Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Jamie, thanks very much.  I am ranking #1 for TrophyCentral, but dropped off the charts for trophies (we had been on page 1 for many years), so we are pretty sure it is a penguin issue, but we have not been able to figure out what's causing the problem.  We have no manual actions against us.

I have been reluctant to change the home page focus too much since I thought the home page was the most "powerful" and trophies are a big focus item for us.  I also noticed our competitors have a similar setup (ex. crownawards is #1).

I hear what you are saying though, so maybe I will reduce the focus to a different variation and more focus (like trophy | trophies and awards | from TrophyCentral) and then change the trophies page to be just focused on trophies.

Would this make sense?  Thanks!

Thanks, Raymond!  Sounds like some easy things I can try!  Much appreciated!

Hi, our company name is trophycentral, but many companies are linking to us as trophy central (with a space in betwen trophy and central).  We are seeing this in many links and I have a feeling that google is penalizing us for it (since we used to be on page one for trophies and tophy and now off the charts).  Is there a way to let Google know this, maybe some sort of tag?  Thanks!

Hi, we have products (trophies and awards) that can be catagorized in many ways. Using Award Medals as an example: - Medals by type: 1 1/2", 2", etc. - Medals by sport Baseball, Basketball, Cheer - Medals by Style Color, Gold, Silver, Bronze Right now, we have an Award Medals section off of our home page. The section has a decent page rank, but should be much better (I think). My guess is that we are loosing page range since we have separate sections with the groups above as we want our customers to be able to find the medals easily. Unfortunately, when we setup our site 10 years ago, we organized by type and this is what is hanging off the home page. The other groupings we added more recently. I have attached a snap shot of what the sections look like. We would like customers to find an individual medal when they do a Google search. For example a search for Baseball Medals. In Goggle, they likely would not search for 1 1/2" medals. My question is this: Can we keep the same structure we have today (to enable customer flexibility) but improve page rank and also have the sections like basball medals rank well? I have thought about using canonical tags, but the pages are not the same - in one case it is all baseball medals, in another it is all 1 1/2" medals, etc. Thanks for your help!!

Thank you, Francisco!!!  I wish I thought of that (-:  Have a great day... Neil.

Hi,  I ran the seomox link report and see that I have an entry for our home page (http://www.trophycentral.com/) and http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html.  The index is shown with a 301 redirect.  Does this mean that a redirect is already in place to http://www.trophycentral.com/?   I want to ensure our traffic is not being split between the two urls, but not sure how to confirm this.  Thanks!

<colgroup><col width="294"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="81"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="80"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="77"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="214"></colgroup>
| URL | HTTP Status | Total Links | Page Authority | Number of Linking Root Domains |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/ | 200 | 5746 | 53 | 244 |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html | 301 | 5123 | 42 | 4 |

Agreed.  Except I refuse to spend more on Google PPC - I went the other way and reduced spend.  If they penalize us for no reason the last thing I want to do is give them money!  I could understand if we intentionally did something wrong, but that fact that a dozen top webmasters have all given different advice and can't point to anything concreate leads me to believe that everyone is to some extent guessing (even though some thoughts were excellent and everyone was well intentioned).

That's is fabulous!  I have to check it out.  Thanks again!!

Thanks very much for your replay and help!

At the end of the day, neither is easy and I will probably do a combination of both as I think it might deliver the most benefit.  My concern is that we have a lot of content for each product now, but it is very similar content because the products are the same (thus your suggestion of combining products makes a great deal of sense to me).

Thanks again...

Hi, we have about 6500 products, almost all with descriptions.  SEOMOZ is showing about 2500 of them with duplicate content.  The reason for this is that only one or two words are different for each product.  For example, we have 500 award certificates.  All are the same size and have the same description. But one is swimming, one baseball, one reading, etc, etc. Apparently the 1 word difference is not enough to differentiate.  We have the same issue with our trophies - they are identical, except for figures.  Does anyone have any good tips on how to change the content to avoid this issue and to avoid making up content for 2500 items?  Thanks!

Neil

trophycentral.com

Thanks for your response.  To answer your question - I did file a reconsideration request and was told there was no manual penalty. So I assume it was Panda / Penuin because my home page, which ranked in the top 1-7  positions for trophies and for trophies and awards disappeared (meaning it could not be found in the top few hundred listings).  Even our brand, trophycentral, disappeared for a couple of weeks.  TrophyCentral came back after a few weeks, but nothing else on the home page came back.  Other pages are fine.  So we are getting some sort of algorithmic penalty and we have no idea why.  It has been a couple of months now.   Thanks for your thoughts.

Thanks, Malcolm, I will give it a try...

We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them.  We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links.

1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad?

2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site?

Thanks!

Thanks, Malcolm!  Originally the m. site was likely indexed as I wasn't even thinking of what might happen.  I have since gone back to the programmer to ensure it is not longer indexed.  I am not sure though,

a. how to confirm the m. site will no longer be indexed?

b. who to ensure any pages from the original index aren't causing an issue still?

Thanks!

John, thanks very much!  Actually, I am not sure, but it makes good sense.  I will check with the programmer aspa.  Thanks again! ... Neil.

Hi Georg, I read through these posts and felt as though our issues are almost identical.  I got hit a month or two ago and wasn't sure why.  We have been in business for years and never had an issue (of course our rankings have moved up and down over the years). We lost (like no where to be found) at least two huge keywords on our home page and about 25% of our overall business.  I have 5 people and already had to lay off one. The scary part is we have no idea why.  While I am sure we are doing some things wrong, we don't know what.  I have had a bunch of great suggestions and have been addressing them (but everyone has a different thought as to what is causing it).  Still no luck with getting the keywords back. I have reduced keywords, reduce crawl errors, changed content, etc, etc.

I will keep watching this thread in the hope that I learn something as panic is an understatement at this point!

Hi, we ranked very well for keywords trophies and trophies and awards on our home page, trophycentral.com for quite a while (many years).  Recently we dropped off the charts, but are not sure why.  So we posted this issue last week and got some great suggestions and are in the process of addressing them.  However, we are now wondering if we caused this issue when we launched our mobile site a few months ago (timing makes sense).  Has anyone had trouble with a mobile site impacting their traditional site?  I am wondering if maybe google is splitting the traffic to the trophycentral domain and the m.trophycentral.com domain?  Here is the code we have< script type="text/javascript" src="http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/sportsawards/mobile-redirection.js">script>Appreciate your comments!