Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Keep in mind that well-formatted structured data is only step one of (X), where Google defines X and X is always changing. Ok, I exaggerate a little, but the frustrating key point is that structured data is no guarantee that you will get enhanced results or any kind of Knowledge Graph entity. It's just a suggestion, and Google has to factor in a lot of other things. If the testing tool is giving you the green light, that's usually about the best you can hope for.

What kind of KG entity are you trying to produce, exactly (do you have a sample query with a competitor who has it)?

I'd tend to agree. It won't harm you to go over, but since no one's going to see it, what's the point, generally. Now, if you feel thinks are being cut off arbitrarily (like the name of a product) and those keywords should be included somehow, fine - go over the limit. You can potentially rank for those terms and they may show up in other places. Some directories, social networks, etc. read the title tags, too.

If it's just ego, though, like a long brand name, I'd suggest letting it go. Unless you're a really big brand, it's not going to matter that much, and you're likely to rank for your brand anyway. If the brand is getting cut off, then name recognition won't help your CTR anyway.

Usability research definitely shows that people pay much more attention to the front of a headline, and even just the first two words, so even if a longer title "makes sense", people may not care or even see it. So, sometimes, I think we obsess over getting something just right that may not end up mattering that much, practically.

Personally, I'd pick a different battle with the client, and maybe just keep a few long that are critically important.

Panda updates have hit microsites where content across the sites was either duplicated or "thin", although thin is often in the eye of the beholder. Keep in mind, and I mean this kindly, that "unique" is not always high-quality, and the quest for technical uniqueness can lead to practices where microsites are just spinning out versions of content with slightly different keyword concepts or ordering, etc. In other words, it's technically "unique", but most people wouldn't view it as valuable.

Early Panda updates did hit certain kinds of spun-off content hard, including geo-located content. In other words, you spun out your plumbing services page for 5,000 cities and it only differed by city names and a few basic facts (even if technically unique), that's definitely something Panda came down hard on.

Truthfully, though, it's really tough to tell without specifics. I'm more on EGOL's side of the fence - my gut feeling is that 20 micro-sites is excessive and I'd strongly suspect quality issues.

Some questions that might help you pin things down:

(1) Has traffic dropped across the entire cluster of sites or just the main site?

(2) Can you pin traffic drops down to any given date, set of keywords, or pages? Drill down as far as you can - that's always the most important first step, IMO.

(3) Are some of your micro-sites essentially dead - no traffic or ROI? You might not have to go all-or-none here. Odds are that some small % of your micro-sites are creating a large % of your value (let's call it an 80/20 rule). It's likely you could kill 10-15 of them with very little harm - at least that's what I typically see. You don't have to drop all 20 cold-turkey.

Could you provide a sample query? A number of features have "Feedback" links now, including Knowledge Graph features (as Umar said).

Yeah, I'm honestly not seeing much rhyme nor reason to that. There are plenty of other properties listed on the page. Your header structure is slightly odd, but your title tag and other meta data seem fine. I'm not sure why Google has grabbed "Kolea 10A". It could be due to some inbound anchor text (in links from other sites), but it would take quite a few, I'm guessing (one or two links is going to lead to Google overruling the title).

The queries I'm finding it on have nothing to do with "Kolea 10A", so I don't think this is query-dependent. Unfortunately, much like with title rewrites, Google hasn't given us any control over the process.

I'm noticing that the other two links I see are "Kolea Map" and "Kolea Beach Club", neither of which are coming from the page titles. They seem to be coming from internal links, such as on this page:

http://www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/

I wonder if there's an internal link with the specific property for some reason, or possibly inbound links or bad sitemap data? Not sure how to circumvent that other than possibly give the page a shorter title that Google is more likely to use. You can sometimes use the NOODP tag to prevent some rewrites, but that tends to be a crap-shoot (it's risk-free, but it rarely works).

I've seen instances where Google has created a canonical relationship between two duplicate URLs, even if one isn't explicitly defined. In these cases, they're basically deciding that the documents are duplicates and choose one for search. The document is linked to another site entirely, which may not be helping, either.

If this is a document that lives on multiple sites or is provided by a third party, ranking for it or getting Google to see it as unique may be very difficult. There could be technical issues here, but I'm not seeing any offhand - it's possible Google just doesn't want to index multiple copies of what it sees as exactly the same document. If it's important to rank for it, you might need to create your own, slightly customized copy, or an HTML version.

What search query are you using to get those site-links? They can be query-dependent. As others have said, you don't really have much control other than to demote them. Google will rewrite site-links just like they'll rewrite titles. In some cases, it's because they feel the title is a poor match to the query or that the title is long or a little spammy, but that's not always the case. Sometimes, the rewrites can feel more than a little arbitrary.

Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle on this one - as Richard said, an off-topic domain with low authority isn't going to buy you much. If you want the domain for the name or something, great - but don't expect much SEO benefit. Google has gotten pretty savvy about ignoring this stuff, as buying and redirecting domains has been heavily abused. I doubt you'd be at much risk here, but you'd probably see very little benefit.

Yeah - it doesn't seem to match known updates, but it's certainly dramatic movement. This isn't some seasonal shift or cyclical thing - these are clearly steep climbs and drops. We don't know the dates of most of the Panda data refreshes, but we do pin one at Sept. 23, 2014, so even that's not lining up cleanly here.

Are you seeing a lot of losses in the long-tail? The site doesn't seem to have much authority, but you've got 10K+ pages indexed, and I strongly suspect that many of them may look thin to Google. It feels Panda-like, for lack of a better word, even if it isn't quite Panda (maybe just a very strong filter). Meanwhile, if the links you have our problematic at all, you could be hitting a double-whammy. It might not be a single update, but you could be getting hit by a number of different changes over time. The trend-line certainly isn't promising.

My concern is the individual definition pages, like:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/barrio/

While it looks to have a lot of content, the definitions come from online dictionaries (or, at least, are shared with them), and the examples seem to be drawn from publicly available web pages. So, it's very possible that each element on these pages looks duplicated across the web to Google. With a strong link profile, it might not be a problem, but if you're struggling on links and with content, the odds could end up stacked against you.

Truthfully, you may have to see where your strongest ranking pages are (are they top-level or long-tail) and consolidate. If you've taken losses on individual word pages and most of your traffic is coming from pages like this:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-a/

...then you might want to consider not indexing those lower-value pages and focusing on what's working. This could help concentrate your link equity on a stronger offering. It's a difficult choice, but I don't think you're looking at a technical problem here or a clear, single-shot penalty. I think you're looking at a systemic problem.

Looks like you've got a chunk of 404s in your category pages, too, such as:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-z/10-letters/

Not sure what's up there - if you're trying to de-index those, or if there's a technical issue.

Unfortunately, I suspect this is a complex, multi-layer problem and there probably isn't a single solution. I hope I'm wrong, but that's my gut feeling at a glance.

Sorry, that link goes to a PDF price list. I think you sent the wrong document.

Generally speaking, I've seen it when either there's a weird redirect in play or, in extreme cases, when Google is treating one site as a duplicate of another and canonicalizing them. I've seen this even when no rel=canonical tag is in place. It's uncommon, but it's happened.

So, it's just refreshing itself, right? It should be ok - Google can view meta-refresh as 301-like if it's going to a new/different URL, but a refresh will probably be ignored. If the pages are the same content but different URLs, be careful - I'd at least make sure I had rel=canonical in place.

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.

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.

Patrick's explanation is definitely plausible, but it can be really tough to tell without a lot more data. Did you see a corresponding drop in rankings across keywords along with the organic traffic drop? Have you lost traffic only for specific pages or across the board? Did your total traffic drop as well, or did the organic traffic fall into other buckets (like direct or referral, which could indicate an attribution issue)?

The more you can segment this loss, the better. If you're seeing ranking drops across many keywords that mirror the organic traffic loss, and you've got a lot of link profile issues, Penguin is certainly a reasonable possibility.

We only crawl your own site, so we wouldn't surface a duplicate with Tumblr, unless something really, really weird is going on. This is why I need to look at the campaign - what you're describing shouldn't happen, in theory, so I have a feeling this is a pretty unusual situation.

My gut feeling is that you have 2+ issues going on here. Neither Moz nor Webmaster Tools are going to detect the duplicates between your subdomain and Tumblr. So, we/they, must be seeing duplicates in the subdomain itself. This sounds like an overly-complex setup that is likely to be causing you some harm, but without seeing it in play, it's really hard to diagnose.

Could you PM me with the domain - I can log into Moz Analytics as you and check, but you have a few campaigns set up.

(Sorry, I originally was logged in as Marina and my reply posted - I apologize for the confusion)

Yeah, these are the newish attributed answer boxes (that come from the index/web), and here's what we know so far. Basically, if Google interprets a query as question-like (which is an ability that may have come out of Hummingbird or been increased by that update), then they look at the sites ranking on page 1 and try to see who's title/snippet/content best match the question.

In other words, you have to rank on page 1 organically, and then you have to provide a decent answer. This second part still seems pretty crude right now - Google seems to be trying to match against question/answer keywords in a fairly literal way. So, if you see a competitor ranking, you may want to tweak your page title, Meta Description, and on-page content to better match the intent of the question or to sound more like a succinct answer.

Google is officially supporting some emoticons. I talked to one big-brand SEO last week who has tested it with a fair degree of success. A couple of warnings:

(1) Testing the impact on one title tag is a fair amount of work, so it really has to be a high-impact SERP. This isn't something you want to spend days on across thousands of results.

(2) Make sure the character/symbol really is relevant. People focus on the first two words of a headline, and that emoticon may well take the place of one of those words, so make it count. I wouldn't do this just because you can.

(3) Not all characters render properly on all OSs and devices. Make sure to test.

Can you give me a sample query or a sense of where you're appearing in the Knowledge Graph? Is it an attributed answer at the top of the left-hand column, or a right-hand column Knowledge Panel? Different aspects of KG are powered by different engines, so the specifics are pretty important.

Yes, Google is going well beyond mark-up with the new v2.0 answer boxes. They're trying to extrapolate answers directly from indexed content. This is essential if they're going to expand the Knowledge Graph, but it's also an aggressive move, and they're not all that good at it yet. Unfortunately, there's no great way to control when/how/what they show.

So far, all of these answer boxes seem to come from page 1, so you have to have enough authority to rank on page 1. After that, though, it's a pretty crude matching process to on-page keywords. The matching is contextual (since the Hummingbird update powered more of that), but it's still pretty basic keyword/concept matching.

I can't replicate it, but I wouldn't assume it's a glitch. Google is taking a lot more liberties with titles and snippets lately, and that's going to continue. It looks like they're going to remove display URLs (or rewrite them to paths) on mobile, and that may go to desktop, too.

In some cases, this can be a sign that Google thinks the title tag is either (a) a poor match to the query, or (b) too long or too spammy. If you're seeing title tags being rewritten frequently, you may want to revisit them in the context of that query. You can't 100% stop Google from rewriting, but there are ways not to encourage it.

I'm afraid the short answer is that we don't really know. Google is pushing that direction, but sites that have taken the plunge aren't reporting much in the way of verifiable gains. As you said, there is a real risk, too, and it can complicate some things.

As Patrick said, there are many legitimate business cases for having SSL, and if you're dealing with commerce or private data, you really should look beyond the SEO aspects. If you're only doing this for SEO benefits, though, I think there are better places to spend your time and money. Google may turn up the volume on this factor over time, but the evidence for major benefits is still lacking.

Unfortunately, "can" and "will" are sometimes two different matters. Google is pretty CSS-savvy at this point, and I'm 98% sure they can index those images. If it's a background image, and depending on how it's set up, they may choose not to, but that's a bit trickier.

Weird question, but do you want it indexed, or not?

Asking around to see if there are any image-SEO experts who can provide a more data-driven answer.

I'm having trouble getting hotme.ca to rank for anything competitive - I can get it in #1 for "Toronto sex toys", but here you've got a strong local SEO impact, which could easily over-ride a lot of standard organic signals.

In most cases, it's not that they're hiding anything in their link profile, but one of a few explanations:

(1) Other sites have inflated PA/DA due to spammy links. We've just introduced spam scoring recently, but keep in mind that PA/DA are generally measures of overall ranking strength, and they don't account for quality/spam. In an industry where spammy is common, and especially when you've got tons of sites in the 20s and 30s, these numbers can leave out a lot.

(2) We're not crawling a lot of the weaker or lower-quality links. We tend to take a quality-over-quantity approach in MozScape, but if an entire industry relies on low-quality links, Google could be seeing more than we're seeing.

(3) Other factors are over-riding these link signals, as Massimiliano says. On-page is definitely one, technical issues is another, and local factors (as I mentioned above).

When someone is masking a link profile, what we usually see is that they're 301-redirecting other domains to that domain (and we aren't seeing those links directly). Typically, though we'd see those 301-redirects, and I'm not seeing that for hotme.ca.

Truth is, if they are doing something unethical, there's almost nothing you can do about it, unless it's flat-out illegal. In SEO, chasing your competitors bad behavior is almost always a completely waste of time - believe me, I've done it for clients (and it was a colossal waste of time and money). You have to focus on your site and what you can do.

So, I've got you around #43 for "adult sex toys" (just to pick one), and PinkCherry.ca around #11.

It's tough, because there are a ton of sites in the first few pages with DA/PAs in the 20s-40s. This is a tricky range that covers a lot of sites - it's not particularly strong, and it can be easily skewed by bad links or hurt by technical issues.

I don't see any evidence of an outright penalty situation. I see a lot of small technical issues and sub-optimal on-page (such as the internal linking mentioned on Massimiliano's comments) that could make a difference, but it's hard to say how much of a difference.

At first glance, I do tend to agree that the link profile is dubious. I see a ton of free directory links, for example. They range from ok to things that look outright spammy, like:

http://seolinkcloud.org/Society_/Sexuality/?p=15

Now, any one of these directories by itself is no big deal, but if you have a link profile built on this stuff and a lack of a strong core to offset it, you can end up seeing your site devalued. Unfortunately, when you're in that 30s range for DA, this is a common problem - the strong links aren't strong enough to offset the moderately spammy links.

The good news is that I think some small-scale link clean-up, a focus on stronger/better links, and some technical changes could actually go a long way for you. I'm not seeing a smoking gun here (and admittedly Q&A can't replace a full audit), but mostly a lot of small things that may be adding up to harm the site.

I'd tend to agree that the top menu is spreading link equity far and wide - I'm seeing something like 800 internal links from the home-page. It doesn't give Google any sense of hierarchy and could really be harming the top category pages from performing well.

This home-page size is also huge - I know that's not uncommon for an e-commerce site, but you've got something like 1MB just of Javascript and multiple 200K images. This isn't penalty-level stuff, but it can really weaken your ability to rank, and generally isn't great for conversion either. The giant scrolling banner images would be an easy thing to lose - I don't know of one UX/conversion person who thinks those are good for sales, and they just take a huge amount of code and load-time.

Did you file for reconsideration after the work? If so, did you get any kind of useful response, or was it just the default "Thanks for playing!" message.

Could you provide a sample of a couple of phrases where you're popping up below these competitors?

In the case of Pink Cherry, there are many ways to operate a .com and .ca site without it looking like duplicate content to Google. If the sites are properly targeted, and Google doesn't think they're trying to "double dip", so to speak (rank two identical sites in one country), they can operate two sites in English without any penalties. There are risks and trade-offs, but it can certainly be done successfully.

Unfortunately, this can be a time-consuming and mostly manual process. If the link was actually removed, you can check the cached page directly through Google search, which may be the best bet. With disavow, though, you're really just left with Google saying "Yep, we got it." Six months should be plenty for disavow.

When you say it's manual, how did you verify this? Was it a message in Google Webmaster Tools? In the absolute worst-case scenario, you could have a combo manual/algorithmic penalty. If it was Penguin, you're still stuck waiting for a refresh.

More likely, the changes did take, but Google doesn't think it's quite enough yet. Have you filed for reconsideration? When you did, did you lay out all of the link removal steps you took (the more details, the better, in most cases)?

Yes I hate to say it, but this is a "Do as we say and not as we do" scenario. We're a 150-person company now with multiple engineering priorities and the short answer is that mobile has gotten back-burnered for too long. We hope to have the blog mobile fairly soon (no ETA yet), but product will be a bigger challenge.

Right now, our audience is not heavily mobile, but that's a difficult bit of data to crack. Our audience isn't mobile, in part, because we've trained them not to visit our site on mobile. So, it becomes really hard to predict how many people would visit us on mobile if we were more mobile-friendly. Philosophically, though, we're supposed to be thought leaders in the industry, and I personally feel we've dropped the ball on this one.

This is a matter of internal debate, and I do not speak for everyone. I also recognize that we do have many engineering challenges, like any company our size, and sometimes we make tough choices. At Moz, we try to err on the side of building a better product when we have a choice, and sometimes that means the overall site gets improved slower than we'd like.

It can be a tough call with mobile - beside the investment itself, some sites have huge mobile user bases and some have little to none. Google is essentially making the call for every site, and that's a bit simplistic, IMO. So, now, if you know for a fact that only 1% of your audience is mobile, you may well have to make the switch anyway.

Now, it's easy to say (and Google will) "Well, that's good for users", but it costs time and money. What if the resources spent on making your site mobile, when that's a tiny part of your audience, could be spent instead on other usability improvements that impacted a larger audience. I find Google has a way of turning complex scenarios into a kind of dogma, personally.

Unfortunately, I'm hearing reports that different validation methods are producing slightly different results. It's likely that some pages that don't pass the test will be ok, but I hate to tell anyone to just hope for the best. You might also want to check the mobile usability report in Google Webmaster Tools.

It's unclear whether this is some kind of re-ranking layer (and those certainly are in play today for local and other factors) or if mobile pages will get a separate index. As this gets more complex, though, and they want to do more with it, my gut feeling is that we may see the index split. I doubt they'll give us much more info on that topic for now, though - they like to keep details of the index pretty well guarded.

Unfortunately, Google tends not to communicate these things directly on social media (or, at least, not consistently) - and, when they do, it's usually Google+. As I personally have data, I'll share it on my account (@dr_pete) and/or the MozCast account (@mozcast).

Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) is a good bet, too.

We're getting a lot of questions about the upcoming Google mobile algorithm update, and so I wanted to start a discussion that covers what we know at this point (or, at least, what we think we know). If you have information that contradicts this or expands on it, please feel free to share it in the comments. This is a developing situation.

1. What is the mobile update?

On February 26th, Google announced that they would start factoring in mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. The official announcement is here. Of note, "This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results."

2. When will the update happen?

In an unprecedented move, Google announced that the algorithm update will begin on April 21st. Keep in mind that the roll-out could take days or weeks.

3. Will this affect my desktop rankings?

As best we know - no. Mobile-friendliness will only impact mobile rankings. This is important, because it suggests that desktop and mobile rankings, which are currently similar, will diverge. In other words, even though desktop and mobile SERPs look very different, if a site is #1 on desktop, it's currently likely to be #1 on mobile. After April 21st, this may no longer be the case.

4. Is this a boost or a demotion?

This isn't clear, but practically it doesn't matter that much and the difference can be very difficult to measure. If everyone gets moved to the front of the line except you, you're still at the back of the line. Google has implied that this isn't a Capital-P Penalty in the sense we usually mean it. Most likely, the mobile update is coded as a ranking boost.

5. Is this a domain- or page-based update?

At SMX West, Google's Gary Ilyes clarified that the update would operate on the page level. Any mobile-friendly page can benefit from the update, and an entire site won't be demoted simply because a few pages aren't mobile friendly.

6. Is mobile-friendly on a scale or is it all-or-none?

For now, Google seems to be suggesting that a page is either mobile-friendly or not. Either you make the cut or you don't. Over time, this may evolve, but expect the April 21st launch to be all-or-none.

7. How can I tell if my site/page is mobile-friendly?

Google has provided a mobile-friendly testing tool, and pages that are mobile-friendly should currently show the "Mobile-friendly" label on mobile searches (this does not appear on desktop searches). Some SEOs are saying that different tools/tests are showing different results, and it appears that the mobile-friendly designation has a number of moving parts.

8. How often will mobile data refresh?

Gary also suggested (and my apologies for potentially confusing people on Twitter) that this data will be updated in real-time. Hopefully, that means we won't have to worry about Penguin-style updates that take months to happen. If a page or site becomes mobile-friendly, it should benefit fairly quickly.

We're actively working to re-engineer the MozCast Project for mobile rankings and have begun collecting data. We will publish that data as soon as possible after April 21st (assuming it;s useful and that Google sticks to this date). We're also tracking the presence of the "Mobile-friendly" tag. Currently (as of 3/25), across 10,000 page-1 mobile results, about 63% of URLs are labeled as "Mobile-friendly". This is a surprisingly large number (to me, at least) - we'll see how it changes over time.

Our data in OSE can lag a bit, but I'm concerned that you're seeing the same thing in Google. Is it possible to provide an example URL?

When you say "Google is still indexing the old URLs", can you tell me exactly how you're measuring that (I find "indexing" means a lot of things to a lot of different people). It's not uncommon for both the old and new version to be stuck in the index for a while, and that's not always a bad sign. It can be, but it might not be (I realize that's not terribly helpful).

Have you double-checked some of these redirects with a header checker? It's amazing how often a redirect is supposedly in place but isn't working properly, is producing multiple hops, etc.

I assume these are pretty deep in the site structure, so I don't think those "links" being reported are very powerful or important. Some people claim that, since PageRank is recursive, you don't want to cut off paths, but when the paths are deep I've rarely seen any evidence to support this. A big, bloated index full of thin content, especially content available on other sites, is a much bigger danger.

I would not recommend using both a NOINDEX and a rel=canonical on these pages. It's a mixed signal, and that can cause Google to ignore one or both signals (and at their choosing, not yours). I think NOINDEX is fine here. I've built structures like this for things like event websites (where we index the main event but NOINDEX all of the cities/dates, because they change so often) and have never seen any major issues. Actually, in one notable case, even before Panda came along, the site's rankings improved measurably.

Blocked pages are generally not going to pass internal link equity, but the impact of this depends a lot on your site structure. If these were deep pages at the end of paths and your site nav covers major/ranking pages, it shouldn't matter too much. If these pages were in the middle of paths, you could be causing serious problems.

There's also the question of whether these pages themselves (the blocked ones) were getting inbound links or were themselves ranking for some of these terms.

Unfortunately, at this scope, it's really hard to speak in generalities. Can you give us a sense of what these pages are and why they were blocked? How large is the site overall?

Did this get resolved? I'm seeing your home-page indexed and ranking now.

I'm not seeing any kind of redirect to an alternate URL at this point (either as a browser or as GoogleBot). If you 301'ed to an alternate URL and then rel=canonical'ed back to the source of the 301, that could definitely cause problems. It's sending a pretty strong mixed-signal. In that case you'd probably want to 302 or use some alternate method. Redirects for the home-page are best avoided, in most cases.

If you are fighting a war, I'm not sure you'll win this war this particular way. There is not tool (including Google) that can give you link data in real-time (or even in a couple of days), so you'll end up acting late and always in a reactionary way. You'll have to cut as you go, and you'll always be a step behind, if they keep up the attack.

Google will often discount these links over time (unfortunately, it just takes them time to catch up), but your client's efforts may be better spent building a stronger link profile that can withstand attacks like this, even if it means some short-term pain. Otherwise, I fear this is a battle you'll keep fighting for months.

Unfortunately, the keyword-heavy brand name makes life a little tougher, because Google is more likely to see branded anchor text as suspicious (as opposed to having a brand name that isn't a general search term, like "Moz"). It may help to make sure the client's brand is strongly established in social channels and other profiles (including Google+). Let Google know this is associated with a brand, and you're not just keyword-stuffing (which may be how it appears to them, because of these targeted links).

Here's the problem - these things never happen in isolation. Technical problems, a weak link profile, possible negative SEO - they all compound each other. If this site had a strong historical link profile, throwing a few dozen (or even a few hundred) bad links at it wouldn't have an impact. Big sites can absorb that. The problem here is that the entire link profile looks too much like spam. Now, add in technical issues, and you're just crippling your efforts all around.

Neither of us can prove where the links came from, but it is my strong gut feeling that these links look a lot more like something a past SEO company or past employee would've done than any attacker. They're not blatantly bad - they're just uniformly low quality. The bad redirects looks like exactly something a company that moved sites would do - not an attacker. I think you need to dig deep, because either someone isn't telling you something, or someone just doesn't know. It's amazing how often past efforts never get documents or just disappear.

Majestic will index the links a bit faster than us, but nothing will do it as soon as they get posted. Right now, if this is entirely negative SEO, your only tools are disavow and legal action.

It is my sincere belief, though, that there are many fundamentals missing that could shield your site, and that you're going to end up chasing a problem that doesn't exist and wasting a lot of time and money.

My gut feeling is that this is very unlikely to be negative SEO. Frankly, it's still very rare, and most cases that are assumed to be negative SEO turn out to be much more complicated. One oddity here is that I'm not seeing a clear penalty-like scenario. You're talking about a very specific case of multiple pages showing up for a single query. This could be as simple as Google tweaking their domain crowding settings. I see this frequently - one day, a single domain will get multiple listings; the next day it will get one. If you look at thousands of SERPs, this actually happens every day.

This could indicate Google saw a change in your signals or signals related to your brand name, but it's unlikely to be due to negative SEO. It's also, honestly, not a huge issue, for the most part. You still rank #1 for your brand, and your brand is just one query. If Google has decided to not show multiple pages from your domain, this may be beyond your control and have little or nothing to do with your SEO efforts.

I do also share Dirk's concerns. A lot of the internal pages are being cached with very little text - Google is indexing them, but the text-only content is showing up as just a few menu items. These pages are going to look thin, and they may be running into some quality problems. This could cause them to compete with each other and fall out of some rankings. While Flash can be used successfully, the implementation here is part of the problem. The load times could also be causing you some issues. At best, it's creating obstacles.

At first glance, your link profile also looks pretty weak. You have a ton of free PR sites and web directories. In small quantities, these are fine, but when they make up a huge swath of your profile, you're getting into danger territory. When I see things like "free link directory" over and over, I start to worry. Add that to technical and on-page problems, and now you're compounding the issues.

I'm also seeing that some of the "links" are actually 301-redirects from a very long, exact-match domain, that you've redirected to the site entirely. I'm seeing a number of serious quality issues in your link profile, to be brutally honest.

I don't think the problems here have anything to do with the competition. I think you have to take a good, hard look at both the technical state of the site, the overall content quality, and the overuse of low-quality link tactics.

If it were a brand new site and the target markets were pretty equal (or the Brazilian market was relatively small), I think the sub-folder approach is a good bet. You could use <rel="alternate" hreflang...> for language-equivalent pages, and the combination of a .com plus language/country targeting should work fairly well.

In this case, though, since the Brazilian market is so strong, and you're already dependent on that .com.br domain, I think making the switch completely would be very high-risk. From an organic standpoint, I would advise against redirecting the .com.br domain to the Brazilian sub-domainfolder

I'd suggest either launching the new domain with  <rel="alternate" hreflang...>and no Brazilian sub-folder, or, as you said, setting up <rel="canonical"...>from the sub-folder to the .com.br domain (and keeping that the main site for Brazilian visitors). As the new site gains ground and you see how it performs, you can always switch them out later.</rel="canonical"...></rel="alternate" hreflang...>

As Michael said, make sure you're not double-dipping on the Adwords side with two domains in the same region. That could land your account in hot water. For now, if the .com.br stayed canonical for Brazil, AdWords should continue to use the .com.br site. You can set up regional/country campaigns for the .com site and target them specifically. That shouldn't be a problem and will give you time to build up the quality score and history on the new domain.

There's no easy answer, I'm afraid, and if an answer looks too easy, I'd stay away from it. Building low-quality links might help in the short-term, but it's too high-risk in the long-term. Plus, if you're combining it with duplicate content, you've got multiple quality issues in play (at least, in Google's eyes - I'm not making a judgment calling about using product descriptions, which is very common).

You say that unique text is proven to have worked, and yet it isn't an option. Why? If it's a matter of time/cost, I'd strongly consider not only the long-term ROI but the possibility of investing selectively. For example, you don't have to write unique text for every product you sell (or re-sell) - you could pick the top 10% of products (which may account for 90% of sales) and start with those. Even the top 1% would be a start. Small investments in the right places could yield large returns here.

The other option that people don't like to hear but really is powerful is to consider more carefully focusing your link equity on a smaller number of products. The more products you list, the more duplicates you have, and some of those products are probably very poor sellers or have very poor profit margins. What if you focused your site architecture on 25% of the total products? You'd focus your authority more and each page would be stronger, relative to your competitors.

One easy win is to make sure you're not dealing with any internal duplicate content (product options pages, search filters, etc.). If you're compounding external duplication with internal duplication, it's only going to make all of your problems worse. The internal duplication is much easier to solve.

Glad you got it sorted out. If you're 301-redirecting a lot of domains, I'd suggest doing it gradually or maybe holding off on the lowest-quality domains. Google can see a massive set of redirects as a bit of a red flag (too many people have bought up cheap domains and 301-redirected to consolidate the link equity). If the domains are really all closely related or if you're only talking about a handful (<5) then it's probably not a big issue.

Google seems to be indexing 30-ish pages, but when I look at the cached home-page, I'm actually seeing the home-page of http://rfprototype.com/. Did you recently change domains or 301-redirect the old site? The cache data is around Christmas (after the original question was posted), so I think we're missing part of the puzzle here.

I can't imagine why any CMS would be designed that way or, why, from a coding standpoint, it would be hard to remove. I try not to second-guess third-party providers (because I've been in their shoes), but that sounds like borderline BS to me. "Can't fix it" is far too often "Don't want to fix it".

My gut feeling is that Google will ignore a standard port 80, and will only index the port if it's non-default or if the entire site (including internal links) is explicitly using the port. By adding that canonical, though, you're definitely sending a mixed signal, and there is risk. I've never seen this actual situation in play, so I can only speculate.

Is it possible to remove the canonical tags on these pages and using 301-redirects or some other approach? Unfortunately, a lot of this depends on how the pages actually resolve and what other signals are in play. It's a bit tough to tell without looking at the specific site.

Yeah, I'd have to concur - all the evidence and case studies I've seen suggest that rel=canonical almost always passes authority (link equity). There are exceptions, but honestly, there are exceptions with 301s, too.

I think the biggest difference, practically, is the impact on human visitors. 301-redirects take people to a new page, whereas canonical tags don't.