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Hello all,

As of 10am Pacific on September 12th, 2013, my team has noticed that our site, www.wirelessemporium.com, does not show up on the first 5 or 6 pages of SERPs for branded terms like "wireless emporium." We have not received any messages from Google via Webmaster Tools regarding this. Major activity that we've been doing to our site is updating content, meta tags, and h1 tags, along with removing/301 redirecting certain pages that did not meet Google quality guidelines. We've also been purging our backlink portfolio of toxic links and URLs, both manually and through the disavow tool. No blackhat has been done to this site for a very long time (more than 8 months now).

One thing to note is that we did have a manual spam penalty placed on us back in July of 2012, it expired in early August of 2013 after a reconsideration request was submitted, and a 2nd manual spam penalty was placed on us again later that month. We are submitting a 2nd reconsideration request this Monday.

Could this or the recent Panda update have anything to with this? We are very much in need of opinions as to why this is happening to our site.

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In June of this year, our company submitted a reconsideration request, which Google rejected and confirmed that they had a manual spam penalty placed on us. After cleaning up our extensive link portfolio, we submitted our 2nd reconsideration at the end of this month (July) and received this response:

Dear site owner or webmaster of domain,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider domain for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.

If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.

If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

1. Has anyone else or their clients experienced this recently?

2. Can this be attributed to the "softer" Panda update?

3. Any other additional information is greatly appreciated.

Our blog has recently been updated to allocate past posts from 2011 and on to link to one of our recent writers who just came on board in 2013. Our writer set up a new Google+ profile for our blog last month, and has tagged all of the past posts with his Google+ authorship code.

Is there a possibility that this could actually hurt our writer's authorship authority and our blog's authority, since the blog posts and the Google+ profile activation dates will not match up?

We are thinking of splitting our e-Commerce site into a Canadian site w/ localized content, a potential French version and for additional relevance w/ localized currency.

What would be the best way to go about this if we were wanting to gain traction as soon as possible on the organic side?

1. Split the domain into domain.com and domain.com/ca/ (subfolders)

2. Split the domain into ca.domain.com and domain.com

3. Or split the domain into domain.com & wirelessemporium.ca

Also, what are some key best practices we need to keep in mind to avoid duplicate content issues, etc?

Hey Thomas!

Thanks for the response.

We have an in-house team that focuses on on-page optimization, but of course, any agency we bring in would be encouraged to aid us in on-page optimization efforts as well. Because our focus has primarily been on on-page tasks, we are looking for more assistance in off-page efforts.

Yes, I totally agree that quality content is truly the most white-hat method of link building but as we all know, it's incredibly time consuming. That's why we've been looking for an agency that can help in that particular effort. We've shopped around for content marketing agencies as well in the past but are leaning more towards a comprehensive and all-around solid SEO agency that can provide insight on both on and off-page improvements to our site.

Thanks for the recommendation! Will definitely look into it.

I'm looking for recommendations for SEO agencies for an e-commerce site in the cell phone accessories niche. The list of companies recommended by SEO Moz are out of our budget, as we are looking to stay under $3k/month.

Looking for an agency that will focus especially on link building efforts, as there has been minimal white-hat link building implemented for the site in the past. Many of the agencies we've talked to are relying entirely too much on easy wins like directory submissions and we are looking for an agency that will be able to garner us quality links as opposed to a huge amount of mediocre links.

Any recommendations for reasonably-priced, quality SEO agencies?

Thanks!

We own and operate a site called: http://www.phonesale.com/

For the past 5-6 months, we have been working to recover our organic traffic which was hit heavily May 2012.

We have made many strides in terms of eliminating technical issues w/ the site as well as cleaning up our link profile to no avail.

Is there anything else that we can do to help get back into Google's good graces, both on page and off page?

That's correct. We do this for all compatible products.

I am interested in potentially changing a category name on our site, WirelessEmporium.com.

This section has been called "Covers & Faceplates" for the better part of the decade. However, changing search trends, PPC data and search volume analysis have indicated that our preferable KW combo may be "Cases & Covers" instead.

What are the potentially ramifications of making the switch now? We have a significant amount of age, link juice, etc built up toward our "Covers & Faceplates" section at the moment and all of their relevant URLs.

A change would involve 301 redirects, rewriting of URLs, rewriting of all tags, img alt tags, etc.

We run an e-commerce site with about 250,000 SKUs.

Certain items, such as a micro USB car charger, will be applicable to several different phones. Example:

http://www.wirelessemporium.com/p-165787-samsung-galaxy-proclaim-illusion-sch-i110-heavy-duty-car-charger.asp

http://www.wirelessemporium.com/p-165856-sony-xperia-ion-4g-lte-att-heavy-duty-car-charger.asp

As one can imagine with so many items, unique content for each item description page can be a challenge. What would be the best way to address this on a large scale?