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Hello fello Mozzers,

I have just read a post about 301 redirects on the Blog. A great read and has provided me with a bit more insight and highlights what could be a potential issue for a managed site I look after.

On this website I manage, I have inherited a .htaccess file with literally hundreds of non file based existant 301 links.

e.g. redirect 301 /dealerbrandname http://www.domain.com/

So we have lots of dealers and they place a link on there site to http://www.domain.com/dealerbrandname

We then redirect it to the homepage or a relevant topic page along with some tracking variables. Is this likely causing significant issues, based on the post I read I imagine it will be, but anymore thoughts on this would be hugely helpful.

CheersTim

Could the meta title be being pulled from an external source - causing an override?

I noticed this morning a drop in the SERPs for a couple of my main keywords.

And even though this is a little annoying the more pressing matter is that Google is not displaying the meta title I have specified for the majority of my sites pages, despite one being specified and knowing my site has them in place.

Could this sudden change to not using my specified title be the cause of the drop, and why would they be being displayed by Google in the first place, when they are there to be used.

The title currently being displayed inthe SERPs is not anything that has been specified in the past or from the previous latest crawl etc. Any insight would be appreciated.

Tim

I do agree that not spending too much time is critical, as it can become hugely time consuming and inefficient. But getting rid of a few is also a help.

Being so time consuming was the main reason in my initial post, to see if there were any quicker options available to web masters, e.g. sending google a list of links that you wish for it to disregard due to not being generated by yourself... unlikely I know... :o(

Thanks for the response.

We have been made aware of a series of irrelevant links on some rather dodgy sites.

• http://www.designerdogstop.com/level-static/http://www.bestfirepits.net/some-of-the-best-vacations-for-families/2010/05/05/
• http://whatcigarsdoismoke.com/cigar-lighters/cigarette-cigar-2/
• http://dollfuss.org/build-bear-hawaii/

Absolute rubbish im sure you will agree. These links must surely be causing our link profile some damage.

They are currently wordpress sites with no means of contacting the authors. What ways and means are there of removing these negative pages and links?

Cheers all, any help appreciated.

I have been looking at the organic keyword search position rankings on Google. I think

Thanks for the insight Sven,

I have a had a look over the stats for the main keywords in our analytics and there is certainly a downward trend for our main keywords. I have been keeping track of the Ranking for our main terms via the rankings tool on SEO moz - we dropped as low as 10 from around position 5 since the Penguin update. In the last ranking results we had climbed back up to 8.

According to Google Queries we have had no impressions or clicks for our main terms for the last three days - I am hoping this is due to it needing time to catch up.... otherwise something is very wrong.

Due to the seasonality of our market, as soon as the weather is nice people go out in their motorhomes and caravans, this will also affect traffic to a degree.

NOTE - just looked in webmaster tools - this does only go up to the 27th of May not to the 30th so a couple of days behind.

Hello All,

Just a quick question.

Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings.

The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)

I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories.

Put in place before I started here

Any help truly appreciated.

Regards

Tim