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No. We are just telling the search engine that the German version of the website (www.example.com) is located at www.example.com/de/ So all the pages/folders originating from that directory become the part of this process. (www.example.com/de/2ndpage OR www.example.com/de/another-page.html )

Thanks for the info.

Our links were from an SEO company who always vowed their methods were totally adhering to google, but that was before penguin. I have heard this exact statement countless times. I hate to be harsh on my own industry but things are quite bad for clients. They do not know who to trust, with good reason. many "SEO agencies" have little to no SEO knowledge. They skipped everything and built links, which worked too well in the past and now many site owners are paying the price. many of these same agencies outsourced 100% of their work to other countries were the work was performed in the lowest quality manner, despite assurances to the contrary many sites offer the appearance to be US or UK companies, but a quick inspection shows the veil is very thin and these are actually companies from India or other countries who pay for a virtual office or a single small office in order to funnel business. Companies and site owners need to know how to navigate the shark infested waters of SEO and work with quality service providers. Regarding your Penguin issue, based on the information provided your efforts are not even close to what is required to resolve the issue. 1. A comprehensive backlink report is necessary to capture all known links to your site. I use data from Bing, Google, OSE, Majestic and AHREFS. Once combined, this report is the most comprehensive list in the industry. There is no single source, nor any two sources, which can be used to properly capture all the links to your site. 2. The links need to be properly identified. Most site owners and even SEOs struggle in this regard. It cannot be done by any automated tool as there are far too many errors. 3. A comprehensive Webmaster Outreach Campaign needs to be conducted, and it needs to be successful. On a bad campaign the success rate should be about 25%. On a good one, the success rate exceeds 50%. There are numerous factors involved. I know you are probably thinking "no way! I only get 1 out of 100 site owners to respond". The problem I see is most site owners chose the easy way out when they built manipulative links, and they similarly choose the easy way out when attempting to remove them. That is why forums are full of site owners sharing "I have turned in 10 Reconsideration Requests and all of them were declined". You need to eliminate a "significant" number of links before using the Disavow Tool. My recommendation is to seek out a quality SEO provider with experience in resolving Penguin issues. If you cannot afford the cost of cleaning up the manipulative links, you can also change domains. The cost of losing all your good links and changing domains is very high in the long term, but in the short term the expenses are quite minimal.

Hi James, Everyone has their own view of Google and what interacting with them might mean. My personal view is that anyone who thinks they are clever enough to fly under the radar when everything they do is aimed at making themselves visible in Google is probably mistaken. often people have said that this just raises an alarm bell to google if not totally necessary? If you are seeing keywords that have dropped below page 100 in the SERPs, I would think those alarm bells have long since rung. Sha

Keep in mind that many non-EMD sites were also hit around the time the EMD effect went into place. Some folks have claimed this result is very similar to the -950 "penalty" from a few years back

Only on Google, Yahoo and Bing are not effected, no updates were made in particular, especially not to every site, but it happened on the 5th around the time of a Google update. also all 4 lost sites were 3 keyword EMD's with dashes, which we are thinking might have been the cause after doing some research on recent updates? The site not effected was not an EMD and was an authoritative original version.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a penalty. It is just that Exact Match Domains have been "turned down" as Matt Cutts put it. It means that Google doesn't pay AS much attention to them as they previously did and yes it may cause ranking drops due to it. When you talk about moving over to another domain you won't 'carry the penalty' but you might not see any ranking changes because changing domain won't give you back what the EMD used to give. You might want to look at your backlink profile. I have had experience of people having EMDs but having a poor backlink profile and it has dropped them down the SERPs. Just be aware though the EMD is NOT a penalty by any means, it just means a ranking signal has changed and you have been affected, so focus on your other ranking signals such as links, on page optimisation etc... and get that improved to improve your rankings.

Hi thanks for the reply, Should we not have any shared scripts, how can we avoid this, just by removing them? Ideally we need the pages the same, but with different language versions, while not being punished. I will make all the changes you suggest. The Geo-targeting was not done for all, but we did it today. The drops were on Google regional and com search engines. Would these changes lift the penalties, or are they more permanent sometimes? You would not suggest subdomains and moving the foreign pages to the main site? Also I have just been told that having 'dashes' in the URL has become an issue, has anyone ever heard of that?? Many thanks