Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mark,

I think we've all been in your situation at least once in our careers as an SEO. As you've mentioned previously you've resubmitted the site via GWT etc so there's not much else you can do.

I would however recommend filing a reconsideration request if you're happy with your backlink profile and feel you would pass a manual inspection of the site. As the reconsideration request feature isn't just for sites that have been penalised.

Case and point, I had a client with 2 very similar sites targeting two seperate countries, he accidently blocked off one of his sites with a robots.txt and the site wouldn't rank properly for 2 months and the issue was only rectified after a reconsideration request.

Good luck

Quickly glancing over it. I'd recommend looking at your canonical tags on your search results / categories within the sidebar.

I understand that you're linking to "search results" but if it's one of your main navigation widgets then maybe think about creating proper pages for them?

E.G - http://www.palicomp.co.uk/facets/attr_Range-High_Performance

Canonical :/cat_.html

I'd say you'd be losing out on a lot of long tail searches if those pages aren't readily accessible e.g PC under £500

Aside from that it's looking good.

Hi Chunlei,

There are a number of tools that can help you source and keep track of your link building process. I've listed a few of the most popular ones below:

• Raven Tools

• BuzzStream

• Link Prospector

One of these should fit the bill

Fastest way to do it would be through a combination of Google Webmaster Tools and Robots.txt / noindex,nofollow meta tags.

Firstly if your domain hasn't been verified within GWT, go through that process. Then proceed with the remove URL request within GWT. (Image Attached)

You will need to upload a robots.txt and/or implement the noindex meta tag within the header of the pages you no longer want indexed.

Example Robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /offendingportal/

Example Robots Meta tag:

That should be enough to get rid of the offending content from within the SERPS and prevent it from being re-indexed.

removeurl.png

If your theme is your property i.e custom design then I'd recommend you start by e-mailing the website and asking them to remove your property, then send a DMCA to their host. Finally if all else fails one to Google but be sure you've got proof that you own the design in question.

You can read more about the DMCA rules for Web Designs here - http://www.digital-web.com/articles/dmca_and_take_down_notices/

Hi Allen,

After taking a quick look at the site in question and investigating the pages that are still indexed, i'd recommend the following plan of action:

Change your robots txt to allow the crawling of the offending pages in question
Change the response code from 301 to 404
Use the remove URL tool within GWT for all of these offending pages

Wait a few days, for all the pages to be purged from the cache and then if you're not seeing any results submit another reconsideration request. As it's most likely an algorithmic penalty there's not much they can do, but they may crawl the site again when it's clean.

Hi Ben,

If you could provide an example affiliate URL that your clients would use that would help define whether Google MAY see it as a paid link. Most programs affiliate setups tend to go through 302 redirects to drop cookies etc - e.g

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-7033554-10830325?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.firstchoice.co.uk%2Fholiday%2Faccommodation%2Foverview%2FSharm-el-Sheikh%2FHoliday-Village-Red-Sea-028436

If your affiliate link ends up going through a 302 odds are you're absolutely fine, and likewise if there are a number of variables at the end of your link you'll be fine as well.

The only instance where I could see it being an issue is if your affiliate program simply requires users to link directly to your target page without any queries. Lastly if you wanted to play it completely safe, you could get your affiliates to play the nofollow attribute on the widget.

Hi Tyler,

I'm assuming these are all legitimate movies, or educations films that are free to download and not infringing of any copyright of course...

A traditional wordpress setup stores all post data within a MySQL database, and then any media file uploaded is stored outside of this database, so the only limitation you may hit is finding a host that will give you 500gb of storage space. You'd probably find something around the £20/month mark if you're lucky, but most hosts will question why you'd need such a large amount of space and aren't really serving any data + if you are hosting illegal files you'll leave yourself open to all sorts of legal trouble.

Forgot to mention you could use a service like dropbox or google drive insted for the same kind of price.

Usually the fastest way to do this would be to first block that url off with either a robots.txt or robots meta tag, but as the page no longer exists i'd recommend going to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a remove URL request (image below).

That's all there is to it!

removeurl.png

Hi John,

No worries!

If it's an in-house SEO for a small-medium company then all of the above duties can be handles but 1 person, but you may find that the actual PR side of things is done by someone else. If itis from a consulting perspective then you may struggle a little bit.

This is a complete blanket statement and I know a lot of fellow SEO's may not agree but SEO tends to be more logical whereas Social is more creative and the two tend to attract different personalities. If you can find someone that can do all of the above and enjoys it then you've found someone that would be able to consult as well as do the tasks at hand.

Most SEO's will know at least basic HTML and CSS or have the ability to search google to find out what it is they need to do + 1 additional language (PHP / Ruby / net).

As a lot of sites are now CMS based, a basic understanding of Joomla/Wordpress is highly recommended and excel is also an invaluable tool for most SEO's.

Hope that's helped

Hi David,

Directories are a difficult one. The recent Penguin updates (and to some degree, Panda) have pretty much destroyed the generic directories. However, the benefits of local directories and citations are still there! (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx)

With regards to the particular directory that you're querying. The quality is low, even for directory standards. You're probably doing more harm than good by mass submitting to 50 directories that are linking out to all sorts of drop-shipping / foreign / low quality sites.

Matt Cutts also made a video explaining how Google treats Paid Directories. There are a few good directories that request a review fee that may be worth it - BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo, but the rest are just paid links.

What your agency are doing isn't the darkest of black-hat SEO, but it's definitely low quality, lazy and against Google guidelines. 50 directories probably won't harm your site. However if the majority of your backlink profile is made up of directories, it definitely won't be doing your site any favours.

tl;dr

• Local Directories - Good
• Genuine Review Fee Based Directories - Possible Benefits
• Mass Submissions / Paid Directories - Bad

If you'd like to read more, I wrote a post about my thoughts on directories back in September that I feel still rings true!

watch?v=rKUlVquEImc

Hi Kami,

It's unfortunate, but a number of modern day e-commerce platforms still suffer from poor canonicalisation and multiple URL's.

If possible, rather than blocking off access to those queries via robots.txt or meta, I'd start by trying to specify a canonical URL when a query is created.

E.G

Query: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all
Canonical: http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html

Failing that I'd try to implement a "follow,noindex" meta tag or via x-robots if you're any good with apache.

If that's still a no go, then try GWT, Google is getting much better at handling dynamic URL's within e-commerce platforms and you can specify which queries Google should ignore directly within GWT

There's a great post on Moz that deals with e-commerce and canonicalisation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/qa-from-ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues-webinar - I'd suggest starting there!

As a last resort I'd look to block the URL's within robots.txt, but this prevents crawlers from flowing freely within your site and can result in poor indexation.

Hi,

You need to connect your site to a personal G+ account. At the moment it's not possible to connect the rel=author tag to a business. You can connect the rel=publisher to a business page but it's not an ideal solution.

If you're ok with having the e-commerce authorship go to 1 person then the following posts will tell you everything you need to know about implementing the tag.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/

Hope this helped!

Hi Peter,

A couple of things - directories do work in moderation, however i'd steer clear of the majority of them. Local directories and a few high profile (BOTW/DMOZ) are probably the only one's i'd ever suggest you submit to.

Building backlinks can be done in a number of ways

I'd recommend you start by reading - http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011 I've also written a rather length post - http://www.sebastiancowie.com/seo/link-building/101-link-building-techniques-for-2011-inc-white-grey-and-black-hat/

With regards to your query about opensiteexplorer. The last index update for OSE was on the 9th of November, this tends to update monthly, so just because it's not showing in OSE, doesn't mean you haven't created a backlink to your website.

Has the site accepted your submission, and can you see the link on their page? If so, you've created a backlink!

Usually the fastest way to do this would be to first block that url off with either a robots.txt or robots meta tag, but as the page no longer exists i'd recommend going to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a remove URL request (image below).

That's all there is to it!

removeurl.png

Hi Guys,

I'm currently in the middle of creating a comprehensive blog post covering SEO Tools that I wouldn't be able to work without. So far I've got the following down, as I use these on a day to day basis and they make my job infinitely easier.

1. SEOMoz / OSE
2. AHrefs
3. BuzzStream
4. Scrapebox
5. Xenu / Screaming Frog
6. Excel
7. GWT / Analytics / Adwords Keyword Tool

What tools or subscriptions do you use on a daily basis and couldn't be without?

I was going to write a long post about the lack of ethics and how they're basically creating competiting sites and you're paying them for the privilege but I think "Horse Shit" pretty much sums everything they've said.

Anything in GWT? Doesn't look like a penalty on the face of it and the backlink profile isn't too bad.

I had a client that had something similar happen to them when they released a duplicate of their site in a different country. Ended up having to do a reconsideration request and everything sorted itself out after that.

One thing I have noticed is the following two pages are identical and Bing returns the top 1 as the first result.

http://www.plussizeplum.com/plus-size-lingerie/plus-size-lingerie.php

http://www.plussizeplum.com/

I'd run through the site with Screaming Frog, check for any duplicate pages and make sure the canonical tags are in place becuase I can't see any on either of the above two pages at the moment.

Hi Allen,

After taking a quick look at the site in question and investigating the pages that are still indexed, i'd recommend the following plan of action:

Change your robots txt to allow the crawling of the offending pages in question
Change the response code from 301 to 404
Use the remove URL tool within GWT for all of these offending pages

Wait a few days, for all the pages to be purged from the cache and then if you're not seeing any results submit another reconsideration request. As it's most likely an algorithmic penalty there's not much they can do, but they may crawl the site again when it's clean.

Whenever I'm snooping competitor Adwords campaigns I use SEMRush.