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Hey Stephane, We were just engaged in a similar quandary yesterday, but a little different circumstance based on whether to use sub-domains or sub-folder and the effects that may occur to our ranks in Google.  We came across the follow two articles which may shed light on your current questions. Older article, but still valid: http://moz.com/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites http://www.whitefireseo.com/site-architecture/subdomain-or-subfolder-post-panda/360/ Shouldn't really cause a problem, but your sub-domain may not benefit in ranks from the strength of your root domain. Hope this helps, and best of luck.

Ok great then, maybe I got concerned too soon. Thanks for your input!

I think you are forgetting that engines are capable of running Javascript just fine, and all the content that is brought via AJAX to be viewable to the user will also be indexed by search engines. I would certainly go with option 4, it's a standard Today, but have a look at the "pushState", that and address manipulation, that way, your users will be able to access an exact review (say in page 3) by just typing the address: http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page3 and have by default the page 3 loaded. If you go this route, you can also put a hidden (css'ed) NEXT PAGE button at the end to link to the next page. Hope that helps!

It appened the same to me. I used everything disavow, link removal, everything so like you i decided to do a new website that now is ranking well and bringing me the good traffic although it as been almost a year and in the first 6 month the old one penalized still reported better conversions Know they are ranking almost the same on alexa, as the site as been penalized for especific keywords, and not for long tail wicht old web still on first position, but for content old web still ranking first on lots of long tail searches althought will never rank well for main keywords. It is hard to leave an old domain with lots of years that was a reference and with good authority to one with no authority And harder is to take all content of it. Keep working man Note: i have my websites propdental.com (old) and propdental.es (new) on different servers with no linking i just placed a no linking banner telling people to go to new website. I time i will plan to remove all content, but for know as i dont need it i did not remove it, and besides lots of websites as copied my content so if i change to my new site maybe i will have the content copied that was first copied from me. It is a risk i am not willing to But with time you will see that the money from the old site will dropp as the one for the new one will rise Best wishes

I would not worry much about them as I don't see anything really egregious. Alan makes a good point on the broken links. I did not see them (again it was cursory). Best to you both.

If we're understanding the situation correctly, I'd say this sums it up pretty well.

You shouldn't be focusing blog posts on specific keywords at all. Blog posts are best for long tail terms, so it doesn't matter how many you write. If you start writing multiple on one topic that is a head term you are shooting for, then you should have a category page for all of those, and that is the page that should rank for the head term.

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.

Press Releases are meant to get picked up by lots of media outlets.  That's the point.  For example, if you submit to PR Web, your press release will end up on hundreds of sites.  I know from experience that it does not hurt you as I do daily for my clients and my own sites/ companies.  It helps as long as they are optimized well and have high quality content that people will want to read.  Google et al will select the "best" one(s) to keep in th SERPs and the rest will drift away.  Even though those pages with the press release still exist, they have no impact positively or negatively for you, and you won't get a duplicate content penalty as the search engines knows how to treat News.  I agree with Chris that you must understand where they fit into your overall strategy.  They are only one small piece of the process.  If you build a strategy relying on press releases, you are going to be losing that treadmill battle.

You will never see the second one (as url) ranking above the first - so no issues there. Google ranking system is ok with dealing with this type of things even if the Google bot isn't and it puts everything into the index Just to sleep well  I would post this question on Google forum and wait for someone in Google to assure you it's fine. I would't worry a bit.

Not necessarily. I run a news website that covers current affairs. And as my site is in a small niche but has good domain authority, it ranks well for many random search terms. My bounce rate is about 83% but still ranks #1 for all my main keywords. Naturally, I'd prefer if it were lower, but it does show that it's not a critical factor. I'm pretty sure it counts a lot more when Google calculates your quality score in AdWords however.

Hi Stephane, I'm wondering if you've seen any rebound at all since the penalty was revoked back in May?

Hi Stephane I also do not see duplicate pages indexed in Google. Not this page: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html or any others searching the few pages of results on a site: search. Perhaps it was a temporary thing were some got indexed. I've seen that happen on occasion, and then they get removed. If you're still seeing otherwise definitely feel free to chime back in, and provide screenshots or an example query. Thanks! -Dan

You have some great responses here. To summarize some of the advice and add a little new advice, this is what I would do: Display a text warning at the top of the site that the site has moved. I'd not worry about the text somehow contaminating the new domain. Keep the old site running, and try to get the penalties removed on the side. Noindex (or delete, if it's not important to the user) all the content that you want to keep but has few links, then move it to the new site. If the penalty is lifted, redirect the old site over to the new site's counterpart. Still, don't 301 redirect pages with low-quality content or spammy links. (You can just kill the pages that are "all bad" now.) The only question left is what to do with the content you want to keep and has with clean external links. You could probably redirect and cut the internal links without too much risk, which is what I'd do. The completely safe thing to do would be to avoid linking altogether, leaving it out there to gather what traffic it can. Good luck!

I would go with another solution tho. I will start analyzing the pages where you have the highest CTR, then on those the highest bounce rate. Are those visitors leaving because the content is useless or because they finished reading the piece and there's nowhere to go? Consider all variables and try improving the content pages to include links to related posts kinda "You may find this articles interesting", or "Related Articles", etc. Try improving the site navigation, if you are getting CTR from search, then do whatever you can to keep those visitors there, by improving user experience and navigation. Hope that helps!

I'm betting all those subcategories were indexed (unless you had specifically set them not to be, to manage dupe content). If indexed then yea, removing/redirecting them is removing pages from your site, so obviously number indexed would show a reduction. Same if you removed tags. When you made category changes e.g. changed /updates/ to /news/ did you make sure that WordPress created a proper redirect fro the old URL? If not, you'll get all those posts 404ing which will look like fewer pages indexed as well. When you say you removed  low quality content - that could be a lot of pages right there. Lastly, have you confirmed that your xml sitemap updated fully and correctly? If not, the crawlers could be looking for pages that no longer exist. (For example, pages that have been 301-redirected should no longer appear in the xml sitemap. As you can see - lots of possibilities, but those are some starting points. Paul

Hi, 404 pages won't affect your site performance in any way - aslong as you don't heavily link to those pages internally. Redirecting, in my opinion, is not a very good idea - as long as you don't have some better content that is touching the exact same subject, in a better way, as the old page. if this is not the case - I would't spend any more time on those - Google will clean them up after 3-4 bot visits. cheers !

I wouldn't re-write old posts. If they can be refreshed or added to with recent updates go ahead and redirect (if it can be redirected without losing any additional info) or link to the new version. Things get tricky if there's nothing new that can be written about the post. First, kill the really bad stuff, as Mike suggested, and keep the good stuff. The stuff on the borderline is probably not worth keeping unless it was still receiving traffic. In my experience with Panda, using 410s on bad pages is better than redirecting, but you will probably want to 301 redirect to the next-best page if you have good links. If it was still receiving organic traffic, think about what you can do to make it better or provide additional resources and reading. Try to save traffic-generating pieces by improving them and making them useful to the people who were landing on them. For high-traffic pieces, you will want to look at the organic keywords and make sure the page somehow answers the query. As always with Panda, make sure your design doesn't turn people off and that you're not filling the template with too many ads.

Personally, I wouldnt. Scrapers have been around for years and it's "natural" in my eyes. all the good sites out there, even moz, have thousands upon thousands of scraper sites linking to them. I it's about penguin, then id look into the other links deeper. For client work I do, I just disavow them if the DA of the site is below 30. LOL.

You can remove the links from PR Web press releases, even after publication. No need to disavow unless they have been picked up by other sites and do-followed. That said, I seriously doubt they can get you into trouble...unless they are part of a sustained pattern of misconduct, say dozens or hundreds of press releases from spammy press release sites (not PR Web, which is reputable.)  Your backlinks from PR  Web may even be helping. There is much confusion on this subject. Two general and casual remarks Matt Cutts made years apart have been taken out of context and widely misinterpreted. The conventional wisdom seems to be that all backlinks from all press releases are always and everywhere useless or harmful. This suffers from the defect of being untrue. And it's s just as silly as saying: "All directory listings are useless -- or harmful." or "All guest blogging is useless -- or harmful." or "All infogrpahics are useless -- or harmful." Life is complicated. Context is everything. And much depends on your overall link portfolio.