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Since going to a wordpress platform in November,  I have seen many 501 server errors in the crawl report.

When I click on the link in the report however, the link shows the actual page with no errors.

I reviewed all the Q&A but didn't see anything related to this issue. Does anyone have an idea as to why the actual link works when I click on it but the SEOMOZ crawl bot is showing a 5XX error.

Thanks for any ideas or feedback you may have.

Thanks for all the feedback. After some serious review, I am convinced that Google somehow began indexing our HTTPS pages and dropped all our HTTP pages.  As this is a .net website with a web.config file,  what would you all recommend I do to make the google bot read the http pages instead of the https pages.

Would you add robot.txt file to the web.config file or handle it another way.

Again, thanks for all the assistance.

Nothing "naughty".  I have done some guest articles on various blogs related to the industry over the past 4 months but they are all legit unique articles and on sites with a domain authority or 30 or higher so that should not have been the issue.  Also, they were not paid articles, they were free articles.

Our chief competitors have been actively promoting theire sites and increasing the sizes of their websites. We have been limited. We also do not do any PPC, but all our top competitors are doing PPC. That should not be an issue, but maybe things are changing. I am not sure on that point.

Thanks for the feedback.

I have only been with this company since July 2011, but I believe they were hit by the Penguin update of March 2011. Since then it has been steady. During that update, they lost their local listings but retained there national rankings. Since that time, the rankings have remained in the top 5 for our major keywords.

I have had a 10 page website(registered in 1999) rank for my top keywords(top 5) for over 4 years.  No changes have been made to the website. (Static website).

July 11, 2012, most of the keywords, and all the major keywords were dropped from Google. They remain steady in Bing and Yahoo.

I saw that some people referred to a Panda 3.9 refresh on that day, but also saw that Google(Matt Cutts) denied the refresh.

Given the simplicity of the website and the strong backlinks, which remain, what are other reasons I could see a drastic drop in 1 day.

Any ideas on where to target my search for solving this very serious issue?  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.  Although I have been on the vendor side of the equation for over 7 years doing SEO, SEM & Consulting, I am now on the client side and making these decisions take on a whole new importance.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

We are located at a physical address and people can come through the door and work with us one to one, however that is not the preferred method.

My bigger issue is that if we only have one physical address and register it with Google Places, will it affect the rankings we are receiving in other areas of the country.

For example, in some cities, we are on the first page under the term "city"+keyword, but if I register our corporate address with Google Places, will it affect the other local SERPS?

OK, Here is a question which I can't find but think people have thought about. I would like to know others opinion.

I have had a site that ranks well under generic national keyword terms. (not geographically specific)  Its a small website, only 10 pages.

We get 85% of our business from online applications.  These applications come from all over the united states.Our SERP rankings generate 70% of all our traffic.

My question is this: we operate in a state where we don't do business.  We are a virtual business.  Should I sign up for google places? Will It hurt my national SERP rankings?

I have 300 URL specific websites that rank well in Yahoo and Bing.  Unfortunately I don't have access to the websites due to a previous marketing agreement (before my time).

I do have access to the application that is i-framed into the websites.  I was thinking about adding a paragraph below the application with a link to the primary website.

How does google look at these links. If I add the link, there will be an additional 300 links showing up at the same time. Not what they want to see from my personal knowledge base. At the same time, its not black hat SEO, I am just trying to link to the other websites which I own which are related.

What are people thoughts.

I have thought about that but what criteria would you use to decide if it is worth the $8 bucks for the renewal.

I own a couple hundred domains and am also trying to also figure out whether I should stop renewing them and let them expire or 301 them to one of my industry related websites.  I understand that seasoned URL's that are keyword specific can add small bit of value, but how much value.... $8 worth per year?