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Quick question on Referral exclusions. We have a client that just rebuilt their Magento website, referral data from Paypal was never an issue, the site properly attributed to source. New web devs finished the site and all purchases through Google Analytics from PayPal Is now showing as referral traffic.  Doing research on the issue the suggestion was to create a referral exclusion in GA from PayPal. My question on that, will the ecommerce  value default to the previous referral or will it delete the e-commerce value completely from what is gathered?

So there are two types of penalties, manual ones as you have dealt with and algorithmic ones.  So clearing a manual penalty won't necessarily clear the algorithmic one if there is an issue. If I was going to find a smoking gun it would be links like www.juryverdictalert.com that have what look like a banner ad to the site but haven't put a "no-follow" to the link. It looks spammy to have hundreds of links on low word count pages all point to you from one domain.

The other things. You rank #1 for "Verdict Videos" so that doesn't look like it is algorithmic- it could just be bad targeting. I get that is your title tag, but I didn't see the keywords in anything more than an h3 and I couldn't find a single anchor text backlink that is live (I used Ahrefs). Not that you want to go crazy with that, but you would expect it somewhere.

Just echoing Dmytro I would noindex, also this can help resolve duplicate issues as often the "Tag" and Search pages can create duplicates or pages the spiders have trouble with. If you are using Wordpress Yoast has a nice feature to help automatically care for this task.

Normally I would advocate moving whatever possible to a subfolder, but I'm a bit confused by the .shop. Did you mean shop.mywebsite.com?

I would use canonical tags in this situation.

Have you tried removing them in Search Console?

We have an e-commerce client that is launching a new site. In setting up for it they decided that they want to change their navigation on the site and url structure. So everything being even, the new site will have appropriate 301 and it's built on Magento so the product pages are all structured as website.com/product-A but the category pages will now be deeper than before. So before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category. Hope that makes sense. I'm not as worried about the 301's or specific products but I'm worried the category pages dropping a folder level will hurt page authority. Any thoughts, am I being overly nervous?

Thanks for taking the time and looking at this Russ, been pulling my hair out so any help is appreciated.

I think the second is probably the issue more than the first. I would format the markup in your footer to match the format that Google Lists as well as a thought.

The other suggestion is the recent negative review might have some temporary negative weight.

So the back story on this project is we've been working as PPC and SEO managers with an ecoomerce site (Magento Enterprise based) that crashed in April. After the issue they fired their developer and switched hosting to Simple Helix at the recommendation of the new developer. Since the change we have seen a plummeting ecommerce conversion rate especially on weekends. Every time something seems really bad, the Developer gives us a "nothing on our end causing it."

So doing more research we found site speed in GA was reporting crazy numbers of 25+ seconds for page loads, when we asked Simple Helix gave us answers back that it was "Baidu spiders" crawling the site causing the slowdown. I knew that wasn't the issue. In all of this the developer keeps reporting back to the site owner that there is no way it is hosting.

So the developer finally admitted the site could be slowing down from a Dos attack or some other form of probing. So they installed Cloudflare. Since then the site has been very fast, and we haven't seen turbulence in the GA site speed data. What we have seen though is the appearance of 524 and 522 errors in Search Console.

Does anyone have experience with Cloudflare that seeing those types of errors are common in usage? Is there any other thought what might be causing that and what that means from the servers, because the developer reports back that Simple Helix has had no issues during this time.

This has been a super frustrating project and we've tried a lot different tests, but there is really abnormal conversion data as I said especially during peak times on the weekend. Any ideas of what to chase would be appreciated.

One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.

It can be, especially if there is a lot of content on the site doing it. I would also be worried in this case because of the content is short (could be seen as thin) and is common quotes so it is probably duplicated on other sites. I would lean toward cleaning it up.

Yoast has a great tool for fixing this. That or I would noindex one category.

Just curious how you think Pigeon affected a wedding directory site?

The disavow can take some time and may not see results until the next refresh of the algorithm that was causing the issue. We had a number of clients that came to us with a drop in traffic and rankings over the last year. We did extensive back link removal and disavowing. We saw some limited improvements but it wasn't until the November refresh that all of them "got out of jail" and returned to the first page for their keywords.

My other thought for you is that while you said you disavowed bad links, I ran your site through ahrefs and it's showing a large spike of new back links over the last month. Most of them are pretty spammy looking. http://authority-domain.com/computers_and_internet/calendar/society/dating_relationships/?p=8

If you are already dealing with a bad link profile I'd stay clear from directory link building.

You might want to elaborate on the type of issue. Is it a penalty or has it been affected by a recent change in Google's algorithm?

Here is my only thought on that (and you may be correct),

From his data screenshot and what he said this site has already escaped numerous Panda updates. The drop doesn't coincide with a published change. It could be a small tweak sunk them, but if it was Panda wouldn't this be an end of May hit?

I'm not saying the links are not legit, I'm just saying ahrefs  is seeing a high volume of the same anchor text that's not branded coming inbound on a short period of time. It could have triggered something algorithmically. It's a large volume of growth of links compared historically for your site from multiple domains (several are coming from a site without a written domain) with the same anchor text. I could see something triggered in Google for that. I'm just shooting from the hip from the data you shared and your impressions.

If you wanted to test it have the MUSCHealth site change the Anchor text or throw a non follow on for a test.

I would also look at landing pages from the site and see what ones dropped off turing that period.

I would also think about your backlink profile. I ran the site through ahrefs. I'm not sure if it was intentional but there was a lot of newly discovered links all using the anchor text "Digestive Disease Center". There is the Site Wide one from http://muschealth.com/ but there are others and one with a dotted quad url http://128.23.34.205/blog/2013/10/ that is using that exact anchor text. You are currently on page 3 now for that phrase.

The issue isn't the 301, that's already been taken care of. Unfortunately it is a branded url, so that can't be changed, even if they did start over though on a new URL that wouldn't solve the duplicate site floating around out there.

Here is my issue and I've asked a related question on this one. Here is the back story. Site owner had a web designer build a duplicate copy of their site on their own domain in a sub folder without noindexing. The original site tanked, the webdesigner site started outranking for the branded keywords. Then the site owner moved to a new designer who rebuilt the site. That web designer decided to build a dev site using the dotted quad version of the site. It was isolated but then he accidentally requested one image file from the dotted quad to the official site. So Google again indexed a mirror duplicate site (the second time in 7 months). Between that and the site having a number of low word count pages it has suffered and looked like it got hit again with Panda.

So the developer 301 the version to the correct version. I was rechecking it this morning and the dotted quad version is still indexed, but it no longer lets me look at the cache version. Out of experience, is this just Google getting ready to drop it from the index?

Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.

I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.

Something else to consider why you might want to omit them, that is an easy way for your competitors to do keyword research.

We were seeing that before Hummingbird. Even in SERPS with no mapbox or the returns under it, slots 7&8 seemed to be very local centric. We did screenshots of the same result in an incognito in our various locations and got very local specific returns in those slots.

Yes,

Resubmit the total file with the "good links" omitted. It takes a little time but Google will start giving you link credit again for them.

Nope, as far as I know. Matt Cutt's commented on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsSwqo16C8s

The only time I could see it was useful if you were doing some black hatish stuff and didn't want multiple domains on the same C Block that were related, but I'm pretty sure Penguin/ Panda is catching that sort of thing now.

Matt Cutts commented on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=2217 go to 36.24. He was addressing the idea of the new TLDs. It doesn't seem that it will.

One we were watching, the Official site for Jehovah's Witnesses went from watchtower.org to jw.org with a major site redesign. What makes it an interesting case study is that it was a multi language site as well.

I think you have a solid plan, my only thought is not to use the 302. It won't pass link juice over from that home page (Probably their most important) onward to the official site. I would either just 301 right away to the new site, or do a placeholder on the homepage explaining the merger with links to important pages on site A.

We went through a similar issue when Google migrated their local services to G+. Several of our clients had correct categories and when the platform switched they arbitrarily set new categories. Some were way off. If the personal injury is the most important category, I would delete the others temporarily and try reintroducing the other categories later. It could also be a situation where you have citations outside of Google in Bankruptcy related directories or with data related to it. Doing a citation building campaign focused on the personal injury category may also help.

It's always a good practice. It also depends if you are using a CMS that has an automatic 301 for the WWW vs the non for the site. For simple sites that's the only real reason that you would need it. I still like to have the tag, the major search engines have been recommending it and I usually do whatever makes Google happy if I can.

You can see if you have duplicate content if you subscribe to Moz in their campaign tools. If not there are a few free tools that will allow you to as well.

Here is my thoughts based on experience.

First the links don't disappear from Webmaster tools. You will still see them there. A reconsideration request only helps if you got hit by a manual penalty not algorithmic ones. If your traffic dropped after the disavow list was supplied it could be that you told Google to kill some valuable links and now you are missing that link juice. Though with that the  flip side from mantra of causality and correlation that Rand preaches. Google has been rolling out some changes so your traffic drop could be unrelated.

I would go back to the disvow list though and see if they put some links in it that shouldn't have been flagged as spam and resubmit the list.

To start I would make sure you have your current site structure well mapped out and that they are working with the designer to make sure pages aren't being dropped. A great tool to use is Screaming Frog for this. We find with larger sites and ones with extensive blog content that is the biggest issue that any potential 301's are in place when the new site rolls out so as not to lose rankings from broken inbound or internal links. I'd also make sure the site maps are updated and ready.

You may also want to make sure the architecture of the site hasn't changed dramatically for major pages. I would look to see what are your top pages for landing pages in Organic search and make sure they aren't being buried deeper in the site for no reason. So a page may have been mysite.com/awesomelandingpage and with a redesign it gets moved to mysite.com/genericfolder/subfolder/awesomelandingpage and it could lose some of it's link authority.

Just a few thoughts....

Ok the question doesn't fully explain the issue. I just want some opinions on this. Here is the backstory. I have a client with a domain that has been around for a while and was doing well but with no backlinks. (Fairly low competition). For some reason they created mirrors of their site on different urls. Then their web designer built them a test site that was a copy of their site on the web designer's url and didn't bother to noindex it. Client's site dived, the web designer's site started ranking for their keywords.

So we helped clean that up, and they hired a brand new web designer and redesigned the site. For some reason the dotted quad version of the site started showing up as a referer in GA. So one image on the site comes from that and not the site's url. So I ran a copyscape and site search and discovered the dotted quad version like 69.64.153.116 (not the actual address) was also being indexed by the search engine. To us this seems like a cut and dry duplicate content issue, but I'm having trouble finding much written on the subject. I raised the issue with the dev, and he reluctantly 301 the site to the official url.

The second part of this is the web designer still has that one image on the site coming from the numerical version of the site and not the written url. Any thoughts if that has any negative SEO impact? My thought it isn't ideal, but it just looks like an external referral for pulling that one image.

I'd love any thoughts or experience on a situation like this.

Thanks, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy and was missing something obvious.

I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?

Gregory summed it well, my only add on to it in setting when adjusting the geographical settings also adjust the intent. So if you have a German in Berlin searching for "my service in Newcastle" they won't be served the ad if they out of the actual area, if you don't want any non UK PPC visitors.

My suggestion is to ask the owner to make them a non-follow. Technically for a Banner Ad that is the Google's recommendation.

My thought on seeing if you were penalized. Use webmaster tools to see if you have any manual penalties. If not I would go back to Google Analytics and filter Organic Search and look at the traffic for the last three years if you have the data. If there was an algorithmic penalty you should see a drop off in traffic. If there is I would also look to see if there were other changes made to the site during the period to rule out on page issues.

I wanted to throw this out where we have been seeing so much emphasis on Google cracking down on bad linking, have they let up enforcement on manipulative on-page tactics that have faded in current years? I've been seeing hidden text popping up again and ranking. Here is an example. Google "landscaping Portsmouth NH" and find the #1 result. Now find "Portsmouth" on the page. So what I find interesting, the site has a clean backilnk profile, but that's a pretty blatant manipulation hiding those keywords.

What I find interesting is I filled out a report on it a year ago. (I'm not a big "fill out spam report" guy, I was curious if Google would take action). A year later it is still #1 for the competitive keyword. So I'm curious if others have seemed similar trends like font-size:0px, or text color as the background popping back up and ranking.

I would love other's thoughts on it.

Ok I have a client with a branded hashtag that is only working part of the time on Instagram. Client posts don't show up when the hashtag is searched and only partial people in their community have  their posts saved. We would like to find more fans of the brand who are already using Hashtags. I looked through all their help info but couldn't find a place to report it. Any thoughts?

Having the rich snippet is not a guarantee Google will use the information. We see that all the time especially with author tags. Providing the information to Google is just telling them it's available, as they tweak their results it tends to move around a lot. It sound like you checked webmaster tools to see how your mark up is perceived with Google.

I don't think you are correct. Google isn't the most truthful at times, but straight from the horse's mouth:

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375

I would just go with the no follow if the issue is that you are concerned about bleeding page rank. I don't think it is a big issue either way though.

Are you logged in doing the search or are you searching through an incognito window?

Just curious if you have any Empirical evidence on that thought of it should be used as a last resort? I know that google cautions usage of it, but my hunch is that they are afraid of two situations. The person who disavows all links and hurts their positive link profile and the strategy of someone purposely building suspect links knowing he can remove them.

I'd love your thoughts if you've seen harmful results of using the tool.

No there was no response from Google. From what I've gathered from research on the issue, if the issue is an algorithmic penalty there is never a response. You are just altering your site's profile and when the search engine choses to use that information it affects your health in the index. If you receive a manual penalty with an email to your webmaster tools, it's more severe and you need to also send a reconsideration request through the web master tools.

That shouldn't be unless the web developer set all client urls in the same profile, but that seems like an incredibly backwards way to do things. I'm not even sure if that is possible.  If that was the case you would still see all the other clients with a user account. If you get Admin rights for a particular profile it doesn't give you access to the other profiles.

We just went through this with a site that got penalized with the Penguin update because a previous SEO company had used a comment spinner that built a spammy profile across numerous porn sites. We uploaded as many as we could find. to the disavow tool.

We experienced about a five week period where none of the pages were ranking in the top 100 for the keywords that we had been tracking. It was only this week that across the board the majority of the keywords have bounced back to page 3. So we have a little more work to do.

Along with the disavow tool we also started a campaign of Authority building links over the last month. If the trigger of Penguin is ratios of spammy links to appropriate ones, we felt this would be a beneficial strategy.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last line. I would do it just for the social share pulling up the snippet that you have crafted versus some random part of the page getting ripped out of it.

Does anyone know of a tool that has similar capacity to Raven's Reports? I'm doing some white labeling of reports for another Agency that is used to sending their clients a monthly Raven report that is basicly pulling out all the Google Analytic Data of top referrers, keywords, landing pages ect and putting them into a nice format. I've used the Moz reporting and at times just combined it with a pdf of the actual GA equivalent. That's always seemed a bit clunky but I don't want to have to take on a Raven subscription just for that. Anyone have any good alternatives or know if when the new dashboard launches if it will also up its game when it comes to the generated reports?

Hey Baldea,

I wasn't asking What black hat is, I was asking for specific urls that have onsite examples to show the class.