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The main difference between the two is that a reconsideration request is more likely to work with a link warning than with a regular Penguin hit.  Penguin is algorithmic, whereas the link warnings were usually triggered by/resulted in manual penalties.  Either way, it's a good idea to try to get as many spammy links removed/updated as possible, as well as build some new, non-spam links to increase the percentage of your links that are not spammy.

I wouldn't suggest building more spammy links to drown out the Penguin-targeted links - why not spend that time and effort building some natural links?  They will last longer and if you do have to do a reconsideration request you're not running the risk that Google will also see your brand-new spam links.

Jaume is correct that the best solution would be to 1.) change that 302 redirect to a 301 (which would let Google know that the redirect is permanent, rather than temporary) and 2.) Also use a 301 redirect to redirect http://www.ecuadorvisapros.com/home.html to http://www.ecuadorvisapros.com. http://www.edcuadorvisapros.com is the home page that you want. However, this can be difficult to do if you don't have developer experience, and how easy it is to do also depends on the website system you're using. Here's an article on the godaddy.com site about how to do it: https://www.godaddy.com/help/using-301-page-redirects-234

If you don't want to mess with redirects, or can't get the page redirecting properly, you will want to use the canonical tag instead. In the section of  http://www.ecuadorvisapros.com/home.html, put the tag . This will let Google know which version of the page is the "official" version. You can learn more about the canonical tag in the Moz learn section, here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization.

I would recommend taking a look at your historical referral data, to see what sites have sent traffic to this site historically that aren't anymore - that will give you an idea of where the links were that went away. Even if you can't get the old link back, you may be able to form a new relationship with those sites' owners, which could result in future link opportunities.

It sounds like, whatever the cause, the site has had a bunch of inbound links to it disappear. This is frustrating, but without knowing where the specific links were, it's going to be hard to get them back. I would focus on getting some new, high-quality, high-authority links to the site. Since you've got this new aggressive competitor, you could use Open Site Explorer to see where they're getting links from, and see if any of the sites that link to them would be good candidates for link outreach from your team as well.

Hi Marlon,

There are a lot of different issues that may cause Rogerbot to be unable to crawl your site. For troubleshooting tips, I suggest reading http://moz.com/help/pro/why-can-t-rogerbot-crawl-my-site. Hope that helps!

I agree with Sean - I've never heard of an official limit to image filenames in terms of length alone. Since the file name is almost always part of the image URL, you could be running the risk of too-long URLs but that's a relatively minor problem. I would make extra sure that your file names don't appear keyword-stuffed, though - so watch out for things like repeating keywords or having all variations of a keyword. There's a big difference between widgets-extralarge-round-blue-widgetmaker.jpg and blue-widgets-best-blue-widgets-blue-widgets-online-free-shipping, if that makes sense. Other than that you should be fine.

Honestly I think this is a question that is going to vary based on a lot of factors, including:

• Where the autoplay video is happening (on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or your site)
• Who your audience is and what they're doing when they see the video
• The context of the video (is it an ad, or is it part of your site content?)

Some things to consider when using autoplay videos:

• Mobile users tend to find autoplay videos especially obnoxious because they use up so much data.
• Autoplaying videos may inflate your video views count, since the view isn't user-directed; autoplay video engagement should be measured using additional metrics such as time viewed, additional videos viewed, or clicks-through.
• Sites such as YouTube and Netflix have seen increased engagement through strategic use of autoplay, starting another video as the first one ends.

I would recommend testing this out for your site or sites and seeing whether autoplay increases or decreases engagement and conversions. Anecdotally, a lot of people say they dislike when videos autoplay, especially with sound, but anecdotal evidence is no substitute for a good test, and you seem to be correct that the results of this sort of test aren't readily available online. If you do run a test, it would make an excellent  YouMoz post!

You are encountering something that happens from time to time with communication about websites - as far as GoDaddy is concerned, there is only one "page" - there is only one document that is your home page - but the page has several different URLs, which is what's causing Google and Moz Tools to recognize it as several different pages. It's more of a terminology thing than anything (but a sarcastic response is never in good taste, not the best customer service there)!

As far as website content management systems go, I always recommend WordPress. It's very customizable, but there are many great out-of-the-box templates that work well for SEO too. There are several great plugins for WordPress that help make SEO changes easier - two good ones are WordPress SEO by Yoast and the All-in-One SEO pack. If you want to change your website's hosting as well, do a bit of research - many hosting companies will help you with step-by-step instructions for moving your site and installing WordPress.

Is the problem that the page isn't appearing in the index, or that it isn't ranking for its target terms?

If the page has a lot of images but doesn't otherwise have much copy, it may be that Google is determining it to be too similar to other pages on your site and so is not displaying it. If it's not being indexed at all (doesn't show up in a site: search or when you search for a block of copy in quotations), double-check that your robots.txt isn't blocking it and that you don't have a meta robots noindex tag on the page. The suggestion of running Screaming Frog on your site to make sure a crawler can find the page is a good one - Screaming Frog will also tell you if the page is returning a weird HTTP status or is blocked by robots.

Recently Google has been taking a closer look at anchor text, because exact keyword anchor text isn't really how "natural" links (i.e. links you didn't build) look.  Ben has a great point that natural link growth usually means anchor text that is either your brand name or your URL.  Rob Kerry recently did a Whiteboard Friday on the Penguin update that may shed some more light on your predicament: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-penguin-update-whiteboard-friday

A majority of your inbound links should not have exact keyword match anchor text.  Instead, focus more on building overall link volume, both for your domain and individual pages.  Try to get links from high-authority sites, and create pieces of content that people want to share and link to - these are link building strategies that will be more successful than a hyper-focus on anchor text, whether branded, keyword or "click here."

I think the steps Ben outlines above are a great start.

This is what I would do, too: search for a large chunk of text from the page and see if the page comes up. Site: is not always 100% accurate.

Ah OK, thanks for the clarification!

That problem, to me, sounds like you need some links! In general when Google is ranking your home page for a term, instead of the page that is actually about that term, it's because they recognize that your site has some topical relevance for that term, but the individual page doesn't seem that important based on how many links are pointing to it. Are there ways you can flow some additional internal link juice to that page? Are there sites that are linking to your home page right now that are very closely related to the topic of the page in question, that you could ask to point to that page instead? Are there topically-related sites that don't link to that page right now that you could possibly get a link from? All of these will beef up your page authority, which should help.

In terms of your copy being too far down on the page - if you don't think it will negatively impact your user experience, you could try moving it up, or integrating it into the section with the images, but I don't know how much that will help. You also may need more copy on the page - if your page is 300 lines of code long, and only 5 of those lines are unique copy, it's hard to send a strong enough signal of relevance. Can you expand what you say on the page to make it a better resource on the topic at hand?

The basic idea behind hub linking is that there are certain websites that are "hubs" for information - that is, they are one place that you can go to get resources on a topic.  A lot of times these domains link out a lot, because they want to showcase other websites that have good information resources on the topic.  They often do have good page authority, if they are good resources on the topic, because people link back to them.

One thing to look out for when engaging someone to do Hub linking is, you want to make sure the sites you're getting links from are actually relevant resources that real people are using.  A lot of "hub" pages are created solely for SEO purposes and tend to have thin content and too many links, which can be a sign to Google that the link is a shady one.  So it's important to be judicious in selecting a hub page to target for links, and I would advise against trying to create one yourself unless you have a long-term strategy for how to continue adding content and making it useful.

AH! OK, gotcha. In that case, Martijn was right - you'll need to add the Review type. Required fields for the Review type are:

• reviewBody (text)
• reviewRating (of type: Rating)
• author (of type: Person or Organization)

So the markup would look something like this:

Don't forget that every keyword is different - how you rank depends on what you're doing compared to other sites targeting that term, not just what you're doing on your own site. So some keywords just take a larger, higher-authority link profile to rank for than others. A good place to start with getting links for that page would be to look at the backlinks that other pages that rank for that term have - you may be able to get some links from the same or similar sites.

If you have more than one link to the same page on a given page, it won't be considered duplicate content necessarily - but it also won't pass any additional page equity.

You're right to be against the subdomain idea - that's not a good call for SEO at all.

What I would do is start out with a full database export of all the URLs on the current site, and figure out what URL each of those resources is ultimately going to live at. This can be daunting with a large site, but it goes faster than you think it's going to - once you figure out that all the pages in example.com/old-folder/pagename are now going to live at example.com/new-folder/pagename you can figure out the URL structure for large chunks of the site at a time. Since it sounds like there won't be any changes to the overall design and structure of the site, just some possible URL changes, that will make it easier, too. I did this for the SEOmoz.org -> Moz.com transition and it took about a month to map out 65,000 pages alongside my other SEO duties (but that was with a lot of major changes in site structure, too).

Once everyone (you, the client, both dev teams) have agreed on the new structure, it's simply a matter of:

• moving the pages in each "chunk" from their old URLs to their new URLs
• 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new URLs on a page-to-page level
• doing a database find+replace on the old site and the new one to update internal links to those pages

Be really really careful with managing expectations for this. It's very common to see pages take a temporary hit in rankings and traffic immediately after they move to a new URL; this drop is usually temporary and reversible. But you don't want the client taking that data as proof that the migration isn't going to work or isn't working, and abandoning ship. To help matters along, take a look at what their best inbound links are and the linking sites with whom you have the best relationship, and as those pages move to their new addresses, reach out to the linking sites to try to get those links updated.

Does that answer your question? Happy to discuss further if not.

Using the Change of Address feature in Google Webmaster Tools and having your host point the DNS at the new site will help Google understand that the site has moved. However, you will probably see URLs from the old site outranking URLs from the new site for a while. If you can't create entirely new content for the new site, it would still be worth refreshing and rewriting the content for at least your highest-traffic pages, so they aren't exact duplicates.

Reclaiming as many links as possible by reaching out to get them pointed to the new site, rather than the old site, is definitely worth doing. You should also start thinking strategically about how you're going to market the new site to earn more links links once it launches, to make up for the links you can't get re-pointed to the site.

It will probably take a few months for the new site to start performing well and outranking the old site, but it's definitely possible.

I'd recommend continuing to try to build higher-quality links, rather than pursuing lower-quality directory listings. It's likely that a lot of these lower-quality citations aren't doing anything for your competitors, and the risk of a link penalty from such a strategy is pretty high. Are you reasonably sure that the citation links are the reason they're ranking higher (to the extent that anyone can be sure about why a page is ranking)? Like I said, I'd bet a lot of those citations aren't having much effect on your competitors' sites, as directory listings tend to be devalued by Google pretty quickly. Are there other areas you could try to outdo them - content quality, featured snippets, user experience - to make up some of that ground?

I know it's frustrating to rank lower than people who are being spammy, and high-quality link earning takes time, but that's what I'd advocate doing.

This is fine, as long as you don't want to exclude robots from crawling any part of your site.

Ennovation and Malcolm are right - search engines will see the entire text, as long as the JS is just being used for show/hide (users without JS enabled will see the same thing).

As long as there is an option to show the text (i.e. it's not completely hidden from users), and the text itself isn't keyword-stuffed or spammy, I can't see a reason why search engines would consider it spam.