Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Orion, Moving/merging one site into another has substantial and long-lasting implications so you do not want to go into that lightly.  It's not necessarily a difficult task, but it is one that takes plenty of planning and forethought.  Most SEOs can tell you many stories of being called to the rescue after a company jumped headlong into the merging of their domains, only to find out that they lost lots of search traffic, lots of links, and/or lots of audience members.  If you don't have an strong need to move forward immediately and you don't have an expert in-house or a contractor to turn to, there's no harm in taking a month or two or three to slowly study up and become your own expert on merging domains/blogs.  You might start with these resources: Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz Cutts excellent video on 301 redirect limits  301 Redirect Relevance And then you might move on to wrap your arms around the information in found in searches such as: merging domains merging wordpress sites

On top of Dana's answer, it's worth looking here - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change - to see if your traffic started dropping again after any particular updates.

Hi Keri, thank you for your reply. We do have about 35K products online. all lighting and decor items. The site is an old site from 2008. We dont have time for DIY, we are looking for an SEO with experience in megento platform with multi store configuration who can guide us the right direction thank you nick

It is recommend you try to get in touch with the webmasters of the sites before going down the disavow route. I second this as well. Disavow is not a plan A, but an plan B, C, D. In the process of link cleaning

In relation to what Elison said, there's no fixed "best practice" percent. That said, here's a few things I would do if trying to target a keyword. Please note this is only my personal advice, and not based on any scientific evidence: Use the keyword phrase near the beginning of the title tag Use the keyword (or a close variation) in the h1 page title Use the keyword (or variation) at least once near the beginning of the content, and also anywhere it makes sense. It's usually best practice to use keywords and variation in the alt text of an image, and also in the image filename After that, keep in mind that the other words on the page (and not just synonyms) play a role in determining how search engines determine the relevance of the page So if you're talking about "Seattle's Best Seafood" you just can't say "Seattle's Best Seafood" a bunch of times and expect to rank. If I were a search engine, I would expect you to talk about Anthony's Fish House, or the Blue Star Diner, or great salmon dishes. I would expect you, if this was an authoritative page on the subject, to discuss the subject of Seattle seafood in great depth, using a variety of ideas and topics.

Google have said that if you have the same site at a different URL then they may apply the same penalty to the new site as they did to the old one, therefore if you wish to redirect a site, I would recommend doing it at the same as you make some other significant changes to it. I came up with a way of doing this which should work. On the old domain redirect everything to the home page and then on the home page create a noindex, nofollow page with the following line of code in it: Where example.com is your NEW domain name. This way you're using a redirect at the html level, but telling search engines to not index or follow the page.  This should work!

It sounds very likely that you just got caught up in penguin links thing and someone upstream got hammered, as well as you, and that left you with less authority than you had before. If the penalty has been removed, it means that you've done what was required to fall back within googles webmaster guidelines and if you're still not ranking, then it's time to get back to work networking, creating content that engages customers, networking and creating content that  engages customer, and over and over. I mean, if your current content isn't doing it for you you need to strategize on new content that's going to map to your business goals and engage your prospective customers. You might look at it as starting again from square one and be thankful you're not in the same situation as many others who haven't yet been able to escape the penalty.

Hi Nick, I think I'd echo what Alan said. Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one. As such I'd probably be inclined not to 301 the whole site. Assuming your second site is topically similar you might consider reaching out directly to those high quality sites that are linking to you and asking them if they'd be willing to link to your other site instead. Similarly you might consider moving the link worthy content to your second site and (assuming all the links to your content are 'good') just 301 those pages. I hope this helps, Hannah

Google has been changing/rewriting title tags in some situations for a while you may find this article interesting - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049990/Google-Changing-Titles-in-Search-Results-SEOs-Not-Happy

Hi there! There can be geolocation factors that could affect your mobile search results, additionally maybe some of the sites that you're competing against for desktop are not that relevant towards that location but your site is, or maybe for some of these sites Google identifies that they're not suitable to be displayed in Mobile and even if you don't have a specific Mobile version your site can be still identified as suitable to be shown in Mobile search results and for any of these type of reasons you might you end-up ranking better. In order to verify well how you attract the visibility with your desktop site with mobile search results: Take a look at your Google Analytics, verify specifically the organic search traffic coming only from mobile devices. Identify which keywords are bringing this traffic and the pages that these visitors are going to. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and select the "Traffic >> Search Queries" and select the "Mobile" filter and see which keywords and pages are giving you mobile search visibility. Use a mobile emulator or a user agent switcher to simulate a mobile search result and closely analyze how your current pages are shown there, who you're competing with, your link popularity and relevance against them, etc. All this will give you a much better idea of your current mobile search situation. If you identify that you're already getting a reasonable amount of traffic and there can be potential, I would suggest that you do a Mobile targeted keyword research, following the steps that as I described in this Mozinar... you might identify much more opportunity through Mobile SEO. I hope this helps!

Remember, that was an opinion based on a very small amount of information.  Your mileage may vary.

It's not true that you will "never recover," no. I've seen sites go from being manually penalized to being the most heavily organic trafficked site in their respective industries. You probably lost credit for some links that were helping in the past, and there are possibly still some bad links dragging you down algorithmically. The best solution is just to continue generating awareness and build up your trust with Google. You can absolutely recover completely and reach new heights.

Ok here is my url goo.gl/Ai17f we have tons of products, some with long descriptions some with short. Categories have some content in them and we also have videos, brands, articles section and a blog. I m suffering from google's algo changes in 2012. We received a link penalty in sept 29th and since then have cleaned up our link portfolio got rid of thousands of links, used the disavow tool and working on new links. We are trying to get back on the right track here. I have fired everyone who worked on this site for the past 3 - 4 years. I m now trying to fix all the issue by myself. I would appreciate if you could guide me in the right direction with any advice. thank you

The danger of the disvow tool is that it is possible to disavow links that weren't harming your site. If you disavowed a number of decent links it could explain losing some indexation. My other thought is perhaps the deindexation is part of a penalty that you have yet to be lifted. Did you file another reconsideration request? Sometimes, if you're lucky, they do give you some useful feedback.

MY Blog Guest, or Post Joint are the great blogs to start but you can also find  the blogs that allow guest writing by using Google search operators Like: Ecommerce inurl” “write for us” And more...

Feel free to email me ryan@vitopian.com You may also call my office. In the US/Canada 855-633-4SEO, all other countries 800-633-4SEO I am not clear if this post violates SEOmoz standards. If so, feel free to delete. I perfectly understand.

thank you for your reply. that ip had only mysql on it for over a year and no http files. We ve recently move the mysql to another machine. wmt shows 75K links from this ip to our site. but when you tried to go to the link , you couldnt, even with mysql on that machine. i read in the google webmaster forums that this is some sort of bug or display bug on ip linking. i m not sure what is going on. nick

What do you mean by "shut down" ? If you can navigate the site then so can Google. Changing your home page to "we're no longer here" won't help either as Google can still access the pages "behind" your home page because it already knows they exist so it'll go directly to them when crawling. You either need to delete the pages entirely, or delete the entire website, edit your DNS information so it no longer resolves your domain name... something that permanently "shuts down" and removes the site.

There are many factors involved but, at a high level, a bad link profile as detected by Google's Penguin algorithm is one with a high percentage of keyword anchor text links. The way most natural links are created is to copy and paste a link. For example, a link to this Q&A thread is: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-a-good-link-portfolio-look-like. When site owners create links to their own site, they often try to take advantage of Google's algorithm by using specific keywords such as good link thread. When you take a site which sells watches and you look at the profile and see most of the links are URLs with some occasional anchor text links thrown in, that would be a more natural profile. When you see most of the links use anchor text such as "best watches" or "cheap watches" that indicates a high likelihood of manipulation. There are numerous other aspects of a good or bad link. Some criteria to consider: the PR of the linking page the number of links on the linking page the position of the link (in content is best whereas a footer link would offer less value) the anchor text the relevance of the linking site to the target page You can go to Open Site Explorer and examine the backlink profile of good sites such as Google and the New York Times, then compare it to some spammy sites. You will see the difference quickly.

You're welcome! Just to add some more credibility, the new Matt Cutt's video supports my initial statement. Hope everything went well for you!