Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

In the case where you did receive a warning, feel free to aggressively try to remove the links and / or make a disavowal submission. For generic warnings, I don't believe example links are given - I have seen example links provided in follow-up emails to the webspam team though.

If the rest of your profile is, to your knowledge, clean then I would start with these links. It's disappointing on Google's part because they used to be quite adept at ignoring links like this that should be discounted - their spam trigger finger is a lot itchier now than in days past and a lot of legitimate sites are getting caught in the mix.

Hi Dave,

There is a wealth of information out there about internationalisation but I'll cover some of the main points here.

The first thing to think about is the TLD of the site, e.g. .com, etc. If they are currently running on a TLD that belongs to a designated country, they will need to move to a generic TLD. In other words, you can't use site.ca to target Mexico. You will need to move to site.com, .org, .net, or similar.

You can use subdomains or subfolders on the parent site to target different countries. A good URL to target Mexico would be site.com/mx. If you have English language content from Mexico as well as Spanish, you could use site.com/mx-es/ and site.com/mx-en/. No matter how many versions of the site you create for different markets, you will need to use the rel="alternative" tag (also sometimes referred to has the "href lang tag"). This will allow you to create site.com/co for Colombia, site.com/nc for Nicaragua, site.com/mx for Mexico and site.com/ar for Argentina without being penalised for having duplicate Spanish content on different parts of the same website. If you also have the exact same content on the site in other languages, this tag allows you to show which versions are in English and are meant for the US, which versions are in English and are meant for Canada, which versions are in English and meant for the UK, etc. as well.

They can go down the route of registering domains in the countries they want to target, like site.com.mx, site.com.ar and site.com.br, but this usually requires a higher level of link development to push authority at all of these sites. For truly local content, the local domains could be best, but for many queries, .com sites rank just fine in South America.

Check out these three Moz resources for international SEO as well:

http://moz.com/blog/5-dos-and-donts-of-international-seo

http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Hi Michelle,

It's common to have latest news displayed in a set area of a select few pages, but I would not recommend this being a footer element. Footers have long been used for spam purposes, meaning that Google has a habit of disregarding their content or taking it as possible manipulation if it sees something undesirable in this area.

Absolutely no problem having a regularly occurring piece of navigation on pages, but perhaps reconsider placing this latest news section site-wide, especially in the footer.

For such a massive duplication and linking from the same IP, I would definitely follow the canonical / nofollow route - do you know how long it will take the user to implement these? In the meantime, there isn't terribly much you can do - you definitely do not want to do anything like disavowing the links (you should only do that if you receive unnatural link warnings or have been hit by a penalty or negative SEO attack). The quicker the tagging can be done, the better in this case. Although Google should understand and disregard, I did have a new client penalised back in 2010 because they were sharing a financial widget across a range of Australian newspaper websites that were all owned by the same company and thus all on the same IP. We got the penalty removed with reconsideration requests but were about to implement a network-wide nofollow on these little widgets before we submitted the request.

Hi John,

This looks like a aggregation website that links to a wide range of relevant sites, including Yahoo, Merriam-Webster, YouTube, etc. Unless you are receiving unnatural link warnings in Webmaster Tools, I would definitely not do anything like disavowal submissions (you should never do this until you have received a warning / penalty or are sure that you are a victim of an attack anyway), as is documented here:

http://moz.com/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath

http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664

A year or so ago, I had a client decide of their own accord that they were going to disavow "one link, to test impact". This is most certainly not what the tool is meant for - definitely save it for a last-resort when you are in trouble, not just because there are some directory links or similar out there

I would not be concerned about these unless you see a big drop in rankings or receive warnings, at which point the idea is to clean up every link that you don't consider high quality. Until then, Alan is correct - many many sites have this sort of site linking to them and Google understands that they have not been built for malicious purposes. When Google messes up and decides that these _are _malicious, disavowal is at your disposal.

If they still bother you because they take up a large portion of your backlink profile or you suspect ranking issues, try contacting the site to have your links removed before using disavowal. Not only does it make any future submissions or reconsideration requests more likely to succeed, but it can mean you take the care of the issue without having to involve the Webspam team at Google at all.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Anthony,

It looks like a simple error on Google's part, especially since your other pages are displayed correctly, but do try the actions listed by Chris like Fetch as Googlebot, perhaps after also making some minor changes to the title tag to spur a new title to be indexed (nothing drastic, try "PicoSure Tattoo Removal UK | Fastest Treatment in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham" perhaps).

I don't believe this will be the problem in this case, but beware of copying pages' content on other websites like Yell:

http://i.imgur.com/JAqToZv.png

http://i.imgur.com/e94blAB.png

It's a bad idea to place your content on other websites, especially authoritative sites. Google heavily filters (and sometimes penalises for) duplicate content and the last thing you want is Yell or another review / directory site being considered more relevant for your text than you are.

Hi Sally,

This could have to do with Google's desire to present the most diverse selection of results for terms, and since there are a range of other websites relevant for the [david lerner] query, Google has dropped the subdomain in favour of keeping the main site in first position, and showing a potentially relevant result for a totally different business in second position (the leggings result). This can happen even when a result has ranked well for years.

To solve this, it would be good if the site displayed "sitelinks" for the brand query (i.e. the six or more links that appear below a branded search, usually linking to other key pages within the website). Obtaining these links usually requires strength and authority that far outweighs other companies with similar names. It's not very common to see subdomains appearing as sitelinks, but it does happen sometimes, when a brand and the subdomain are particularly strong, e.g. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ycombinator&oq=ycombinator&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0l5.1467j0j9&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 (look at the Hacker News and Y Combinator Posthaven links).

You have a partial duplication issue with both http://news.davidlerner.com/ and http://news.davidlerner.com/news_index.php displaying the snippets for largely the same stories, but this should not be enough to damage the subdomain from a Panda point of view. You may consider restricting bots' access to the /news_index.php page unless it is performing a different task from an SEO perspective for you. Again, I do not believe this has caused the site to drop out of the rankings (and it is still perfectly indexed, ranking for its URL and full name) but it's something to consider tidying up.

Hi Carl,

You should be able to do this with one rule:

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule (.*) [newdomain.co.uk] [R=301,L]

Give this a shot and see if it works. It should direct http://www.olddomain.com/villa_rental.php to www.newdomain.com/villa_rental.php and so forth.

Cheers,

Jane

I'm not sure that you'd encounter a situation where Google is intuitive enough to decide on UX and equate it to a ranking factor - although they do definitely try to render pages and understand websites from a user's point of view. Not to get all UX on you on an SEO Q&A board, but if this truly is a bad user experience, consider investing the time to fix it, but as long as Google can crawl a sensible hierarchy through internal linking (ignoring the breadcrumb issue), I don't believe this will be actively moving you down the rankings.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi,

To echo the comments above: you need to fix this by either:

1. Using the canonical tag on domain.com/jobs?location=10, pointing to domain.com/jobs/sheffield, or;

2. 301 redirect domain.com/jobs?location=10 to domains.com/jobs/sheffield

(... and repeat with all the other instances where this has happened.)

The first method means that both pages will remain live, but Google will de-index the /jobs?location=10 page and credit the /jobs/sheffield/ page with a sizeable amount of that page's authority. The second method means that /jobs?location=10 will be inaccessible and will fall out of Google's index, to be replaced by /jobs/sheffield/. The /jobs/sheffield/ page will retain a sizeable amount of the other page's authority with this method as well.

Hi there,

Whilst I don't think you'd likely be penalised for this, we generally don't advise linking like this from footers due to how often footer linking was used as a spam technique in the past. The paid links Google is more concerned about are the links where hundreds of dollars are exchanged between unrelated parties for one party to post what looks like an editorial link to the other, with no disclosure that the link is basically an advertisement meant for the purpose of influencing search results.

A purist would likely say you should nofollow these links in order to remove any risk, so that is a good option if you are concerned. I don't believe you'd be likely to fall into a severe penalty or anything similar with these, but I would consider nofollowing based on these links being classic footer links.

Hi,

Definitely don't use disavow unless you think that the links are poor quality and could harm your site, or are actively harming it right now. That is what disavow is for, not for removing your 404 pages.

There is no harm waiting for Google to remove the 404 pages on its own, especially if you have used its URL removal tool as well. If there are any good links in the backlink profile of the 404ing pages, do attempt to contact the webmaster and have them changed - most people are more than happy to do this.

Hi,

Samuel is correct that Google has announced a crack down on links they have reason to believe were posted in guest blogged articles for the sole purpose of gaining links. There has been a lot of debate about whether they really have the ability to detect this if it is done very well, but one key indicator of guest posting being a main tactic employed by a website is if a majority of the site's links are from blog posts. This is especially true if a number of these posts have "guest", "sponsored", etc. in the header or footer or the articles.

Writing for others' sites can still be done well, and I know some companies are very good at scaling lead generation for potential posts / links (most of this is proprietary technology). In the long run, Samuel makes a good point that the safest route (especially for SMBs) is to focus on awareness from a PR angle and enjoying the links that come from it, rather than chasing guest post opportunities.

Hi Peter,

In some ways, subdirectories seems even more sensible when you're dealing with single landing pages, as they'll work together somewhat to look like a fuller site from Google's perspective, rather than just a collection of subdomains happening to exist on the same domain.

Hi,

Is your target market international or targeting one particular country? I would only recommend a .fr domain if you are targeting a French market: if you're looking at the UK, see if you can get a .co.uk domain. For the United States or an international market, go with .com. It is harder to get a geo-targeted domain, i.e. one on a .fr, to rank in a country that is _not _France with a language that is not English. You will see .es domains ranking with Spanish language content in South America, but you rarely see situations like the one you're proposing.

From the UK, I see some .fr domains ranking in local search for this term, but no sites ranking in "regular" results: http://i.imgur.com/ZhKTxk9.png

Hi Bob,

This is fine - Google recommends 404 / 410 for removing pages - if you want them gone even quicker, have them return 404s and use Google's page removal tool.

Hi Thomas,

As Vahe said, searching from outside of the US is bringing up the .org site first, so I agree that this is probably a geolocation issue. The .org has many times more backlinks than the US site. It's essentially a glitch, but one Google has probably done with the best of intentions, meaning to show US content to a US audience. Is the US site geotargeted to the United States in Webmaster Tools? Unless the site has some rankings that you are very concerned not to lose, try removing that geotargeting for now and monitor results for about four weeks.

Hi,

CleverPhD has a great response, but I wanted to add specifically that if you do this move, you will not lose the authority of those 13k links / 1,200 linking domains if you do the 301 redirection process properly. The guides linked to in CleverPhD's comment will help.

301 redirects pass the majority of authority from one URL to another, but you may also want to create a list of the top linking websites from that 1,200 and contact them after you have completed the move, asking them to update their links to you. This will ensure that you retain your best links on top of properly redirecting all the others.

Hi there,

When developing a new site, if there is no need for subdomains, we generally recommend staying away from them and using subfolders. However as Andy says, there's no reason why subdomains can't be used to create successful rankings and well-performing websites if they're used correctly.

I would suggest changing this structure if it appears the site is performing poorly... but if you can see a lot of other things you could fix to improve performance that have nothing to do with the subdomain issue, I would look at doing those first. The exception to this is link building - if you think that link building is what is needed to improve performance, make the decision about whether to keep the subdomains or use pages / subfolders first. You don't really want to do a lot of link building to URLs that you will then 301 redirect - redirection transfers a good amount of authority from one URL to another, but probably not 100%. Focus link building efforts on URLs that probably won't change any time soon.

My former agency took over SEO for an aged, successful business a few years ago that was using subdomains to target different regions. We didn't like the set up from a purely SEO point of view, but would never have changed it due to the rankings the site already had. We didn't want to put them in jeopardy (it was a very competitive industry). We worked well with what we had. The decision has to be based upon cost / benefit of changing and risking what rankings the site has currently, and how well you believe the site could do if it were structured differently.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Thomas,

It's highly likely that a link from a page like this is useless no matter where the link is placed, I'm afraid. Unless the directory is highly cited from other reputable sources, closely edited and genuinely listing the best in a particular business (which I would say it isn't, since it's selling link space and is very long), Google will understand not to pass authority to the sites listed. If there is any boost from having a link on a page like this, it will be temporary and may well carry much higher risks in the long term than it does short term benefits. You may spur on indexing of your URL by having it listed there, but you are also likely adding it to a bad neighbourhood. Do you trust all the other sites the page / site has linked to, most of which will also have paid to be there?

The issue is also that if you are well aware that you can pay to be listed, Google is probably aware of this too. It should be very easy to crawl for terms like "submit your site" and look for £, $, € values listed by submission request forms. I would honestly consider removing your site - your competitor likely does not beat you because of this one listing or listings like it (especially if their site has been on this page for quite some time). For context, when we do link clean-up operations for new clients who have a lot of poor links or whose sites are under penalties, we remove all links on pages like this.

I hope this helps,

Jane

Hi Edmond,

If you are going to use "search results" pages as good landing pages, they need to be made useful and high-quality enough that Google has no problem ranking them.

To keep using ASOS as an example, this URL ranks very well in the UK for [black dresses]: http://www.asos.com/Women/Dresses/Little-Black-Dresses/Cat/pgecategory.aspx?cid=9419

Using the site's internal search, this page appears if I search asos.com itself for [black dresses]: http://www.asos.com/search/black-dresses?hrd=1&q=black+dresses

There is little difference in the pages, but one sits beneath a folder structure, is linked to, includes a description and has a slightly better optimised title tag. But most importantly, the search results page is excluded via the site's robots.txt whilst the similar landing page is not - http://www.asos.com/robots.txt

For sites without the authority of Asos, I'd say you'd need slightly more than Asos' short black dress description, but in truth this is a search result page by any other name that has been made into a well-ranked landing page.

You see the same thing as you go down the SERP, e.g. http://www.debenhams.com/women/dresses/little-black-dresses versus http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Navigate?langId=-1&storeId=10701&catalogId=10001&txt=black+dresses

I hope this helps.

Hi there,

It would be much trickier to do this with blog content given that it is naturally archived in a chronological way, unlike static web pages which can be updated with new dates. If you found you had a selection of blog posts that you wanted to update like this, I'd say you needed to turn these into static articles first and use the method Rand suggests going forward. Obviously that would require new URLs and redirects.

Hi Anthony,

Unless you find a campaign or individual who has been tracking results, either for a specific keyword or for a specific domain, you can't retroactively do this through tools like Moz.

You can use Searchmetrics' domain visibility tool to see how dominant a site has been in its niche over time, however, which gives you a rough understanding of whether it has ranked well or poorly for its keywords over time: http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/visibility

My former agency has an in-house process like this that we used daily (I wrote about how it works in this post, although it has been developed into a tool and is more sophisticated now). It's useful for when you want to look at historic performance but don't have specific ranking reports and Searchmetrics is a great public alternative.

I hope this helps!

Jane

Hi,

This does seem to be a bit of a problem as I am not getting redirected to the non-HTTPS version of the site, and the HTTPS version is not loading CSS for me:

http://i.imgur.com/WoA66F4.png

http://i.imgur.com/T7pf7zU.png

You need to put or fix a 301 redirect on the HTTPS URLs (I take it it was working properly before?). Also place the canonical tag on each page, referencing itself with an HTTP URL.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Scott,

Check out the Moz Recommended List - included are companies whose services Moz recommends for consulting, covering SEO, CRO, design, etc. You may find a good agency or freelance consultant through this list that meets your needs or who can refer you to someone appropriate.

I echo the statements regarding contacting the person who developed your website if you had a specific developer. He or she may be able to help too.

Best,

Jane

Hi David,

Did you manage to see where these visits were coming from yet? Agree with many posters below that 100+ visits from Google would be surprising given that Google does not report 99% of organic keyword data anymore. Were the visits from other search engines?

Hi Jonathan,

Agree with Donna - these are all very good reasons.

From the perspective of what an engagement will look like without an initial audit, a consultant can be left trying to piece together small fixes, unsure of whether some issues are more important than others because they have not had the time to develop a full picture of how a website is structured and how its CMS works / is managed.

Clients tend to be less willing to implement changes if they have not received them when they expected to, i.e. in an audit process with a prioritised list of changes and reasoning behind why the changes are necessary. The process of fixing a website can get arbitrary - emails and calls here and there about random issues. Web developers usually don't like operating like this: they want to know that the next push is for SEO purposes and that a set amount of time will be dedicated to making the changes proposed or working with an external team (you) to find compromises if what you suggest isn't possible. You can schedule whole days on-site with a client to get this stuff done and worked out, rather than badgering devs or managers for months with the things you discover along the way.

Audits can also tell the consultant a lot about how the site works that they might not have been told otherwise by the client (who might not know or understand themselves), both from the manual investigation and use of tools to analyse the website. I find that as a consultant, this knowledge sticks with you - if you learned that a client's CMS performs a certain task a certain way early on, you go into every situation understanding how it works and expecting certain functionality. This increases efficiency for the rest of the engagement. You are rarely taken by surprise by an issue, and many on-site issues are much easier to avoid / solve when both you and your client have a comprehensive document outlining how the website is structured.

I hope this helps!

Jane

Hi there,

That's odd! I've found you on there so I'll PM you instead. Cheers!

Hi there,

For the question of how long rankings will take to come back, unfortunately that's impossible to answer for sure. I had a client once mistakenly point all of their canonical tags at their home page, effectively de-indexing the whole site. The fixed the error within a day, but it took five weeks to get their rankings back. This was a very new website that had very little authority to begin with, but it was still a huge hit to take.

If your site is a little older and more established, your recover should be a lot quicker. Unfortunately it's still very hard to put a time frame on this.

Hi,

Technically this is duplicate content, but it is most likely something search engines understand to ignore (especially if no links point to the upper case / incorrect URLs). If it particularly bothers you, place a self-referencing canonical tag in the page's file so that www.examples.com/pAGe/PROducT references www.examples.com/page/product in its tag. Either that or a 301.

Cheers.

The next time Google crawls the previously-linking page, it should note that the link is gone, as it will cache the page. Any benefit or detriment that the links was passing on should technically be nullified. Moz's crawl will update when it re-visits the page as well, but the frequency of Moz, Googlebot and the updating WMT is really hard to predict. If the link is on a highly-traffic, well linked-to page, G and Moz should pick it up quickly. If not, it can take a long time.

The Moz index is updated about every 3 - 4 weeks; again, the removal of one individual link requires the latest crawl to have noticed that it has gone, which is likely but not a certainty.

Hi Peter,

I understand that the platform only allows for subdomains. From a purely SEO point of view, subfolders or pages are preferable to subdomains because authority does not appear to pass between a parent domain and its subdomains in the same way as it does between subfolders and parent domains. If your landing page sites are only one pagers, they may be seen as quite thin as well.

However, there is no reason why you can't build quality content like this - it just may take more link building to establish the authority for the subdomains than it would for pages on the same site. You will need to ensure that as much unique content as possible is placed on the landing pages to increase their 'worth' in Google's eyes, given that they are separate from each other on subdomains.

HI,

It's possible that you are not passing authority effectively to internal pages if so many internal links are 302ing. PR / authority doesn't pass through 302s, so you have a case where authority is being passed to URLs that are not indexed (as per your statement that the 302ed pages aren't indexed), and that authority is going nowhere.

Understand that you can't update the 302s - do you have the ability to update the links that point to those URLs?

This can cause indexing problems and artificially deflated authority for deep pages in a website.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Mohammad,

It's impossible to tell if the deindexation is the cause of your ranking drop without knowing what other activity was going on at the same time, but James is correct that canonicalisation would have been a better option than deindexing your pages. You could consider allowing crawling / indexing again and using the canonical tag.

Hi there,

Dennis and Kevin are correct - Google sometimes displays what it thinks might be "better", even if you disagree. If possible, can you show us the example? Feel free to PM it to me if you would rather. If you'd rather keep it private, I still definitely agree with trying to change the tag in various ways, perhaps improving its descriptiveness, to see if the page displayed in the SERP changes as well.

I hope this helps.

Jane

Hi there,

I'll go through the questions one by one:

1. Does Changing the Anchor Text Bad? Does Google have a new way of detecting anchor text changes.

Google will note the changed anchor text when it re-indexes the pages the links sit on. There is no hard evidence that this is viewed as "good" or "bad", although if the links are otherwise "bad" (from spammy sources), changing the anchor text won't help - the link would be better off being removed. However, if the link is neutral or good, there is no evidence that changing the anchor text will hurt you.

2. Can I change the Title/Anchor to something more generic, so that the anchor text profile is more natural.

Definitely - if you are going to change the anchor, it is best to change it to something related to your brand, e.g. the name of the company or URL of the website.

**3. Since this is a Directory is http://obln.org/ - Does anybody know being on this directory bad? **

Free web directories are not advisable places to build links, so despite this conversation about anchor text, I would remove the link in this case. Yes, they have a PR of 5, but it is the best rule for modern SEO to not use free directories as link building tools because they have been abused so badly for spam in the past.

Hi all,

Following up from Brad's post, just a note that the index was updated on March 11th - next update scheduled for April 8th.

Cheers all,

Jane

Hi Stephane,

For just one or two pages, targeting different countries, on-page content might prove to be sufficient. That is, a page about companies in X field in the UK, listing UK companies with their addresses and telephone numbers, will give Google a range of signals to indicate that that content is most relevant to people from the UK.

That said, the page itself should not contain href lang information to indicate that it is for a Canadian market. If href lang information is included, it should specify the UK.

If the content is sitting on a .ca domain, it will be harder to show that the UK review page is for the UK - it would be better to place this sort of information on a generic TLD website.

The question of duplicate content between .com, .ca, .co.uk etc. sites is answered by geo-targeting, both using the ccTLDs and href lang tags. Google "ignores" duplicate content when the websites' tags tell it that although the content is the same, this version is for Canadians, this version is or Americans and this one over here is for Brits.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Vince,

.htaccess can't change the HTML of the webpage, but I am not sure if it can rewrite outbound clicks. I'll reach out to other other contributors to see if anyone has a shortcut way of updating these links. I am seeing it mentioned online that you can do this, but I would like some verification from the team.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

You have two good answers here already from Andy and Dennis. If possible, could you provide examples of the site and the terms for which the internal pages are ranking? Feel free to PM them to me if you would rather they not appear on the thread. This should help me look at whether the internal pages are just more relevant to the queries, or whether it's truly strange that the home page doesn't rank.

Cheers,

Jane

I like EGOL's idea of partnering with US websites that do not ship to Canada and arranging a referral scheme. This is one way to take advantage of US sites taking up real estate in Canadian results.

I agree that "canada" is likely a common modifier - if the product is niche enough or bought in small enough quantities, large-scale keyword research tools might not be of much use. Consider other modifiers, such as "ca" as well.

Don't go overboard on the keyword usage though: stuffing "Canada" into every title is unnecessary and will start to look unnatural. Make sure you've taken advantage of localisation tools and techniques such as geo-targeting and the rel="alternative" tag for language, i.e. specifying en-ca as English language, for Canada (or French as well, if that's part of your market!).

Unfortunately if your competition, albeit irrelevant US sites, are incredibly strong, you'll need to compete with them on standard metrics such as the rate of link acquisition and the quality of the links you both build. Don't worry yourself with building the same number of links Petco has outright, but you may need to look at figuring out their rate of link building and look at their social / content activity, and devise a plan to match that as best you can in the future. You don't need to build the same historical numbers as these huge sites have, but your competitiveness needs to rise to match or better the sites you want to keep up with / pass.

Hi again,

This could be dampening Google's view of the site, but I would be interested to see what the link building and other promotional activity of your competitors looks like. DA might not have caught up with what they're doing yet, but the subtle improvements are enough to make the "playing field" a little tougher for you.

When you're being slowly out-done, I'd definitely recommend making sure the site is absolutely perfect from an on-page point of view. If you suspect you're keyword stuffing at all, resolve that and tidy up any other house keeping issues you come across. I don't think that would be enough to take a site from top 3 rankings to page 2, but it won't help if there are other competitive aspects you are being beaten on.

Forgive me for linking to my own post, but I wrote about competitive link analysis a few years ago and it might be helpful if you're looking at what others are doing as far as links go: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html

Hi again,

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

The links being from identical content should not be harmful to you - this sort of citation is fairly common, e.g. when a site has shared a piece of viral content like a video, infographic, tool (calculator etc.) or cited case study that others reproduce and link back to. I'd be far more concerned about the quality of the linking sites.

I think the duplication question will also be even less of an issue if you remove the poor-quality links: identical citations from high-quality sources will pass as normal and not malicious liking activity.

Hi there,

I would stick to one high quality website with separate sections for sports and weddings. My only hesitation is the vast difference in the subject matter and the fact that wedding photography is such an important niche unto itself, but from an SEO point of view, one website is definitely preferable. You'll need to work on site structure and the branding of the wedding and sports sections to differentiate them and not confuse / alienate your potential clientele.

For the home page, I would go with the part of the business that is most profitable (I am guessing weddings?) and use navigation and SEO to optimise the sports photography page. PPC is a great way to get an influx of new traffic, especially if you want to do some conversion rate testing in the early stages, before you have a good amount of organic traffic.

I would consider creating pages for specific genres, even within your chosen niches. For example, a basketball page, including all the basketball content you've created like http://www.soobumimphotography.com/basketball-floor-remote/ and http://www.soobumimphotography.com/2013-nba-finals/

This section would sit under sports and be linked to from http://www.soobumimphotography.com/portfolio/sports/, along with a section for football, soccer, volleyball, boxing...

In terms of conversion, the contact form should be specific to the page it sits on - there is no need for a generic form with engagement and wedding options on the sports page, for example. I would tailor that to ask about the sport, the teams, the league (NCAA? High schoo? Pro?). I'd also really consider reviews or recommendations from your former clients, especially for weddings. They add trust, especially when paired with the people's actual photos. You can use Rich Snippets to include star ratings, and those star ratings can show up in search results: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146645?hl=en

http://i.imgur.com/HMegwvh.png

I hope this provides some ideas for now. Let me know if anything is unclear.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi John,

This is not an uncommon problem - have you tried contacting any of the spammy sites and requesting the links be taken down? Link take-downs are also very common nowadays and are a good way of both culling undesirable links and gathering "evidence" that you have tried to clean things up if you need to send a reconsideration request to Google.

If the request to take down the link comes from an official company email address, and you follow up within ~10 days to sites you get no response from, link removal requests can be quite successful. Granted, there will be some sites you cannot contact or who don't get back to you (and some will ask for money to take the link down - it's up to you if the price they ask for is worth it). If you are truly dealing with penalties, removing links is a lot more effective than other options.

One other option is to "disavow" the bad links through Webmaster Tools - more information on link disavowal is available here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

We have always found, however, that actually removing the links is most effective, and that disavowal is a good tool for when you can't remove some of the links.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Sina,

Sorry to have gotten your name wrong!

It looks like Google does not always send this sort of notification through Webmaster Tools. See Matt Cutts' tweet from 2012. This tweet was in response to a lot of speculation in March 2012 that notifications were being sent about Panda.

When we see notifications, they are usually about "spam", which also usually means link-based issues rather than on-page problems.

I would still suggest that on-page clean up will help a lot here, but also that you will need to wait for Google to de-index the old content.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

For sites whose rankings are slowly going down, I would be very hesitant to use the term penalty. Penalties usually result in large, noticeable drops - more than 10 places lost at once and huge percentages of traffic gone "overnight". If several sites are losing one or two positions a week, it is more likely that competitor activity is taking place at a higher rate or quality.

There are a myriad of things competitors could be doing to slowly push ahead - the usual suspect is better / more link building: competing is not about matching competitors link for links, but rather:

1. Acquiring links at a faster rate
2. Acquiring more relevant links
3. Acquiring better-quality links (a BBC link as opposed to a link from a hobby blogger, etc.)

If link activity isn't the answer, so many other reasons can account for slow drops. Pagination issues resulting in duplicate content may not be enough for Google to outright penalise a site using its Panda algorithm, but they could be enough to make a site look like it was lower-quality and didn't deserve to rank as well as a tidy, well-optimised site.

Heavy "mentions" from around the web (e.g. the Telegraph mentioning a company 10 times in one month without linking to it) are positive signals, as is heavy social media activity and interaction.

What is the rate at which these sites lose rankings? I'd like to know a little more about how quickly they're dropping in order to think more about the "penalty" potential.

Thanks,

Jane