest around the reviews will be worth investing.

-          Videos

The thing that I see most ecommerce website is not investing on is the videos. If it is possible for you to make videos and put it on your product section, chances are your conversation rate will increase tremendously.

There are tons of more ideas that you can play around with and having a new text is one of them.

Hope this helps!

If you are not sure that this action is actually a penguin attack or not then you probably should get in to your analytics and see on what dates your website receives a major dip in rankings and compare it with the algo updates… if you see the similarities in dates you probably are a victim of it.

You can also check your Google webmaster tool to see if you receive any manual action penalty in GWT.

If you are sure this is a penguin attack and not panda or any other update then it is most probably because of the links that point back to your site. Here are some of the ideas that you should consider as important.

-          Audit your website links and see which of them harmful links are. You can use software like Link Risk and Link Detox to see how many harmful links you have in your link profile.

-          Remove as many bad links as possible

-          Re develop your content (if possible)

-          Create new good and high quality links that points back to the site.

-          Submit a disavow file

Crate new content and link on continuous basis. This will take a bit of time for your website to start receiving that organic traffic back but continuous effort will take you to that point again.

Hope this helps!

Ok here is my understanding regarding this and I could be wrong on this so I would love if anyone in the community correct me if I am wrong.

Google usually consider http URLs and https URLs as different URLs so if your website will be working on both http and https the moz tool will give you duplicate content indications.

The reason I believe your rankings are going down is because you have rewrite the URLs but the link value is still on http versions I believe you need to use 301 redirects so that your link values can also shift to https versions.

Again I am not sure about this but this is something that I feel, it should work like this!

Hope this helps!

In the light of this article (http://searchengineland.com/google-can-now-execute-ajax-javascript-for-indexing-99518), I can say that Google can crawl the content in Javascript (few of it, if not all).

Hope this helps!!

I did some research but it seems like Squarespace didn’t actually have their plugin directory which is quite weird. As they don’t have a plugin directory, similar to wordpress or open card or Joomla, they probably didn’t have their SEO plugin as well.

My advice would be to move to a platform where there are plugins and extensions available for every little thing so that you can freely use them and move on accordingly.

Here is what I would do if I will have the similar situation. Instead of saying good bye to the old domain just because someone is negatively attacking the website, I would try and get all of their links using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic SEO and disavow in Google disavow file and at the same time try to get highest quality link back to the website so that Google can have a clear idea of what is going on with the website.

Even in that case if the website hit the penalty or the penalty did not wave I probably will go for a new domain. In case of a new domain my advice will be to again create a link disavow file and include all links in the file and let Google know that you are buying this expired domain which have the following history but you are disavowing all the links so the history does not bite.

Obviously there is always a risk but I probably will take that risk if the domain name is that good.

Hope this helps!

I would personally suggest you not to go for 301 as it will increase the page load time of the website which direct affects the rankings in search engines. I would rather prefer to choose the preferred version and use canonicals on every page of the website. This way Google will have an idea about what URL is the preferred and crawl the stuff accordingly.

Hope this helps!

There are two options in my opinion.

1. Use the same Meta description if they are helpful for your audience. I know this will create problem as far as the Google and SEO is concern but the importance of Meta description as a ranking factor is questionable so if it is helpful for user, you can take that risk.
2. Do not use Meta description at all. This way Google will pick any random Meta description from the content and I think as Google is someone who did that so there can be no legal restriction to it.

Hope this helps!

Interesting question!

Canonical tags are used to inform search engine about the preferred version of the website when there are two identical pages available on the website and removing anyone of them is not possible.

If the page is not identical to any other page on the website not having a canonical tag or canonical tag of the same URL make sense to me but if the page is identical to some other page that which is preferred then you should include the URL of that page.

For example:

http://www.example.com/543256 is a unique page on the website then not having a canonical tag or having one with the same URL in the code both make sense but if page is identical to another URL let’s say: http://www.example.com/abc and the 2nd version is the preferred version in that case the first page should contain the preferred URL in the code of the first page.

It is kind of confusing but let me know if you need more help in this regards.

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If the first para of the blog post is available on one page and the whole blog post is available on the different page then in most cases this will not be considered as a duplicate content.

Hope this helps!