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I would say this is pretty risky. One barometer I have for penalty risk is "if a human quality reviewer looked at this, would they see something amiss?" and in this case, someone who knew what they were looking for would sniff this out as shady right away. I also think the combination of signals you're describing are easily machine-readable to an extent that a penalty trigger would definitely be possible.

I also don't understand the logic the vendor is using here. If Google can't crawl schema in an iframe, why include the schema at all? It's not like users are going to see it or get anything from it. There's no point in having schema if it's not machine-readable, so why do it at all?

James has a good point that reviews are actually more trustworthy when they include some negative ones. Users are smart enough, and used to reviews enough, at this point to be able to tell when they're only being shown the positive reviews - so including only 4- and 5-star reviews is probably hurting their credibility with customers, as well as with Google.

I don't have any data on how Google specifically treats markup within an iframe. I have heard that you are only at risk for a penalty if you're receiving the reviews rich snippet, so that's one thing I would look for - but again, if they're not trying to get reviews snippets, why do any of this in the first place? If they're a small enough business with low enough traffic, this is the kind of thing that could fly under Google's radar for a long time, but as you've already experienced, recovering from a penalty is a lot harder than never engaging in shady practices in the first place.

It looks like the links were on the pages when Moz' crawler crawled them, but have since been removed. The site you link to above mentions that they're having some WordPress problems, which is a clue.

What I suspect happened is that links to your competitor's site were part of some kind of link injection malware that was abusing some exploitable WordPress feature common to comics blogs. Often when a bot is injecting links to a bunch of sites onto vulnerable pages, some of those links will be the bot's "customers" - that is, people who have paid for their links to be put on a bunch of sites and aren't too picky about how they get there - and some will have just been pulled in to the mix so that the spammers can mask their client list. So it may not be that this is something your competitor was doing on purpose; it's hard to know for sure. Either way, it's far more likely to be bad news for their site than good news, but probably just won't have any effect one way or another. Since the links aren't there anymore, it's likely that the site owners caught and fixed the bug so those links disappeared.

If this was happening to your site, I'd recommend disavowing the sites in question and keeping an eye on your backlink profile for future weird links like these. Since it's happening for a competitor's site, though, you can just ignore those links entirely and focus on the backlinks of theirs that are actually relevant that you might want to pursue.

It depends, in part, on whether what you're seeing is a manual penalty or an algorithmic update that is causing your site to rank lower.

Often times with Penguin updates, what looks like a penalty is actually just that a lot of the links pointing to a site have been devalued and are no longer passing juice. This is definitely something that can affect your whole domain, if there are enough inbound links to enough different pages on your site that have all been devalued. Subdomains won't be immune to this effect. However, as Michael points out below, losses from Penguin are usually more page/keyword specific, so you won't necessarily see your whole domain/subdomains hit.

With a manual penalty, whether or not the subdomain is hit depends on whether or not it shares the low quality signals that got the main domain hit. I certainly wouldn't recommend isolating black-hat practices on a subdomain, however; a penalty on a subdomain CAN affect other subdomains and the main domain, but it doesn't always do so. It's something to keep an eye on.

I would say, don't use press release syndication as a way to build links - it tends to generate duplicate content an David's right, the links aren't worth much.  Instead, use PR the way PR is traditionally used - to build awareness and encourage media outlets to cover your stories in their own words.  The last thing you want is for your own content to outrank you on somebody else's site!

I think Miriam has some great suggestions. Some other things to try, if you're not quite ready to move your site (or in addition to moving your site):

• Remove as many instances of the word "Events" from your site as you can. Replace them, where it makes sense to do so, with a more relevant keyword. This will be somewhat damaging to your brand if you are committed to the business name "New York Jazz Events," but may help reduce the "Events" signal you're sending.
• Look into markup with schema.org. Here's an intro to it on the Moz Learn section: https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data. Marking up your data will help Google further understand what you do and don't do. This is another area where you may want to bring in a professional SEO consultant, since it can be a bit fiddly to implement.
• Create additional content around finding a jazz band, and try to build some more topical authority in that area by attracting links from other sites about jazz bands/finding a band for your event.

Good luck!

The results of your internal search tool are all fully indexable, which is creating hundreds of variations of very similar pages based on the user's search term and the filtering options they select. Alick300 is correct that dynamically inserting the search term into the title and description tag is a problem - it means that the possibilities for individual pages and title tags being created are pretty much endless.

I usually recommend adding the meta tag

Honestly, the sandbox isn't something Google is doing much now.  It was more something they did several years ago before they had the power to quickly crawl and index new sites.  You say your site has been indexed - you used to rank for your target term and you're still ranking for other terms.  That means you are not in the sandbox.

Again: you are not in Google sandbox. If you were, your site wouldn't be in the index at all.

It sounds to me like you're not ranking for this term because it's very competitive.  The link sources that you mention (squidoo, article marketing, press releases, directories, social bookmarking) are all relatively low-value.  I would suggest creating some new content for this term.  Take a look at the pages that are ranking well for the term and figure out how you can provide a resource that is different from them while still being useful.  Then try to get some links from related sites - maybe doctors, medical/support communities, pharmacists, etc.  The best way to do this is to create a resource that would be useful for these target audiences and then reach out to them to see if they will link to or share it.

Ranking for a very competitive term is hard and takes a long time, and a ton of work.  It can definitely be done but you may also want to see if you can rank for less competitive, more specific terms - like "homeopathic hemorrhoids treatment," "hemorrhoids treatment over the counter," etc.  This would probably be faster and you would need to get fewer quality links to rank.

Hi Rosemary,

Miriam has the right idea - Google probably can crawl your marked-up JavaScript, but whether they will actually use it in e.g. rich snippets is up to them.

You can apply semantic markup to the individual containers that each piece of third-party data is pulled into, and that should work.

DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.

It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.

You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.

One nice thing about the Penguin update is that we don't need to be quite so concerned with anchor text.  I would say focus more on getting links from high-authority, trusted websites and less on the anchor text.  Getting keyword-rich anchor text links from time to time won't hurt - and if you're using natural link building methods, you'll probably be fine having them - the important thing is that your ratio of keyword-rich anchor text links to regular anchor text likes (like "click here") is similar to that of other sites in your niche.  It's when it's ALL your links or a vast majority of your links that it starts to look suspicious.

It's fairly common for Google to rewrite the displayed title of a website to more closely match the searcher's query, if Google thinks it would be helpful to do so - it's like an extra signal "yes, you're in the right place." When your query is your domain name it's not unusual for Google to display that instead of whatever the actual title tag is. I'm not sure where the apostrophe is coming from; it may be that a high percentage of inbound links use the apostrophe, or it may be that your entry in a data provider like Localeze has an apostrophe. I'd use the Moz Local testing tool to make sure your business name is consistent across data aggregators. Other than that, I wouldn't worry too much about the snippet changing, since it will give people searching for your brand/domain a strong signal that they're where they're supposed to be. Hope that helps!

It could be a lot of things.  If all or most of your inbound links to that page have "Hemorrhoids treatment" as their anchor text, you may have been hit by a Penguin penalty for that keyword. Have you received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools?

Getting tweets can be good for being quickly indexed, but links from tweets don't have much staying power.  Here's what I would try:

• Remove directory links from any directories that aren't human-curated.
• Check Google Webmaster Tools for any warnings or errors.
• You could also try creating a new page targeting the keyword, since the existing page is no longer ranking.  Some fresh, high-quality content and concentrated linking could do the trick.
• Regardless of whether you create a new page or use the existing page, try to target other websites on related topics for links and shares - don't just rely on social media, social bookmarking and press releases.  You might start by looking at the pages that do rank for that term and seeing if they have links from sites that might be good targets for you, as well.

I think you pretty much have to be engaging with people on social media - otherwise in what sense is it "social"?  You're missing out on a lot of opportunity not only to win your users' hearts and minds, but also to learn how they interact with and think about what you do.  That's how a lot of companies right now are using social media - to figure out what their customers really like and want so they can make a great product.  The conversation will happen whether you participate or not - don't you want to be part of it?  If you're not, you have no control over the message.

So who to hire to do it?  I've had a great time working with the good people at Social Creatures Media.  That's who we use when we need some social magic.  I don't know what you'd consider a "reasonable" cost but I find their pricing more than fair for the quality work they do.  And no, I don't work for them

You certainly don't need to include every page of your website in your top navigation menu. Your plan of having a Locations page that then links to each of your location pages individually is a fine way to go.

That said, the deeper into your site architecture your page is, the fewer ways there are for people and search engines alike to discover it - to your point, there is now only one page on your site linking to all of these location pages. One reason internal linking outside the navigation is important is that it provides additional ways for users and search engines to browse to your content. I would recommend taking a look at the pages on your site and thinking about what pages a user might want to visit next, and linking to those. Providing an intuitive next step for your users keeps them engaged, and provides additional ways for your content to get discovered.

The indexing behavior you're describing does sound like you may have been hit by a penalty, but from what you're describing I don't know why you would have been.  It's starting to sound like you may need more consultation than we can really give over Q&A - I suggest hiring an SEO consultant to look into this more deeply.

I'd recommend checking MozCast.com to measure overall volatility in the results page - but I agree that dropping from #3 to #10 doesn't sound like a penalty. Remember that Penguin et al are updates to the whole search algorithm, so in addition to big shifts there are also going to be a ton of smaller changes as Google tweaks what works and how well it works. It's definitely something you can recover from. Take a look at the sites that are ranking above you now: what do they have that you don't? That will give you some insight into what you need to start improving first.

Hi Nick,

It's common to see a drop in traffic after a redesign, but you definitely should have recovered by now. The difference in your number of indexed pages is a red flag. When you run a Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl/Moz Crawl Test crawl of the site, what shows up? Are there any site sections that are missing? Does that 7,740 pages number sound close to the number of pages that are actually on the site, or are there still more like 30K?

Take a look at the pages that were getting organic traffic before the migration. Which of them aren't getting traffic now? Can you verify that they still exist and that redirects are working properly? Are there areas of the site that used to have a lot more internal links pointing to them then than they do now?

I doubt that your domain name and age have much to do with this, and it's common for 404s to pop up from time to time, so I don't think those are your culprits.

One thing you might try is reaching out to the domains that link to your old site and see if they would update their links to point to the same page on your new site. Start with the sites with whom you have the best relationship, and any who link to you multiple times. Make it easy by providing them a list of the pages that link to you and the updated links. You won't get a 100% response rate but it might mitigate some of the link loss.

I hope some of that helps!

I wouldn't use the SKU property unless it was actually marking up a SKU - marking up something else would probably not be useful or result in a more detailed snippet. Could you use another property to mark up these grouped products instead, like the ProductID property?

Having an SSL certificate won't remove your (not provided) keywords. As long as users are arriving from Google's HTTPS service, their keyword data will be stripped out, regardless of your own SSL status.

There's no compelling SEO reason to have or not to have an SSL certificate - as Kevin points out below, it's really more a matter of user trust/data security. If users are providing you any kind of personal information (email, address, CC info, etc) you probably want an SSL certificate at least for the pages where you're collecting and sending that data. Your users will appreciate the extra security.

One thing to watch out for is that http and https versions of the same page may be counted as duplicate content - so make sure that one redirects to the other.

Hi David,

Google's semantic processing has gotten pretty sophisticated - If the name of the website is on every page and is the URL, and also makes up a significant portion of the anchor text, those are all pretty clear signals that "this is the name of the site."

With an exact match domain you want to make it clear that you're not a fly-by-night site just set up to quickly take advantage of a single keyword.  Some ways to do this are:

• Make sure you have deep content on every page - Panda can be particularly brutal to EMDs.
• REALLY watch your usage of your brand name - give it the "read out loud" test to see if you're using it too much and giving the appearance of keyword stuffing.
• Optimize non-home-page pages for other, related keywords and create content accordingly
• Build a history of social mentions - search engines look to social mentions and interactions as proof that "this is a real company."
• Focus less on anchor text when building links, and more on creating sharable content that people want to link to. People will be more likely to use your keyword as anchor text than would be typical, since it's already the name of the site, so I would focus link building efforts on other keywords and just on general link volume, even if the anchor text is "click here."

Basically, do everything you can to show Google that you're a legit site that deserves to rank, and not a keyword spammer.