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Hmm.  I'm doubtful that a PPC campaign would knock you down like that in the organic results.  When did the drop happen?  Google has done several updates in the past few weeks, including a Penguin update, that may have happened at the same time.  I noticed that in Open Site Explorer you only have two "external" sites linking to the page, cnsmosaic and cnsgroup.  From the links on the hut3 site, I'm assuming these are all part of the same company.

It's possible, however, that Google sees the links from those sites as external links.  Since it would appear that the links to the penetration testing page are sitewide accross the cns sites, I wonder if Google is treating those as external sitewide links, all with targeted keywords, and has penalized you for it, either manually or by algorithm.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

If you just want to get rid of the pages, I'd 301 redirect them all to their corresponding category page or just all to the homepage.  That way the search engines can find the redirects and make the adjustments and anyone who goes to the page (either from your site, a bookmark, or an external link) will not get an error.

If you have bad links to the pages, then just delete them, but note that you may end up with a bunch of errors and broken links on your site.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You're not giving the search engines different content, so it's not deceptive.  I can't think of any way it would harm you.

I can't speak to the technical side of setting up session IDs, however, you can deal with the URL issue with canonical tags and setting up URL parameters in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.  That should prevent the search engines from indexing every URL with a different session id and keep all the page authority on the main URL.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Kerry,

Masoko has a good point.  If the URLs of the page change each time, there will be a different affect than if it's the same URL or you use the canonical tag on them.  So, an example would be helpful.

That said, assuming the URL stays the same, then the question is whether the content is just changing order or different content/products are being displayed.

• If the same products are displayed, but in a different order, then you may see some minor fluctuations in rankings because the content is shifting around, but it shouldn't be much.  This could affect both the rankings of the category page and the products displayed on the category page.  However, since there really isn't any such thing as static rankings, you may not even notice.
• If different products are being displayed every time, then you may see some larger fluctuations, especially if you don't have much other content on the page other than the products.  Again, you may see changes in the rankings both of the category pages and the product pages.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Happy to help.

You may actually want to recommend to the brokers that they take the time to create original content.  It's in their best interest since I assume they get paid for booking rooms/properties and they'd probably book more if they got more traffic by having original content.

In regards to that directory site, it's likely Google just decided they weren't the version of the content they wanted to display.  If everything else is fine with that site, I'd bet just rewriting the pages to have original content (not just spun) would change their situation dramatically.

This is exactly the kind of situation where rel=canonical is supposed to be used.  Rarely is there going to be 100% exact match because in most cases the use of the duplicated content is on different sites which have different headers, footers, nav menus, etc.

Put the canonical tag on your own site and then ask the booking sites if they would put them on their pages, indicating that your page is the canonical page.  If they won't, then publish your page a week or so before you give out the content to the booking sites, making sure to use the canonical tag on your own site.  That way, Google can find it first.

Another option would be to write unique content for your own site and then send out something different to all the booking sites.  Yes, they will all have duplicate content, but your site won't.  So, you should rank just fine and they will have to compete to see who can get in the listings.

Keep in mind that there isn't really a duplicate content penalty.  When Google sees duplicates, they just don't include all of the duplicates in their search results.  They choose the one they think it the canonical version and the others are left out.  Not every page gets listed, but no site is penalized either.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Paddy is right not to nofollow internal links (Actually Matt Cutts just addressed this a day or two ago in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GHCVRReJs

And Elias is absolutely right about the first link.

Sage advice gentlemen.

It sounds to me like you don't want the search engines to know that your moving the content, but rather have them think that you have dropped the pages from your site because you don't want the search engines associating those pages with your site, correct?

If that's the case, then you do want to keep the noindex on the old pages and setup 301 redirects as well.  The redirects are for real users who happen to use any links/bookmarks to the old pages.  By keeping the old pages noindexed, then hopefully the search engines won't crawl them and won't follow the redirects.  I'd also remove the pages from the Google and Bing indexes in their webmaster tools for good measure.

If you are linking from your site to the new location of the user content, you may want to nofollow those links or, better yet, create the links in javascript or something to hide them.  If all the links to the content just shift to the new location, Google and Bing may still associate it your site with the new site.  Then again, if all the content from the old pages is all the new site, then they may figure it all out anyway.

I wouldn't say that it wouldn't hurt your site, but it may confuse the search engines a bit and you may see a good bit of movement for a while.

That said, I think you might want to rethink what you're planning.  You indicated that when you changed your title tags you got an increase in rankings and CTR.  That's awesome!  If the number of impressions decreased during a time when your rankings improved then the decrease would, by definition, have to be due to a decrease in the overall searches.  Normally, you rank higher and a greater percentage of people see your listing.  So, a ranking improvement leads to an increase of impressions if the traffic for the keyword remains constant.    So, if you saw a decrease in impressions, it would indicate the search traffic dropped and you cannot improve that with a Title tag change.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

What is OPE?  Are you referring to Open Site Explorer?  If so, you should note that the disavow tool in GWT doesn't remove links from the sites, it's just supposed to remove them from your Google link profile.  So, any outside link aggregator (like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO) will still show those links because they report what links actually exist (the one's they've found) not what links Google is counting.  They don't have access to the disavow request or Google's link profile.

As to the original question, Google can take a while to process disavow requests.  So, it may just be a time thing.  I'm also wondering if Google filters new links it finds through the disavow list?  This isn't based in experience or even anything I've read, I'm just wondering.  If you disavow a domain and Google removes those links, but then later they crawl that site and find more links (new to them), do they automatically not include those links because you've already disavowed the site or does the crawler add it to your link profile and then they filter those links through the disavowed list after the fact, if at all?  If they add the links and then filter it later, that could explain what you're seeing.

Perhaps there's someone out there who's tested or observed this who could provide more clarity.

Looking in Open Site Explorer, I'm seeing several suspicious links in the report.  These are links from sites that have nothing to do with medicine whatsoever, all with targeted keywords in the anchor text.  When I click to view the page and look for the actual links, I'm not seeing anything.  So, it seems the links are no longer there.

If the report from Open Site Explorer is correct, it looks to me like someone was purchasing links and has now removed them.  Did you purchase links?

Some of the suspicious links are:

• afghan-network.net/Bookshop/persian-books.html
• learnscratch.org/resources/why-learn-scratch
• www.tiltshift.com/

If these links are also in Google's link profile, I could see why the site is penalized.

Sometimes it takes a little while for the disavow tool to remove links.  So, you may need to give it some time if you just did that.  You can always include the disavow request in the documents for your reconsideration request.  Beyond that, I'd take a closer look at your other links to see if there are other links causing an issue.

Bummer about the rejection.  You said that you were having trouble getting the press releases removed (and I assume the links), have you disavowed those links?

That stinks that those publishers did that.  I'm a little suspicious that this would happen from a single press release.  Usually, it takes Google a bit more than that to trip a manual action.  Are you sure there aren't other links, maybe other press releases, that are suspicious?  I only ask because Google usually responds to a pattern of manipulation, not a single action.

In regards to your actual question, natural links typically aren't "tainted" by a previous penalty.  In fact it would probably work in the exact opposite way.  With manual actions Google thinks that you are trying to manipulate them.  In order to get the manual action removed, Google is looking for you to clean up the old links, apologize, and demonstrate that you have changed your ways.  So, getting new links that are completely natural demonstrates that you have changed your ways.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You're right that the search engines are treating the new pages like...well...new pages.  It has nothing to do with how much code has changed and everything to do with the fact that they simply have new URLs.

I agree with Alan.  Two weeks isn't a terribly long time.  Obviously, it's best to have all your ducks in a row from the start, but I think there's good chance that just from setting up the proper redirects for the pages the site should now transfer, though it may take few weeks and you may not get completely back to where you were.

As far as submitting the sitemap for all the old pages, I'm not sure what that would do.  It's possible it may do exactly what you want, basically tell Google about all the redirects, but then again, Google may think it's a bit odd putting up a sitemap to redirected pages.

PixelKicks gave a good answer.

In theory you shouldn't see much, if any, change in rankings, but in practice, any time you move pages, there is some risk.  I don't know if you can do a slow migration or not, but if you can, I'd suggest you do the following.

Start small:
Move a portion of the pages (maybe a couple hundred thousand for your big site) first, track their traffic and ranking and see if there is any impact.  I'd probably watch the pages for 3-4 weeks just to make sure.  If you see a drop, you may want to keep watching them longer to see if it comes back on its own.  This should give you an indication of what to expect for the other pages.

Setup Canonical Tags First
If you are able, setup the new pages (or entire new site) and then add canonical tags to all the old pages, pointing to the new pages.  This will actually start the transition process for Google and others and you may see the pages with canonical tags having been switched in Google in just a few days.  After you have seen that most or all the pages have been switched in Google, then setup the 301 redirects.

You can see Rand talking about this process in the video on this page: http://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

How Long to Recover:
You may not see any drop in rankings.  You may see a little shifting for a few days, but then everything settles back to where it was.  If you do see a drop, it's likely that it will recover after a few weeks or months (as PixelKicks indicated).  If, on the other hand, you see a drop and it doesn't self-correct after several weeks, then the recovery is a matter of having to rebuild some authority to your site.  The time that will take will depend on how much work you put in to doing that and what your competition is like.

Good luck.  That's a huge site.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

I agree with Lars and would add that the links will be more helpful if they are from relevant high quality sites rather sites that don't have anything to do with your site.

Great point.

Jesse,

I think it depends on the situation.  Matt Cutts has even said what you are saying, that in some cases you don't need to do anything because Google has just taken action against those links.  I have, however, seen a situation where dealing with the links that caused a partial manual action did help to improve rankings.  In that case, it appeared that Google had no only disavowed the suspect links, but had also penalized the specific keywords (or possibly pages) that were being targeted.  There was a clear and quick drop in rankings for specific keywords, but not all the keywords the site ranked for.  Once the suspect links were dealt with, the rankings for those keywords improved.

Unless it's a huge pain to deal with the links, I'd take care of them just in case.

Thanks Miriam and Vadim,

Thank you for your responses.  My question was a reaction to seeing Yext from being a way to distribute local info to sites, like American Towns and Local.com having their "claim your listing" option take you to Yext.  Maybe I clicked on the wrong link on Hotfrog, but I thought they had gone to the Yext dark side, too.  It's not that these sites are super important.  I like to get as many of the local players to have the correct info as possible.  Just seeing multiple local listing sites moving to Yext seemed like a trend.  I'm now thinking my question was an over-reaction.

Also, thanks for pointing me to David Mihm's post.  I had missed that.

Thanks!

Kurt

Remus's answer is good.  I would add to that that Google has their first link filter.  If you have two links pointing from page A to page B, Google only passes link authority (pagerank) and reputation (keywords in the anchor text and relevant surrounding text) through the first link that appears in the code.  The second link does not pass anything.  So, whatever the anchor text of the first link in the code is, that's the anchor text Google is going to use (Remus is right that anchor text has become less important).

The second link does, however, dilute the amount of pagerank passed.  So, like Remus pointed out, each link in your scenario only passes 20% of the pagerank.  Since Google ignores the second link to the shoe page, that 20% of pagerank does not get passed.  I'm not sure if it stays on the page or just gets lost.

So, what does this all mean?  From an SEO standpoint, you want the link with the targeted keyword to be first in the code if you have more than one link to a page.  Also, you don't really want to have two links to the same page on that one page.  Now, that's from an SEO perspective.  From a user perspective, it may make perfect sense to have that second link and the page may convert better.  So, you'd just have to decide which is more important...and it's probably the user perspective that's more important.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

It sounds like you should either redirect the old Wordpress site or delete it.  Redirects are the better SEO solution, but I don't know what Wordpress charges for that, so you'd have to make that financial decision.

As to whether that would solve your problem or not, I don't know.  The manual action didn't have any sample links to indicate what the issue was and I haven't reviewed your link profile.  There could be other issues.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Over the past several months it seems more and more local listing sites are now using Yext for their listing information.  Some of these include Local.com, American Towns, Hot Frog, etc.  I'm not even seeing a way to claim listings anymore with these sites without going through Yext.

If Yext has the wrong information, is there any way to correct these listings without paying Yext?  I used to be able to claim listings with the actual listing sites.  It was more labor intensive, but I didn't have to pay Yext $500/year.  I could pay an assistant a lot less and they could do it.  It seems that option is going away.

Do any of you know of another way of correcting listings without using Yext (or at least without paying Yext)?  If not, do you know if Yext has an enterprise solution for SEOs so we don't have to pay the $500 for every client?

Thanks.

Kurt Steinbrueck

Yes, internal links can be over-optimized, but wouldn't worry about it too much unless you are going out of your way to over-optimize the links to a page in order to manipulate rankings, things like the footer links Ruben mentioned.  Google is usually looking for a pattern indicating manipulation.  You can always test it and see what happens.

As for the page that has only one link, no there's no risk that it's over optimized.  Think about it.  No matter what text you use for the link, that text will be 100% of the anchor text to that page.  So, it's impossible to avoid that...unless you use an image, I guess.  So, don't worry about that page with it's one link.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Good question BeytzNet and good answer Schwaab.

High domain authority comes primarily from quality backlinks and, to some extent social likes and sharing (I think the strength of the social signals will continue to grow more important as time goes on).  So, the question really is, how do you build links and get social shares with a site that has no text on the site?

First, you don't need text for people to have something they think is compelling and worth sharing a linking to.  There are plenty of other forms of content that people link to.

Beyond that, there are really 3 ways to build links to a site:

1. Create content that is valuable to people and post it on your site.  You can get social shares by posting things on other sites (Facebook, Google+, etc.), but that usually doesn't lead to links to your site.  As noted above, the content posted to your site doesn't have to be text based.
2. Do an awesome job doing whatever you website/company does.  As an extreme example, Apple doesn't need to put out any content to get links at this point.  People link to them because they like the Apple products.  When they release a new iphone, even if they just put a product product page for it on their site and they would get tens of thousands, if not millions of links.  This works for smaller companies, too, though usually on a smaller scale.  Just do a great job, offer great products, etc. and people will link to you.
3. Do link building strategies.  Most of these, if not all, are now against Google and Bing's guidelines, so these are pretty much all black hat now.  But black hat can work...at least for a while.  Personally, I recommend people stick with options 1 and 2 above because I think the risk is too great with the linking schemes.  However, I mention this because, when investigating how other sites are ranking well, this is always a possibility.

Of course we've seen results from whitehat SEO.  That's not to say that blackhat SEO doesn't work, too.  Afterall, who would take such a risk if it didn't work...but it is a big risk.  Many sites using blackhat techniques wake up one morning to find their site's rankings are in the toilet or worse.

The rest of the advice that's been offered is good.  Create truly good content that's valuable or entertaining and build up your audience.  Whitehat SEO does work; however, Whitehat SEO with unoriginal, boring content, doesn't work so well.  And like SEO 5 Team said, if you know your competition is violating the guidelines, report them.  Beyond just the small business reporting, you can actually submit a spam report:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Search Office Space's answer nailed it.

If the duplicate content was duplicated on other sites, then by rewriting the content and making it unique, you may see your site ranking for keywords you didn't rank for previously.  Google and Bing try to weed out duplicate content.  They prefer to just show one result with that content.  So, typically, they pick one of the pages that has the content, the one they think it the original, and they only include that page in the search results (at least in the first few pages).  So, if you're site was being kept out of the search results because Google didn't pick your site to display, you may now start to rank for those keywords.

As to how dramatic a change it will be for you, it depends on how competitive the keywords are, how well you optimize the pages, and how authoritative your website is.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You don't absolutely have to do both, but by doing the parameter handling you are sending another signal to Google of what you want them to do (keep in mind that both canonical and parameters are only considered suggestions by Google).  It's pretty simple to setup the parameter handling, so if you are really concerned about the duplicate content issues, why not do both?

Also, technically, the canonical tag tells Google which URL they've crawled to give prominence to when they are duplicate content, whereas my understanding is that parameter handling (when Google follows your suggestions) actually prevents Google from even crawling URLs with those parameters.  In other words, canonical tags tell Google what to do with URLs they've crawled and parameter handling tells Google what URLs not to even crawl.

You do have some content and it uses your keywords.  That's good.  Perhaps a little more content might be helpful, but I've gotten pages to rank well with very little text content.  Remember, that SEO is a balance of a lot of different signals.  If you are a little light on some (like being light on text in your case), then you can make up for that with some of the others (like getting more links and social shares).

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Dan,

I mean both.  The canonical tag will help with duplicate content issues and the parameter handling will help with indexing.

Setting up the canonical tag shouldn't be an issue.  If the same page content is being displayed and the only difference is that the URL has some parameters in it, then the canonical tag should naturally be included with the rest of the page's code.  Since the canonical tag doesn't change, it should work perfectly.

For example, if you have a page, login.php, and that page always has a parameter, ?visitor=### (where ### is a random number), then you simply put the canonical tag in the head of the login.php page ().  That canonical tag will always be in the login.php page no matter whether the URL is login.php?visitor=123 or login.php?visitor=56, etc.  It will always tell the search engines that the original page login.php.

I agree with Devanur.  Just about every site get's scraped and has other poor links to it.  Google knows this.  They are looking for a pattern indicating intent to manipulate the rankings.

One other thing...

I'm assuming (hoping) that the content you will be providing the news site will be original and not reprinted on your site.  If you do reprint on your site, you should use a canonical tag to establish the originator of the content, which the news site will probably want to be them.

Also, if you have setup a Google+ authorship account, you can claim authorship of the articles that are being published on the news site as well as content on your own site.  That can help with your search rankings as well.  Right now, Google says authorship doesn't affect rankings (which i think is debatable), but I know for a fact that it does affect personalized results.

If you are paying for the site to publish your content or even if it's like a guest blog thing, you should use no-follow for the links.  Google shouldn't care if you get a huge bump in traffic (technically, they say the Google search algorithm doesn't ever look at analytics data.  So, the bump in traffic should be any concern for you, only the new links.  As long as you no-follow the links, you should be fine.  In fact, that's specifically what Google says to do if you are paying for links or guest blogging.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You can use the parameter handling and setup canonical tags on the pages.

It could very well simply be location.  Being close the centroid is a huge factor.

These types of reports, whether it's the Moz DA, Majestic SEO link report, or even ranking reports, are tricky.  They tend to fluctuate quite a bit.  I'd recommend trying to get the client off of focusing on these types of reports and get them focused on either traffic to the site or (ideally) conversions.  These other reports are really just tools.  They are indicators to help you do your work.  After all, would the client be happy if you got them a DA increase of 30 points if at the same time their conversions dropped by 50%?

Hi Yiannis,

As far as I'm aware, there isn't really a way to "block" a link.  The link is seen on the other site.  Returning a 404 for the page being linked to doesn't change the fact that there are a 100K links from one site pointing at your site.  The only options I'm aware of are to 1.) contact the owner of the website with the links and ask them to remove the links and 2.) if that doesn't work disavow the links.

I understand your hesitancy to use the disavow tool, but quite frankly, this is exactly what it is intended for.

If you feel comfortably with the links being there and think Google has already dealt with them, then do nothing, but if you want to do something about the links, you either have to get them removed or disavow them.

BTW - My understanding of the partial manual actions is that often times Google not only deals with the suspicious links (devaluing them), but they also penalize the pages/keywords they think you were attempting to manipulate.  So, just because it was a partial action and not a full site action doesn't mean it's not effecting some of your rankings.  It's just not going to affect all your rankings for all your pages.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

The indochino site has is a high authority site and has built up a brand.  Content on a site is only one part of the equation and, like many equations, if you increase one part of the equation, you can decrease another and get the same results.  For example, 2 x 6 = 12, but so does 1 x 12.  I've seen sites, especially decently branded sites, that had no readable content on their website but were ranking very well for competitive phrases in their niche.  It's because their site authority and brand were strong enough to over come the lack of content.  I'd say the same thing is happening in regards to your question.

When dealing with local results, there are a lot of factors that contribute to rankings beyond PR, some much more influential.  A quick look at the map indicates to me that the physical location of vipbailbonds.org is closer to the Google's centriod for Van Nuys.  That alone could cause them to out rank you.  Beyond that, there are reviews, citations, content on the Google+ Local page, categories, etc. all of which could cause them to out rank another site despite having a low PR page.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

I suppose it's possible that duplicate content could be an issue if the exact same content is on other sites.  Try changing the content on the homepage so it's no longer duplicate and see what happens.

It's hard to say what's going on without doing an investigation into the situation.  It could be a duplicate content issue, but then again Google likes to show the pages (not sites) which they think are most relevant.  Perhaps, for one reason or another, Google just thinks those sub-pages are more relevant to the search query than the homepage is.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Good point.  If a new domain is able to rank as well as the old site before the 301 redirects are put in place, that's very compelling evidence.

Cool.  I hadn't heard of using canonical tags to move sites.  That's quite helpful.

I'm curious about the idea that the canonical tag passes link authority or PageRank.  Is it possible that these tests people have done just look like that's what's happening?  Here's what I mean.  Let's say I write an article that gets reproduced on another site and Google is ranking the other site in the top ten for some keyword.  Then I get the other site to put a canonical tag on their page and in a few days my site is ranking for that keyword.  Now, does that indicate that any link authority was passed or does it indicate that Google would have ranked either site in the top ten for that keyword, but they had to decide on one or the other because they are duplicate.  So, the canonical tag just caused Google to change it's mind about which site it would rank.  In other words, could it be that both pages are authoritative enough to rank and the canonical tag is just telling Google which of the two should rank?

Has anyone done tests where one site had content for a while that didn't rank and then another more authoritative site re-published the content and ranked for it and then the authoritative site put a canonical tag to the original site and now that original site was able to rank well for the keyword?  And when they did this, they would have to not have put a link to the original content only using the canonical.

Dave,

What you're describing is exactly what the canonical tag is for, reproducing content on pages, but giving credit to the original.  Anyway, if 301's wouldn't work, what else would you do?

Hey Dave,

I just found this tool from Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration.  Try that.

Edit: Ok, so I just tried the tool and it just took me to the manual actions section of webmaster tools.  I did a little more searching and I don't see any other way at this point to do a reconsideration request.  Unless someone else out there knows of another way, I'd have to change my previous answer and say that you don't have a manual action any more.

You said you've been removing bad links.  Perhaps when Google redesigned the manual action notification system they re-reviewed sites and yours no longer qualified for a manual action so they lifted it.

Have you noticed anything in your rankings?

My understanding is that canonical tag only establishes the original location of content.  It has nothing to do with PageRank.  I've not seen anything from Google that would indicate that adding a canonical tag to a page will pass all it's authority to the canonical URL.

It's possible that the new message system in Google Webmaster Tools may only display new messages.  Since your original message came before the Manual Action section was setup, it may not be listed.  I'd still do the reconsideration request because it will answer your question.  If there isn't any manual action, they will tell you that.  If there is, then you may get it removed.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

I'd take duplicate content over thin content.  There are tons of eCommerce sites out there with duplicate product descriptions.  I don't think that Google is going to penalize you, per se, they just might not include your pages in the search results in favor of whatever site they think is the originator of the content.

The reason I think duplicate content is better is users.  Either way your search traffic is probably not going to be too great.  With duplicate, the SE's may ignore your pages and with thin content you haven't given them a reason to rank you.  But at least with some real content on the pages you may be be able to convert the visitors you do get.

That said, I like Egol's suggestion.  Don't write new product descriptions yourself.  Hire a bunch of people to do it so they can crank out the new content real quick.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com