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A couple of things to keep in mind:

(1) Our authority metrics factor in link strength and try to model ranking ability, but they don't model things like spam factors. If you have a lot of links that look strong on the surface but have been devalued or penalized, we often won't catch that. We're working on spam modeling, but it's extremely complex.

(2) As soon as you add "sydney" to the mix, this becomes as much a local SEO puzzle as an organic SEO puzzle. It's entirely possible that the competition is weaker on things like links or social signals, but has solid local ranking factors (like reviews and citations).

Google seems to have a strong preference for the root domain, and I've seen this before. Unfortunately, ASP/.NET can be really stubborn about going for the "index.aspx" or "default.aspx" page. You're probably still getting credit for the back-links, but it can be tough to tell. A couple of things:

(1) Make sure you're linking internally to the canonical version (in this case "index.aspx"). Otherwise, you're sending a mixed signal and that can disrupt the 301.

(2) Add a canonical tag to the "index.aspx" page. It can't hurt to double up, in this case.

Oh, sorry - just saw your follow-up. That 301/302 chain could exacerbate the problem, although it would typically leave link-juice after the 301. It's a bit complex, though. You could consider moving your English home-page up a level and only redirecting other audiences. That is a tricky proposition, though, and carries risk.

I'd also grab a header checker and just make sure Google is seeing what you're seeing. It's always best to verify that your redirects are working as expected.

I don't know anyone who has a back-channel into when Google updates toolbar PR. They've been increasingly inconsistent. The last one was in February, as best I'm aware. Shaun Anderson reports them pretty reliable, from what I've seen:

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-pr-update/

That said, I agree with William - toolbar PR is a very unreliable metric and limited metric, and it's often so outdated by the time it updates that it's easy to misinterpret. Real PageRank is being updated in nearly real-time, and even "true" PR is just one of 200+ ranking signals.

It's very likely that the "index.html" version is more authoritative because you're using it in internal links. The problem is that that often creates a duplication issue - you refer to the root (non-index.html) version in inbound links, social, etc. (and people tend to link and bookmark the root version), but then link internally to "index.html", so Google will end up indexing both.

If the authority is coming from internal links, and you:

(1) Switch the internal links to the root ("/")

(2) 301-redirect "index.html" to the root ("/")

...you shouldn't lose any authority, as you'll have re-routed it by doing step (1). You'll also consolidate your signals and be better off all-around, IMO.

Kane's right, though - it's a bit tough to tell without knowing the specifics.

One warning - not to derail the discussion, which is amazing - I'm as sure as is reasonably possible that at least one major search engine used META keywords as a spam signal in the past, and I'd bet it's still corroborating evidence for Google. Probably goes without saying, but if you use it - use it well. Just because it's not a positive ranking factor doesn't mean it's not a negative ranking factor.

I agree that the competitor aspect never bothered me. Hopefully, you also use your keywords in your actual content. Otherwise, what's the point?

One clarification one Vahe's answer - if these continue (?page=2, ?page=3, etc.) then it's traditional pagination. You could use the GWT solution Adam mentioned, although, honestly, I find it's hit-or-miss. It is simpler than other solution. The "ideal" Google solution is very hard to implement (and I actually have issues with it). The other option is to META NOINDEX the variants, but that would take adjusting the template code dynamically.

If it's just an issue of a bunch of "page=1" duplicates, and this isn't "true" pagination, then canonical tags are probably your best bet. There may be a Drupal plug-in or fix - unfortunately, I don't have much Drupal experience.

The question is whether these pages are being indexed by Google, and how many of them there are. At large scale, these kinds of near-duplicates can dilute your index, harm rankings, and even contribute to Panda issues. At smaller scale, though, they might have no impact at all. So, it's not always clear cut, and you have to work the risk/cost calculation.

You can run a command in Google like:

site:example.com inurl:page=

...and try to get a sense of how much of this content is being indexed.

The GWT approach won't hurt, and it's fine to try. I just find that Google doesn't honor it consistently.

That's the kind of study I don't do because I'm secretly afraid it might work and then I'd have to quit my job and just drink full-time.

It's a bit hard to tell without seeing the specific case, but the first thing that comes to mind is a ton of links to that URL - either bad internal links or inbound/external links created accidentally or maliciously. If Google sees the URL linked to prominently, they could decide to treat that URL as legitimate (even without a page).

Does the bad URL 404 correctly? It's possible the URL is out there but it's resolving with a 200 or a weird redirect, and Google isn't recognizing that the page doesn't exist. One of the first things I'd do is run a header checker against the bad URL and see how it's resolving. For example, a tool like:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

If you haven't yet, please see my follow-up post:

http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

This is a moving target, and it's actually a pixel width (512px), but I tried to take a data-driven approach, and as best I can measure, 55 characters is a safe limit about 95% of the time.

I will add that Google definitely processes characters beyond that limit (some are even in the source code) and words beyond that limit could count toward ranking. They won't count much, I strongly suspect, but this new limit doesn't mean you automatically have to cut everything shorter. There's certainly no penalty for going over, as long as you're not keyword-stuffing to extremes.

One down side is that the new method (using CSS for the cut-off) means that Google now cuts mid-word, instead of between words. This could be more detrimental to CTR, in my opinion. It's very situational, though. The best I can say is to look at your most important title tags in the context of real searches and make your own judgment call.

It can be really tough to separate the Google "dance" from "bounce" from daily fluctuations. The "Google dance" was originally a reference to monthly algorithm/data updates - that actual phenomenon has been gone for years now. Data is updated all the time, and the algorithm can change daily at this point. If you suspect an algorithm change has impacted your site (for example - a Panda update), you typically have to look at the dates of the updates and how the factors in that update are represented on your site. We keep an ongoing history here:

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

When I think of "bounce", I tend to think of sites that are moving up and down a lot for a sustained period of time (while other sites in the same rankings don't move). That can, in some cases, be a sign of an impending penalty or Google re-evaluating something about your site (your indexed pages, links, etc.).

Unfortunately, it can be really tough to separate "bounce" from daily fluctuations. I'm working on a project to track daily changes in rankings, and one thing I can tell you is that Google is far from stable. The average change in any given Top 10 day-to-day is surprisingly high. Anecdotally, the changes in deeper pages of the SERPs (2, 3, etc.) are even larger.

So, this could be perfectly normal. I'd keep an eye on a few things:

(1) Are you tracking using a 3rd-party tool, with personalization, localization, etc. off? It's really easy to see different SERPs these days, just by changing computers, being logged in, etc.

(2) Are you bouncing up and down daily, or is it a gradual change?

(3) Are other people in the Top 20 bouncing as well?

(4) Is this bounce having any real impact? This gets into @stubby's reply - if the bounce isn't impacting search traffic, the number of keywords you get traffic from, the pages that get traffic, etc., it may not be worth worrying about. Dig into Google Webmaster Tools and your analytics and find out what impact these ranking changes are really having on visitors to your site.

These look like mini-sitelinks, and not breadcrumb links (since I'm not seeing any breadcrumb links on the site). Unfortunately, mini-sitelinks, just like regular sitelinks (that appear in full size under a #1 result) are both a bit beyond your control. It comes down to some calculation of authority and relevance.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing it on any current SERPs for that site, and I'm not finding those links in the actual URL (I suspect they rotate or have changed), so it's a bit tough to pin down. These links are very query-dependent, so they can come and go from day-to-day and query-to-query.

It can take a while. I disagree very slightly with Alan and EGOL on one point - while 301s are traditionally more appropriate here, I often find that canonicals are pretty strong (and more than a hint). Both suffer the same problem, though - the signal has to be crawled and processed, and that doesn't always take right away. I haven't seen any reports on it taking 2, 3, etc. times to happen, but I've definitely seen a page re-cache without the indexation signals beign honored.

Are these true duplicates or did something change in the interim a bit? If the duplicates don't seem like true duplicates or you put 1000s of them out there all at once, Google could choose to ignore the canonicals.

If these really seem stuck, though, switching to 301s is harmless, and for a permanent URL change, it is probably the better way to go. I wouldn't expect that to kick in instantly either, though.

You can add sitelinks in AdWords, but not for organic. In Webmaster Tools (Search Console), you can only tell Google to block sitelinks you don't want.

Just adding to previous comments, both a 301-redirect or canonical tag should work here. Traditionally, we tend to suggest a 301-redirect for critical pages, but the canonical can sweep up other variants of the home-page (and it's common to have variations, like tracking parameters, https: versions, etc.), so I've gradually moved that direction.

In your case, the trick is that you're driving other content off of "default.asp", such as:

http://www.etraxc.com/default.asp?demo=part

I'm not clear if that's a unique page or if it's also a partial duplicate. If those pages are unique and you use the canonical tag, you'd knock those pages out of the index, so it would probably be the wrong choice here. If those are unintentional duplicates or low-value, then canonical is probably a good bet.

Even if you fix your internal links (which is the right thing to do), it's still good to sweep up the bad copies in Google's index, so I'd implement one of the fixes.

Yeah, this one's a bit tricky. These are snippets Google is creating from on-page search results. To the best of my knowledge, this particular style of snippet is not based on any particular markup. Google is extracting it from source-code structure (like tables and CSS elements).

If you don't have these and want them, all I can really suggest is clean HTML/CSS. Why and how they do this, exactly, is still a bit of a mystery.

If you have these and don't want them, you're kind of out of luck. The only options are blocking snippets completely or trying to essentially make your source code so awful Google stops doing it, and the side effects of that are a lot worse than an undesired snippet format, IMO.

When you say "delete", do you mean delete it from the home button (and just use the root version), or delete the page? Keep in mind that the "index.html" page also drives the root version of the site ("www.example.com/"), so you definitely don't want to delete that file.

Whether you use 301-redirects or canonical tags (either should be ok, but it sounds like the canonical tag would be easier for you to implement), it is important to use a consistent path. So, you do need to change the button link to match the canonical version of the URL. Don't do this until after you've got either the 301 or canonical tag in place.

We've seen two spikes in October, but neither one is clear or particularly off-the-charts. There's some evidence that the second "update" may have partially reversed the first one.

I've dug into data around the "Hacked Sites" algorithm, and the signals Google is claiming aren't evident yet. I can't find any unexplained SERPs with a drop in total results, and there's no clear movement on spammy keywords. Google has been unclear about the roll-out date and timeline on this one, and it seems like it might be a long roll-out.

One of these URLs just seems to be the encoded version of the other, which should appear as identical. I'm not seeing any evidence that Google is indexing both. I have a feeling that you may have some bad internal links that need to be fixed. I'm seeing the English/German version of this page in the index, but that should be fine. As Khem said, you could use .

Be careful about converting to a "static" version. It's not that it's a bad idea, but the problem is that you could end up turning 2 duplicates into 3 duplicates. You'll still have to canonicalize the dynamic version to the static version. In other words, done badly, changing your URLs could actually make the problem worse.

You've got some recent links that are dubious (got a second opinion). Check out this one:

http://www.getgawjus.com/2016/02/fashion-files-springsummer-2016-trends.html

This has the appearance of a sponsored link, it's on the text in question ("wholesale silver jewellery"), and the link isn't highlighted (which makes it appear as if it's more for Google than users).

Are you seeing any manual actions in Google Search Console? This has all the appearances of a highly targeted action (based on specific phrases), and those are quite often related to link-building.

Unfortunately, it does get tricky in those multi-parameter situations. Googe has suggested that you NOT use canonical to solve pagination issues, unless you canonical to a "View All", and that has some restrictions. So, don't use canonical if it covers "page=2", etc.

Adam Audette has a great post on the subject, but it is complex (he just didn't an updated talk at SMX, but I don't have that link offhand yet):

http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

Basically, you can use canonical and rel=prev/next together:

(1) The canonical tag would point to "?category=used&page=2"

(2) Rel=prev/next should include the "price=high" parameter, and other parameters.

Unfortunately, this makes for tricky code. See the end of this post:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

I'm not thrilled with Google's solution, but it does seem to be working. Bing only partially supports rel=prev/next, to complicate matters.

The other option is to use Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing Webmaster Central) parameter handling to inform them of the functions of "price=" and "page=". If you're just trying to prevent problems, that's viable (i.e. you don't have any current issues).

You can also NOINDEX the variants - Google says they don't recommend it anymore, but I still find it does work in some cases. I just wouldn't combine NOINDEX with rel=prev/next/canonical - you can end up with a mess.

Google confirmed a core update around January 8th in the US, but I don't have data on international roll-out and most of the analyses of what happened at this point are very speculative.

Your "site:" search issue is very odd. As you said, Google is flat-out denying the existing of pages it clear has in the index. It doesn't seem to be a change in query interpretation or spelling. Whether I use the British or American spelling of jewellery/jewelry, I run into the same problem.

My gut feeling is that this looks much more like a phrase-specific penalty. Normally, this would occur if you were abusing exact-match anchor text (linking from hundreds or thousands of sites with exactly the same text). I'm not seeing any evidence of that. Your link profile isn't very strong, and there are maybe a few too many directory links, but most of the anchor text is brand-related and I'm not seeing anything that looks particularly spammy.

I'm going to run it by a couple of people - it's an interesting case and a bit of a stumper.

(1) DON'T canonical to the first page of results - Google definitely has issues with that. If you've got rel=prev/next in place, then I wouldn't canonical to "View All", either. They're kind of competing signals. You can use rel=prev/next with rel=canonical, but it's a bit complicated. Basically, it's for situations where you have pagination AND some other parameter, like a sort.

(2) If you increase it, just make sure it doesn't negatively impact users or load-times (might be worth A/B testing, honestly). Are you saying that you might end up with a URL like "?page=7" which basically doesn't exist because now you'll have less pages? I think you might be safer just letting that 404 and have Google recrawl the new structure. The odds of having any links to Page 7 of search results (inbound links, that is) are very low, and just letting those pages die off may be safer.

So, first off, my apologies - I completely missed the 2015 and thought this just happened last month. You can tell that I'm one of those people still writing "2015" on my checks

Unfortunately, a 13-month lag makes tracking down a difficult problem even more difficult. Talked to a few SEOs, as this is such an odd case, and we generally agree that the typical culprits are:

(1) A targeted penalty due to link-building (usually, anchor text over-optimization)
(2) A targeted devaluation due to on-page over-optimization

I'm just not seeing evidence for #2, for the most part, and this does not look like a Panda issue to me. Typically, Panda has wider impact now and wouldn't be targeting specific phrases. The profile just doesn't fit, in my experience.

The redirect problem is suspicious, but so many months after you redirected and then reversed it, it's going to be really tough to sort out. I'm seeing something very weird, though. Run the site: operator in Google on your old site (since it's still live):

site:jewellery-collection.co.uk/

There are two URLs for what seems to be the home-page, one http: and one https:. Click on the cached version of the https: site, and it's a completely different site, for elf925 Jewelry. Something very odd it going on there.

Given that reversing the redirect hasn't helped you in over a year, I think I'd either go ahead and re-consolidate these sites or kill the old one completely. You could try a rel=canonical on the old site, if you're concerned about doing another 301-redirect. This legacy site could bite you in more than one way, though, so I think I'd take it out of the picture. After a year, you may need to try some more radical solutions.

It's a little tough to tell without seeing the URLs in question, unfortunately, but it is possible, yes. When you say "has virtually gone missing", what do you mean, precisely? It usually boils down to a continuum:

(1) Not indexed

(2) Indexed but not ranking

(3) Ranking but poorly

A bad 302 setup is more likely to cause (1) and maybe cross into (2) then (3), but it really does depend. The first step is to see how you're being indexed. The other question is if the 302 is creating duplicates or causing crawl/index problems - for example, are both versions of the URL being indexed (that could also be bad)?

If the correct URL is being indexed and it's ranking, but it's just not ranking very well, then I suspect you've got more going on than the 302s. If nothing else, fixing the problem will make the situation cleaner and easier to diagnose. If you add technical problems on top of other problems (like link profile issues), sorting out the mess can be extremely difficult.

I'm not aware of an algorithm update around April 24, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. It is possible for individual pages to be penalized. It's also possible for individual pages just to be heavily filtered. A penalty might occur to an individual page if you were targeting bad links (paid, anchor text abuse, etc.) at just that one page. A filter might hit you if the page was seen as highly duplicate or thin content. I believe the "Top Heavy" ad penalty is also page-specific, but I'm not 100% sure.

The pages dropping in and out of rankings is a bit trickier. It could indicate that you're on the border of having a problem, or it could just be that the pages are just starting to get strong enough to rank.

Unfortunately, both are tough to pin down without specifics. I'd start with the two pages that don't rank at all. Not ranking for their main keywords could simply mean they've been devalued in some ways and not outright penalized. Are they ranking for long tail terms, including exact-match title terms? If you can't get them to rank for any terms at all, that starts to look more like a penalty or possibly a severe technical problem. The fact that they're being indexed, though, generally rules out some of the technical problems.

I assume you're not seeing any messages in Google Search Console.

That's pretty much typical search pagination. You can use NOINDEX on pages 2+, but Google currently recommends the rel=prev/next tags:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

The new tags seems to be working better over the past few months, but they can be tricky to implement, as they're different for every page (you have to create them dynamically). Historically, I've found that NOINDEX works pretty well for search pagination.

In this particular case, you wouldn't want to use canonical tags. Pagination is a bit unique. Unfortunately, even within internal search, different aspects can require different tags. It gets tricky fast these days.

We've seen a lot of reports, including Q&A questions, of sites showing bad dates in Google SERPs. I've verified this bug in the wild. There are also reports of bad dates being caused by YouTube embeds, with Google taking the video date instead of the page date. I can also confirm this is happening, although I don't know if it accounts for all of the bad dates.

Some people are reporting that these bad dates showing up corresponded with ranking drops. Usually, I would treat that as a coincidence (Google could easily launch an update and have a glitch on the same day), but in some of the reported cases, removing YouTube embeds led to ranking recovery soon after. I can't verify this, but I can't disregard it. There seem to be multiple reports of this recovery.

I'm in communication with a Google rep, and they are unaware of any direct connection between a bad date and ranking (such as some kind of QDF effect). I've passed along some data, and they are investigating, but there may have been multiple updates in play that are making for noisy data (even for Google).

There did seem to be heavy algorithm flux on November 10th and 18th, with some people speculating the latter spike was a reversal of the former. I have no evidence to support this, but MozCast data and chatter do seem to support both spikes.

If you've been affected by this problem and the ranking drops are severe, it's worth temporarily removing YouTube embeds (if feasible). Replace them with direct links (or maybe a linked thumbnail) and have Google re-fetch the page. I can't guarantee it will work, but the risks are low. It's easy to restore the embed.

Update (11/22) - Gary Illyes is saying on Twitter that the date problems have been fixed. If you see the proper dates cached, but have not seen rankings recover, then these may be unrelated events.

Yeah, the canonical should be ok - I just wanted to make sure you had something in place. One minor thing - I'd get that up on the page - with all the JS, the canonical is down on line 436 of the source code. You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files. It shouldn't make a big ranking difference, but it won't hurt.

You do have have a dozen pages that share your home-page TITLE and META description. Some seem to be odd, near-duplicates, where others probably just have duplicate meta data. Either way, I'd clean that up. Run this query in Google to see them:

site:ccisolutions.com intitle:"Acoustics, Sound, Lighting"

...or check Webmaster Tools (or your SEOmoz campaigns). Again, it probably isn't the culprit, but it's not helping.

I'd really dig to see if anything else is going on. The timing could just be coincidence. I find it really hard to believe that the META refresh change alone harmed you, unless this is just a temporary bounce while Google sorts it out. I definitely would NOT put it back - you risk compounding the problem. People rush to reverse things, assuming that will take them back to where they were, and it rarely does. More than 70% of the time, it just makes a bigger mess.

Yeah, that's the one I'm familiar with, and is the only big change I'm aware of in the past year. Haven't heard any chatter about location switching since then. There have been some changes that impact how Google handle locations for automated SERP collection, but most of those don't impact regular searches.

I'd tend to agree with Dawn - it's a balancing act. I wrote about it a bit back:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

As for named anchors, though, they should be fine. Google should treat them all as links to "page.html" (as long as they're true named anchors and not AJAX) and basically ignore the 2nd, 3rd, etc. link. They may not even be crawled (I'm not 100% sure on that), but they shouldn't dilute your internal link juice.

The only semi-consistent story we're seeing is some minor reversals from the August 1st update, but even that's not clear. I'd say that, if you were hit by August 1st, I'd pay closer attention, but that's about as strong a statement as I'd make.

In general, unless there's something really obvious, like an error in Google Search Console, then you're looking at traffic changes and ranking changes. Both can have not only seasonal but day-of-week and even hour-by-hour variations, so it's important to track any change over time.

In this case, it did look like the March 12 core update rolled out in 1-2 days, followed by a relatively quiet period of algorithm flux, so I don't think this is a sustained roll-out. If you were hit, you'd be seeing it by now, I suspect. That said, note that ranking changes may take longer to see, depending on how often your data is updated (we're weekly in Moz Pro).

It's certainly a mixed signal. It's hard to predict what Google will do, and they may just ignore the canonical in that case, but I've seen enough problems that I wouldn't take chances with it. My gut feeling is that the 301 is probably overpowering the canonical (and your Google index is showing the trailing slash in most cases), but I'd fix the canonical. You could see some short-term bounce, but I think it's for the best long-term.

FYI, you've got a ton of title tag duplication within the "/women" pages - you might want to look at adding some uniqueness to the deeper pages. That's unrelated - just something I noticed.

I haven't seen much in the way of data on this. Since many usability studies and A/B tests mean that a site has solid investment, it's rare to see someone test "bad grammar" vs. "good grammar". Plus, if you've invested in good grammar enough to have a "B" version, then why not just use it. So, practically, you just don't see this in the research very much.

I agree with GNC that it's primarily a trust issue. Are you going to give your credit cart to a company with dozens of typos, spelling mistakes, and bits of bad grammar? If they offshored their copy for bargain basement prices, is that where you want to put you money?

I saw a good international SEO talk once about the importance of writing copy for your target audience and NOT just translating. So much is idiomatic that it's easy to lose important details in translation. When your competitor is a click away and especially if you're an unknown quantity (and not a big brand), these details can matter quite a bit.

I have to disagree with Mike a bit - this is the kind of situation that can cause problems, and I think the duplication across the industry actually makes it even more likely. Yes, the big players can get away with it, and Google understands the dynamic to some degree, but if you have a new site or smaller brand, you could greatly weaken your ranking ability. You especially have to be careful out the gate, IMO, when your authority is weak.

To be fair, I'm assuming you're a small to mid-sized player and not a major brand, so if that's an incorrect assumption, let me know.

There aren't many have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approaches to duplicate content in 2013. If you use rel=canonical, NOINDEX, etc. then some version of the page won't be eligible for ranking. If you don't, then the pages could dilute each other or even harm the ranking of the overall site. Each product won't "carry the same weight in search" - if you don't pick, Google will, and your internal site architecture and inbound link structure is always going to weight some pages more highly than others. Personally, I think it's better to choose than have the choice made for you (which is usually what happens).

I'd also wonder if this structure is really that great for users - people don't want to happen across nine versions of the same page, that only differ by the branch. The branch is your construct, not theirs, and it's important to view this from the visitor perspective.

Unfortunately, I don't understand the business/site well enough to give you a great alternative. Is there a way to create a unified product URL/page, but still give the branch credit when a visitor hits the product via their sub-site. For example, you could cookie the visitor and then show the branches template (logo, info, etc.) at the top of the page, but still keep one default URL that Google would see. As long as new visitors to the site also see that default, it's not a problem.

Unfortunately, it can vary wildly - in some cases, those variants aren't really crawlable and/or Goolge will ignore them. In other cases, they can spin out a lot of duplicates. It's hard to speak to the crawlability without digging into the site, but you can test for indexed copies with a Google query like:

site:example.com inurl:scid

If you're seeing versions of these URLs indexed, then you may have a problem. GWT parameter handling is one option, but you could also use rel=canonical to point these variants back to the original page. It depends a bit on the situation and the scope.

I'd generally say "no", but I suspect that there may be a point where the ratio of noindex'ed to indexed pages starts making Google wonder about your content quality. I think it also depends on where those pages fall in the site architecture. If you noindex everything below a certain point, that my be completely reasonable (I've done it without incident - ex. shopping cart pages, etc.). If you start noindex'ing major pages or it looks suspicious (like you're trying to PR-sculpt) I could see that raising red flags.

I doubt it's an issue, but I just think it's possible to take anything too far, especially if the usage seems deceptive or spammy in some way. Without knowing the situation, though, my gut reaction is that it's not a problem in 90% of cases.

I think that's a great clarification. Paying $20-25K for someone to build authoritative, trustworthy links and content to drive you to the top on competitive keywords could be a bargain. Paying that for someone to create junk is worse than a rip-off - it could kill your rankings. Off-page (1)-(8) all look low-value to me, and (9) is ambiguous.

I'm seeing your home-page ranking by name, so I don't think "android" in the domain is the culprit here. Whether that's a good idea long-term is a different issue, and depends entirely on Google.

I do see certain exact-match phrases bringing up tons of your pages, but not the actual posts, such as:

"Sony Xperia Ion LT28i Android 4.1.2"

This could indicate a technical problem, or it could be a link-based devaluation or penalty. Your link profile definitely looks a bit questionable, at first glance. I'm seeing some pretty low-quality stuff, enough that it could be causing you problems.

I can't find the exact-match title itself on your domain, but I find dozens of pages referencing the title in internal links. This has the feel of a penalty, but it's oddly specific.

I'm also seeing a ton of low-value pages indexed, like all of the "Index of..." pages. Run this query in Google, for example:

site:androidgadgematic.com intitle:"Index of"

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's anyone one smoking gun, so much as a collection of small problems, and that can be a tough situation.

If it's just a matter of link count, I wouldn't worry about it. If the comments are clearly spammy, then I htink M.-J. is exactly right - you need to moderate and remove those comments. It is possible for a large number of spammy comments (with outbound links) to cause problems with a site. It's not just an SEO issue - it looks bad to legitimate visitors as well. If you can't moderate, nofollow would be the next best option (the only other option, really).

If you've got 200 links on the page, though, and the comments are 95% legitimate, it's fine. It's just a popular post.

Unfortunately, "index.php?mact=Calendar" is not a folder, it's a page+parameter. If you tried to block that as a folder in GWT, it would mostly just not work. If it went really wrong, you'd block anything driven from index.php (including your home-page).

A couple of options:

(1) Programmatically META NOINDEX anything that calls the calendar parameters. This would have to be done selectively in the index.php header with code, so that ONLY the calendar pages were affected.

(2) Block "mact=" or "year=" with parameter handling in GWT. under "Configuration" > "URL Parameters". ONLY do this if these parameters drive the calendar and no other pages. You can basically tell Google to ignore pages with "year=" in them.

You can also block parameters in Robots.txt, but honestly, once the pages have been indexed, it doesn't work very well.

Unfortunately, the answer is a giant "It Depends". There's nothing wrong with that structure or having pages like you've suggested, but you have to offer some unique value and you have to have the link profile to back it up. If you only have a few links and then spin out 1000s of pages of eHow-like content, you're not going to rank for most of it (regardless of your URL and site structure). You may even find that most of the pages aren't indexed at all.

If the content is "thin" (mostly pulled from other sources, too heavy on ads, etc.), you could even get hit with a Panda-related penalty. So, you really have to focus on the quality at first, and on build up links and authority to support it. Ideally, it's an organic growth process, and you're not going from zero to 10,000 overnight.

That's not to say it can't work - just that it's not only about how you structure the site. It's ok for one site to cover multiple topics, if it's well organized and has authority, but it's going to be hard to build authority for 100 topics all at the same time. You might have more success picking a niche or at least building up gradually.

Unfortunately, I think this may not only be the best option, but the only option. You can't NOINDEX or use rel=canonical if the https pages aren't resolving, so you would have to do the redirects in .htaccess.

Unfortunately, messing with .htaccess for anything sitewide can get pretty tricky, and a little dangerous. I believe this code should work, but I'm not sure about any quirks in WordPress or specifics of your site implementation:

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php/topic/35833-how-do-i-redirect-https-to-http-on-my-site/

You may want a WordPress specialist to take a look.

I'm going to come somewhere in the middle. I think the data supports Eppie in that relevance doesn't matter nearly as much as we think it should (except for anchor text). Relevant pages typically don't pass more link-juice than irrelevant pages, and Google probably doesn't have the capacity to test relevance on every single link (that's a huge computational task).

On the other hand, chasing only low-relevance links can bite you. Too often, low-relevance means low-quality in other dimensions, and it can be a negative signal or even lead to a penalty. Diversity is very important. I wouldn't worry about relevance in terms of any given link - if you could get a link from CNN.com and it wasn't very relevant, for example - do it. No question. If you only have low-relevance links, though, you're probably doing something wrong.

Keep in mind, too, that links have other value, including traffic and lead-generation. Low-relevance links probably have no value beyond SEO. If Google devalues them, you're left with nothing. If Google ignores a high-relevance link, but it's driving traffic, you're still making money.

Honestly, submit and forget it. You could wait months, and I don't know of any secret way. If you're following the DMOZ rules, then no submission service is really going to help. In many cases, there just aren't enough editors.

The other issue is that many new DMOZ links are on deep pages, some of which aren't even getting indexed. No indexation means no link-juice. See my blog post from last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wheres-the-love-dmoz

At the end of the day, it's just one link. It's nice to have, but your efforts are better spent elsewhere, IMO.

I don't have much direct client experience with it (not very applicable to my previous niches), but I know that a couple of SEO friends in the newspaper industry reported using it successfully (very successfully, in one case) not long after Google approved cross-domain use. Of course, like anything, Google seems to modulate things over time, especially if they get abused. We're seeing a lot of changes in how 301s are handled this year, and I expect Google to start altering how canonicals (both internal and cross-domain) work, especially when people misuse them.

We do get a lot of scrapers Google doesn't manage it all that well, unfortunately. There are a couple of cues:

(1) As Harald said, Google does try to determine which came first. This can be tough, because auto-scrapers actually can get indexed before sources in some cases. Having a solid crawl structure, XML sitemaps, pinging relevant sites, etc. can help.

(2) If the sites link back to you (on purpose or accidentally, by including links you put in the content), it's a signal to Google that you're the source.

(3) If you're a high-authority site, you've generally got an edge. Most of our scrapers are pretty weak sites, so we're not in much dangers. Unfortunately, I've seen times when scrapers outranked original content.

Proper syndication, with back-links or other signals (like syndication-source or cross-domain canonical) can definitely be good for sites. Having a ton of scrapers on a site that's relatively new/weak can be very negative, unfortunately. Then again, most new sites don't have a ton of scrapers, so it does balance out a little.

You have to understand that "unique" is relative. Yes, each of these pages have some unique content and legitimately target different things. In Google's eyes, though, they have virtually the same title tag, are on the same subject, share common header elements, text, and keywords, and could be seen as near-duplicates. The audio page especially appears thin, since Google can't weigh in the value of the actual audio itself.

Personally, I'd combine the audio/video on one page, for starters. I just don't see clear value in the separation, either for search or users. As for the transcripts, that page is essentially richer. It's the video + the transcript. From a business/organizational standpoint, I'm not really clear on what the two sites are trying to accomplish, but you are potentially diluting your ranking ability. Two sites are harder to market and promote than one - that's a reality that goes far beyond SEO.

I see that the two sites have very different purposes, but if it were me, I would probably focus the ranking power of these videos/podcasts on just one page, and use cross-domain canonicals. This is as much a business decision as an SEO decision, so I can only give you my opinions, but the four copies probably are hurting you in the long run.

As wordy as I usually am, I think Brent's short-but-sweet answer is dead on. It's like hiring any contractor - there's always risk, and you have to do your homework. That means:

(1) Get referrals, properly vet them, and make sure they pass the "smell" test. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

(2) Outline what you expect in detail. I can't stress this enough. People hire outside firms, say "get me some links" and then are angry when those links are crap. You didn't say what kind of links to build, or how many, or what you're opposed to, or what your risk tolerance is. Make that all crystal clear.

(3) Monitor them, like any employee or contractor. If someone comes to work on my kitchen, I check in on them. I'm not trying to insult them, but it's my kitchen, and if they screw it up it's my problem. Insist on reports, get logins to sites (where applicable), get lists of the links they're building, etc. If you're uncomfortable with what they're doing, tell them to stop.