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What do you think of a plugin like this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/auto-redirect-404/

Just got this:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www. for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated ourquality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

My guess is that your website has been hit by the Panda (or some quality-related) algo.

You can find similar product listings on many other websites.

Here's one example: http://copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.frenchquartermarket.com%2Faccessories-dining.aspx

Maybe you should "noindex" pages with no added value and add lots of quality content (reviews, articles) to product pages you want to rank.

Your link profile seems clean.

Do I need to do something about my GA account?

I've got about 12 websites and no major changes (+1 / -1)...

The higher the weather, the more changes there are in SERPS, that's all.

Some are saying there was an update earlier today so we should see this reflected on mozcast tomorrow morning.

It took me about 50 to 60 hours to go through approximately 6,800 links. What a f*cking pain.

Here's how I did it if ever it helps someone:

1. I gathered all the back links from the following sources:

• Google Webmaster Tools (Sample Links + Latest Links)
• Link Detox (http://www.linkresearchtools.com/)
• ahrefs.com: Make sure to include sitewide links and nofollow links too (you can't be too careful)
• opensiteexplorer.org

2. I merged all the backlinks into one single Excel spreadsheet and removed the duplicates.

3. I uploaded the backlink list in CSV format into Link Detox (http://www.linkresearchtools.com/). It verifies if the links are still there and gives you back lots of details about each link like text anchors and the destination url.

4. You will be able to export 3 reports from Link Detox: Healthy Links, Suspicious Links and Toxic Links. Merge all 3 in one single spreadsheet.

5. I identified the obvious links first by sorting the Link Detox spreadsheet by anchor text. You can easily spot the exact match anchors.

6. Next, sort the spreadsheet by destination URL. You know the URLs to the pages you've spammed

7. Finally go manually through all what's left. Have fun!

8. When you're done putting all the bad links in another spreadsheet, rerun the Link Detox report by uploading the full link list as well as the list of links to disavow. This will allow you to see what's left and if you forgot anything.

I identified about 1,500 bad links from nearly 1,000 unique domains and emailed each of them when possible (about 300 - 400 emails sent).

It took two reconsideration requests before the penalty was finally taken off. The first time, I only used the links found in GWT and Link Detox. The second time around, I used ahrefs.com and opensiteexplorer.org also. I found about 100 more links the second time.

I am not sure about redirecting all the subpages to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com

The website still has about 300 visitors a day. It's for "money keywords" that it doesn't get any traffic. Redirecting all the traffic to the homepage would cause the website to fall quickly.

If I wanted to keep as much of the visitors from the old site as possible, what about displaying a message at the very top of every page stating that the new website is at webhostinghero.com (I'd use an image instead of text to avoid any issue). Or what about showing a popup to each visitor?

There are speculations about a Google update being rolled out today (Sept. 12).

That said, it is difficult to say without knowing what your website is.

I should also add that when submitting the reconsideration requests, I explained everything that's been done, from the SEO services / softwares used to build the links to everything you did to clean it up.

I included the full list of back links in a Google Docs spreadsheet as well as the list of disavowed links. I also printed all the emails I sent in PDF format and uploaded that as well to Google Drive. I shared both documents and included them in the reconsideration request.

Don't forget: the Google team will not open documents from anywhere else than Google Drive.

I don't know if you've done everything "by the book" like you say but you have tons of exact match anchors.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=www.carrentalbuddy.com.au&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domain

It seems that Google have been or will penalizing websites with too many ads above the fold.

Is it me or Google's search result layout is a perfect example of what NOT to do?

According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags.

The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages:

http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2

The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages.

Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter?

Again sorry for my english.

Thank you,

Stephane

I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today.

I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care.

My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again.

Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!

(By the way, sorry for my english, I speak french!)

Well I don't mind brutal comments but I also asked for constructive comments.

That said, I appreciate your honesty however it's easy to bash something without suggesting how to make it better.

1. "The fatal flaw is the anonymity. No sensible person would ever attach any importance to buying reccomendations  that come out of nowhere from an anonymous nobody."

I do agree with you on that. Now how do I solve this? Should I include a byline with my picture in every post?

2. "Worse, this garbled, illogical and contradictory disclosure is deeply buried in  a footer and confirms worst suspicions"

I admit I simply copied the disclosure policy sent to affiliates by some web hosting companies. Do you have any examples of what you consider to be a clear, concise disclosure?

3. "I'm not saying affiliate marketing is always and everywhere wrong. But first you have decloak [...]"

What do you mean by "decloak"? To me, "cloaking" is showing a different content to search engines than to visitors.

4. "[...] publish valuable content free [...]"

Did you look at the 220 tutorials I published? I put a ton of effort into them to make them as valuable as possible. Unlike many web hosting sites, I DO know my stuff, I've been a programmer, web developer and sysadmin for more than 18 years.

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/category/tutorials

That said, there is some early content that makes me cringe a little when read them. I'm setting them to "noindex" and removing them gradually.

I also provide some free tools I've developed myself and I think this one is especially useful:

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/

If you think the content is not valuable enough, please explain a bit further.

As for the top 10 lists, they will soon be transformed into valuable buying guides instead of simple comparison grids.

5. "The basic pitch is that you would never jeopardize your reputation by recommending  anyting other than valuable products you use yourself."

I do have accounts with most of the hosting companies advertised or listed in any top 10 lists (of course I get them for free most of the time). Obviously, I can't run 20 "real websites" just to use these services so what I did is I set up an identical blog on each of them and I perform benchmark test regularly.

Like I said, constructive comments are welcomed!

Probably not but you may avoid a penalty though.

As my site has definitely got hit by Panda, I am in the process of cleaning my website of low quality content.

Needless to say, shitty articles are completed being removed but I think lots of this content is now of low quality because it is obsolete and dated.

So what should I do with this content?

Should I rewrite those articles as completely new posts and link from the old posts to the new ones? Or should I delete the old posts and do a 301 redirect to the new post?

Or should I rewrite the content of these articles in place so I can keep the old URL and backlinks?

One thing is that I've got a lot more followers than I used to so publishing a new post gets a lot more views, like and shares and whatnot from social networks.