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Hi Shawn, 1, if you spot clearly spammy and unnatural links.. go ahead and disavow them. Keep in mind that there is the possibility to disavow entire domains. Here for more information about it. Disavow backlinks - Google Search Console. 2, No, sitewide links from a blog or in any part of your own website won't be a cause of penalty like this one. Google is able to recognize sitewide links a few years back. I wouldn't worry about that. 3, There are many areas to focus after an organic penalty. I'd suggest trying to understand which queries and URLs are the ones losing traffic and rankings, mostly from Google Search Console. Then, analyze what's going on with the User Experience and Site Speed, comparing your website with the ones that outrank you. And, last but not least, content! Check your content whether is the one that should be answering user's queries. Hope it helps, Best luck. Gaston

That almost looks like... your client doesn't have WordPress actually installed on their sub-domain at all. It looks like they set up a 'something.wordpress.com' site, which WordPress actually hosts - and somehow overlayed their own sub-domain over it (using DNS / name-server shenanigans) If that is true then, since WordPress hosts the blog, there's not much you can do. If it is a local WordPress install that does exist on your client's actual website instead of being 'framed' in (or something shady like that) - then I haven't seen this error before and it seems really odd. It smacks of someone trying to cut corners with their hosting environment, trying to 'be clever' instead of shelling out for a proper WP install. Clearly there are limitations... Ok, there's only one other alternative really. This is also technical though and I don't know if it wold be any easier for your dev guys but... You can send no-index directives to Google without altering the site / web-page coding, as long as you are willing to play around with the (server-level) HTTP headers There's something called X-Robots which might be useful to you. You need to read this post here (from Google). You need to start reading from (Ctrl+F for): "Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header" As far as I know, most meta-robots indexation tag directives, can also be fired through the HTTP header using X-robots It's kinda crazy but, it might be your only option

As Red mentions, you're actually hosted on WordPress.com, not .org (which is the self-hosted version of WP) To resolve the specific error you're asking about... It's telling you that to be able to use the custom code features that are available, the settings for your domain name at your registrar should be pointing to the nameservers at WordPress.com, not the nameservers you're currently using (likely the registrar's own nameservers). Hope that helps? Paul

Hello Shawn, Please see http://www.goinflow.com/mobile-optimization/ . It sounds like you need to do two things: 1. Use the VARY HTTP Header response. 2. Apply a rel canonical tag on the mobile version, which points to the desktop version.

Thank you!