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I'm actually working in house for the owner of this website, a larger marketing firm screwed him over from a Penguin and link perspective. I live in Philadelphia and know some employees from Seer, do you think I should ask them if this would be something Seer could take on?
Hello,
On 9/11/12, we submitted a reconsideration request to Google for http://macpokeronline.com, at the time we received penalties from both penguin and manual removal. We have since worked on cleaning up our link profile, and got this response from Google:
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.macpokeronline.com/.
We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
I honestly don't even know how to take this, we always showed up #1 while doing a site search, so it is kind of irrelevant to us in this case.
Is this the reply of them accepting our request?
Thanks
Zach
You need to remember that SEOmoz is constantly changing their ranking algorithm, just like Google is, I think that they have a place to track changes.
Hello,
I would agree with what was said, this is DEFINITELY duplicate content, and is also exteremely Spammy. I unfortunately see this as well on a lot of sites, especially for local SEO, without getting in to detail of these strategies. My view of this is that these concepts are adding absolutely no value to the web, and really should not be done by any legitimate online marker as a means of increasing rankings.
Here is a recommendation, since I don't belive that the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach would be helpful, why don't you create specific pages for each zip code/locality, and create unique content for every page. As a rule of thumb, I try to have 55% of content on any given page unique. Some strategies that work for me is to use local landmarks and events.
I think as google's algorithm progresses strategies like this will be beaten down, but who knows how long it'll take for that to happen.
Hope this helps
Zach
I didn't realize that it was still redirecting. Do you recommend we completely replace the WordPress core? and then go through the plugins?
In a previous post I made, I was able to determine that one of my sites; http://pokeronamac.com/ was hacked and was feeding spam perscription drug content to search engines, then redirecting to another site when clicked on Google.
I then contacted my web host, and, after they did a scan of our files, they determined that something within the wp-includes directory was compromised and malicious. They removed the file, though they weren't able to determine the source of the attack, or how they god in (should we be scared?). Anyway, its been several days now ~5 and if I do a site search the spam pages still show up, but the redirect is no longer working.
At this point, I am at a standstill, because i'm loosing traffic on my site by about 90%, and google hasn't sent us any warnings of malaware or the like. I know I was recommended against this before, but should I attempt to submit a reconsideration request, or should I just wait it out?
Thanks for your help,
Zach
Yes, we are actually doing that now. We have a dedicated box hosting a few of our websites. The developer doesn't have the permission to speak and the owner stepped away for a few minutes, but that is our plan, and if they cannot help us, we will go through and reinstall the WordPress core and the like.
Thanks
Travis,
I think we all do this from time-to-time. I can take a look into this more if you'd like, all you need to do is provide us with the URL(s) and we could look into it for you.
We have seen a drop in organic traffic by about 68% over the past week. This is according to SEOmoz.
Okay,
Thank you guys so much for your help! I really appreciate this, and I can hopefully get this solved quickly. I'll keep everyone updated on what course of action I take, and the results the reparations make.
Thanks
Zach
As far as I know the limit was 10. That article on the APIWiki says the same. I do know, as a premium subscriber, that the # of batch requests per second is 200, however.
Quote from the API Wiki:
"You can submit up to 10 URLs for every batch request. Larger batch requests will return an HTTP 400 response."
I'd just be careful, because if your not getting a 400 response, they may end up throttling you.
Hope this helps
Zach
ADDENDUM: It looks like the redirects of the hack are not working anymore?****
So our options here are to:
Google didn't report any malaware on the site in WMT, but I see what you mean, should I still submit a reconsideration request either way once this is fixed?
Thanks,
Zach
Hello Everyone,
After looking at one of my websites, http://pokeronamac.com/ I noticed that there is a significant drop in all traffic to my site. I cannot figure out what the exact source is, as we received no warnings in WMT, and as far as I know there are no major updates released in the last week or so by Google.
I took a look at the content section of GA and I saw that virtually all of my content was seeing a decrease in traffic, meaning that it isn't specific to a few pages, which leads me to believe that it is an algorithmic penalty. My confusion was that there was no changes made to the website in the past few months, although, on September 10th (5 days after traffic dropped) I updated the meta descriptions and titles site wide.
I don't believe that the penalty is from Panda or Penguin because we actually experienced a positive influx in traffic during the week of April 25th.
I'd appreciate any insights into helping me recover from this so I can get the visits again that I had before. If any other metrics are required, i'd gladly provide them.
Thanks
Zach Russell
Agreed, displaying prices via GeoLocation is definitely the way to go
SEOmoz recommends batch requests of 10 URLs according to their API wiki http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/url-metrics it states that any batch request larger than this will output a 400 error from the server.
Hope that helps!
Zach
I agree with what Streamline Metrics said, I just want to add to this by linking you to a great SEOmoz post on canonicalization which may help you clear things up more.
In your case, having 1 rel="canonical" tag per page is what you want, so you should be fine with that, just make sure that the canonical tags (listed under canonical 1 in Screaming Frog) is the actual URL that you want.
Hope this helps
Zach
I do not have enough specific experience with this to speak from an authoritative position on this topic. My experience is manly with the hReview ritch snippet. Hopefully someone else here has more knowledge than I and can help you fix these errors.
We literally just wrote on the same error 
I ran through screaming frog, and there is definitely duplicate content because of non-canonical URLs.
Hello Richard, I just ran your site through a tool called screaming frog, which instantly crawls your site and allows me to view errors such as duplicate titles and the like. Here is what happened, when Screaming Frog, and SEOmoz crawls your site, they see both URLS: http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html http://weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html Both have the same title: "Wedding Dance Lessons Sydney | Dancing Lessons to couples to learn their first dance and to look confident at their wedding." Even though to humans there is little deliniaton between the two, it is exteremely important to search engines. The solution to this is to use the rel="cannonical" tag check out this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not, it's dated but still relevant to your case. Once all of your pages have that tag, your SEO issues should resolve themselves Please let me know if you have any more questions Zach
