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That is not going to look good to any search engine. Do you have many other external links?

I'll look forward to hearing how you go.

I've thrown together a quick 10 question survey to gather some information about the effect of the algorithm change. If you would like to be included you can go to Google algorithm change survey.

Sha

Well that is great news Tommo so then the next thing to look at is the content itself.

There is an explanation of the two stated algorithmic changes that relate most closely to your issue in the 2nd & 3rd dot points in this Google Webmaster Blog post.

Remembering that your problem is a drop in traffic, it seems that what Google is pulling from your page text is not moving searchers to click through to your site. So the challenge is to ensure that the text on the page includes the most useful information possible, written in such a way that it motivates people to want to buy the product. If you can get this right, whatever Google pulls from the page, it will be more likely to result in clicks.

This is not an easy thing to do, but if you can achieve this aim, you are likely to not only improve the current problem, but also improve sales conversions.

Again, I would run a test with a small number of pages and see what works.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Tommo,

Yes, I would say that it is very likely that what you are seeing is the result of what is loosely referred to as a "panda slap". This is why I suggested that I believe you need to look at the content of your pages.

The clue is that Google does not think your Titles accurately reflect what is on your pages and when it serves what it thinks is accurate, less people are clicking through.

If you want to test this, I would choose a small group of my highest value keywords, roll up my sleeves and work on improving the content. When the improvements are made, if rankings and/or traffic improves for those pages, you have your answer - and a clear strategy for fixing the problem

Also, when you say "product pages" my first thought is "are you using product information that is provided by manufacturers?". If the answer is yes, then you are likely to have a serious problem with duplicate content. Dr Pete talked about duplicate content and panda in his recent blog post Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Chammy,

With no other information on how he came to "lose" it, I would say his only hope is if he still has access to the Google Web Master Tools account, but he would have to act NOW, in the hope that the new domain owner is slow in getting things organized.

The process:

1. Purchase a new domain
2. Upload all content and ensure that site is ready to go as soon as new domain resolves
3. In Google Webmaster Tools, create a Site account for the new domain & verify it
4. In your old Webmaster Tools Site account, notify Google that the site has moved to new domain
5. Add a few pages of completely new content to the site on the new domain
6. In the Webmaster Tools Site account for the new domain, use "Fetch as Googlebot" to fetch each of the new pages and up to the maximum 50 most important pages in the site. (If a page is successfully fetched with this feature, you can manually add it to the index.)
7. Find all existing backlinks possible (using Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, link: search operator in Google, Bing & Yahoo) and contact as many of those webmasters as possible, advise of the domain change and ask them to correct their links.

As Alan pointed out, the only way that this will work for him is if the new domain owner is slow in setting up a GWMT account and he still has access to his existing account, so basically, he needs to act immediately and pray a lot

Incidentally, if he has already missed out on the opportunity to tell Google about the change of domain he should still follow the steps above for the new domain and try to get the links corrected if he can to get some quick traction where possible.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Tommo,

Without actually looking at your site, it is pure guesswork, but the key here would be that Google thinks what it is serving in the results page provides the searcher with a better insight into the content of your pages than the Titles and descriptions that you have loaded.

This would indicate that perhaps your Titles & descriptions may be misleading or keyword stuffed.

Since the overall result is that serving what Google thinks accurately reflects your page content has lead to a dramatic loss of traffic, I would say it is time to look very closely at the content on your pages and think about improvements that may make them more interesting and useful for users.

Sorry to bring bad news, but I hope it helps,

Sha

Hi Michael,

I haven't used the plugin myself, but have seen a number of references to it around the traps.

I do remember seeing some information that mentioned it is used by well known internet attorney Mike Young on his website mikeyounglaw dot com. Perhaps you could contact him direct and ask if he can offer any comment.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Ian,

The first place I would look to identify a reason for significant change in places position would be the number of reviews the site has and whether the other sites have gained more reviews.

In the USA, # 1 Listing in Google Places has an average of 33 reviews.

Other Page 1 Listings in Google places have an average of 26 reviews.

If other sites have increased the number of reviews they have and your site has remained static, or not also increased its reviews, this would account for the drop in position.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Michael,

You do not need to make any changes to your .htaccess file. Actually, if you 301 these URLs you will break your search so that it no longer works.

The solution I would use is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and tell Googlebot to ignore the parameters you are concerned about.

In your code, the ? says "here come some parameters" and the & separates those parameters. So, in the case you have quoted, the parameters are a, b, c, d.

Be aware of course, that Roger will still see these URLs as duplicates since he doesn't know about your private conversations with Google   This means that they will still appear in your SEOmoz report, but as long as you make a note of them so you know they can be ignored that shouldn't be a problem.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again,

There are a few really helpful posts you can take a look at that come from Duane Forrester. This one on the Bing Webmasters Blog is about developing great content.

Duane also gives some great Bing specific information in these Whiteboard Fridays from March, June and October.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Zack,

I think most things have been covered, but I would just add:

Start at the beginning. Your title needs to be capable of earning the clickthrough all by itself. The current title is ambiguous - is Austin a city in Texas or a guy with a name that starts with "A".

Consider the difference in impact of a slight wording change. For example "Why is Austin such an angry city?".

Hope that helps,

Sha.

Hi Dominic,

If you want pages to be removed from the index and ensure that they are not crawled again, you do exactly what you did with the others EXCEPT for one detail - the robots meta tag that you use should be "noindex, follow.

If you use "nofollow" you are trapping all incoming link value on that page and preventing it from flowing internally through your site.

Yes, you can add robots meta tags using the Yoast SEO plugin. You will find the features you are looking for in the "Indexation" section. Read the support documentation and on-page instructions carefully and you should be fine.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi strasshgoa,

Good advice from Calin - my guess would be that you don't have a redirect in place for that, or that you may have some other canonical issue, perhaps caused by having written the same URL differently in a link. An example of this would be using both www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.html in your code. While both call the same page, they are different URLs and therefore seen by the crawler as duplicate pages.

The easiest way to identify the problem is to click the blue links in the column to the right of the URL that has been identified as having a duplication issue in your Report. The number of URLs that have been identified as duplicates of the page will appear as a link and when you click the number you will see the list of URLs.

There is also a help page for each of the tools in the Pro App which you can access by clicking the tiny blue "? Help" link to the right of the page towards the top (directly opposite the summary link on the left of the page). The help page for Crawl Diagnostics is here.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Alex,

As far as I'm aware the crawl will always come back to the day that the first crawl was scheduled.

However, if you want to find out for sure, the quickest way to get a response would be to email the help team direct - help [at] seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi michelleh

The solution given by Dan above is the most reliable method as robots.txt will not block pages that googlebot finds via an external link to the page. Given the reasoning behind your desire to noindex, reliability is extremely important.

Also, you want "noindex, follow" rather than "noindex, nofollow" as the nofollow will trap any link value coming into the pages (from both internal and external links) and stop it from flowing through the site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks Alan,

I like a little mystery hunt

Hi Jason,

There is obviously something going on with this that is affecting what some crawlers are seeing on your pages.

I ran the Screaming Frog Tool and it shows that the majority of your pages have empty Titles even though I can see that there are Titles loading in the browser.

On checking your code I see that you are using the pragma directive meta element , but it actually appears below the Title element in the code.

Example from your code:

<head>
<title>Are You Socially Awkward? | Branding Blog | The Bullettitle>
**<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />**

So I ran the page through the W3C Markup Validation Service  and it also indicates that it sees no character encoding declaration:

No Character encoding declared at document level

No character encoding information was found within the document, either in an HTML meta element or an XML declaration.

So, I believe the issue here may be related to the fact that the pragma directive should appear as close as possible to the top of the head element ie before the Title element.

The following is from the W3.org documentation on declaring character encoding. You will see that there is specific reference to the fact that the use of the pragma directive is required in the case of XHTML 1.x documents as yours is:

For XHTML syntax, you should, of course, have " />" after the content attribute, rather than just ">".

The encoding of the document is specified just after charset=. In this case the specified encoding is the Unicode encoding, UTF-8.

The pragma directive should be used for pages written in HTML 4.01. It should also be used for XHTML 1.x documents served as HTML, since the HTML parser will not pick up encoding information from the XML declaration.

In HTML5 you can either use this approach for declaring the encoding, or the newly specified meta charset attribute, but not both in the same page. The encoding declaration should also fit within the first 1024 bytes of the document, so you should generally put it immediately after the opening tag of the head element.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again,

If it is queued then you should be fine.

SEOmoz Associates and staff do check questions periodically and would be able to either flag your question with the Help team (Associates don't have access to your account), or deal directly with the problem. This may take some time to happen though, depending on when you post and when they happen to visit.

If it is something that actually needs investigation or action from SEOmoz, then the quickest way to get an answer is to send it straight to the Help team.

Sha

Hi Chris,

Since the 404's don't appear to originate from the landing site you mentioned (I ran a quick check), there obviously are (or have been) links out there that point to those URL's. They could be links from another site, URL's that have been indexed in search engines or even old browser bookmarks.

Since you have no way of knowing where they might all come from, the 301 Redirect is the only complete solution. Philip is correct in suggesting that getting the links fixed at the source would be the ideal, but on its own this would still leave open the possibility of traffic coming from other sources.

Since the 301 Redirect serves the dual purpose of preserving the traffic AND sending a signal to the Search engines to deindex the old URL and replace it with the new target URL, source is eliminated as a factor.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Bethany,

If you are still seeing the message that says the next crawl is due to complete November 1st, then you will need to email the SEOmoz Help team direct and ask them to take a look at it for you - help [at] seomoz.org

Hope that helps,

Sha