Hi,

It will not work when you put it in the body - check mistake 5 on this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

"When we encounter a rel=canonical designation in the , it’s disregarded. "

rgds

Dirk

Even the volume is not abnormal - suppose you have a Italian restaurant & take-away in Manhattan, then you would probably appear on pages on restaurants, italian restaurants, mediterranean restaurants, catering, take-aways in Manhatten, New York,... - all these lists are indexed in Google and all these pages would have links to your site. Depending on your business & region - you could appear in an awful lot of combinations of (sub)categories & geographic locations.

rgds,

Dirk

These are normal 404 errors - the :443 after the url just indicates that it's using the https port (you can add the 443 after each of your https urls - they redirect to the normal ones); Don't know why wordpress is adding the :443

Check your site if you have internal links to these 404 pages (try Screaming Frog or another crawltool. These pages seem to have existed in the past: check this example http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_M5jZnMoFmcJ:https://www.compleetverkleed.nl/hoed-al-capone-panter-8713647758068-2/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl

If no internal / external links to these pages exist - this problem should disappear after a while.

rgds,

Dirk

Normally the links from yellowpages are of type "nofollow" so they do not need to be disavowed.

Apart from this fact, given the fact that most businesses are listed in the yellow pages, these links don't seem to be very unnatural to me.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Peter,

Don't really understand your question about permalink & url - as far as I know a permalink is just an url which remains permanent. Could you give an example of what you mean?

GWT is checking if pages exist - it's not showing you errors if only a part of the page (like the image is missing) - Screaming Frog is much better to help you with this. If Screaming Frog is detecting the issues, it implies that there are links to these images. When you go to the "Response Code" tab - filter on 4xx errors and click on the image url - you can see in the window below under "inlinks" which pages are linking to this image.

Dirk

It could be that the message is only disappearing tomorrow.

The message from Google however doesn't say that the penalty is revoked but that it has been revoked or adjusted. It's possible that the penalty is now only applied to the specific subdomain rather than the site as a whole. Is it still the original message which is shown under Manual actions?

Would update the terms & conditions anyway - so that you can react quick if you see other actions appearing. Try to scan the subdomains from time to time to make sure that they are not violating the Google guidelines.

Regards,

Dirk

Hi,

Try to answer your questions point by point:

1. You could add to your terms & conditions that sites created need to follow Google webmasterguidelines - and if they are not followed you can delete the subdomain.

2. Revoke the penalty is only possible by cleaning the site and removing the contested content. It depends on your current terms & conditions if you have the possibility to force the one who is managing this blog to clean the site.

3. Idem as above - if your terms & conditions didn't stipulate that messing with Google guidelines is forbidden, there is not much you can do at this point.

4. Wordpress is hosting the blogs on wordpress.com - the main site is wordpress.org. Weebly has terms & conditions that forbid Spam/SEO sites (probably Wordpress.com has this as well - but it's stated very clearly on the Weebly.com)

Update terms & conditions if necessary - send warning to offending blog users & delete them if necessary.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Peter,

It depends.

If you don't get a lot of traffic from image search there is no need to do anything special.

If you are receiving a lot of traffic you basically have two options

• redirect the images to the new location (if this is easy to do)

• alternative would be to keep the images in the old location & put them in the new location as well. As you update the sitemap & redirect the url's Google will after a while update the index for image search & get the new location. As long the index is not updated, your 'old' images will still appear in image seach, when people click on the link they will however be redirected to your new page (as the page containing them is redirected). In my experience - the update frequency of the image index is lower than the normal search index.

I applied this strategy on 2 migrations of sites with 90% of search traffic = image & it proofed quite successful.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have additional questions,

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

In the Search Analytics report could you put the filter on "Pages" rather than "Keywords" - and check if there are pages listed that seem suspicious to you?

Did you try "spammy keyword" site:yoursite.com in Google?

Recently there where quite some questions about wordpress sites that had been hacked - mainly caused by this vulnerability:

https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/09/slider-revolution-plugin-critical-vulnerability-being-exploited.html

or this one https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/12/revslider-vulnerability-leads-to-massive-wordpress-soaksoak-compromise.html

I guess that sucuri would normally detect this - but maybe you could doublecheck that you're not using these kind of slider on your site.

rgds,

Dirk