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Hi there,

I would say that comments, especially of a good length and with no duplication from elsewhere (so not just people stopping by to say "great post!") would be seen as a positive signal, but not nearly enough to qualify as a ranking factor. That is, having no comments would count as a lack of a signal, not necessarily a negative factor.

It's unfortunate that the site has lost all of its comments. Anecdotally, the same thing happened to a blog of mine four or five years ago. The site did not suffer a drop in traffic and remains successful.

Hi Behnaz,

bstone81 is correct about it taking a long time for Google to re-index so many 301ed URLs - has the issue improved at all in the last week?

If you search for snippets of content from your blog posts, are the new URLs on tcclinic.com showing up, or is the content still indexed under the old Shopify URLs? I've run a couple of these and I see them indexed in the two locations. Please see the following screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/fvawU9L.png.

The Shopify URLs return 404s (http://tcc-e-store.myshopify.com/blogs/news/11632829-luxe-diamond-foundation) - it's not guaranteed how long Google will take to re-crawl these pages and acknowledge that they are gone. Unfortunately, you can't 301 redirect them to speed up the process.

Unfortunately, some of these pages do NOT return a 404, even though your content is gone. See this example (the redirect plugin is from my former agency, and shows the headers the page returns and if there are any redirects):

Indexed content: http://i.imgur.com/QHSAnlR.png

Shopify's page, returning a 200 OK response but no content: http://i.imgur.com/TT9ZehC.png

Several post pages do return a proper 404 though: http://i.imgur.com/L30npnv.png

As Google says here, the best way to remove content is for the URL to return a 404 or 410 server response: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/64033?hl=en

That page also says that outdated pages not returning 404s will drop out if people stop linking to them. Try to change any and all old links that might point to the Shopify blog to your new URLs.

You also have issues with multiple versions of your content being indexed on many URLs within your main domain: http://i.imgur.com/Z7Hzz37.png

For this, you're going to want to look at pagination options. This post from my former colleague at Ayima is a really good one on this subject: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html. It was highly recommended in the SEO world (Rand seemed to like it, tweeted it, etc.) and it should be useful for this issue.

You also have issues with an expired security certificate, which is returning this error if you try to access HTTPS URLs on the site. Quite a few HTTPS, as opposed to non-secure HTTP URLs, are indexed: http://i.imgur.com/ADX9hBc.png

This should be fixed, and HTTPS URLs should be 301ed to HTTP URLs where the URL does not need to be secure. Here is an example of both versions of the URLs being indexed for the same content: http://i.imgur.com/A7VkACx.png

There is quite a lot of housekeeping to be done on the site to perfect its on-page optimisation, and this will certainly help. There's a chance you are affected by Panda because of this: Google thinks you have duplicated content from the old Shopify blog, and content is duplicated throughout the site in its eyes.

I hope this helps - I know it's a lot of work to clean up the site internally but it's definitely necessary.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Brandon,

To the best of our knowledge, Google does not "notice" or count URL content after a hash, meaning that the link juice would stop with www.example.com. It is almost certain that the home page is receiving the benefit of these links.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Mark,

I would say that there will be negligible results in redirecting these pages unless they happen to have a high number of good inbound links from other sources. Redirecting the individual pages alone is unlikely to make a huge difference to the authority / strength / rankings of the high-traffic pages you redirect to or the domain itself.

If you were to do this, I would do it with usability in mind. Do people arriving on the low traffic pages regularly bounce? Do you believe that they would be more likely to convert if they arrived on the high traffic page? I am not a CRO expert so would stop short of making CRO testing advice.

The one SEO benefit I can think of would be if those low-traffic pages are contributing to any duplicate content issues on your site and redirecting them would count as "cleaning up" the site. This is definitely not for sure, so I'd still stick with the mindset that you'd be doing this for the purpose of directing traffic, not search engines.

I hope this helps.

Jane

Hi Paul,

I realise it's been a couple of weeks since this was submitted, but I wanted to follow up. At my former agency, we went through a few reconsideration procedures for new clients. We managed to be successful with all of them, but some took quite a long time (August - February being the longest).

We have found that disavowing alone is not nearly enough to make a difference - it is far preferable for the links to be removed. Unlike Claudio below, we have had a far higher rate than 5%, but it all depends on where the links come from. Sometimes it's hard to even find a live email address to contact webmasters, and some people want payment to remove links (worth doing if the payment is not too high). We crafted templates and _always _followed up within two weeks if we did not get a response from first emailing someone for a link removal with another specifically crafted email template.

It's true that if you cannot remove links, it is still worthwhile demonstrating to Google that you attempted to do so, with email screenshots or at least a list of the sites you contacted. They want to see effort. They want to see that you removed, or attempted to remove, the vast majority of the bad links. It's time consuming and tedious, but it's worth it if you get the penalty removed.

As I said, the longest process we went through was over six months, but the site in question had a TERRIBLE backlink profile that was the result of years of abuse by bad link builders. We're talking removing thousands of links. However, it came through - the penalty was removed and the client's rankings are on the rise.

I hope this helps. The short version is: remove remove remove. You won't maintain a penalty if there are no more bad links holding the site back, and those links aren't helping it rank anyway.

If you'd like some advice on how to decide which links to remove and which to keep, please let me know. In the meantime, check out this post from my former colleague Brandon at Ayima. It's a good resource for link analysis.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Unfortunately I think you will be lucky to escape the penalty being moved to the new domain, no matter whether you are selective with which URLs you 301 or not. Our understanding is that the penalty will be transferred with the 301 of the domain.

It would be preferable to resolve the penalty before the domain move takes place, but if you really can't wait to change the domain in line with the SSL certificate, you're best advised to keep working on the reconsideration / link removal process continuously to try and have it removed as soon as possible. The more links you can remove, the higher the likelihood that your request will be successful. As I mentioned earlier, unfortunately I doubt that the new domain will escape the penalty. As such, you're better off continuing with the efforts while the domain move takes place.

When you submit the next reconsideration request, consider including the information that you have changed domain names for business purposes and you understand that this is not a tool to escape the penalty.

Basically, Google wants to see real evidence that you've put a lot of effort into link removal. It always seems that the more effort that can be put in and demonstrated, the quicker you can get a reconsideration request approved.

Cheers,

Jane