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Bradley's response is spot on. I coincidentally manage a large site in the legal area that has had errors like yours although the error isn't law related! As Bradley implies, this is typically the unintended result of code that is spitting out the unintended line feed in the CMS. I'm guessing that what you're seeing is probably the result of something related to PHP rather than an error in user input. Typically entering white space into user editable areas will result in it being stripped. When you have actual code like this inserted, it's the result of some line of PHP someone edited and saved without realizing the effect. I've had this happen before with RSS feeds where one little glitch will put a forward slash to the end of a URL and connect the beginning of another. Good luck with finding the solution, which shouldn't bee too tough.

Matt -

Thanks for taking the time to take a look, it's much appreciated. Yes, I had two SEOs look at this who know my niche and said they cannot find anything glaring at all on a large site like ours that would explain the atomic bomb being dropped. You provide some useful stuff (and thanks!) but haven't really either found too much to complain about. The +1 votes missing just seems to further suggest we've been caught in some glitch. I'll reply to your points.

1. Title Tag - Very minor issue appearing that only affects a few pages if you look closely. Fixed and thanks.

2. The internally linked jpeg - There is practically no way Google thinks I'm suddenly in the link selling business because one single link was named "banner" with an internal link to my own stuff. If that's the cause to blow up the entire site, I should have received a warning for a link selling penalty and it's goodbye to the 99% of the Internet that is way more obvious!

3. There is no duplicate content issue on the site - In addition, numerous sources have long reported that there is no duplicate content penalty (I think Matt Cutts himself may have stated this.) The article you refer to appears once. Scrapers shouldn't reduce your forums from 5-6 to a zero. In addition, if Google can figure out artificial link building, it surely must know a scraper if it sees another site suddenly grow quickly with content that it indexed from another site for the past 13 years. I point at a likely error affecting my site because we have a zero PR and Google gave the scraper a PR 2 - who is now down due to my takedown notice. Google's failure to figure out something a 5 year old could (the Wordpress scraper's site was bare bones, obvious scraper site) then I'd hope to have a dialogue with someone to understand why.

4. My home page experience is quite clean. Perfect? Nothing is perfect. The link you pointed out was a recent change, no biggie. The copyright statement is in no way telling Google anything related to PR or of much value for that matter. I've updated it to use the right footer. Note that the scraper had no copyright year - yet ranked above our site - so there goes that theory. The oldest game is for scrapers to predate their Wordpress posts, forum posts, etc. ) Google should know this. And the two links in the footer are for UI. Too many users are lazy so as not to submit a ticket to the right department. Similar area but not the same link, not a UI issue. I think the most often parroted phrase is "Google obsesses about this and that" - I think it's a great selling phrase to say you've gotta hire me because you have to sweat even the smallest stuff. But hey, I know what you're trying to say.

5. Old links pre-2010. Well... the first web page I put up was back in 1995. I don't think Google expects every website owner to require a full SEO staff to try to remove links from pages that are dated directories and the like which weren't created by us and just a sign of the times. Some of the "spam" you refer to are just very dated pages when compiling lists was popular. My backlinks may contain RSS aggregation sites, true. But as Google points out, you had better be darn sure to disavow well or it will work against you. Funny thing is that most SEOs today always assumed sites had "link building campaigns" when it was really just organic. I'll look again and only for the comment spam, which should absolutely not appear and there might be some negative SEO efforts here.

6. One comment spam link - not generated by us. Will get it disavowed an try to scour the rest of the backlinks. There just isn't enough of this to justify a PR 6 to 0 for hundreds of thousands of pages, even with someone's negative SEO campaign.

7. There are no spun articles - you'll need to point to something specific. I know because I wrote most of them. Will they look similar to other law sites - yes.That's because the law is the same. The terms of art used will be the same. So will the general content. What you're not realizing is that my articles are generally more than 500 words and far more comprehensive than the other "article sites." I don't blame you for thinking this at first glance as I'm familiar with my own niche. Could some be in the realm of more general? Sure - the couple in the articles section which is user submitted (just a dozen or so.) But we are far, far away from an article directory and this requires closer observation. If you're talking about the anchor text to our lead gen page, that's our niche and it explains what it is. If you have a suggestion, glad to hear it. Otherwise, this too isn't taking down the whole site or 90+% of the Internet would unquestionably go to zero PR.

FYI - the largest area of the site - by far - is the law forum, well cared for with much useful information. Why is that now all a page rank zero? There is no explanation for an indefinite death penalty. Now if you want to know why my "competitors" are catching up it's because since Panda 2.2 Google has me chasing nothing and I've wasted years of effort on nonsense like this instead of producing awesome content. _I'll show you three sites in my niche that have blatant link exchanges, spammy titles in their forums, RSS feeds in their forums to increase Google's indexing, a horrendous UI and duplicate content from other sites -- and those sites have been making serious gains on my traffic. _The fact is, as I stated above, is that Bing, Yahoo and the others have allowed my content to consistently grow without egregious, death penalty measures with absolutely no way to easily determine why and nobody at Google to begin to explain the above. They are simply not reachable. Unless someone can point out something that might explain the atom bomb being dropped, I'm going to have to resort to doing the only thing that worked post-Panda 2.2 and see if that changes something. If it does again, it will be a rather remarkable indication and potential confirmation of what some theorists believe.

Thanks for your response. The truth is that if a few bad links sets you back to the dark era, it's not worth the effort of putting out content whatsoever. I'm under the impression, as are most, that you'd have to do something pretty severe to blow up a legitimate website up for 18 years with hundreds of thousands of legitimate posts.

I've looked through the small stuff. If there are a couple of bad links, we'll get rid of them and use the disavow tool since there is little we can do to control what happens outside of our site. But the issue is that Google never warned us that there is any problem. Don't know why they would. But the real indicator that something must be wrong is that a scraper was rating a PR 2 for our own posts and we went to zero for an extended period of time now. The missing +1 votes even further suggests some problem.

I can tell you (I have significant legal experience) that chances are you will need to spend huge sums of money trying to prove your slimy competitor libeled you. Libel cases are the most difficult to make and you will almost certainly need to put the money up front to fund your own lawsuit. So let's answer this question - how will you be able to identify who put up all those bad links to cause your negative SEO? Send information subpoenas to every site, hoping that they have IP address info for every bad link that was posted? This is why slimy companies will do this - very difficult if not impossible to prove and the money taking you down is worth the investment and price of doing business. It's tough and dirty. Perhaps best to worry just about keeping clean.

Thomas -

Thanks for your comment. Much of the general information you're sharing I've been through for quite a while, although I know it is well intended. Scrapers will target my site periodically and no matter what program I'd use, takedown notices are just a matter of what we need to do periodically.

I just replied to someone else about the links you're pointing to above as "junk" and spam. Sites like mine have been around since the 1990s and what you call "spammy looking junk" looks more "dated" to us. We've seen this back when the web was young. Take a look at every link you've listed above - none of them are obvious garbage. In fact, they look more like lists someone compiled on their site long ago and they typically neglect them or don't bother to update their look for the new millennium. FYI, I use a backlink checker that uses technology from another service similar to MOZ.

• http://www2.pair.com/budg/ - I notice several high ranking websites around for a long time (like lectric law.)
• http://www.srikumar.com/freebies/freebies.htm - Has all my major competitors, include some of the largest you've missed.

The pages you've pointed to aren't a horde of blog spam, which is true spam. And even assuming some backlinks might be bad, you don't exactly go from a PR 6 to a zero, lose all your +1s for that.

I know my competitors very well. Lawyers.com is billion dollar company. You've missed a few others who can afford to pay the SEO firms you've listed $150 an hour or what they are asking to patiently inspect links and eventually remove some, add others and, in many cases, plant articles on very high PR sites in order to build traffic. Some of the links back are in directories. It was common for people to try to populate them with popular sites to grow them. Why do I have to audit these directories and disavow websites that aren't great but not necessarily spam? (e.g. linksnow). I don't think these are devastating our site. We didn't lose some PR - we lost ALL value. That's an insane result. If a few bad links knocked me to zero, 90% of the Internet should be well into the negative PR numbers and that isn't happening - as scrapers are actually ranking for my own content. That is easy to spot but for some reason, Google is still rewarding this.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to try to help. With a death penalty like this, there has to be evidence of a lot larger a crime and it should be conspicuous. I'll review the links but it's not likely the cause is here.

Regarding the issue of bounce - I will only say that IMHO Google may severely penalize you for what you let it see (Analytics, Adsense, etc.) I've always wondered whether having bots thrown at your site that would increase bounce rate would affect a site. Call it paranoia but my data seemed to indicate that the less Google knew the better this site did. Nobody would know how Google really takes into account except Google. Almost everything else is our speculation. Good luck, truly.

While I'd love to comment (and I know you're hesitant to provide a URL), I don't think that you'll get any truly useful advice that would help since there could be so many reasons why you'd encounter issues after a site design change. The useful advice comes from those who will analyze your site, see what changed and determine what changes (or open items poorly done or overlooked) might be a good indicator of how your rankings dropped. Everything else is speculating in the dark. There is no substitute to taking a good look, IMHO.

This is a short response but you should make sure that you look at where you are in the SERPS:

1. Logged into Google

2. Not logged into Google (that's key!)

3. Using different countries' search engines since your rank will probably vary between US and CA.

I'm suffering from a similar problem such as you. My first site was up back when people didn't know what a search engine was. There are a couple of things I'm noticing that give me cause for concern based upon SEO people researching my links and coming to the same (and wrong) conclusion.

Frequently these SEO experts would check backlinks, see domains that had pages that looked like extremely poor. Cheap looking design, missing images, sometimes with long blogrolls too, etc. They told me I was getting significantly downgraded because of these spam pages from my obvious link campaign. After review, I realized that all the links were legitimate (we didn't do a link campaign.) The sites they spotted had pages that probably weren't changed in at least a decade, similar to that geocities look. Blogrolls were really popular many years prior to anyone even knowing what a nofollow link is. I'm wondering whether I'm getting penalized by Google as a result of these because I can't find any reason for our severe penalty and you're suffering from the same.

One other item - those with the gold will make the rules and get content placed everywhere, obviously for a payment behind the scenes. Large SEO shops are selling these placements and there seems to be little the small to mid sized websites can do to maintain their position before the domino effect kicks in. I'm wondering whether you need to increase backlinks to at least remain in the game.  Wishing you the best of luck.

18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6  Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery.

Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s.

I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank?

What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.