Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sven and John, thank you very much for your help and fast responses. I am going to get started on employing the methods you both have suggested, and hopefully they will help us turn things around. The tips and resources are definitely appreciated!

The keywords report has informed me that my company has dropped significantly for a few keywords that we were doing well for previously. How can we go about increasing our keyword rankings again? We have tried content writing through blogs and articles, neither of which seem to have the same effect as they did before the Panda updates. In addition, we are optimizing our product pages, including the meta titles, meta descriptions, and product descriptions. Should we focus more now on social media, such as using certain keywords in Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr posts? Are there any other ways we can increase our keyword rankings?

Thank you very much for the help! We'll definitely keep this in mind going forward.

Duplicate content

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.

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