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Hi,

We recently got "the message" from Google about unnatural links for two of our 50 sites. Ranking has dropped significantly since, we did not take any action to remove the links.

All our 50 sites were managed by the same SEO company but only two got this message.

We are in the process of understanding the best ways to deal with this situation, but currently there are two main approaches we can detect:

1. Remove the links, resubmit for reconsideration
2. Ignore the message and do not do anything, if you do something it is actually like admitting you did something wrong, and Google can not prove that you did...

Any insights on what approach we should adopt?

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

I need to change all my site pages URL as a result of moving the site into another CMS platform that has its own URL structure:

1. Currently the site is highly ranked for all relevant KWs I am targeting.
2. All pages have backlinks
3. Content and meta data should remain exactly the same.
4. The domain should stay the same

The plan is as follow:

1. Set up the new site using a temporary domain name
2. Copy over all content and meta data
3. Set up all redirects (301)
4. Update the domain name and point the live domain to the new one
5. Watch closely for 404 errors and add any missing redirects

Questions:

1. Any comments on the plan?
2. Is there a way (the above plan or any other) to make sure ranking will not be hurt
3. What entries should I add to the sitemap.xml: new pages only or new pages and the pages from the old site?

Thanks,

Guy.

Hi guys,

In our never-ending search for better SEO strategies and results, our journey has led us to question the idea of creating custom social media icons for our site.  We are wondering if anyone has had experience, either negative or positive, by using these icons, or if there is no difference at all?

I would like to make it clear that we are only thinking about customizing the icons that lead to our Facebook page, Twitter profile, YouTube channel, etc.  NOT the like/share/tweet/etc buttons.  We understand the negative effects in changing those icons, but are interested in knowing if creating general icons that match our design will be a good or bad thing.

Any replies are appreciated, thanks!

Hi everyone,

We have a short question that probably has a very long answer:

What are all the ways that Google differentiates one search result from another?

This is really important for us to know and, up until now, we can't find a really good and complete source that explains this.

Thank you in advance.

Hi there,

We have been having a problem with one of our websites.  It appears as though someone has stolen our template and used it for themselves, but in the process also stole our analytics information.  We have problems with the analytics, but are fixing that ourselves.  The problem we have now is that when we tried to put in a sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools the URLs are submitted but have yet to be indexed.  We have tried pinging them, but there has been no change.  This is not a problem for our other websites which are very similar.

What could be the problem here?  For reference, the url is http://www.dentistinlittlerock.com

Thank you for your responses in advance!

Hey everyone,

We've recently seen a strange, unexplainable occurrence from one of our new websites.  We have been moving up in the rankings with the site since it was put online and some of the pages even jumped to #1 for their keyword category.

However the following week we lost all of those places.  Pages that were drowning in #1 were now just barely getting their feet wet in the 80s or 90s, and some pages in the 90s were lost completely from the charts.

Is there any way we may have gotten penalized for something on our site? Does Google penalize?  Or do they have bugs like this for some reason?

Any response would be helpful. Thank you very much!

Just for reference, the domain in question is www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com