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What's a "cornerstone page"?

Bounce rate is determined by a wide variety of factors....   the quality of your traffic, the attractiveness of your site, the speed with which it loads, the quality of merchandise, the variety of merchandise, many other things.  The software measuring the bounce rate can also be a factor because different programs calculate bounce rate in different ways.

I work on two retail sites in very different niches (one hobby supplies and one close to the office supplies niche).  In the past month they had bounce rates of 22% (average 3 pageviews per visit) and 23% (average 3.5 pageviews per visit).

These are just observations of how your site differs from mine...

Home page... You have 12 CATEGORIES displayed with a lot of wasted space... the 12 categories is close to duplicating your top navigation.   We have about 12 categories like you and they are all shown as a large image and sentence on the homepage but we also include lots of individual, best-selling items and new stuff.    You have about 180 pixels of empty space on the right....  We have a  300 wide column on the right that is completely dedicated to informative content.  Nothing for sale in that column, just links to articles about how to use the products, how to selection them, videos of product use.

Lots of people come into the site and go straight to the free information.  This free information is our credibility and it does really well in the search results.  Lots of people enter these free information pages and then purchase the items that we explained how to use or how to select.    These free info pages attract links, likes, shares, email referrals.  In my opinion they drive the rankings of the website.

Category/Product Pages...    As an example... http://www.vrtack.com/riding-apparel-c-34.html       ...   This page does not render well for me... The top row of three items comes in fine but the second row only has one item.  If a person has a tablet or a small monitor they will see four items and think that is all you have.  Also some of the photos have been resized impropery - stretched or scrunched.  This looks very unprofessional - especially if you are selling clothing! If you want people to click through or buy something get fantastic images on the site.

We really value high quality photos.  We invested in a very good camera, professional lights, light box, etc. to have the equipment.  I have also allowed my webmaster to spend lots of time experimenting to get great shots of each item.  Over time his images have become better and better and the amount of time required for each has dropped.   He  spends 10% to 20% of his time taking photos to improve over what manufacturers provide or photos that illustrate fine details about the product and how they are used or compared.   I don't sweat labor hours spent on images.  Never.   In my opinion, kickass photos are one of the most important characteristics of a retail site.

On your product pages you have a 300x300 image on the left side.  I would allow that to be 300 wide and an unlimited height.  Lots of your clothing products would present better there if a taller image were allowed.   Where you have multiple images of a product, I would show ALL of them in on that left side at full resolution.  Bandwidth is cheap, visual impact is priceless.

I see that you have some links going out to wikipedia.  If this was my site I would be monitoring how many people use those links and writing custom content for my own  site to receive the traffic from those links.  Each of those pages will have related sales items on them, they will pull traffic from search and they will be customized to make the exact point that I want to make.

Some of your product descriptions are quite short and are used verbatim on other websites.  I would spend the time needed to beef them up, make them unique, and include links in them to informative content about that product cateogry that I would create for on my own site.

I see that you have visibility in Google for quite a few of your products.  Nice work.  Improving the content and making it more substantive could improve your rankings, pull in longer tail keywords and make visitors regard your site and your staff as an "expert" place to buy.

Good luck.

I am not sure that "sandboxing" is an appropriate word at this time.

If google takes a manual action against your site they notify you in webmaster tools.

If the problem with your site is detected by algorithm, they simply demote your site.

I honestly think that you need experienced professional help with this.

See how Target gives you all of the colors of this Rachel Ray cook set on one page...

http://www.target.com/p/rachael-ray-10-piece-porcelain-cook-set/-/A-14595398#prodSlot=medium_1_2

I would improve on this by listing the colors in text outside of the JavaScript and adding the most popular colors in the title tag.

Rachel Ray Cook Set | Red Blue Green Orange

In my opinion, any answers given here are guesses and are inappropriate to use as an attempt to solve this problem.

This is a high stakes problem.   So a detailed evaluation of these sites, their historic linkbuilding practices, the quality of their content, their traffic source history and more should be considered.

If these were my sites I would get a penalty pro to look at them and be willing to pay the cost of a thorough review and recommendation.

If this was my site we would get rid of the product pages and display all of the color choices on one page.  Then you have a product page AND a category page in one.

So... are you working hard to improve and increase the content offerings of your website or are you spending all of your time trying to build a fire on social media?

If I want my website to take off I spend my time working on content to build a fire there... and if I am doing a great job of that the people who visit the website spread the word about my content on social media with zero work from me.   If that isn't happening then maybe the content is less than inspiring or the topics are chest-thumping promos that nobody cares about.

I have never used godaddy hosting.  I am sorry but I am not familiar with how this works.

I would look for someone who really knows Panda.  Here is a site owned by Marie Haynes, Moz member.

http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/

If you have been hit by Panda you likely have duplicate content, which must be thrown away, noindexed or rewritten; or you have thin content which must be thrown away, noindexed or rewritten.   Do you have the gumption to throw away and do you have the time or money to do the rewrite?   If you get rid of all of the thin or duplicate content will you have anything left?

Bottom line.  If your whole site is thin and duplicate you need to start from scratch.  If you have some good content then you need to chop out enough of your site to get rid of the penalty.

Just saying what we did...

We had a site that was hit by panda.  We had lots of very short news blurbs and some republished content from government agencies and academic institutions - much of that done by their request for exposure to our visitors.   Immediately after the hit, we noindex/followed or deleted/redirected the republished content.  We also noindex/followed or deleted all of the short content.  The site got out of panda a few weeks later.  Some traffic loss but  not substantial

As for improving short content.  We have done a lot of that.  We had lots of very short descriptions of two sentences plus one or two images that were getting nice amounts of traffic.  We improved those to a few hundred words and two or three images (very time consuming, very expensive - a few hours per page.  The rankings for short tail queries went up nicely and there was a huge increase in long tail traffic.  We later started improving the few hundred words plus two or three images to one to two thousand words plus four to eight images - even more time consuming - a day or two per page.  Again, rankings and traffic go up nicely.

Today, for each new article that I publish, I am making a huge improvement to a page that is a proven traffic getter but could be improved a lot.

For you, take a look at the traffic into those 2700 old articles prior to your panda problem.  Some might not be worth much, but others might be golden.  Then decide what to delete/redirect, what to noindex/follow, and what to improve.  Then begin working.

Good luck.

You have probably done these but I will ask just in case....

Is your redirect working properly?    You can test it at.. http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php and determine if you have search engine friendly 301.

Is your redirect handling all possible versions of your domain... like www.example.com and example.com?

Is your new domain properly parked on the old domain?

I see plus.google.com pages in the SERPs every day.

If you are logged into a Google service that shares your plus.google.com login and search for a query that is relevant to a person in your circles, you might see that person's plus.google.com page on the first page of the SERPs.

For example, I have AJ Kohn in a circle.  When I search for "news" I always see one of his google plus posts on the first page of the SERPs.  I often see two people from my circles in the "news" SERPs - and other SERPs.

I have a site that targets some queries that are searched for millions of times per day. Some that you might search for now and then.   Someone who I respect told me that I should post on these topics to google plus, then go to out to get as many people in my circles as possible because my google plus pages would show in the SERPs (for people in my circles) and pull lots of traffic.  Up until a really really smart person told me that I should do this I have had nothing but disinterest in Google plus.  Now I am thinking about doing it but have not moved on it because I don't like Google plus and the way that google is shoving it at people.  Do you think I am stupid?

Some of mine are dofollow and some are nofollow.

I don't know why they are split this way.

I see thousands of pinterest links as backlinks in Webmaster Tools.

You can make hotlinking rules in your htaccess.   See example here.

http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2004/06/htaccess-prevent-hotlinking

Some guy on ebay was hot linking lots of my images in his auctions.  These were big images in really busy auctions with lots of people viewing.  I asked him to stop and he said.. FU, I am not using your images.   So I edited the images to say...

Parts missing.  Sold "as is".

He stopped using my images.

Try searching Q&A here.  You might find someone who posts lots of great free advice for Volusion merchants.   Then imagine what you will get if you are paying them.     Hiring people from a forum gives you a chance to look back at their post history and see if you are impressed by their knowledge and decide if you like their style.

Let us know if you get one.   I am curious to know how much guest posting is being done by Moz.   

It sounds like you are going to toss up a naked little site with title tags and no content or with title tags and yada yada yada content.... then Google will find it and say... "look at this trash" and give it a Panda demotion.

Spend your 45 days working hard on great content.  That will be a better use of your time.

I have always considered SEO to be "free".

There are quite a few companies who spend over $50,000/month on SEO.

And, if you consider content creation to be part of SEO then an awful lot of companies are spending that much per month on SEO.

All that I put into it is my time, both writing content and working on our websites.

You can place a value on your time.  If you are just starting out just assign yourself a wage.  If you have an established biz then divide your average annual profits by the number of hours that you work.

If you do either of those you will probably conclude that $300/month is not very much at all.

how can you possibly do white hat work for that kind of money?

As SEroB says, if they are in a not-to-difficult local niche that might be enough to be effective.

If they are competing in a sleepy little product niche with mostly naive competitors then spending that $300 on one piece of really great content per month (hitting different keywords with each) might be enough to get some traffic flow that will pay back long term.  It is possible that the competition is weak enough that a few pedestrian content pages will pull in traffic (but not links).

If the company has a person who can write this content then you might get a couple great pieces per month and use the $300 to promote them.

However, if they face any real competition at all then it might be best to tell them...  "What would happen if you sent 10 soldiers out when 10,000 are needed?   Right... you got your ass kicked and wasted 10 soldiers."

I think that it is going to take $xxxx/month (or whatever).  If you are up for the fight I think I can help you but I don't want to lead you into a fight that you can't win.

This does not influence my opinion about anything.

1. Google does not calculate DA

2. I have first-hand experience that merging a subdomain into a folder on a domain can have a kickass effect on your rankings.

I believe they've been advised a few years ago about the subdomain being the best approach.

That was probably good advice at the time.  But times Google has changed.

however the client won't want that

You guys who have clients must have a lot of patience. 

hence my thinking at least by adding the nofollow attribute, I can tell Google's algo I'm not trying to pass any juice across.

If you do that and those links have supported rankings then there could be a traffic loss.

FROM INITIAL QUESTION:  do you think this would be causing some kind of algorithmic penalty

From this I think you are saying that the site suffered a rankings loss.  If that is the case then taking action might be helpful.   If that is not the case, I would be inclined to do nothing....

... well, honestly, I would be redirecting that subdomain to a folder if this was my site.

If this was client site, I would be tempted to describe Door A, Door B and Door C.   And tell them that my best judgement says that there is shit behind A and B but safety, possible rankings increase behind Door C.   If it was my site or my mother's site I would be using Door C.  Then they have been given your best advice and choose the shit if they like it.

Just read how Apple has been blocking lots of search query data and making it look like "direct".  This explains why my direct data was ramping up in 2012.

http://searchengineland.com/ios-6-removes-all-google-search-referer-data-134560

Mine looks similar to that.... but my drop did not occur until July and was not as dramatic as is shown on your chart.

Something is going on.  Google is messing with the data.

Go back one month.  I bet you had a lot of direct in mid July that dropped in late July or the first week of August.

I am using Clicky.com for my analytics.   My direct traffic started an unreasonable climb over one year ago.  Showed a huge drop in early August but now is back on an unreasonable power climb.    It has to be google.  I know its not bots or course management systsms.  And, there is no other reason for me to be getting that much traffic from direct visitors - although I do have a lot of direct.

I am getting amazing amounts of this "direct" traffic.

It has to be smoke from Google.

My question is, do you think this would be causing some kind of algorithmic penalty (over optimisation / penguin)?

Personal opinion...  Probably not.  But, if those three links each have different anchor text with money terms and are hitting different pages on the subdomain then I might be wrong.

Or, do you think Google realises these links are pointing to a subdomain and says, "hey, OK we understand these two domains could be related" or given subdomains are seen as essentially standalone websites, the algo is saying "hang on a minute, pal, this looks fishy, why are you linking to this subdomain 1000+ times with sitewide links on the same anchor text"?

Maybe.

Should I nofollow these sitewide links? Do you think that will help?

You could.  That would be a good conservative response.

Why do you have all of these links?  Does anybody click those footer links?  I bet nobody is clicking them.

I know that the answers that I gave above were less than satisfying.        I responded to this question to suggest that the content on your subdomain could be moved into a folder on the root domain.  I did this on a site and the results have been kickass.  Kickass.

If you got Jesse and PhD sayin' something, best go with it.  

what else should I add to the list? How many of each?

I think that you should add the words... "kickass" and "best-on-the-web".   These words should replace "X" in each of your items.

The owners don't have much time to write content. [..] The people that run the site are authorities in the field.

OK... you said.. "they don't have much time".... then they still have "some time"... and they should use that to the fullest.

IMO they should FIND TIME, because if they are "authorities in the field" they don't want noobs writing their stuff.  Kick them in the pants. ...

.... or you can become their cheerleader and buy beer or lunch or cookies or show up in your tutu when they get a new blog post up.

However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article.

Yes, but you gotta be really careful.  If you fill syndicated content with anchor text links you will have a Penguin problem.

** Wondering if this was written before Penguin. **   If I was the boss at Google we would have a bar of soap used to wash the mouth of Googlers who talk about link building.

**Our initial reaction is to have them use a "canonical link" to assign the content back to us, but also implement a "no index, follow" tag to help avoid duplicate content issues. **

This is the way to go.  But, you must require them to use the canonical and the no index.   You gotta say, "These are our conditions for your use of our content."   If they are good guys then they should have no problem with it.    Stick to your guns about this.

My bet is that some will simply rewrite your content.

I placed rel=canonical on some content that is shared by two websites.  Now when I go into webmaster tools and look at backlinks.  The pages on the site that have rel=canonical are displayed as backlinks on the site with the original copy.

I am really happy with how this is working.

I get calls from lots of networks, both wanting me to advertise and get into our ad space.   I can't tell you how much time and employee labor I have wasted on these people and their offers.  Most of them are crap but occasionally there is a good one.

What I do now is say....   "Tell me the names of three websites where I can see your ads in the most prominent positions.  I need to see your ads on websites that get millions of visitors per month before I can spend time talking to you."

Most can not produce  this type of evidence that they are successful.   Most will send you the URLs of three crap sites that display crap ads.   Not worth your time.

Start here...  http://moz.com/learn/seo

Read everything twice. Then implement.  Keep records of your work and track your results.

Return to Q&A when you have questions.

In math class you probably learned that 4 + 4 = 8?

Same principle here.

Measured response:   These metrics have a lot of flux.   If you are tracking personal progress I think that they are best viewed as a "long term moving average".   If you are using them for competitive metrics they are like hefting a rock in each hand to get a sense of which weighs more.

Personal opinion:  It's OK to spend a "moment a month" to look at these numbers but don't worry about month-to-month flux.   If you have a problem your traffic. rankings and income are more sensitive and meaningful metrics.

Organic search traffic is up, no keyword rankings have fallen, external links are up slightly, but not massively.

Great work!  Do more of what made these happen.  These are better metrics of success.  Better still would be ad income, sales, leads, etc.

lol...

Robert,  I am sure that you will be back to kicking ass by the end of this week.

Carry on!

If this business is like many a small number of products/services account for the majority of **profits **(I intentionally did not say "sales").  There will also be a few types of products/services that I like to sell/provide.  So I would identify the targets on the basis of profit volume, success rate and services that make us whistle while we work.  I would attack these with  vigor.

I would have a blog that featured projects that we have successfully completed.  (Projects because this isn't an ecommerce website.  It is a portfolio website... and you make an awful lot more from a project than you do selling a couple plants.)   My site in the SERPs would look like this...

• **Dogwoods and Daffodils in Rocky Mount **
• AppalachianLandscapes.com
• Landscaping with pink dogwood trees and yellow daffodils on Elm Street.   Design sketch, planting photos, two year photo.

I would hammer the SERPs with dozens of real project pages that each have a design sketch with a splash of watercolor, plant photos and details, installation photos and photos of the finished project two years out.

These pages would showcase the plants.  Give tips on how to plant them.   Show how our staff prepares design sketches for clients.  Shows our staff doing site work.  And show finished projects that we have done.   These will show products, services and expertise.

• Sod and Landscape Project - Fredericksburg Hospital
• AppalachianLandscapes.com
• Design sketches, site preparation details and photos of a successful commercial landscaping project.

Strut your stuff for jobs that range from interior planters at a physicians office to your contract with large institutions.

It's 100% original content as well. So how can those issues arise 6 months later?

Scrapers or content thieves are possibilities, but technical issues and oversight could also cause it.

A quick check seems to indicate that most of the articles on this site have been published on other websites.  Just an example....

http://www.lasvegasbestinsurance.com/insurance/renters-insurance-las-vegas/

http://rusteration.com/insurance/renters-insurance-las-vegas/

I looked at several pages and the content of each was published verbatim on at least one other site, sometimes on may other sites.

My concern is that if these items get into the websites of these newspapers I could run into a duplicate issue.

You are correct.  If lots of your articles are published lots of times on other sites this will create a problem for you - especially if the newspaper sites are more powerful than yours.

**We have some quality writers who can generate some great content that we already use on our site. **

I would double this effort and not worry about the printed word.

We are looking for a way to expand into the printed world.

How often do you read something in the newspaper and go to a suggested website.   I bet that happens infrequently.  So, from a "conversion rate" perspective, I would invest more in my website.

If you are trying to spread the word beyond your site, get your article shared on Facebook and twitter.  If your articles are really good that should generate a ton of buz and some traffic.  If that isn't happening then your content might not be as good as you think it is.

I didn't get any updates until a few minutes ago.

I did a one-semester internship while in college.  They paid me $2/hour - which was more than the minimum wage at the time and tells you a little about my age.   It was a great experience because I attended public meetings and wrote summaries about them for a member of the governor's cabinet.  I also examined public utility tariffs and wrote summaries about them for the same person.  My supervisor critiqued my writing severely and that made me a much better writer in a very short time.  Great experience.

I lived several hundred miles from home for this work and the expenses of living in the city in low-rent housing consumed my paychecks.  Full-time internships at my university were for 16 academic credits and I also had to pay full tuition and fees to receive them.  I made a few extra bucks from plasmapheresis looks at arms.

In a previous career I worked for a government agency and we had interns every summer and they were paid slightly more than the minimum wage.  Our office was in a University city.  Although the students didn't have to establish living quarters far away what we paid them barely covered their living expenses and they had to pay tuition to the university for the internship. We knew that the interns would be there in the summer and had projects for them.  Many of them did field work that could only be done in summer weather.

In another career I was a professor and saw students complete internships at many government agencies, companies and organizations.  The university required a written job description from the employer that needed faculty approval.  That helped  employers plan the experience and demonstrate that it would meet university expectations and the award of credit hours to the student (which the student had to pay for). The employer knew that at the end of the experience that the student would prepare a report of what was done and faculty would compare that to the job description.  About 1/2 of the internships were paid.  If you looked at the list of organizations, the ones that paid were usually the good experiences.

(Personal opinion here... If a school does not require an internship then it is usually only the highly motivated students who seek them.  If you are drawing from this pool you are probably getting high caliber.   However, if the school requires an internship then there can be a lot of mediocre students looking for positions and the applicant pool will be different.  If this is your pool, early applicants who have bright eyes and spring in their step are probably your best bet.   Be ready to accept applications early.   'nuff said.)

I currently don't have interns at my office.  I am trying to run a very small ship and trying to be retired.  If I had interns I would pay them the starting rate of a professional employee.   I would be especially interested in 4.0 English majors who have a demonstrated life interest in the content area of my websites.   If you want them to do valuable work that remains after the internship then you want a good written record.  Mine would probably be writing some content and I am really picky.  I would need good people for the experience to fit well with me.  Thus the better rate of pay.

I think I should write to the White House.

As for the Menus, I left of "golf" to save space and figured google can figure our we are golf as that word is used about a gazillion times in our site.

I would try Robert's suggestion.  I would add that word a couple times in the key places that he suggests.  Those are high caliber ammunition....  and cut back a few of the gazillion others.

Given the quality of site, make small changes over time. Do not go crazy out of fear of dropping.

These are the words of a confident and experienced General.

In one of my retail niches, in late June, I saw what appeared to me as rankings boosts for manufacturers and big brand sites.

Manufacturers moved up (probably because their name is mentioned repeatedly on every retail site), even though small specialty sites have greater product breadth (they sell all of the widgets made by several manufacturers) and they also have greater content depth than all of the manufacturers combined.

Big brands who sell one or two widgets moved up, even though lots of small expert sites have greater content area expertise, staff who are available by email or phone, and sell every widget made by every manufacturer.

My personal analysis is... there is nothing wrong with my site... something is wrong with Google.  Carry on!

It does not bother me to see disagreement on how to SEO a page or a website.  That gives the person with the best BS filter an advantage over everyone else.  It also makes the person who stops, thinks, and researches an additional advantage over everyone else.

I believe that most SEO advice posted on the web is bad advice, including a lot of the advice that I give.  Again, it comes back to giving the person with the best BS filter a huge advantage.

So, when I read this article my BS meter goes off here....

While I can understand that preaching “build good content, focus on growing your brand’ sounds great and it’s what people want to hear, for a HUGE percentage of search phrases, this is just no longer relevant....   I just can’t take anyone seriously who mentions these things anymore in 2013,

.... and the rest of the article doesn't make much sense to me.  But, since I think that about 95% of SEO is based upon good great content, it doesn't surprise me that I don't "get" the rest of the article.