SEOMOZ crawler ignoring redirect?

[CatfishTPA]

My crawl report for www.poker-coaching.net show a number of duplicate content warnings.
First, it shows a warning for www.poker-coaching.net and www.poker-coaching.net/, although there is a redirect in place for this, and for non-www. to www. as well. So IMO there is no duplicate content here, so why the error message?
Next, it shows a duplicate content warning for a number of pages, but when I click the number on the right, there is no info an which pages contain the duplicate content. Will this info be there later when the crawl is completed?

My problem is that this is my oldest site, but since over one year it seems to have a penalty which I can't get rid of - I cannot identify the reason for the penalty. I already rebuilt the site from scratch once, but I still do not see results.

If a membership at SEOMOZ would be able to help me bring this site back on track, that would already be worth one years membership fees, so I'd really be very thankful if someone could take a look at the site and give me an idea about what needs to be done here.

[CatfishTPA]

I just want to make myself a little bit clearer here. While I appreciate any advice on why the site's rankings might be (mildly) affected, I am more interested in finding out why the site might have been penalized (which is most probably the case).
Here are my suspicions:

1. I had three articles that were 45% duplicate - thanks to one of my writers, may he rest in peace ;)), but they were removed/rewritten 2 months ago
2. I had a guy build some links for me about a year ago and he set up a link wheel without my consent, so the link profile might be a problem (too many similar links?)
3. Duplicate content because same article exists on my site with different URLs?
4. Too many links from main page (as suggested by your colleague, although I doubt very much that this can cause a penalty)
5. Panda related - although my content is of good quality
6. Site structure for the multiple languages (.net for german is one Joomla installation, and the other /xlang/ is a separate Joomla install where I use Joomfish for the various translation

Any ideas?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Think of it this way...

If you got a link from the New York Times, it would boost your rankings. But then imagine the New York Times was caught buying links from terrorist, turns into a porn site, and is penalized by Google (extreme example). Your site wouldn't be penalized by this, but you'd loose the huge boost you once had from the link.

So those links that were once helping you, if those sites were penalized then the links are less valuable. You aren't being penalized, you just aren't getting the good link juice you once had.

Just a possibility.

On the affiliate links... I completely agree with you, and have used a similar technique myself with no problem. I'd simply add a nofollow just to be safe.

[CatfishTPA]

Duplicate URL: but I do have a redirect in place from with / to without, that's why I was surprised to see this pop up as an error? Actually I redirected http://poker-coaching.net, http://poker-coaching.net/ and http://www.poker-coaching.net/;  all point to http://www.poker-coaching.net (suing the function of AceSEF module for this).

Per 1.: Ok this is something I will consider.

Per 2.: I use those redirects on all my sites, never had any problems with those? It's a very common thing with affiliate sites btw.

Per 3.: Isn't it agreed upon that your site cannot be hit with a penalty because a bad neighborhood site links to you (as opposed to me linking to such a site, which of course can be a big problem)? Webmasters don't have control over sites that give them links. If Google were to penalize me for that, would we all be google-bowling our competitors sites?
I can see problems with a link profile where maybe too many links have the same title and thus look unnatural, when you look at my link profile would you say that might be the case?

This site has given me so much problem I was considering "selling" it to someone else, host/rebuild it on a different server and do a reconsideration request telling Google I am the new owner... Tried regular reconsideration requests several times, but G always tell me there is no manual penalty, so I must have tripped some algorithm. Question is, which one?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Catfish,

Technically, www.poker-coaching.net and www.poker-coaching.net/ are 2 separate URLs. One with the trailing backslash, the other without. To be perfectly compliant, you would want to make sure that one redirects to the other. You can use a tool like this: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/ to check. For example, see how the homepage of SEOmoz does a 301 redirect when it contains a trailing slash - http://www.seomoz.org/ redirects to http://www.seomoz.org

That said, Google has said this isn't that big of deal. So fixing it would make you technically correct, but it probably won't have that big of difference.

On the the penalty... I see 2 potential problems.

1. Huge number of links on each page. The drop down navigation is huge. I've seen Google crack down on sites like this with lots and lots of nav links above the fold. I'd cut those in 1/2 and see what happens.

2. Meta Refresh. You have a lot of affiliate links that redirect via meta refresh. I see that you have blocked these pages with robots.txt, but you might want to add rel="nofollow" to those links as well.

3. A lot of your backlinks are from poker related sites (which is good, in a way) but it is possible that they were hit by penalties as well. If the folks linking to you were devalued, you suffer as well. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but building a more robust link profile never hurt.

Hope this helps! best of luck.

[CatfishTPA]

Thanks a lot!

[Keszi]

Hey Catfish,

Today I have a full scheduled day, but tomorrow I can take a look what is happening over them. We'll keep in touch.

Istvan