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Bizarrely, I just answered quite a similar question to this about five minutes ago... Have you looked into the rel="alternate" tag option? Sometimes this is also referred to as the "href lang tag". You can place these on both the UK site and the .com, indicating that the UK site is "the same" but is targeted for UK customers only. This is basically canonicalisation with a geo-targeting twist: it negates the issue of duplicate content whilst reinforcing that the .co.uk is for UK audiences. More information on the tag is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en The .co.uk replacing the .com in UK SERPs won't be immediate, but this is a fairly safe option for rankings. Can you also use a javascript lightbox when a UK IP is detected on the .com site, explaining that UK customers have to purchase on the .co.uk and providing a link? It isn't good to automatically redirect based on IP, but a JS pop-up / lightbox will be ignored by search engines and will allow any remaining UK traffic to the .com to make its way to the appropriate website. Does this help? Cheers, Jane

I agree. Get rid of all the links that do not offer any benefit. Remove external links that don't point to good, relevant info. Disavow inbound links from any banned or questionable sources. Even if the links pointing at you are no follow, the links can still get visited. Remember, it's up to Google to respect the no follow rule. In some cases they may ignore it, if they think it's a relevant link.

I believe you have it misunderstood - they took action on the pages (on your website) which were benefiting from the unnatural links, rather than taking action on your entire website. You should still try to target and clean up the unnatural links. Best of luck!

The penalty is for links rather than thin or duplicate content, so at this stage I would primarily focus on your link profile.  If your content is indexed first with social signal pointing to it then Google will (should) know you are the originator. You will need to systematically go through every single link coming back to the site.  If you have any URLs 301ed to your site then those link profiles will need close examination too.  If you have had a manual penalty you can't mainly get it right, you have to completely clean out anything with a whiff of toxicity.  Keep a close record of all your activities, possibly using a tool like Rmoov, when your have exhausted manual attempts use Disavow then file a reconsideration request.  There are some good threads and posts on here covering all these aspects.

Chris is absolutely right. User experience should come first and foremost - in fact, forget about Google, think about the user. One idea I had was to combine all that great content into a PDF/eBook style download as such things are generally pretty good for link baiting, etc.

I agree with Andrew.  If you use GA, custom variables are the way to go.  You can actually put several parameters onto a page and have them in plain English without have to have a bunch of crazy stuff in the URL.  We use this on a site and it works quite nice. What is great about this too, is that since this is all in GA and if you have goal and goal values setup you get all types of insights into what are the most valuable categories etc on your site. If you do need to change the URL, setup the 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL and you should be fine, especially if you have a 1 to 1 relationship with those 301 redirects. One thing to consider, we have setup urls for articles etc that read like this www.domain.com/folder/######-page-name-slug-here.html The ###### is a ID number for the content that we use internally in our CMS.   We are then able to use the ###### as a fail safe in the URL structure if there is some other error in the url when it is types in or linked to for example www.domain.com/folder/######-page-name- www.domain.com/folder/######-page-name-slug-here. www.domain.com/folder/######-page www.domain.com/folder/######-page-nam www.domain.com/folder/######-Page-Name-Slug-Here.html www.domain.com/folder/######-page-name-slug-here.htm www.domain.com/folder/###### We setup our system so that if any of the examples wrong URLs occur above, the system can use the folder and the ID to always 301 redirect to www.domain.com/folder/######-page-name-slug-here.html As we have the ID as the absolute identifier.  We have found this helpful with the inevitable issues that may come up with an incomplete URL. Good luck!

Howdy! For starters please make sure you are using rel="alternative" and rel="canonical" meta tags. I also highly suggest that you have completely unique content of both pages. Do not recycle anything unless you are going to robot.txt the page that will be using the duplicate content. We also prefer the practice of using responsive design. Since this does not seem to be an option for you, I suggest that you do some further research into optimizing a mobile site. Hope my tips help you out! Ashley @ ScriptiLabs

Basically I don't see a reason to remove old news articles from a site, as it makes sense to still have an archive present. The only reason I could think of to remove them is if they are duplicate versions of texts that have originally been published somewhere else. Or if the quality is really crap...

Hello, In general, I believe it won't.  Why? because since your website is the main source, the other affiliates are all linking to that particular product page.  As such, even if these affiliates are scrapping your descriptions, they are all still linking back to that page.  This would suggest to Google, you are the main source, thus you shouldn't get penalised. Also, even if you change the description, new affiliates would still scrap the content.  However, I think once in a while provided if you have the resources, you should refresh your descriptions to keep the content fresh. Hope this helps.

Hi Michelle, So you're 404'ing the old sitemap URL yet you've placed the new sitemap at the same location...? If you want to private message me your domain, I'd be happy to take a look for you. There should be no need to 404 anything, just replace the old sitemap and Google will do the rest. Alternatively, just recreate the new sitemap index at a new location such as domain.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml. Thanks

Nathan hello I think u solved my problem, the index of old sitemap seems to be the source of the problem kind regards michelle

Thing is some times Google has blocks on specific sites, I have noticed this with sports betting and gaming sites in the past. Sites may be accepted a few years ago. Also from my experience you need very high quality content and you need to be producing content at a fast rate. A good post from the SEOmoz blog can be found here, about getting into Google news: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-seomoz-gained-1000s-of-visits-from-google-news

To tell you the truth it is actually very easy , but you have to familiar yourself with .htaccess HTTP REWRITE engine .. Seriously it took exactly 2 lines of code to detect and 301 redirects walla.mywebsite.com into www.mywebsite.com/walla HTTP Rewrite is an extremely useful tool, if you are not familiar with them , please go here http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html (or just google http rewrite redirect)