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1.  No notices
2. The traffic drops have pretty much coincided with Panda in 2011 and with every change they've just dropped further and further.   We've not had any site changes to speak of since 2008.
3. My sense is links are one issue but I suspect there are others.

We have an older website started in 2000.  We have thousands of backlinks which we believe are hurting us. Starting with Panda our site has been devastated, traffic wise, from a million + page views a month to 1/3 of that now.  We've never solicited links, never paid for them, they just happened.  It seems every "search engine" and spammy site on the web has links to us.  Hundreds if not thousands from sites like , 29searchengines.com, 55 searchengines.net, and on and on..

1.  How does a site know when the links are harmful?
2.  How do you know which links should be disavowed?

Thank you

I guess this is confusing because there is one page (the recipe) and that page just gets rendered with a different style sheet if a user wants to print it out, but this DOES create a different URL.

So you are saying, as long as we put this on the recipe page:

That when the style sheet renders that page as :

http://xxx.xxxxxx.com/recipes/**print/**winter-creme-fraiche-baked-potato-soup
it will include the canonical link back to the recipe page?

Our developer has added a 2nd canonoical link for the "print" version of our page.   I read on another post that this appears to be not be the correct way to do this.  Is there a better way ?  Here is an example of the code:

There is only one article, but 2 unique links to it.  In most cases we do know how they are created, but don't have a solution for it.  In the meantime, we need to redirect those urls to the correct url.

We have a "planned" link structure like:

/Articles/Category/article_name.aspx

but Google has (not sure how yet) indexed that url like this:

/Articles/article_name.aspx  (missing the category name)

So by incorrect I mean they are indexing the both urls, and 1st format is correct and the 2nd format is incorrect.

Due to a site structural problem with our CMS we have alot of duplicate content pages (1 page, with multiple urls).  We are in the process of setting up 301 redirects to correct the problem.  Meanwhile; one of the pages with the "incorrect" URL happens to be the page google favors and also has about 100 FB "likes".

The question is:  Are we better off keeping the "incorrect" URL for that particular page and redirect the other url to it? Both have a page rank of 3.

Thanks

Maybe just a little more confused <g>  Thanks for the assist.</g>

The 2 sites are quite related as to the nature of the content.  Perhaps doing a domain 301 redirect might be the best choice.

We're flying blind here. Clearly traffic dropped significantly but we're out here trying to fix what we are not even sure is broken.

Thank you. There are 2 separate sites,  both owned by us.  There are about 1600 links from the "directory" site, back to our main site.

We committed an SEO sin and created a site with links back to our primary website. Although it does not matter, the site was not created for that purpose, it is actually "directory" with categorized links to thousands of culinary sites, and ours are some of the links.

This occurred back in May 2010.  Starting April 2011 we started seeing a large drop in page views.  It dropped again in October 2011.  At this point our traffic is down over 40%

Although we don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it, we know it is best to remove the links.

The question is, given its a bad practice what is the best fix?  Should we redirect the 2nd domain to the main or just take it down?  The 2nd domain does not have much page rank and I really don't think many if any back-links to it.

Will it hurt us more to lose the 1600 or so back links? I would think keeping the links is a bad idea.

Thanks for your advice!

I guess this is confusing because there is one page (the recipe) and that page just gets rendered with a different style sheet if a user wants to print it out, but this DOES create a different URL.

So you are saying, as long as we put this on the recipe page:

That when the style sheet renders that page as :

http://xxx.xxxxxx.com/recipes/**print/**winter-creme-fraiche-baked-potato-soup
it will include the canonical link back to the recipe page?