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Hi David

Without looking at the backlink profile of either domain I can't be certain, but it very much looks like that 301 redirect has brought about the penalty.

It doesn't matter if there are 30 bad links or 30000, if a Google quality reviewer believes the backlinks are poor quality, you run the risk of being penalised.  I wonder whether you are seeing all of the links at the moment - it might be worth using the Link Detox tool for a more comprehensive backlink audit than Open Site Explorer can offer.  This may reveal more poor quality links.

But it sounds like you're pretty confident that the 301 redirect has caused the penalty.  Rightly or wrongly, I'm afraid it's not up to us to judge what links are "bad", it's Googles.  So while you and I may think the old backlinks are OK, Google may take a different view.  I would also rule out any chance the penalty may have become because of an influx of new links (via the 301) - having set up a number of new websites and redirected old domains (with hundreds of thousands of links) I've never seen this trigger a penalty by itself.

I'd put your theory to the test and remove the 301 and send a reconsideration request detailing you have done so.  From what I can tell, that would remove the penalty.  Run a deeper audit of your backlinks to see if yet-to-be-revealed bad links are present.  And if you really want some authority links from other websites to pass through to the new domain, contact them manually and ask them to update their URLs.

Hope this helps

Personally, I would nofollow.

It's just being proactive - there's a pretty good chance with that amount of links (all the same anchor text as well, I presume? Could be a problem even if branded) that he may get flagged by Google for a penguin penalty.  If it was this and only this that trigged the penalty, then it might be a quick and easy fix - but you cannot be sure.

What you can be sure of is that if you make these nofollow, you're much more unlikely to get pinged by the Penguin.  So, in a choice of nofollowing now and maybe taking a slight rankings hit, or riding it out and maybe getting pinged in the future and getting a big rankings hit for an indeterminable amount of time, I'd go with the option that I could control.

There could be a compromise - if he can get the links on each listing removed, but can be listed a single time on the homepage as a partner, or on a partners page, if done in a natural way then this could still pass on the majority (if not all) of the link strength, while being a lot more safer in Google's eyes.

If the pages will be exact duplicates, you could do either of the options you've given above, or you could use a canonical tag and point it to the original page.

My person preference would be to add a noindex tag on the head tag of the code, so it would be:

Of course, this means the page won't be indexed which is a shame as a knowledge base can be a great way of pulling in long-tail keyword traffic.  If you ever wanted to rank it, however, the content would need to be made unique.

Hope this helps.

Hi Mike

It's quite difficult to say, but I would offer this bit of solace: When I've seen sites that have been hit with a Panda penalty in the past, it has happened a day or 2 after receiving a similar warning to the one you have reported.

And similarly, although not the same penalty, people have reported that they have received an unnatural link warning and then 2 or 3 days later have seen the big drop in rankings and traffic.

Both of these instances indicate that the notification of a possibly penalty comes before the penalty itself.  If (and it is an 'if') this is the case with your site, then the big drop in traffic can be attributed to the penalty that you thought was coming, rather than the action you took yourself.

It does sound like the crawl and the warning would result in potential duplicate content issues or low quality content issues, aka a Panda penalty.  I'd take out due diligence and make sure that you have not blocked any key landing pages via robots.txt file or by any other method - always a good idea to double check.  However, if that's not the case, I would say that the drop is because of the penalty that was likely coming, rather than what you've done.

The next step would be to wait until the algorithm refreshes - Panda updates rollout at least twice a month now so hopefully your efforts should be rewarded soon enough and the traffic will return.

However, it is worth considering that just because the Penguin algorithm updates on a given day, does not mean its impacted is limited to the day or the days that follow.  What I think we've seen with Penguin 2.0 is the impact of the algorithm updating has been spread out over refreshes, so we can't completely rule out this as Penguin action as well.  SERP volatility checkers like Mozcast seem to suggest that this probably isn't the case, all was quiet on August 13th on that algorithm, but it's worth bearing in mind.

I hope this helps - do take my advice with a pinch of salt as it's an educated guess from my experience rather than any definitive evidence.

If you don't overuse "manipulative" anchor text (such as exact match keywords) and don't have these links site-wide, but on a select few pages, then they'll be absolutely fine. If you think as well, if you've worked with these companies and they've been happy with your work, it is only natural for them to want to link to you in a sort of testimonial page.

However, If the link appears site-wide and in the footer, such as "Designed by LinkedCompanyName", then that could certainly trigger a penguin penalty.

Like I say, about the Sunzu links I wouldn't worry about them just now.  Keep a little note of them for future reference.  Chances are that if Google has seen them and devalued them then they're dealt with, as far as any ranking is concerned.

By default, your homepage will nearly always be the most frequently crawled page on the site, so I wouldn't worry about featuring some of the news section on there - especially if you were going to replicate it and the content.  Keep the freshness of the content on the health page.

Attaching a blog could be a way to get Google to crawl more often as well, but I wouldn't write one for that purpose.  I'd write one to attract people to the site - either through long-tail keywords targeted through the blog post or by simply producing some stellar content that will get people to stand up and take notice.

Write for the user, not the search bot.

Hi there Ash

On the contrary, I think Google and Bing are recognising the blog and indexing it well.

With this site search, you can see over 89 URLs indexed - it looks as though Google is indexing the blog posts and the categories just fine.

What were you expecting to see from this?  If there was something specific, I can try and see if it's being achieved.

As a couple of general points, it's a good idea to link some of your blog posts to other internal pages on your site, for example linking the words "funeral plans" in your blog posts to your funeral plans page.  That means that if this page gains links/social shares, the SEO "strength" will pass through that blog post to your key landing pages.

As an aside, the URL structure looks pretty long.  With the postID and number subfolders, your blog posts are 5 subfolders deep.  Sometimes this can be a bit of a barrier for Google and Bing to index your page, although as said before that doesn't look to be a problem.  If at all possible, ask your developer to remove those two subfolders - 3 folders deep is usually the recommended site structure.  This isn't that essential, however.

This often crops up and I wonder whether it's associated with scaremongering or a witch-hunt.

Google will not blanket devalue guest blog links.  It will devalue crap.

If it's on a crap website, then the link will be devalued - just as they were on article sites and directories.  Google can understand the quality of a website fairly well, and so should the user.

If it's a crap guest post, then you can presume that Google will devalue it. The algorithm's ability to interpret quality may still be in question, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that its working towards identifying content, context and relevancy a lot more - so make sure your posts have it.

That's all there is to it.  Guest posting is still one of the best ways to drive traffic and build links, provided that your content is worth reading.  If it's simply rubbish or posted on spammy sites, then it's going to be penalised.  I don't understand why people think it's "very hard" to identify a quality guest post - it isn't for you or me, and it's the human aspect that Google is trying to replicate in its algorithm.

A crusade against all guest posts? Not gonna happen. I wouldn't give it a moments more thought - instead, I'd concentrate on producing quality pieces of content that people will want to read, share and link to.

Hi Christina

If the referrer is the sitemap, it means that the SEOMoz crawler has been directed to that page because of the sitemap you have submitted.

If you're getting 404 errors or access errors for certain pages and they are only able to be accessed via the sitemap, then it's a good idea to remove those URLs from the sitemap altogether.  It doesn't make sense to have URLs listed in your sitemap if those URLs don't exist or have restricted access.

A cleaner sitemap will ultimately help in the long run.  Hope this helps.

Hi there Sara

GTMetrix will be able to do this for you.  It's a free tool that lets you measure response time and also suggests improvements based on Google Page Speed and YSlow guidelines.

What I'd recommend is registering your email (for free) so you can customise and save your test.  You can tweak it on testing location, what browser to use (specifically for mobile you can select Chrome for Android) and what connection to use - again, you can choose a 3g or 2g connection to get some idea for load times on mobile networks, not just on wireless.

Hope this helps.

1 point is pretty negligible, so I wouldn't worry at all.  However, this can be explained.

A number of things go into how Domain Authority is scored.  You can find them via this link.  PA/DA is in a constant flux, so your site may not have changed at all, but the quality of the sites linking to you may have done.

It should also be remembered as well that the Mozscape index changes in size each time it's crawled.  This month's update saw 77 billion URLs crawled, up from 70 billion the month prior.  You can see a history of updates here.  With an increase of 7 billion URLs, it is easy to see why the domain authority average may have changed for your site.  The index may have crawled more or less websites linking to you, the websites that link to them and so on and so on.

A drop of 1 point doesn't indicate you've done anything wrong on your end.  Indeed, if your competitor has dropped as well, I'd share it's more to do with the index and API calculations changing slightly than you.  But a fall of 1 point is very small, so it's normal service as far as I can see.

Hope these links help clarify a few points.

Hey there Mark

The access issue may have effected the traffic and rankings, but that should have recovered by now if it was the sole issue.  Similarly, given the kind of shop you're running, you'd assume now would be the peak time for seasonality, so I think it's a fair assumption that something could be up with your site.

At first glance, it looks like Panda/duplicate content could be an issue with your site - as it is with many ecommerce stores.  Just to use these two examples: example 1, example 2, you can clearly see that these two pages have nearly identical content.  I think it's fairly safe to say that, in the Googlebot's eyes, these pages could be seen as duplicate content.

I haven't checked other examples, but given the nature of your business you may have a wide range of similar issues, potentially causing a big duplicate content issue that may have triggered the Panda algorithm.  In doing so, traffic would have fallen.

There could be a number of other reasons - is organic search historically the main driver of traffic to your site?  Has its dropped been the main driver for your site's drop overall?  Have you seen rankings for certain keywords drop as well - and have those drops been sharp?  If the answer is yes to all of those issues, to me it would look more and more like a Panda problem.

The remedy to this is to either deindex duplicate pages (not ideal obviously), make the content unique enough on each page or work out a solution that serves up the product once, but the one product page includes all colour variations - just as you have done with the sizes for those pages I linked to.

Of course, if you were relying on rankings and organic search traffic before and those rankings have now dropped, it could be an inbound link issue.  Check google webmasters for any messages about unnatural links, but if you can rule that out it may just be that the links pointing to your site are not passing on the strength they once were, or that competitors have entered the market with a stronger link profile.  Earning authoritative and valuable links could increase your rankings, should a penalty not be present on the site.

Hope this helps to at least diagnose the root of the problem and if you'd like to chat further about it, feel free to ask away here or PM me.  It can be terribly frustrating when this happens, but the problems are very much fixable so don't be too disheartened.

Hi Eric

To me, it looks like you've identified the problem. In the technical sense, it looks like your website is suffering from a over-optimisation/Penguin penalty.

If you look at the links pointing to your product pages, there are a number of unnatural signals.  Virtually all of the links come from shademakers.com (unnatural), they all have commercial or targeted anchor text (unnatural) and they are all dofollow, thus passing SEO equity.

The fastest way to remedy this in my eyes would be to remove the links.  You could 301 redirect, but I believe removing the links on shademakers.com looks more like a conscious effort to stop this manipulative linking (as it stops any link equity being passed altogether, which is more what the Google algorithm will want to see).

It's worth noting here that, since this is likely an algorithmic penalty, it may take a while for the removal of these links to be seen and reconsidered by that part of the algorithm (and there's nothing unfortunately you can do to accelerate this).  Similarly, those links were likely to be the cause of the big jump in rankings (in tandem with your on-site SEO), so in order to see top 3 rankings again you may need to earn high quality and relevant links to those pages with healthier anchor texts.  The third scenario is a sort of combination of the two - the bad links have been devalued but no negative action on your site has been taken by the algorithm - in which case you just need to earn high quality links in order to recover the rankings.

I would remove the links completely and try to earn better links.  Once rankings start to pick up, you may want to link from the shademakers.com site again (if it's getting any relevant traffic), but if you do so I would almost certainly use branded or non-keyword rich anchor texts and also use no-follow links - to show that you're not trying to pass PageRank or any SEO link equity, but just want to link to a relevant site.

Hope this helps.

The man himself says it shouldn't take longer than a couple of weeks.

I've found this to be largely accurate - I think the longest I've waited for was 17 days (but hey, who's counting?!)

Hope this helps.

Hi Mark

I'm surrounded by 8 monitor trading desk setups at the moment so the only light I'm getting is artificial!

In the second URL provided, I can see you added a canonical URL to that page - but the page is still being indexed by Google.  When did you implement the tag?

That would actually be a good way of making sure Google doesn't index the second URL and thus the duplicate content, but it may take a while for Google to recognise the tag.  I can see the first URL was last cached on April 18 and the second URL not cached at all - I'm wondering once it has been updated the URL might be deindexed and this aspect of duplicate content might be solved.

Regardless, it does sound like you're on the right track to solving those problems and disabling them altogether does sound like a good idea for now.  Hope it helps get the site back on its feet.

Hi Eric

The manual action appearing in the site is not a bad sign to have at all - it shows that it was not algorithmic action and so now that you've identified the problem you should be able to get it removed ASAP.

Yes, I would remove all the links and then in your reconsideration request mention exactly what you have here.  The manipulative links were unbeknownst to you, you've identified them all, removed them all (and cite the URLs where they have been removed) and you should be good to go.

To me it looks like these were made in genuine error and not meant to manipulate rankings; you should mention that. It's not everyday where they get reconsiderations where 100% of the bad links will be removed, as in your case, so it should be pretty positive.

These requests typically take 5-7 days, but I have seen them take up to 2 weeks, just an FYI.

In theory, yes it should.

The 301 is designed to pass on all of the link data of a page to its new destination.  That means if the redirected page has a spammy link profile etc., then it is being passed on to the new destination.  The latest video blog from Matt Cutts says that pretty much all of this strength is passed on.

Breaking the 301 will break that link.  It might take the crawler a while to recognise this, but it should do over time.  How long is quite hard to say - case in point, I saw an old URL ranking in the SERPs for over 2 weeks (while redirecting to a new page that ranked 1 place above it), before it was dropped from the SERPs. By the same principle, it could take awhile for the crawler to recognise that the old redirected links are not being pointed to the new page any more.

The idea of the canonical tag is to help search engines identify the original URL and content and to ignore any versions of it.  If set up correctly, search engines will ignore and/or deindex the page with a canonical pointing to another page.

Therefore, on that premise, you are asking search engines to ignore the other page and all of its subsequent PageRank, authority, strength etc.

If you have a self referring canonical tag, this is telling Google to treat that URL as the originator and to ignore any other subsequent versions that are created either by yourself on another page, your CMS through a dynamic URL or query string or by people taking the content from your site and posting it elsewhere.  In essence, it should not effect PageRank or authority at all.

Hope this helps.

Hi Iris

I don't think you have anything to worry about here.  This is best practice and having 100 redirect lines in there won't make an impact on site load speed.

It goes without saying that the more lines you add, the larger the file becomes and the larger the file is, the longer it takes to process - but for the .htaccess file I've only ever seen this become an issue when you're looking at 10,000s of redirects.  When you get to that stage, its more of a problem with how you're entering the redirects (using individual URLs rather than redirecting whole subdirectories, for example) rather than it not being good practice.

So, in short, you look to be fine to me!

Not really. By definition of the PageRank algorithm, having an external link on your page means the PageRank the page has passes off the website, but the amount lost (if any) put against the amount gained by having the link is negligible.

The main concern is that if your website is deemed to be linking to poor quality, spammy or hacked websites, then Google may look upon yours dis-favourably  But I can't see that being a problem here.