Penguin Update Issues.. What would you recommend?

[ConservationM]

Hi,

We've been pretty badly hit by this penguin Update. Site traffic is down 40-50%.

We suspect it's for a couple of reasons

1)Google is saying we have duplicate content. e.g. for a given category we will have 4-5 pages of content (products). So it's saying pagenum=2 , pagenum=3 etc are duplicate pages. We've implemented rel=canonical so that pagenum=2 point to the original category e.g. http://mydomain/widgets.aspx

We've even specified pagenum as a url parameter  that pagniates. Google still hasn't picked up these changes. How long does it take - it's been about a week

2)They've saying we have soft 404 errors. e.g. we remove a category or product we point users to a category or page not found. is it best to block googlebot  from crawling these page by specifying in robots.txt. because we really don't care about these categories or product pages. How best to handle?

3)There are some bad directory and crawlers that have crawled our website but have put incorrect links . So we've got like 1700 product not found. I'm sure that's taking up a lot of crawling time. So how do we tell Google not to bother with these link coming from specific sources e.g. ignore all links coming from xxx.com.

Any help will be much appreciated as this is Killing our business.

Jay

[ConservationM]

Hey Ben,

Thank you so much for your response.

I 'm pretty sure it was the Penguin update that brought our rankings down.

We don't participate in any paid linking, no blog networks etc.

The only thing we did was submit to article directories- which i understand are frowned upon now so we'll move away from that.

We'll try to get all the non existent pages to show 404 codes and any clear any duplicate page title and page content errors and hope that we'll get back in google good graces.

[BenFox]

Hi Jay,

Sorry to hear it's hurting your business so much.

Have you double checked the dates of your decrease in traffic against the Penguin update? There were a lot of big changes going on around that time so it's worth being sure it was Penguin.

In answer to question 3  - If they're external sites then I don't think those 1700 404s are having a negative effect on your SEO. If those directories are hurting you at all through the Penguin update then it would be through over-optimised anchor text (although I haven't seen any definitive data on this).

In answer to question 2 - Would I be right in thinking that you're using a 301 or a 302 to send users to a generic error page? However you're generating soft 404s the best fix is to make them real 404 errors so the server returns a 404 code.  The details of setting up a custom 404 page are pretty well documented around the web so you shouldn't have much problem with it.

In answer to question 1 - Have you tried checking to see if Google has re-cached your pages since the change? It's also probably worth looking at the rel=prev rel=next markup as well. Maile Ohye from Google has released a pretty comprehensive video on the topic of pagination and SEO so I'd recommend checking that out.