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MyBlogGuest was penalized towards the end of March, that's probably not his issue.

Did you manually check your rankings? Moz is known to post massive drops like that despite little to no real movement in the SERPs.

A noindex tag specific to Googlebot would also be a good idea.

There are multiple ways to do everything in SEO. Multiple ways to rank highly, multiple ways to lose all rankings. I'd say it's pretty much 0% science, because if any part of it was then it wouldn't be nearly as hard. Even the things that one might say we have down to a science (proper title tag structure, well written meta description, etc.) aren't really because Google can display them how they want to display them - not how you wrote them.

The most important thing I can stress is don't rely solely on SEO. Don't rely solely on any one strategy. That's a guaranteed way to fail. Use SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc. Diversify your strategy and you won't freak when Google changes the algorithm and everything goes upside down.

Might be something you can get from the WMT API.

Also, to really see how many pages are indexed, do a site:xxxx.com search, go to the last page, include omitted results, go to the last page again, and add up how many you have. That's probably the most accurate number.

I don't deal with implementation or specifics of our site search, but we're on Magento and I know we've used Google site search and Solr for one of our sites. We haven't been able to find one we're really happy with.

The penalty will probably pass to site B if you do a 301 redirect. If it were that easy to get out of being penalized then you wouldn't have companies whose marketing is solely based on penalty recovery.

Go to WMT for whatever dev site you want to remove from the index. Use the URL removal tool, but in the box just enter /, nothing else. This will remove the entire site.

If you use rel=canonical on product pages, you risk not having all of them indexed and missing out on long tail traffic. Focus on making sure each page can get served in the SERPs.

I'm in ecommerce as well. We 301 promotion-specific pages to the homepage once the promotion is over, as each one won't come back around for a year.

Moz tells me there's an issue with the GA connection on one of my campaigns, so you're not alone.

Use this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This is what I use to block our dev sites from being indexed and we've had no issues.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used here? No.

OP, it does sound like you have duplicate content issues. See what you can do to make those omitted pages more unique.

Why aren't 301s an option?

From a quick glance at OSE, looks like you do have some backlinks to clean up. Your anchor text is heavily weighted towards money terms - primarily [oak furniture], [solid oak furniture], and [oak office furniture]. Plus sites like http://www.lanaintl.com/basic-info-about-real-estate-agents (which you have a backlink from) are clearly spammy.

If you've deleted the links then you're fine. All the tools - OSE, WMT, etc. - are just slow at catching up.

Check AHREFs, they have the most complete set of data.

Basing it on just these 2 factors is an oversimplification - a lot more goes into it. But of the 2 you listed, it's more likely A than B.

Regardless of what these long-time employees say, try to get in touch with whoever was in this position before you and find out for sure if link building was done. If the company's that big, it wouldn't be surprising if link building was going on and most people had no clue.

We implemented rich snippets for products some time ago. When viewing our site through a site:xxxx.com on Google, they don't show for every product, despite the fact that they should.

I've taken some of the URLs that don't show rich snippets in the SERPs, ran them through Google's testing tool, and they display fine. Not sure what's going wrong here. Any thoughts?

Link Detox is good for finding toxic links, but you still need to manually review them all. It will give you false positives - no tool is 100% on that stuff.

Rmoov and Pitchbox are good for outreach, though I favor Rmoov since it was specifically built for link removal. Pitchbox is more for prospecting, finding new opportunities, etc.

Could be an issue with tracking, ex. PPC or something else could be reporting as organic. I'd look into that.

This is a book they're presenting on their site, of course it's not unique content. I'm sure they're aware of that.

OP, to your questions:

1. Generally you won't be penalized for having too many links on a page, but Google will only crawl so many of them. The higher authority your site is, you can have tons of links on a page and get more of them crawled.

2. What makes you think you're being penalized? Significant drop in traffic?

Apparently I'm the only one who's ever had this problem. Interesting.

Moz is going by a percentage threshold - if more than a certain percent is the same, it's duplicate. Revise your meta descriptions or just accept having it marked as duplicate. Duplicate meta descriptions aren't that big of an issue.

Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange.

I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern.

Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has.

The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning.

Anyone know what's going on?

Why do you say it's not possible? A good copywriter can knock out titles and meta descriptions for a few hundred pages in a day. It's worth paying for.

I was under the impression that dynamic pages where you go through a lookup would be harder to index.

Ex. - one of our sites uses a lookup to get customers to page that lists all the products we carry for their vehicle. The main landing page has a dropdown lookup with 3 to 8 fields depending on the vehicle type, and all fields must be filled in to get to the product listing page.

You're saying Google should be able to go through that and index the dynamic content with no problem?

http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/search/Wiper+Blade/03300/C0047.oap?make=Honda&model=Accord&year=2005&vi=1430764

How is O'Reilly getting this page indexed? It shows up in organic results for [2005 honda accord windshield wiper size].

Unless you got a manual action and did a reconsideration request, you won't hear back from Google. Based on the OP's statements, sounds like his is an algorithmic problem.

OP, wait and pray that things turn around with the next Penguin update.

A meganav is not considered duplicate content. Duplicate content means product description pages that are identical, having the same articles multiple places on your site, etc.

To the main parts of your question - Google does not want it to be easy for people in the SEO world. They give guidelines, but following them means nothing. What Google considers an ok tactic one years becomes an unacceptable tactic the next (see guest blogging). There are many ways to succeed in ranking. Some follow Google's rules and wait for rankings to come, others use tons of spammy tactics and rank instantly (though they always risk losing it overnight if Google catches on).

The idea that an easy to use site and relevant content will make Google rank you fairly is a joke. And though only 1 has said it publicly, there are many top minds in the SEO world who will tell you that in private.

Regardless of what Google says or does, links are still a huge factor in search rankings. You need to some quality links to your site to see improvement in your SERP positions. The Moz blog is full of tips on it.

On top of the site move issues, I just put your site in Open Site Explorer and you have no backlinks from anyone. That's a big part of your ranking problem. Did you get rid of a bunch or have you never had any?

I won't be changing what we do with out of stock items. A 404 is a bad user experience. One of our sites sells tons of products that all come in a variety of colors. 5 of them are core colors that we always have, the rest come and go. So when one of the colors that comes and goes runs out of stock and the page 404s, we 301 it to a core color that shouldn't go out of stock. And for the rare times that we're out of stock on a core color, we use out of stock messaging on the page instead of letting it 404. I was surprised he didn't mention redirects in the video.

1. Why can't you 301 them?

2. If you want them out of the index, try a manual URL removal via Webmaster Tools.

Definitely offsite SEO.

What's the reason for using 302s over 301s?

It's Penguin 2.0, which was put out on May 22, 2013.

Your client can go the easy way with what some would call black hat tactics, rank very well very quickly, get a lot of sales, but then there's always the chance it'll disappear overnight. If you're in to churn and burn and don't care about starting over every few months then go for it.

Or your client can go with what some would call white hat tactics - focus on content, earning links, etc. Results will take a long time to come, but you're better protected from future Google updates. Depending on their resources this may or may not be viable.

I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop.

If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.

No manual actions on our sites, just Penguin related.

I put in a disavow for one site in October and Webmaster Tools kept a message up for some time saying the disavow links file for that site had been updated. I put in a disavow for another site of ours last week and I've had no such message. I checked and the file is there. Was this an intentional change on Google's part? Just want to make sure something's not messed up here.

I'm gonna answer these in the most simple way possible, others can elaborate:

1. If the unrelated site actually featured you for something - ex. you sponsored a program for this travel company, they mention it on their site and link back to you - then that's fine. If it's totally random and not related, it's not fine. If links to you have anchor text that's not related to your site, that's spam.

2. Almost always disavow at the domain level. Exceptions would be if someone set up a spammy blogspot.com or tumblr.com page - those are big, authoritative domains and you don't want to block them completely. In that case I'd go with the URL level instead of domain level.

3. I'd still disavow the links, even if you delete the pages they point to. It's better to cover all bases in a situation like this.

I'm a bit confused here.

Penguin is an algorithmic penalty, not a manual action. Reconsideration requests are only used when manual actions are applied, not algorithmic penalties and you clearly said you submitted a reconsideration request and had the penalty revoked.

So were you caught in both a manual action penalty and Penguin algorithmic penalty at the same time? Please clarify. I've submitted disavows for both our sites in the last few months and I'm always interested in hearing others experiences with this.

An objective based resumé should be for someone just graduating or early in their career. Change that top part to be skills based.

'Bob is a fast learner' - don't talk about yourself in the third person.

Don't say it's been a long time since you used PHP and MySQL. I'm sure you could brush up on it pretty quickly if you needed to.

Don't include 'references available upon request'. If they want them, they'll ask for them.

Monthly should be fine.

50% is a shockingly high success rate, way above the norm. I had a 16% success rate on one of our sites and around 35% on one of our much larger sites. I had one of the top names ever in SEO tell us that 5% would be a good success rate, though I think that's lowballing a bit.

Just curious what you guys are doing in the way of displaying product reviews on ecommerce sites. I couldn't find much on best practices here so I'm turning to the Moz community.

We're moving our main site to Magento and plan to launch it in a few months. Some of our products have 1,000+ reviews and we're wondering what the best way to show them is.

I'm thinking just put them all on there (provided it doesn't slow down the page) to increase unique content per page, more keywords, etc. We've also thought of showing just the 50-100 most recent reviews or filtering the reviews and showing a sampling we choose.

Thoughts?

I've seen this with our sites too. Title tags, meta descriptions, canonicals, robots.txt, etc. should all be considered just suggestions. Google will look at them and in most cases obey them, but they don't always.

I'd assume Moz Analytics still has some bugs to be worked out. Analytics and PRO report different numbers on virtually everything for our sites, from traffic to keyword rankings.