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good observation. let us know how you get on. Thanks

HI Rand, I understand where you are coming from as SEOmoz is a white hat community. However, when I started my business and did not know anything about SEO, I used these spam techniques for the simple reason I didnt know any better and thought that was SEO. Does this make me bad? I dont think it does. Since then, 5 years ago I have come a long way in SEO and consider myself a white hat marketer.

I wouldn't want to put my business at risk with dodgy SEO techniques. However, I did when I was clueless. Now I want to fix it. I'm sure many webmasters on this forum are on the same boat as me.

"simply fell down in the SERP"

you say it like it means nothing....

already mentioned on the post Alan

we need a new sub forum to deal with all this and have all answers and questions in one place.

Peoples business's are being ruined, we need to all come together in one place and learn from each other to get over this as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Please like this and I will email SEOmoz to see will they do it. Thanks

Its nothing got to do with the site in question. Its purely negative SEO. Read the case study about "Dan Thies" who says he is the SEO to Gurus and knows Matt Cutts on a personal basis. They targeted his website and got it off the ranks in about 1 week. He was ranked page 1 for "SEO" and "SEO services" now he is nowhere to be found.

Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website.

I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in.

This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google.

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/

This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.

Yes, the Majority of them is coming from Link Networks, this is what i have noticed in search for answers.

What do you recommend on then? Like Matt Cutts also announced that they were going to level the playing field and penalize websites that are over SEO'd. Whats does over SEO mean.

I ask these questions because I am now completely reviewing my SEO strategy. I want to build a long term business. But, If im going out trying to get links all day everyday, am I SEOing too much then, where do you draw the line?

To be honest, I dont think you should. You should be proactive and review all your link building you have done to date.

I have done this on my other websites and deleted links that might cause suspicion.

This is a rolling update they are doing, they have contact 700,000 website in Jan and Feb, SO FAR. I think not being proactive and trying to clean up your linking profile before it gets crawled could save you a lot of rankings

Dear site owner or webmaster of xxxxxxxxx,

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

I know getting the above was from participating in a service called buildmyrank. A high PR blog network. This was the only sort of thing I did that was somewhat grey hat (or so I thought) the content was always 100% and good. I have hundreds of other links that I worked really hard to get and now its practically all lost.

Google has confirmed they have sent out of over 700,000 messages through its google webmaster interface in February. Thats more than what they sent in all of 2011.

Where does this leave us?

What have we done wrong?

What works going forward?

Im sure many business's will be left in a very bad position over this update, people will lose their jobs.

I always considered myself to be very careful with my link building as I am totally reliant on search for my business.

I think something so big requires a better explanation from google. Has SEOmoz any more info on such a big update? This really needs input from the big SEO heads.

You need to remove all the offending links ASAP. Its seems PR blog networks are causing it. Dont worry, your not the only one going through this, over 700,000 people got the message

http://searchengineland.com/google-sent-over-700000-messages-via-webmaster-tools-in-past-two-months-113807

let me tell all you guys from experience dont use BMR.

I started SEO on a website 9 months ago, I used plenty of variety and the rankings were good, I noticed that and page getting lots of BMR links got good results very fast, so I got greedy

I started to put more and more effort into BMR, as of January, I solely did BMR for the website.

On Feb 25th a good an email on google webmaster about taking part in a blog network to increase my page rank. As of this weekend my website is now page 50 and I was in the top 3 keywords for Gifts, gift ideas, christmas gifts, personlised gifts. Highly competitive keywords

whats your websites URL and I can look to see if you have the canonical tag working correctly. Just incase.

Also, magento 1.4 has the canonical tag as standard now, what magento are you using. I know one I switched it on and did a small bit of editing all my dup content was gone after the next crawl.

However, I still have a bunch of 302 redirects.

HI Freddie.,

I woudnt be very techy minded in regards to 301s and 302s so im unsure what approach to take.

I can tell you I got rid of all the dup content by inserting the canonical tag but I still have a large amount of 302s and im unsure what to do.

Anyone care to shine some light?

Thanks. This is SEOmoz exact words with the problem.

Using a 302 redirect will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any link juice (ranking power). We highly recommend that you replace 302 redirects with 301 redirects.

I have 1600 of these 302 errors, so how can i fix it?

The dup content is a seperate issue then, I thought they would be related? So by using the canonical tag, i can get rid of dup content?

okay thank you. So for example, I am getting the below pages all as dup content for my homepage, this is happening for all my categories.

1. http://www.unforgettablegifts.ie/
2. http://www.unforgettablegifts.ie/?mode=grid
3. http://www.unforgettablegifts.ie/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=position
4. http://www.unforgettablegifts.ie/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=position
5. http://www.unforgettablegifts.ie/?dir=desc&order=position

I was under the impression though, because of the above problem, google is actually spreeding my PR out amoung this 5 pages instead of one?

Hi Folks,

I would appreciate some help on this. My ecommerce website is built on magento and we currently have 1675 302 Redirects on it as pointed out by the SEOMOZ crawler.

Has anyone any idea on how to fix this or ave you  being on the same boat as me. Im pretty sure this is why it coming up that I have a lot of dup content on the website also.

Help appreciated as always. Thank you!

Point taken, but.... ive made no.1 & 2 with the others that are more competitive, thats the annoying part,  Thanks though

Nop, not true at all, I ranked a a fairly competitive keyword No.1 with an exact match keyword domain name, we only focused on 2 variations of a keywords and no penalty.

There are only 3 main competitors and there SEO campign is next to none, they are there because they started a website a few years back and google had to rank something.

Dont get me wrong, they have done  a great job developing their business but they simple do not do any SEO marketing what so ever. If i was able to push them down the page in the keywords that are harder to rank for why cant i do it to the less competitive ones.

I now there is a flaw in my campaign/thinking and i am just looking for some inspiration here.

HI there,

im new to this forum but im doing SEO quite a while. I lost touch with the whole SEO community while building my business's so I said i better get back in touch before I lose my most valued skill.

I set up a gift website 3 months before xmas. We decided to focus on the following keywords starting out, gifts, gift ideas, gifts for him, gifts for her and christmas gifts.

We have managed to rank No.1 for gift ideas, No.2 for gifts.

For "christmas gifts" we could not get it onto the first page, it was hanging around the 12 and 13 spot  for weeks, so we decided to stop linking to the page with anchor text "christmas gifts" and use related keywords, the result, we shot to NO.1 within 2 weeks.

I now have the same problem with "gifts for him" and "gifts for her" except, i have tried everything but we are still hanging around 4-6 spot on page one, I cant get them into the top 3 and cant understand it. Ive done the following to try give it a boost.

1. Increase the variation of the anchor text
2. Decrease the amount of keywords in title tag
3. Link to it from high PR pages

Im really lost and its really bugging me the fact all the other keywords are ranking so well. The only thing I can think of from my research and perhaps someone might be able to give me some advice on this (Backed up by past results) is we have not once linked to this page with the actual URL, 100% of the links are varied anchor text. Would perhaps linking with the plain old URL help it, its really bugging me as we did so well with everything else using 90% white hat, 10% grey hat seo. Please help. Thanks

Also, we have not done any social media linking to it.