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Can't tell why it's happening, but run CollegeXpress through this header checker:

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

You should see a 301-redirect to an odd referrer code. It might be only happening to crawlers or it could be for new visitors (I think I saw it once, but then couldn't replicate it).

If you can update the old links, even though there are only a few of them, that should help. Since it's a unique brand name, even a handful of links with exact anchor text could be boosting the wrong site quite a bit.

I'm thinking the same thing - if possible, the 301 might help override the canonical. Sometimes, in my experience, if you reverse a signal (like rel-canonical) with that same signal, Google takes it's time to re-evaluate, because the reversal just looks odd. The 301 here might be more insistent.

The link profile and other signals should help, but I've seen reversing a bad canonical take weeks. It's a tough signal to undo.

Is the .com site still blocked, though? If you canonical'ed to a blocked site and now are trying to reverse it, but the site is still blocked, Google won't crawl the new signal (the same would be true for 301s). If the .com is blocked somehow and you remove the bad canonical, Google may act more quickly (since canonicalizing to a blocked site would seem strange).

We're re-evaluating the canonical notice, as it's confusing to a lot of people. Our intent wasn't necessarily to say that the tag is wrong, but more of a "heads up" (in case there are potential problems). Unfortunately, there's no good way to automatically detect what page a canonical should point to, so we tend to have to use general warnings.

Unfortunately, although Bing is more transparent about some policies, they're a little quieter about specific updates, and the SEO community just doesn't track the Bing algorithm very carefully. I'm not seeing any evidence of a similar drop in my own client sites, but that's anecdotal at best.

As Alan said, Bing is more aggressive about user signals and I'd add that social signals may have more impact as well, but like Google they seem to be changing the mix frequently.

I always start with the facts. You know you had a recent relaunch - are you seeing any side effects? Is Bing indexing a lot more pages (or duplicates)? Are they have any crawl issues. I'd definitely dig into Bing Webmaster Tools and see what kind of signals they're reporting - not just since 3/27, but since the relaunch. This could be a delayed impact of the changes you made.

I agree with Phil that I'd canonical that home-page - I don't think it's the whole problem, but parameter blocking in GWT is inconsistent, in my experience. For something that important, I'd want a stronger signal. I'm also not clear on why your doing a 301-redirect to ref=collegexpress.com when a crawler hits the site - it just seems like an unnecessary step that could weaken your home-page.

Although careersandcolleges.com isn't targeting "collegexpress" on-page, you do seem to be using it in inbound anchor text. For example:

http://home.epix.net/~captclint/schools.html

This sets up conflicting cues for Google, and since the Careers and Colleges domain is a bit stronger, it could be enough to cause you some problems. I'd make sure that brand anchor text is isolated, as much as possible.

In some rare cases we'll see Google canonicalize two domains, if they think the content is too similar. I'm not seeing any evidence of that here, though. Both domains are ranking, so that suggests that either the Collegexpress domain is being weakened somehow or Collegesandcareers is overpowering it.

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/

While creating the copy of the home-page isn't ideal, if Google hasn't indexed it, it's very likely not creating duplicate content problems. Either they're filtering it out or haven't indexed it at all (since it probably has no links/paths).

I don't think that this alone is the cause of your ranking drop, but you've got a few things going on, so it's tough to say. Unfortunately, most of the ideal solutions seem to be impossible in the Godaddy system, and that's going to continue to cause you some problems.

First off, it's more of a balancing act than a hard/fast rule. I wrote a post about the 100 links "limit" last year, just for reference:

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

Generally, though Expand Online is right - tests seem to show that Google ignores the 2nd, 3rd, etc. link to any Page B from Page A. While we still count those individual links, it shouldn't pose major problems for internal link-juice flow. Google consolidates them, for the most part. It may not be 100%, but it's close enough that you're probably ok in most cases.

It can be very situational, though. In practice, I find the additional links are sometimes unnecessary or even confusing for visitors, so pruning them down is always worth reviewing. I wouldn't create one mega-link, though - it can behave funny cross-browser, and it'll create odd-looking anchor text. If it's a choice of that or leaving things alone, I'd leave things alone.

It's a bit dangerous to simply block "shakeology.html", if Google has preferred it for a reason - you could end up getting your root page back in the rankings, or you could end up just falling out completely. I think you'd be better off leaving it and having the "wrong" page rank, if that's the only viable option.

I'm actually still showing your root home-page ranking, though, and now the "shakeology.html" page isn't even appearing in the index. Did you already make a change?

Are you talking about the recent crack-down on link networks? I'm a little confuse, because you mention a 3/29 algorithm change and the question went up on 3/28 (at least here in the US).

I'm actually working on a post about (1), because I think it's almost completely unanswerable without specifics. I've seen people obsess over on-page or build links like crazy and let their on-page turn into a mess, and often those people would be well served to completely switch gears. Take a site that's an absolute mess on-page but has a solid link profile, and fixing on-page issues could work magic for them (for example).

Let's say we're talking about a brand new site, though. It still varies with the goals and budget, but I'd probably say:

• 40% Content
• 30% Link-building
• 20% On-page
• 10% Social

Without some base of solid content, you've got nothing to build links to or promote socially. I'm not saying content is magical - you have to pound the pavement and build those links - but you've got to at least have enough of a site that someone would want to link to it. So, in the beginning, content is still the mainstay. On-page has to start pretty strong - do your keyword research and build a decent, SEO-friendly structure, but then it can level off a little.

Glad to hear there's at least some progress. So often in these cases, I'm seeing that there are multiple things going on, and all you can do is fix them one at a time until the situation gets clearer. Give it a little time and then make the next set of changes - hopefully, it's all cumulative. Just make sure you measure progress and give things time to work. Where I see the most problems is when someone makes a change, it doesn't work in 3-4 days and then they reverse it or pile on new changes. Half the time, Google hasn't even re-cached 90% of the pages at that point.

Unfortunately, there just comes a point where sometimes these very narrow CMS systems hit their limits, and it can start to harm you. I don't know Website Tonight well enough to help on that (hopefully someone else does), but there may come a point where you want to consider to a more advanced platform. These days, there are a lot of options that aren't budget-breakers, although switching is always a bit tough.

From a broader sense, in terms of Google, yes - the canonical tag will also help alleviate duplicate META data. In our system, though, I'm honestly not 100% sure - I'm going to check with the product team.

My experience matches Nakul's. Technically, Bing claims you shouldn't have canonicals on the canonical page itself, but I've never seen evidence that they actually do anything about that or don't honor the tags. I think they just don't like processing the extra tags. Google originally suggested the same thing, but then softened their stance. I've NEVER seen a practical issue with it on Google.

So, by the book, Bing would rather you only put it on non-canonical URLs. Practically, though, it seems to work absolutely fine. I wouldn't lose sleep over it. So many big sites are doing this now that I don't think the engines can devalue the tactic. It's not spammy - it's just mildly inconvenient for them (some extra processing).

We tag near-duplicates in the system, so I think you've got a combination of factors:

(1) There's only one post on some of the tag pages.

(2) The posts don't have a lot of text, so the "snippet" duplicates about 1/3 to 1/2 of it.

(3) The navigation/code is pretty heavy, compared to content.

Once those tag pages have more posts/snippets, I don't think you'll see problems. Be careful, as you grow, with how many tags you create. Tag searches can start to look a bit thin, and you may want to exclude them (or some of them) from the search index down the road. For now, I think you're probably ok. Once those tags have 3-4 snippets on them, the pages should look a lot better.

Sounds like SEO Executive has got you covered on the Godaddy front - just wanted to point out a couple of things:

(1) I'm not seeing a preview for your home-page, and I had trouble connecting to it the first time. It seems to be cahced, so this could be a fluke.

(2) Not sure if this is part of the Godaddy code, but there's a really weird tag on the home-page:

name="canonical tag" content=""/>

That might just be a reference, but it doesn't do anything. If it's supposed to actually be a canonical, then something is broken.

Sorry - my browser auto-completed the "/350" paginated URL. That change looks good, actually - it'll simplify the crawl path and should prevent those weird, empty results pages. Not sure why those are happening (and you may still need to fix something), but sticking to "Older" / "Newer" should help. I doubt this is the whole problem, but it's definitely an issue.

SORRY: SEE NEXT COMMENT

The current and prev/next link are just showing up as blank for me now (no articles). Something's off in the database, I suspect. It's almost like the "newest" articles are blank.

The category/tag issue is tricky - sometimes, it does make sense to NOINDEX/FOLLOW, if those categories and tags spin out into a ton of internal search pages. My worry is that you're noindex'ing main navigation links - which is really a mixed signal. Those pages are important enough to get top billing, but not to index (?)

I have a feeling the best answer is a balance, but that takes a really deep knowledge of the site to sort out. If it's only been a week, it's really tough to tell. On a big site and deeper pages, it can take weeks to sort out, I'm afraid to say. NOINDEX is far from instantaneous.

Your main categories could potentially get ranked over your blog posts in some cases, but again, that's partially the site architecture. If you don't want them to rank, why are they main navigation links? Another, more radical options would be to kill the drop-down menus and add a layer (each main-nav home page would have left-side links or something to that effect) - that would drive more link-juice to the main sections and articles, and less to the sub-categories.

There's something very wrong with your article/blog navigation. If I click the ">>", I jump to page 417, but then there are dozens of empty pages. This is part of why all those paginated versions are getting indexed. I don't know if this is a WP issue or a quirk of your implementation (maybe a bunch of blank entries in the database), but it's creating dozens or hundreds of empty pages for Google to crawl. Since that's available right from the home-page, it's definitely a problem.

You could use the 3rd domain as the "face" of the brand, temporarily split traffic to the 2 other domains and then, if that gives you trouble, integrate those 2 domains as sub-folders of the 3rd domain (if that makes sense). Then, the user experience would at least be unified over time.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the payment/technical issues are - there may be ways around it (there usually are), but they can get tricky fast. I've coded a few payment gateways in the past, so I know what a pain it can be.

So, I have to say that I'm actually upset about Google's recent recommendations, because they've presented them as if their simple and definitive, whereas they're actually very complicated to implement and don't always work very well. A couple of problems:

(1) Rel=prev/next is a fairly weak signal. If you're just trying to help the crawlers, it's fine. If you have issues with large-scale duplication (or have been hit with Panda), it's not a good fix, in my experience.

(2) Rel=prev/next isn't honored at all by Bing.

(3) It's actually really tough to code, especially their proposed Rel=prev/next + Rel=canonical solution.

There are a couple of other options:

(a) If you have a "View All" page (or if that's feasible without it being huge), you can rel-canonical to it from all of the paginated pages.

(b) You can META NOINDEX, FOLLOW pages 2+. I find that's a lot easier and usually more effective. Again, it depends on the severity of the problem and scope of the paginated content.

If you're not having problems and can manage the implementation, Rel=prev/next is a decent first step.

I should add that this is assuming you mean internal search results, and not content pagination (like paginated articles). With paginated search, the additional pages usually aren't a good search-user experience (Google visitors don't need to land on Page 11 of 17 of your search results), so I find that proactively managing them is a good thing. It really does depend a lot on the scope and the size of your index, though. This is a very complex issue that tends to get oversimplified.

You mean because there's only one entry in that tag result? It's not necessarily a problem, but if you spin out a lot of those tag pages, that content can look a little thin. It's a balancing act. As the site grows, you may want to consider whether or not to let every tag be indexed. Usually, it's only a problem on large sites, though.

Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to separate a bad history from a penalty from a large-scale technical problem, especially on large sites. I've seen many people assume they got hit by Panda when it was really a link-based penalty, and vise-versa. The site's history makes this go from difficult to nearly impossible, at least without a very deep dive, but I'll see what I can see.

Alan's right on one thing - Google Webmaster Tools has huge gaps in what they warn you about, and it's typically only manual penalties. Many sites have massive problems that never trigger a warning from Google.

I notice that you're NOINDEX'ing even high-level pages (in the navigation), such as:

http://dajaz1.com/music/alternative/

That seems like a bad message to Google - if it's important enough to appear in navigation, it's important enough to index. That's a pretty extreme culling of pages.

The paginated content is a bit of a mess, such as:

http://dajaz1.com/page/350/

In some cases, these don't even seem to return any results, so I'm not sure how they got crawled in the first place. The trick with META NOINDEX here is that, until Google re-crawls, they won't process the tag. This gets tricky, but I'd recommend a couple of possibilities:

(1) If the page returns no results, 301-redirect to the last page of search that has results.

(2) If none of these pages have search value, you could block "/page" as a folder in Google Webmaster Tools. This is a bit dangerous, so I'd want to make sure none of these pages had search value.

Are you getting any page load (speed) warning? Hitting your site intially is massive - about 4MB, by my count, with a ton of JavaScript, most of which just fuels the top, rotating images (which are loading very slowly on my machine). It seems like overkill, both from an SEO and usability standpoint, and is probably in your way to recovery. I'd seriously consider stripping down the size of the code and pruning back some of the active elements for a while.

If you can re-open the important paths, get rid of the thin content (this is going to be complicated and probably involves multiple steps), and speed up the site, you'll know enough to see if this is a technical issue (such as Panda).

There is certainly weak ranking even on your indexed pages, which could indicate a penalty, but it's really tough to tell. Too much of your content is competitive or uses shared phrases or videos, so it's hard to see whether a search for:

"Dwayne Wade 70-Foot Buzzer Beater" ...has you in 6th place for competitive reasons or because your site has been devalued. I don't think it's a penalty, at least in this case. It's a YouTube video and there are other, similar videos for a fairly recent, competitive term, so this may be an accurate ranking (in Google's POV).

The history is a lot tougher, and Q&A just isn't adequate to comment on a situation that complicated, as there are not only SEO but legal ramification. Honestly, I'd have to know a lot more details on that. If you suspect the history has hit you permanently, there may come a time when you have to completely re-brand and re-launch under a new domain.

I suspect, though, that cleaning up the crawl problems, removing the thinnest content, speeding up the site, and generally fixing some technical issues could help quite a bit. It's going to be a difficult process, though. The thing about changes like the Panda Update, is that it's not just one factor. I can't point to one thing and say "fix this" - you have to aggressively attack multiple factors, since Google is wrapping multiple signals into Panda and won't tell you which one is the problem.

I should say that I'm not saying this is Panda, but that it's a Panda-like situation - you've got a lot of crawl/index issues that are going to cause you problems. The question is whether those are compounded by your history (and, unfortunately, they probably are). The combination means that you have to be even more aggressive with the clean-up.

I think there may be an important distinction here - are you talking about potentially registering dozens of domains to rank for long-tail phrases? I think we're all assuming that you mean your primary domain choice.

Registering dozens of exact-match domains to rank for long-tail phrases is a lot less effective than it used to be (and will probably get even less effecting over the next 1-3 years). People abused that tactic, for starters, but it also splits your link-juice, social signals, and typically creates either doorway pages or large-scale duplicate content. The negatives outweigh the positives in most cases.

If you're only talking about one domain, and it really is a very long-tail phrase you want to target, then that's a bit different. In the example you give, most of the keywords are very common and a bit ambiguous, so you're right - a short version might not make much sense. On the other hand, the long version is going to target one very specific phrase that probably gets a small amount of traffic. You could target that phrase through on-page cues, inbound anchor text, etc. (the domain name is just one small piece of the puzzle).

It's confusing, but best practice is generally no hyphen in the root domain, but hyphens in the sub-folders (so, "www.mydomain.com/my-domain"). Google is good about separating words in root domains, but not always in folder and page names (and they recommend the hyphen as the preferred separator). Traditionally, hyphens in the root domain are also a (small) negative trust signal - people tend to think you couldn't get the non-hyphenated domain.

This one's a bit weird - your main "Login" link is fine - this is happening down in the comments section (under "Leave a Reply") - that login link tags the source page, so that you can return to the post.

In this case, I think I'd actually nofollow that and it's probably fine to block it in Robots.txt. This is where things get really situational, as normally I'd advise against that - see my recent post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/logic-meet-google-crawling-to-deindex

In your situation, though, Google only seems to be indexing 2 of those URLs currently, so you can probably cut this off before it becomes a problem. Our crawler is being a bit more aggressive in this situation (and, honestly, these links could pose a problem long-term).

If you had a ton of these pages indexed, I'd agree with Slava and recommend rel-canonical, because Robots.txt is pretty ineffective for de-indexing (plus, nofollow causes the problem in my post).

Sorry, I'm making this clear as mud I think a nofollow and blocking are fine here, because basically the problem hasn't happened yet - you're trying to prevent future problems.  You could also monitor for these URLs in Google's index for a few weeks, using this command:

site:irishdancingdress.com/wp-login.php

...if that number stays low (it's currently 2), then you're good to go.

I think the comments here cover the bases - I'm not aware of any kind of outright penalty, but it's always a balancing act - the more words in your domain, the less SEO impact each word is going to have. At some point, it may start to look a bit spammy.

Of course, there's the practical side, which includes the usability aspects, too. Imagine you want to give someone this URL over the phone, print it on a business card, use email addresses at it, or even post it on social media (without a shortener) - at some point, a long URL just isn't practical. It's also a negative trust signal - people aren't going to take an overly long URL seriously, IMO.

Honestly, in most cases, if you're just talking regions of the same country, I'd go for a sub-folder approach ("/region1", "/region2"). I'm finding that the power of exact-match domains is waning, while the benefits of consolidation are growing. Adding a 3rd domain just seems like a recipe for a mess, and is going to dilute your efforts even more.

What's the logic of the 3rd domain? Is it just to target some keywords?

Again, there's the business side to consider, so I can only tell you my general recommendations. It's not an easy situation.

It sounds like you've got 2 different questions here:

(1) In terms of the new/3rd domain, what's the goal? If it's just to get an exact-match domain and then send traffic to one of the 2 main domains, that could look like a doorway page. At best, it's a much weaker tactic than it was a few years ago. Keep in mind that you have to support these domains, build links to them, etc. In most cases, you're much better off focusing on your core domains.

(2) @Highland is right - your current domain may not pass all link-juice to the new domain, even with 301-redirects. You also may lose/gain depending on the domain name itself. That's not to say that you should never change domains, just that it carries risk and should be done carefully.

I'm wondering if a sub-directory structure would make more sense for your regions. Are these within one country (ccTLD) or international. You might be better off merging everything into one domain, honestly. Of course, this is both an SEO and a business decision, so it's hard to give responsible advice in just a few minutes.

The reality is that they might very well be able to get you PR4 links, but as Gareth said - PR is one tiny piece of the puzzle (and can be completely unreliable). Rand has a good post on link valuation here, and how complex it is:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

These services also often use their own link networks, which have been hit hard by Google the last couple of weeks - expect that assault to continue. They won't get everyone, and some do it better than others, but the people charging $5/link are a lot more likely to get hit.

Keep in mind, too, that there's a lot of bait-and-switch in that industry. Someone might get you a bunch of links, wait a month, then sell those same links to someone else (and cut your links). That's the problem with a lot of these one-time deals. They also pull tricks to temporarily inflate the PR of the pages the links are on (like 301-redirecting other domains). By the time, you actually get the link, that PR4+ could be 3 months out of date (and may actually be a PR1).

I'm not saying this as a white-hat - some people buy links effectively, I'll admit. You do get what you pay for, though, and your risk isn't just wasting money - it's potential penalization and long-term problems. If you're going to buy links, make it part of a larger, more diverse strategy, and do it right.

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.

FYI, it looks like you're 302-redirecting the "shop." sub-domain to a deeper page on the root domain. This can be the worst of both worlds, in some cases. I'm not clear on the reasoning, but if "shop." is the e-commerce/store sub-domain, I'd rather see you 301-redirect it to "/shop" or something like that.

I realize you may have technical constraints that require the e-commerce site to be on a subdomain. There are ways around that, like a reverse proxy.

From a purely SEO standpoint, you can potentially rank 2 sub-domains (Google keeps changing their mind on that, it seems), but you're also potentially splitting the link-juice between those sub-domains. In most cases, I don't find the sub-domain approach to be a good long-term strategy. On the other hand, if you're ranking #2 and #3 and aren't seeing a downside, you've got to consider that data.

Google hasn't been clear on this - they stated later (I can't recall where, unfortunately) that this change was only an accounting change in Google Webmaster Tools. It didn't change how they actually pass link-juice across subdomains. I've found it can go both ways. Some subdomains fragment and get treated as separate domains, and others seem to get more tightly integrated. It depends a lot on the site, structure, duplication, etc.