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1. Consider a warning a pleasant courtesy from Google. They by no means do this on a consistent basis.

2. You can usually get back in, but the effort it takes to recover from being deindexed is demanding and probably not worth it for you naughty "dark dark grey" hat folk.

3. I agree with Irving: I've never encountered a friendly warning from Google before they destroyed all the things.

It looks like the guy had no idea what GTM was, and had to learn about it in order to troubleshoot. Do you think you should pay for his ignorance regarding GTM? Did he make his lack of knowledge on the subject clear before starting work? Did you get a new quote on hours after the issue was discovered?

This response makes it sound like he's not trying to scam you, he just didn't know how to do what you wanted, so when an issue arose, it took him forever to resolve.

He quoted you three hours. Did he ever mention between hour #4 and hour #36 that he had no idea what he was doing and was billing you to learn? If not, I wouldn't feel right about paying for all the hours. A quote should at least be in the ballpark of reality, and if things take way longer, the contractor need to let the client know. This is bad business practice on his end, but not necessarily scammy.

Looks like you now have what you need to make your decision. Personally, outsourcing development work overseas sounds extremely terrifying to me and I would never do it. Even if the budget forced cheap dev work, I'd probably just refuse the job, since the budget wasn't there to do it correctly.

Yes, however, implementing canonical tags in the posts on one of the properties will resolve this issue.

Here's a post to help you out with implementation: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Get him to outline the 36 hours, and if you need to, post it here. I'm curious.

And yeah, when it comes to most things, it's good to hire as local as possible. Better communication, more protection for you, and easier to look into before the hire. A ton of people think hiring cheaper will be cheaper... it is not.

That's not an easy answer. It depends on your CMS, the goals, and any other factors like that security issue, which I haven't encountered before (but wasn't his issue to fix, only find).

Really, your dev would know better than me. Call him out on it. Tell him your confused about the hours and you were expecting much less. Then ask him for more specific details on hours spent.

In the future, try to get contractors to quote you an hour estimate.

No, not unless he's charging you for time he was waiting to here back from InMotion, which would not be okay.

With just a few goals set up, 36 hours does seem excessive. Even if there was a hitch you had to resolve with your server company, is he trying to say he worked on it for like 30 hours before he realized there was a security issue? What was he doing for those hours?

Ask him to outline what he did and how long each item took him.

Woo! A new tool for me to play with. Thanks for the tip, David.

Hi DJReason,

If you can manage to not have a pool of numbers for SEO traffic, my solution above will work. By using a script that only fires when certain parameters hit, it allows you to only use one number for non-parametered URLs, so search engine bots will only see the one number. Then you use that number during citation building, and you're golden... at least from that perspective.

Then send a DMCA to the server company. The server company doesn't care that he's a lawyer, and I bet your client and send a very well written one.

Besides that, you're strategy moving forward seems pretty sound.

First things first: before you start working on optimizing the new site, I would work on resolving the issue with the old partner, since this is an issue that can continue to haunt you for a long time if you don't.

The old partner needs to 301 redirect all pages in your client's subdirectory to the new site. Offer to send him the steps needed to do this. If he refuses, let him know that he does not own the data from your client's side of the old website, and you will therefor be forced to send DMCA takedown requests to the server company and to him for straight-up copyright infringement. Once he cooperates and puts in the proper 301s, you will have much less to worry about.

Unless, for some reason, the old partner does own the data, in which case, you shouldn't be using it on the new site.

If the images are coded into the website using "http://example.com/image.jpg" instead of "/image.jpg" then the images will always pull from example.com, instead if your test site.

If they were coded with "/image.jpg" then the code would pull from example.com when the page was there, and example.yoursite.com when you moved it over for testing.

It sounds like the URLs being used in the code aren't dynamic. There are two different ways to embed an image (and it's URL) on a page with html:

You can use a dynamic URL, where the domain will be whichever domain the page is on, like notice how there is no domain in front of the URL path, this means the domain will change depending on which website the code is on.

The other way, and the way it sounds like is being used on your site is This makes the URL definite, since all of it is defined. If you see that your images were put in with URLs like these, you'll need to make them dynamic to accomplish what you want to.

In most cases it will help your rankings, since that link juice does transfer in a 301 redirect. Now, if that competitor's website has some kind of link spam penalty or something similar, that will also transfer over and will hurt your site. As long as the 301'd site isn't penalized in Google, you should see a bump.

Yeah, disavowing should have the same effect as if the links were removed, so you're better off submitting the disavow.

Just disavow. Don't let people like this extort you. If you want to get him to try and remove the links for free, tell him you're not going to pay him, and instead you're going to submit a disavow, flagging his entire network to Google as unwanted links. You made a good faith effort by contacting the webmaster, but being extorted goes beyond good faith.

Awesome tip about transferring with the same content here. Completely noindexing the old site sounds like a good option. I'm going to have to keep this trick under my hat for a rainy day, thanks!

If you're trying to transfer the good SEO juice, but leave the manual action on the old site, that might not be possible. Google has been cracking down on that, and if you try to move over the good stuff, the bad will follow.

It looks like you have two options:

1. You can 301 the old site, disavow all the bad links, and hope for the best. This way you aren't completely starting from scratch, but the amount of ranks you'll recover won't be clear until a few weeks after you do complete this strategy. Different sites have different results doing this.  It depends on the penalty, how well you clean up the links, etc.

2. Start from scratch. New content, new domain, new everything, so there's no relation to the penalized site. This might be what you want to do if the manual action is severe. It'll take a bit more analysis than seeing one keyword drop to know the extent of the penalty you're experiencing.

You can always go in and edit the .htaccess file yourself to put in the redirect. Here is some help with that, you'll likely find what you need under "301 Redirects in Apache": http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

History is showing us that canonical tags are very powerful, and do pass pagerank. Canonical tags and 301 redirects pass roughly the same authority, so even if your physical links are nofollow, those canonical tags are still being interpreted by bots as a link-like entity.

So, by cananocalizing your old domain to your new one, you effectively moved all those links to your new domain, just like they would have with a 301.