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Hi Misi

Don't mean to be pedantic, but can I ask: "Why?"

In previous years, I think Wordpress was a better platform than Joomla in terms of SEO.  But that gap has definitely decreased and not too long ago there was a great blog post on making your Joomla site SEO friendly.

I don't see a major difference between the two nowadays.  Jooma isn't as friendly straight away as Wordpress, but can be if done correctly.

Unless you're absolutely set on switching to WP, I'd maybe save yourself the hassle and optimise your Joomla website better.  If you already have good rankings, I think it would be a mistake to change simply because wordpress is seen as "better" for SEO.

Absolutely, would love their insight too. It certainly has me stumped as to why it has happened and I've only give a few potential causes, nothing definite. So would love to see as well!

Yes, potentially it could.  It always used to be the way that it didn't matter who linked to you, you wouldn't be penalised for it.  But that all changed with the Penguin update. Now who links to you, where they link from and how are all very relevant.

I have seen these things sort of "fix themselves" in a few days, but it's a good idea to stay vigilant. If you ever need a hand, just drop me a line.

Hi there

Well, in theory, most if not all of the "strength" or your links will pass on to the new site if you use a 301 redirect. We've had a recent Matt Cutts video talking about this.

In order to streamline the process, I would replicate an identical site structure on your new .com site.  Same /sub-folders/, same primary article names, as similar as you can make it to you .net domain, the better.

This will allow you to 301 redirect the old domain to the new one, pointing the equivalent pages and sub folders to each other - so domain.net/sub-folder/ to domain.com/sub-folder/ and domain.net/article1.html to domain.com/article1.html.  This way not only are you ensuring that the user is following the same path as before, but all of the "strength" and previous links are being pointed to their new, equivalent pages.

It's such a big help if you can keep the site structure the same.  Now, there may be a case for not wanting to redirect everything - thousands and thousands of 301s can slow down the .htaccess file, not to mention the time it may take. Some pages may not be worth transferring anyway if they have no link juice or are never visited by users.  In this case, it's perfectly acceptable to let these return a 404 error.

If you're looking to get the URLs you want to redirect on bulk, look in your XML sitemap. Download that and extract the URLs from there and place them into Excel.  Most of the time the listed pages will be the ones you want to redirect.  Copy the list into another column, so you now have 2 identical lists.  Then simply use the Find & Replace tool on one of the columns, changing .net to .com.  You've now got all the URLs you'll want to put into your .htaccess file for redirecting.

Finally, it wouldn't hurt to contact some of the webmasters on the sites where you have your best links.  If you tell them you've moved to a .com domain and only that needs changing, they can do the leg-work for you and can ensure that your new domain keeps its strength.

Hope this helps - good luck with the move!

Hi Chris

That's a bit odd to say the least. Normally a loss or PR that dramatic means that Google might be penalising the site - although this normally means it goes to 0, rather than N/A.

You're right in thinking that there are much better metrics out there, but I think this certainly worth investigating.  I'd advise you to keep a close eye on your traffic in analytics and your rankings - it may be penalty related. Only briefly looked at your link profile but there does seem to be one or two links that are a bit unnatural (such as this one) - but like I say, haven't checked fully so could just be the exception to the rule.

Has your hosting or domain expired or renewed recently? I've seen PR fall because of that on some occasions. Also, have a look at your webmaster tools for errors - specifically for any crawl errors that may have occurred, like 403s.  Check for any spike there.  If there is one, it may reoccur, so you'd obviously want to remedy any problem there. You might also want to check your robots.txt hasn't had anything added to it by mistake.

Failing that I can't really think what may have caused your toolbar PR to fall.  My advice would be to watch your site very closely over the next week.  Hopefully, everything will be fine and the PR may return.  Worse case scenario, however, will be a penalty.  Look for any sharp traffic or ranking falls.  If you have the time, you may want to go through your backlink profile and make a note of any poor quality or suspicious links, just to give you a head-start should you need to remove them.

Sorry, I assumed you meant you were hotlinking images, rather than just embedding them.  If you're just using tags with no <href> defined (so just embedding, not hotlinking), then you're right - this won't cause a problem.</href>

Hi James

A lot of this will depend on the site you're linking to.

It's long been a part of the ranking algorithm that if you link to sites that are seen negatively by Google, due to spam/malware/etc, then your site may be viewed negatively itself.  Without knowing where your blogger has been linking from, it's hard to say - but it's worth running a check just in case.

The OSE crawler is a lot smaller than GWT, so some discrepancy is to be expected, I'm afraid.

Have you seen any other rankings of yours fall for different keywords and, primarily, different landing pages? If not, that would pretty much rule out any penalty.

Having said all that, I think your first paragraph provides the reason why your rankings have fallen.

My guess would be (provided that the links haven't been dropped) is that Google has devalued your links from the infographic directories.  Like normal directories, I can't see much of a user benefit at all on a site like this, which makes it a stand-out target for Google to devalue the link.  We've seen recently that Google looks to be heading towards continuous devaluation of links over a number of weeks/months, as reported in this article. I'd go along with this school of thought - for instance, on one site I've seen homepage keywords dropped while the rest of the site was fine - the homepage had a number of directory links which I now believe to be devalued.

Be sure to double check that the links have not simply fallen off and that other pages on your site have not been penalised.  Should you draw a blank there, this is what my semi-educated guess would be - a devaluation of directory style links, resulting in a fall in rankings.

Not at all, I think it's quite obvious to both the user and Google that you're not doing anything manipulative, but merely linking to your (well-earned, no doubt) citation in a major publication.

Furthermore, you're never going to be seen to be linking to a suspicious site if it's the NYT!

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.

Reciprocal links get a pretty bad rap, for pretty solid reasons.  Link exchanges with masses of sites, whatever the relevance, does look pretty unnatural and may flag up as a link network. We definitely don't want that.

However, if done sparingly and kept to really relevant and related sites, then it's a nice traffic sharer, link builder and authority builder.  SEOMoz and Distilled pretty much have reciprocal links on the go, but that's because they're highly related and offer great content and work for one another.  In turn, as a user you may be more inclined to visit either one from the other's website, while the endorsement can serve as an authority check.

I'm quite a fan of legitimate testimonials where link reciprocation occurs. That can look natural and, again, is a nice trust builder.  I'd never go too crazy with reciprocal links and I'd only ever keep it to websites who are related to, have preferably worked or collaborated with you on a project and that you, yourself, would be proud to endorse professionally.

Follow that, and I think some reciprocal links can be OK. But there's no doubt that the tactic has been abused by some. Don't give Google any reason to think you've fallen into that bracket.

Can't see a problem with this at all.  In fact, it's fairly common practice.

Many companies buy domain names that feature their brand + a destination.  Some companies even buy the misspellings of the brand. For example, GTMetrix has bought http://www.gtmetrics.com, which 301 redirects straight to http://www.gtmetrix.com.

Provided these are redirects and nothing more, it shouldn't be a problem.  A problem would occur if your client started building manipulative and spammy links to one of these other domains, hoping that the 301 redirect would mask the suspiciousness and passed on the PageRank.  Just like all bad quality link building, this could cause problems.

Buying the domains and just redirecting them, however, shouldn't be a problem as it wouldn't be interpreted as trying to manipulate PageRank or pass any strength.  It's simply being done to protect the brand, which we know Google loves, if anything.  Should your client warrant an individual site for these locations in the future, you can then reverse the redirect and go for it.

The last thing you would want, in my opinion, would be thin content on these sites or the main site that only serves to attract local search terms and drive traffic to the site, without offering any real value to the user.  I think your potential client would be fine with what he's doing.

Just to clarify Laurence - you've moved to a new domain and on this new domain are the Japanese links?

I'm of the school of thought that you should only use the disavow tool when asked to.  By this, I mean that you shouldn't be proactive in disavowing suspicious links, unless you have been explicitly asked by Google to do so as part of an unnatural links warning penalty.  Google is pretty explicit in saying that you should only use the disavow tool as a last resort if you cannot get the links removed by contacting the webmaster.

I also think that Google is moving towards the direction of devaluing low-quality links on the fly, as per this article.  I can't imagine that these links would be anything other than that and so, for that combination of reasons, I'd leave the links be.

By all means, keep a note of the URLs if anything should happen in the future, but I think you'd be much better off by building your own links and brand persona with an inbound marketing strategy, rather than potentially wasting time removing links that may have already (or soon to be) devalued.

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.

They might be reporting that the keyword doesn't appear in the URL after the domain and TLD.  What I mean is, it may be saying that because the keyword isn't appearing like this: "http://www.domain.com/internet-marketing", the platform may not think it's appearing.

Whatever the technical reason is, I wouldn't worry about it much for two reasons.  First of all because, as you say, the keyword is there in the domain.  Second because having the keyword in the URL is a pretty insignificant ranking factor.  This report is a little dated now, but the SearchMetrics ranking factors show little correlation between the keyword appearing in the URL and the pages visibility in the SERPs.  I'm not one to optimise based on correlation factors, nor do I take everything in that report as gospel, but I am inclined to agree that, while having your keyword in the URL might provide a slight benefit, it's certainly not a definitive factor.

That's why I wouldn't worry too much, in your case, and move on.  Hope this helps!

Hey Daniel

You might be interested in reading this article and this thread on Inbound.org that brought this up a couple of weeks ago.

Too early to say what the potential ramifications might be, but I would say it's a safe assumption to make that Google is focusing more on more on promoting trustworthy brands.  Bringing the brand name to the front often helps the user navigate through the SERPs, as opposed to the SEO optimised titles that we see out there.

Think we'll have to wait and see on this one, but hopefully those 2 links can help for the time being.

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.

The Google AdWords keyword tool only provides an estimation of monthly search.  The figures are rounded up/down, so it's very unlikely that both would have an identical number of searches.  In addition, the number is based on PPC data (although you would still suspect that the user behaviour would be the same for organic).  Incidentally, Bing's keyword research tool provides exact figures.

The general takeaway is that there are roughly the same number of people searching for both terms month on month.  That's all you can really take from the keyword tool, as competition relates to PPC as well and not for the domains currently ranking on page 1. There is usually correlation between an increase in monthly searches and the competitiveness of the term, but sometimes you might just unearth a diamond in the rough.

Hope this helps to clarify some issues.

I would put in a 301 redirect from the old category URL to the new category URL.

You can learn more about redirection with this Moz guide, but what it will effectively do is stop both of the pages being crawled, resolving any duplicate content issue.

Hi Steve

If Google is saying there are still a few more links, then it might be an idea to manually review a few others that you haven't disavowed. I find the LinkDetox tool very useful for this.  It's free with a tweet and will tell you if a link from a site is toxic (the site is deindexed) or if it's suspicious (and why it's suspicious).  You still need to use your own judgement on these, but it might help you to find the extra links you're talking about.

However, there is a chance you have gone and disavowed every bad link, but still got the rejection.  In this case, I'd keep trying but make your reconsideration request more detailed.  Create an excel sheet and list the bad URLs and/or domains and give a reason explaining why you think they're bad links.  Then provide information on how you found their contact details.  If there are no contact us pages, check the whois registrar's email.  After that, say when you contacted them (give a sample of your letter to them too), and if they replied, along with a follow up date if you got silence.  If there are no details in the whois, explicitly mention that there are no contact details and so you have proceeded straight to disavowing.

Then list the URLs you've disavowed (upload the .txt file with your reconsideration email).  You've now told Google that you've found bad links, why you think their bad (also include how you discovered them), that you've contacted the webmaster on numerous occasions and, if no removal was made, you've disavowed as a last resort.  This is a very thorough process and uses the disavow tool in the way that Google wants us to - as a last resort to an unresponsive or anonymous webmaster.

Please forgive me if you've already done all this and it seems like repetition.  I only mention it because I've found it's best to be as thorough as possible with Google in these situations. Remember, a reconsideration request is manual and if they see that you've gone through all this effort to be reinstated, you've got a better chance of being approved.

Keep trying, mate.  It can be disheartening, but if you think it's worth the time and effort, then keep going for it.  I would bear in mind the alternatives, however, such as starting fresh on a new domain.  If you find yourself going round the bend with endless reconsiderations, sometimes your time, effort and expertise can be better put elsewhere.

All the best!