Wow Dana - super helpful thanks so much for chiming in!

I am honestly not 100% sure at this point. I see the option to select broad, phrase or exact via a tiny little icon in the top right, however I am not convinced as to how well this is working. But the option is there, so you must be able to choose still. The default may be exact match, but you can still switch (whereas before default was broad match).

Hi Laurence

Google tries to take the iFrame as associate it with the page it's on (in effect trying to view it as a single page) - so in their ideal world, you should look at the page and the iFrame all as one page and treat it accordingly.

In reality though, they don't always accomplish what they want, so you might be OK.

What I would do is check your cache and text only cache and see if they're caching everything all as one page.

Here's their documentation on iFrames 

-Dan

Thanks so much for that link Jeff!! Had no idea it was there. Will definitely be sharing.

I saw the AdWords help tab had a email address and phone number. I bet if you or someone payone for AdWords contacted (and asked like you're a paying AdWords customer) you could get an answer.

You could also submit a question in the Google Webmaster Help forum, or their Google Plus Group - or join a hangout they hold every Friday.

-Dan

Wow that's crazy! The only thing I can think to suggest is submitting a help request or contacting them.

First thing I want to check;

• Are you using exact match consistently or broad match? Check out the differences.

Next, you may be wondering how i got back to the old tool;

• you can do so temporarily - I would do that to check your numbers in the meantime too.

-Dan

I don't know of one, but internally I keep what I call a "word map" in excel - where I have columns for state, adjectives like "best, top", etc etc. And I tend to create them from scratch each time for each client, but will just cut and pastes from client to client when certain columns relate.

-Dan

Hi, sorry... I just meant if you did have a few other spammy links from other sites, those could hurt you. I doubt the woorank ones are hurting, but perhaps the other 3 spammy sites you mentioned could have been.

Thanks for the details. It may not be those links, but if there were even a few others, it could potentially hurt the site. I had a client who had done some spammy link building in 2011ish with another agency and just those few links hurt the site. I would try removing or disavowing anything you can find that's spammy, and not helping, and see if they helps anything.

The types of things to de-optimize on your own site would be more like keyword stuffing in the titles, URLs, headers and internal anchors - not so much blocking pages from being crawled. Blocking crawling it typically only if you want to improve crawl efficiency on really large sites or you just don't want Google to page attention to that content, but it won't fix a Penguin issue if it's on-site.

-Dan

It depends. If the sitewide links were;

• off topic from the site it was on, not as relevant
• among a giant list of other "blogroll" links
• on a site that may have a penalty against it
• exact match commercial anchor text <--big one
• if it's part of a "link exchange"

Those issues could hurt you coming from one site. If the links were exact match commercial anchors I'd see about changing them to brand or domain name anchors. If the site linking to you is a random topic, or you're among a big giant list of links, or part of a link exchange get the links removed or disavow.

-Dan

I agree with David here. Someone made a custom category plugin for WordPress which will do what David is suggesting. I would not block anything, but rather noindex what you don't want in the index, which is typically for me tags, subpages, author and date archives.

-Dan

Penguin 2.0 is definitely from webspam and backlinks. I suggest using Google Webmaster Tools as your backlink dataset. They provide links that are more likely to be causing problems. It's extremely unlikely the internal links are hurting you if it is Penguin 2.0.