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A couple of years ago, my first agency experienced this issue. There were a few queries I kept a sharp eye on, and the site disappeared for most of the day. The site couldn't even be found for the company name. Later in the day, the site returned to it's previous placement.

That happened a few months after noticing a couple clients received referral traffic from banyan.google.com, via Google Analytics. Basically, The Eye of Sauron was watching the properties. This didn't appear to bother the higher-ups, but it bothered me.

I had advised that they stop doing what they were doing, but they could see no ill end to it. They went on to survive the first Penguin. Penguin 2 proceeded to knock them out of the running. After I left, there was no recovery. They were happy to continue on their way.

Your site may return, but it's unlikely. Are the people that say it will return in a few days the very same that put it in the situation?

Oddly enough it only seemed to happen on the /Servers page - for me at least. The first time I loaded the page, I got a broken image and an X-Out/Close box. That may help you hone in on the problem.

Found the site. I'm able to recreate the problem. Check the image attachment.

I ran it through tools.pingdom.com, a chrome extension called cast_sender.js isn't loading. But something makes me think there's an issue with the CSS that only crops up from time to time, like the JS blocks it every once in a while. There's both a Global.css and a Global.js in the head. There are also folder levels called /Script%20Library/ and /Style%20Library/.

There's a ton of JavaScript on the site, which I don't have time to get into. And honestly, I'm more of a WordPress guy. I managed to make the page load fail a few times out of a dozen or so tries. I think something in the JavaScript is causing the issue.

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I think the understanding of the situation may be a little twisted. Say I give you a phone to review, FOC. Say I give you a duvet to review, free of charge. Or further, I give you a paper plate to review - free of charge.

All of these things cost something. They may be seen as gifts, rather than materials for review if they aren't returned. Giving someone a 'gift' for a 'link' is the very definition of a paid link. The 'gift' is the material.

Any material incentive for a link or links is a paid link, in the strictest sense.

Edit: I didn't adequately answer the question. Below is what I would do:

If you want someone to review a product, ensure that you have a return policy in place. It's not a gift at that point. If they don't return the product, they're a no-good scallywag.

I would say it's terribly generic and you run the risk of a manual penalty. What you're soliciting is a paid link.

"We would like you to create a post about our company and we’ll compensate you for the time you’ve taken to do this. You can choose 1 item under $200 in the following categories and we’ll send it to you free of charge:

Accent Pillows

Sculptures

Accessories"

Paid links are bad, m'kay? The quoted text alone is enough to establish material incentive. So, do you want to run that risk?

Getting penalized for bad links requires a manual review or an algorithm update. Considering the vertical, I would imagine the backlink profile was pretty spammy to begin with. The payday loan update happened in June.

I think that is more likely your answer.

As William said, it's definitely niche dependent. You have to be mindful of other citation sources. However, your generic citation list is pretty close to what you need at the beginning of a campaign.

What happens if I move listings from one account to another?

How it was sold by Mihm at Local U Dallas was that Yext is pretty much like heroine. When you stop paying, the thrill is gone. And he positioned Moz Local as something different.

The documentation says that listings may go away if we stop paying, not 'will go away'.

So which is it?

Yext is fast, but it tends to create duplicates and inconsistent citations. Plus Yext is obviously one of the most expensive options. Moz is obviously slower, but it's definitely less expensive. Moz Local hits the high notes and I've noticed that I've had less issues with duplicates.

There's also a feature in Moz Local where you can nuke a duplicate with one button. With either one, you should probably still supplement your local campaigns with something like Bright Local or Whitespark.

I've used both Yext and Moz Local, but never the two in conjunction. There are also many listings that would become locked if you used Yext which could be counterproductive, and at least redundant, if you used Moz Local as well. I tend to look at it this way; "Do you want it done fast, or do you want it done right?"  If you quit subscribing to Yext, a lot of listings disappear and content added via Yext tends to revert (for anything they lock).

I have a lot going on right now, but if you PM the domain, I can take a look in a week or so.

Your question has been up here for a while today, and no one else had anything. Perhaps our European brothers and sisters will add a bit later.

The itemscope for LocalBusiness is wrapped in an HTML tag. Usually Schema markup is wrapped in a

. Perhaps that's one of the issues.

I tend to keep it tight, on one page, in the body content. I've never had any issues that way.

I haven't worked in that vertical so I'm not entirely sure what triggers these particular snippets. But here's a little more from Google about the subject. I managed to get them to show up by searching 'ticketmaster events'. Though the results were definitely skewed toward my location.

At any rate, look at how Ticketmaster marks up their pages. View the src, hit ctrl+f (if you're using Chrome - I don't use any other browser, unless I'm doing some cross browser tests.) and enter 'itemprop'. That will take you directly to the markup.

Seriously, if you don't do this - you're missing out.

If you haven't considered it yet, you should definitely use Schema Event markup. It's lovely when you're doing something that has pretty cut-and-dried examples. Just scroll to the bottom and click the Microdata tab.

Yes, there are a ton of bad bots one may want to block. Can you show us the robots.txt file? If they aren't blocking legit search engine bots, you're probably okayish. If they are actually blocking all bots, you have cause for concern.

Can you give us a screenshot from GWT?

I use a program called Screaming Frog daily. It's not malicious, off the shelf. I just want to crawl and gather meta data. I can tell it to disregard robots.txt. It will crawl a site until it hit's something password protected. There's not much any robots.txt can do about it, as it can also spoof user agents.

There are a couple of different meanings for a content hub. Both of which seem fine to me, so long as one doesn't churn out 'low quality' stuff. The latter would be more like a crap in fan approach.

So you could have a very high overview - but in-depth piece. Then you could write quality pieces that focus on facets of that. Ecommerce is definitely deep and wide enough for that approach. What could possibly be wrong with that?

A doorway page is generally just crap/cloaking. The link, to me, is a pretty good overview. So long as your pages aren't constructed or behave as such, you should be okayish.

Do the pages, inexplicably, get organic traffic? They don't appear to be indexed by Google. But it's a good idea to check your site analytics. Is there any way you can possibly add some content related to the iframes?

It appears that the pages iframe content about market trends and foreclosures. Could you possibly commission or produce some content that's 'evergreen' in regard to those markets and trends. That way, you may not have to update the content frequently.

So far my crawler has picked up 15 pages with iframe tags, out of 16,000 URLs. Granted, this isn't the whole picture - but I'm getting the impression it's not the bulk of your site.

It wouldn't take long to add a meta noindex tag to such a low percentage of pages. They aren't indexed anyway. Though I would noindex follow them. You never know... links and such from humans can flow into the site.

Though if you can add some content to those pages, it would be a very good idea to allow them to be indexed.

Thanks. Let us bask in the warm glow of Motorhead.

Most of my problems have been pretty well documented. When I run into something a little more obscure, it helps that I brew beer with a pretty awesome WP dev. The guy's either going to speak at the next Austin or Portland WordCamp, I'm not sure which atm. I would bug him, but the lucky chump is ramping up on a great new job.

The good news is it appears the site is hosted with Blue Host. Give them a call and they can more than likely roll it back without a fuss. The WP 4.0 update doesn't appear to have anything to do with security. So you definitely have a little breathing room to figure this one out.

I noticed that it looks like your right sidebar is missing, from your screen grab posted in WP Support. It would interest you to know that 4.0 made some pretty significant changes to the editor.

Without knowing what's banging around in /mu-plugins, I would probably look at NextGen Gallery first.

Hey Ruben,

One thing you may or not be aware of, your site appears to use Must-use plugins. You won't see them in the dashboard and they're always on. Mucking with them in production isn't entirely advisable. So if you weren't aware of /mu-plugins, I may have saved you some frustration.

This issue could really be caused by anything. You might get more mileage from the WordPress Support Forum.

I would advise cloning the install in a test environment, blocked by meta robots, robots.txt and a login for good measure. Make sure you only access the test environment in a dark room, whilst under a blanket. From there you can swap out themes, go into debug - turn off plugins - to your heart's content.

One thing you can do in production is make a new user and see if that changes anything. Right now, you have the same two users I've seen before.

I know it's a pain in the butt, but is TinyMCE allowing you to anchor text in Text mode?

Edit: Nope. I haven't had any issues after 4.0 updates. : /