Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There are a few issues with this, just depends how you are doing it

What did you do with these other domains. Is there content on the site and links point to your other site, or does the domain name simply redirect to that domain?

Did you check the back link profile on these new domains you purchased. If they had black hat associated with them and you 301 to your site, you just got infected You need to research those old domains you just bought and make sure they are clean. If not then you are going to have to clean them up or get rid of the 301

Did the rankings drop after you 301'd the domains? Get rid of the 301's and see what happens to your rankings. If they come back those domains are spammy

Either way you most likely got hit with Penguin 2.0 which means there is something spammy associated with either the old domains or yours. Don't assume just because you haven't done anything black hat that there anything spammy about your site. There are many innocent ways to do black hat.

Always double check with Google's Quality Guidelines

Check out this guy, he's good http://ericward.com/

His ebook is good too http://www.amazon.ca/Ultimate-Guide-Link-Building-ebook/dp/B00BAHA0Q6

Ah I see...

Ok on IOS you can't just change someone default search engine yourself through any third party site. You just can't access a users phone like that. Not sure about android, but I am curious about it as well so I will research that too.

The closet thing you can get to doing something like that is with a Jailbroken iPhone but the user still has to make the change physically on their phone.

http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/971788

The first suggestion is by far the closet thing you are going to get with what you want, you force a default search engine but you can encourage them to use your site instead.

Let me ask you this as an outsider, what would encourage me to use your search engine over someone else?

Diversity is the best strategy for back linking. Google likes it

It's called Penguin 2.0 GL

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270007/Google-Penguin-2.0-Update-is-Live

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xQmQeKU25zg

I use this for my IOS users, works great and I get a ton of returning visitors because of it

http://cubiq.org/add-to-home-screen

I wouldn't be worried about links like this, there are so many out there I think Google understands they can't penalize every site that has one of these. Every site on the internet would be hit

Keep an eye on those directory sites. I know in my first hit from Penguin 1.0 I found tons of directory links that were just spammy.

When you click on the "Submit Link" see if you can pay for the links. If you can then get rid of those links asap. Many of these directories are hard to get a hold of someone so I have had to disavow many of these links. I have a link of a text file that I add too of spammy directories I have found and I continue to add to it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2659865/spammydirectories.txt

Directories while many may be safe, this late in the game of Penguin you are better of without them IMO.

Only a handful are safe:

• dmoz.org
• yahoo.com
• business.com

Go to webmaster tools and find all those directories...

It's called Penguin 2.0

34373123.jpg

Are you talking about Penguin 1.0 or 2.0?

2.0 Just happened yesterday so that would explain Google

Oh fine

Well not everyone might have their language set on their browser either. Just add links on the top so they can pick a language. Along with auto responsive and auto detect language for the outsiders

I personally would do some auto responsive design to detect the location of the user and display the language of choice. Here is some good practices according to Google

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#1

Is it?

Here is what it looks like, its on everypage I have, should I only list it on my most popular pages?

Tell me if it looks good, bad or ugly

https://www.wordgamedictionary.com/

Now that was a good answer

I marked this as answered but as I read through it I realize that I am more confused.

As I understand a 301 is geared towards telling Google that a page has moved to the new URL permanently.

In my understanding if I were to 301 a mobile user to my mobile version of my homepage as a 301 then I am telling Google this has moved here permanently. Which technically is true for a mobile user but can this have an effect on ranking on the mobile side?

Since there is way less content on the mobile site I am afraid this can impact me on the desktop side.

To me is makes more sense to just redirect a user to the mobile version without a 301 so Google knows that this is simply a redirect and not a 301

Now along with that my original question was more of increasing ranking for my homepage site.

Since I have a separate canonical for both the desktop page as well as the mobile page, my original question was asking whether I should make the canonical on the desktop homepage the exact same as the mobile homepage. I noticed in Google that both desktop and mobile versions of my homepage are indexed. Is this normal?

If I had the same canonical for both pages would that potentially increase the ranking overall for my homepage, since my mobile version is more popular than my desktop version?

Hope that makes sense.

You have a source that supports the 301 over canonical as the preferred method?

What happens to ranking in the aspect by placing the canonical to both pages does that potentially boost my ranking for my main site if my mobile site was indexed differently this whole time?

I am pretty sure that the mobile version of the main site needs to be the same canonical link from what I understand. I am trying to find good docuementation that supports this. Even better if its from Google or Matt Cutts.

I have a main domain like http://www.mydomain.com

the mobile version of this is http://www.mydomain.com/m/

Should my canonical be

rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com"/>

for both these pages?

Thanks very helpful article, and BTW AWESOME AVATAR

This post mainly pertains to soft 404's but I recently dropped a few ranks in my main keyword which I have maintained prior to this my better rank for well over 2 years. I participate in NO BLACKHAT and obtain links naturally. I want to describe a few issues that happened prior to my ranking dropping and see what you guys think.

I started to receive about a week prior to my ranks dropping DNS issues with GWT. It was weird because when I would use Goole Fetch on those pages they would return just fine so I was not sure what was happening there.

I use Google page speed server which did in fact decrease my load time (YEAH!!) so that was cool. About 1 week prior to my rankings dropping I enabled godaddy's Website Accelerator as well thinking that could help even more. Because of this I thought maybe this had something to do with my DNS issues with Google so I decided to turn off my website accelerator with Godaddy and just leave my Google pagespeed service on. I figure I don't need 2 of them anyways IMO.

Also at the same time I started to receive a ton (31,000+) html errors with duplicate metadescriptions and titles. I discovered I had an error with my code which was displaying 2 different sets of descriptions and titles for each of these pages. I since then have fixed the issue and waiting for Google to index those pages.

Here is were I think I might have been hurting from the drop in rankings. Some months ago (maybe 2) I decided to redirect my 404's to my homepage. Yes I know this is not good now and I have created a proper 404 page which returns the 404 code. I recently started getting a ton of Soft 404 errors in GWT which is what brought my attention to this issue.

My question is, could my action of redirecting my users to my homepage as a 404 which obviously was returning a 200 on a page that did not exist be possibly the culprit to my ranks dropping?

"The other way is to make a few extra bucks and invest in them in tissues.  You will need them when you wake up to the "Site not found in the top 100" X 2."

Well Said and yeah that would suck

I am thinking that moving from freethiskeyword.com -> thiskeyword.com cant hurt me from a Google sense, unless the EMD does.

I currently dominate on my site for a very high traffic keyword. My url contains this keyword in it along with the word "Free" in the beginning. Lets say my keyword is "This Keyword" then my url would be freethiskeyword.com. I rank 3rd for this keyword and generates me about 8k on a low month. I was just able to obtain my main keyword as my sole URL through an auction for a measly 2,000.00. (Very Excited about this).

So now I have the URL thiskeyword.com

What I want to know is what kind of influence can I expect with my new URL have in CTR.

Since it is a high traffic keyword is there a automatic "Trust" factor that is involved and will users tend to click on thiskeyword.com as apposed to freethiskeyword.com?

My Second Question

I am torn as to what I should do with this new URL. Should I redirect my old URL to my new URL and keep both pointing to the same site? or should I try and dominate my niche and build a new site entirely. Since I currently make about 8k a month for third, if I were to build a separate site and be able to obtain 1st place for my new keyword that would generate me 2 amounts in income based on stats.

CTR based on http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049695/Top-Google-Result-Gets-36.4-of-Clicks-Study

freethiskeyword.com = 8k/m for 3rd based on 10% of clicks (currently)

thiskeyword.com = 24k/m for 1st based on 36% of clicks (in theory)

If I keep each site separate and be able to have one site at 3rd and the other at 1st then I would be making about 32k a month.

If I redirect my old url to my new url then I would only have 1st place (if I make it to first of course) and that would only make me 24k a month.

It seems to me I should keep these sites separate to generate more income. I am torn what I should do. Also with the EMD penalty I am afraid to 301 my site to my new URL since it is my exact keyword as apposed to my current one. I am defiantly branded as "Free This Keyword" so moving it to thiskeyword.com could hurt me more than help (at least I think so)

What you think?

Example Page

https://discussions.apple.com/message/21397989#21397989

Yeah I am not seeing anything in Google for these pages, I did a view source and didnt see a "noindex" on the pages

I also did a https://discussions.apple.com/robots.txt and didnt see anything like "Disallow: /messages" anywere

but I am not seeing the user profiles indexed either unless I am missing something

https://discussions.apple.com/message/21397989#21397989

I was answering some questions on the Apple support website because I like to answer questions for people there and I decided to check out my profile. I noticed that at some point I inserted my website in a field they provide called "homepage" then I viewed the source and noticed that it is a "dofollow" link.

So I have decided to start targeting questions that relate to my niche. Can even these links help my rankings? Since my username links to my profile page which has the link to my website?

I noticed something with one of my sites and now I am thinking I made a boo boo (I think) here is what I have

On my homepage I have 5 links

Link1
Link2
Link3
Link4
Link5

Links 1 - 4 go to a page and stops there. So my URL structure is

www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4

So naturally my link juice passes down to these links evenly. Link5 also goes to another page, but on that page I have more links that go down further.

www.mydomain.com/Link5 -> more links

On page Link5 I have links that go to more pages, BUT my URL structure for these pages go like this

Lets say on Link5 page I have another link that goes to AnotherLink1, AnotherLink2 and AnotherLink3

When you click on those links it takes you to those pages just fine, BUT my URL structure is like this

www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3

Basically I put all the "AnotherLink1-3" in the root directory as well.

My question is concerning how Google passes the link Juice from my pages and if it is passing based on the path of the links and how they point to those pages, or do they pass link juice based on the URL structure.

So since "AnotherLink1-3" is located in the root directory am I dividing my link juice from my home page to all the links as well based on the URL structure. For instance

www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4
www.mydomain.com/Link5
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3

Do I need to change my path for Link5 page to

www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink3

?

I was just looking in my analytics and I saw something I have never seen before. Maybe its old news but its new to me. I have attached a screen shot. I have 2 keywords listed which are the same but are capitalized different

scrabble dictionary

Scrabble dictionary

Does Google really consider these different?

PlstfwR

These are all links to pages on my site, not external

We're they effected by penguin? Did they notice an improvement in their keywords after these changes?

Could to many links on to many pages be a factor that the penguin update would effect your site. I know this is a broad question , but I am curious what people think.

I was reading this q and a and found some video that Rand had made about this and how using influence to change the auto completes in Google.

Is there any chance Google is also dividing the lists from a Geographical location. So users on the East Coast might see something different than the West Coast. I also wonder if Google takes local search over regional. That could also make the auto completes different based on location.

Just curious...

ooooo I like that one

There is an app that does that already with Words with friends

I am going to build a fake product and wanted to get some of your awesome ideas This is for fun, laughs and mainly viral/back links. Ultimately my goal is to leave the user scratching their head saying to them self "Is this for real?". I want it almost believable

First: My site is based on everything scrabble so I want it related to that since my fans are going to get a kick out of it.

I need some great starting points of something fake I can create and post about.

I was hit with Penguin on April 24th like a ton of bricks. Luckily my cash cow keyword was kept safe and still is today with even an increase in traffic over the year. With some other main keywords I used to rank far I fell off the board on that day. Since then I have been slowly trying to clean things up as much as I know

Today I was sitting down with my coffee and Penguin mindset and I decided to use copyscape again to review duplicate content issues and something I noticed which I either didn't before or didn't think was an issue was my footer. In my footer I used a blurb from some other site in my niche a long time ago. Which I discovered they used from one of the main sites in my niche. Anyways I noticed that my footer is what kept coming up as being duplicate content and was always at an overage of 28% according to copyscape.

My question is should I be worried about the footer?

Is 28% a lot?

Call me crazy, but I would rather keep all the profits for myself

Well back linking and establishing relationships online is where I struggle. Maybe I need a consultant more than anything to teach me ways I can do so.

I am thinking of going with them for a back linking strategy. Wanted to know if anyone has any experience with them and what they thought.

I like the whole re"SEO"lve thing

I want to hire out to someone who can write some good quality articles for my site. First has anyone had experience with this and do you recommend this. Also are there any ideas where I could start in looking for this. Websites? Freelance? Let me know

Has anyone gone from shared hosting godaddy to either virtual or dedicated with godaddy or even another provider and noticed faster load times without changing anything on your site.

Any recommendations on hosting providers?

Last week I was browsing Google's index with "site:www.mydomain.com and wanted to scan over to see what Google had indexed with my site. I came across a URL that was mistakenly indexed. It went something like this

www.mydomain.com/link1/link2/link1/link4/link3

I didn't understand why Google had indexed a page like that of mine when the "link" pages were links that were on my main bar which were site wide links. It seemed to be looping infinitely over and over. So I started trying to see how many of these Google had indexed and I came across about 20 pages. I went through the process of removing the URL's in Webmaster Tools, but then I wanted to know why it was happening. I had discovered that I had mistakenly placed some links on my site in my header in such a manner

link1

link2

link3

If you know HTML you will realize that by not placing the "/" in the front of the link I was telling that page to add that link in addition to the URL that is was currently on. What this did was create an infinite loop of links which is not good

Basically when Google went to www.mydomain.com/link1/ it found the other links which then told Google to add that url to the existing URL and then go to that link.

Something like: www.mydomain.com/links1/link2/...

When you do not add the "/" in front of the directory you are linking too it will do this. The "/" refers to the root so if you place that in front of your directory you are linking too it will always assume that first "/" as the root then the url will follow.

So what did I do?

Even though I was able to find about 20 URL's using the "site:" search method there had to be more out there. Even though I tried to search I was not able to find anymore, but I was not convinced.

The light bulb went on at this point

My .htaccess file contained many 301 redirects in my attempt to try and redirect those pages to a real page, they were not really relevant pages to redirect too. So how could I really find out what Google had indexed out there for me since Webmaster Tools only reports the top 1000 links.

I decided to kill my htaccess file. Knowing that Google is "forgiving" when major changes to your site happen I knew Google would not simply just kill my site for removing my htaccess file immediately.

I waited 3 days then BOOM! Webmaster Tools was reporting to me that it found a ton of 401's on my site. I looked at the Crawl Errors and there they were. All those infinite loop links that I knew had to be more out there, I was able to see.

How many were there?

Google found in the first crawl over 5,000 of them. OMG! Yeah could you imagine the "Low quality" score I was getting on those pages? By seeing all those links I was able to determine about 4 patterns in the links. For example:

www.mydomain.com/link1/link2/

www.mydomain.com/link1/link3/

www.mydomain.com/link1/link4/

www.mydomain.com/link1/link5/

Now my issue was I wanted to keep all the URL's that were pointing to www.mydomain.com/link1 but anything after that I needed gone. I went into my Robots.txt file and added this

Disallow: www.mydomain.com/link1/link2/

Disallow: www.mydomain.com/link1/link3/

Disallow: www.mydomain.com/link1/link4/

Disallow: www.mydomain.com/link1/link5/

Now there were many more pages indexed that went deeper into those links but I knew I wanted anything after the 2nd URL gone since it was the start of the loop that I detected. With that I was able to have from what I know at least 5k links if not more.

What did I learn from this?

Kill your htaccess file for a few days and see what comes back in your reports. You might learn something

After doing this I simply replaced my htaccess file and I am on my way to removing a ton of "low quality" links I didn't even know I had.

Just want to make sure I understand exactly what I am doing

If I place this in my Robots.txt

Disallow: /root/this/that

By doing this I want to make sure that I am ONLY blocking the directory /that/ and anything in front of that. I want to make sure that /root/this/ still stays in the index, its just the that directory I want gone.

Am I correct in understanding this?

I was thinking the same thing. I in fact are one of those webmasters.

Just uploaded my list, hope to see results from it

Halarious that the disavow links was just released from google webmaster tools today

What about header links to all my main pages, Im sure those are not considered redundant. Did you find redundant interior links on my site?

As I am continually sizing up my competition in the SERPS I have scanned their sites with a fine tooth and comb. I have found that these sites practice in the very things that I have practiced in the past and have removed thinking that may be some of the reasons I was hit with Penguin.

Some of these factors are:

• Link Scheme with sites they own (C Blocks)
• Content for Search Engines (Keyword rich text)
• Exact anchor text in back linking profile

Yet even though my competition practices in these methods (One site even places exact anchor text in the footer and header of every page for one of their other forum site) they seem to have not even been touched with any of the recent updates. In fact it seems their ranking have increased.

In scanning these sites the only major difference that I have been able to see between them and I is that their SERPS are higher than mine and they have way more social signals than me. One site has about 73k facebook likes where I only have about 300.

My question is Can Google ignore penalties for sites that have higher SERPS and /or social signals that would effect another site that had lower ones?

My other question is related to back links

My main site has links from another site I built a long time ago (Pre SEO and not knowing what I was doing) somewhere in the 73k range. Obviously a HUGE signal to Google that this might be spam and I am aware. I have removed the links from that site but unfortunately the average crawl rate per day is very low so it is taking a very long time for Google to find those pages and re-crawl them to find the links gone. Since that site I have than has those links pointing to my main site has very low traffic I am totally willing to kill that entire site with a 404. Can this help speed up the removal of those links from that site? I figure since the site no longer exists all links from that site will be removed almost immediately from my main site.

Any thoughts?

Since I was hit with Penguin back in April, but with this last update Oct. 5th I did see a very slight recovery, I was thinking about dumping some of my old URL's which contain backlinks which I can't get removed that seem spammy. I was thinking of keeping the page intact but replace with an entirely new URL and NOT 301 redirect. So basically starting over with that URL that way the backlinks points to a dead url.

Any thoughts?

Since there is so little information out there for people who have recovered from the Google Penguin Update I thought I would share my recent recovery and what I did, and what worked for me.

First let me say that I don't necessarily believe that you have to wait for a Penguin update to recover from it, unless there has been an update in the last few weeks that I am not aware of.

When I got hit

I got hit with penguin on April 24th 2012. The reason I know is because 90% percent of all my major keywords I completely fell of the map with rankings, luckily I did not lose my main cash cow keyword which kept me alive (thank goodness) but I did lose rankings on many other keywords. Here is an example http://goo.gl/nZYAu

What I did

When the hit first came like many others I went into panic mode. For many months I tried all sorts of things.

• Redesign of my site
• Changed to friendly URL's
• Rewrote Content
• Got rid of low quality content
• Added more images to pages
• Less ads to the page
• Redesigned internal link structure
• Removed links from other sites I owned
• and more

None of which seemed to work for me, even with all these changes my rankings remained the same. I was scratching my head as to why Google thought my site was considered spammy. I finally decided to dig as deep as I could and literally start over from scratch in my research.

The first thing I did was go to my godaddy account and first see every domain I had owned. I was surprised to see that I had owned 73 domains. After a while you forget what you buy I guess :). Some of these domains I bought but never did anything with, some I bought and copied one of my other sites just to get something up with the hopes to redesigned it and others I had completed sites with unique content. Obvious there are issues with copying an entire site over dealing with duplicate content. Honestly most of these sites I had forgotten I even owned and that even had content on them. Back when I did all these things (about 2 years ago) I really did not know what I was doing from a SEO standpoint. I have learned since then which is why I needed to go through all these and clean them up.

One of the main things I used to do with my sites (Pre SEO) was I would take my big traffic sites and link to my other sites from either a footer or somewhere on a page that would have a ton of indexing (dynamic pages) Usually somewhere in the 90,000k+ in pages generated. I honestly did this not with the intent to manipulate rankings, but with the idea of sending traffic to those pages. I thought that was a great idea

As I started going through my domains one by one with a fine tooth and comb there were many sites which I had totally forgotten about that contained links to my other sites. Especially my main cash cow site. It took me about 2 weeks to get through all my domains and clean everything up. The things I did was

• Removed all duplicate sites
• Removed URL's I was not doing anything with (I know this had no effect, just wanted to clean my domains up)
• Removed all links that pointed to any of my other sites

Now What

About 1 week later (and as those links started to go away in Google webmaster tools) keywords I have not ranked for since April 24th started to gain rank. While many are still not raking and the ones that are have low rankings. They are ranking again. I know for sure now this made a difference for me. These are keywords that tanked from Penguin that all of a sudden I have ranks in them again.

While I know the practices I did where obviously bad SEO much of what I did was done before I actually knew what I was doing. What worked for me was checking every domain I owned and looking at every page I had on those sites. Most of my problems came from sites I totally forgot I even had, which is what was hurting me. Finally going back to those sites and either removing the links/domains is what I believe is making the difference.

Just thought I would share