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Thanks so much for your response.

Honestly I'm still not sure why or what happened.

Essentially  the domain has a bit of history. It's been up since 2008 and is very well known authority figure in the niche. The site was taken down by the Govt in their domain seizure crap and held for 13 months. They had to give it back because they had no probable cause, and we were innocent.  It's been a big issue in the media, especially when all the SOPA madness was going on but not sure if that 13 month disruption caused any issues for us.

When we came back up we were doing really well, ranking very high and doing about 5k visitors a day from google. We had our highest google traffic day on March 4th and then for some reason we did a massive free fall. Google just left. When I searched site:dajaz1.com it showed paginated pages, category, tags, search pages ranking, it stopped ranking our post pages.

I started going through the site to try and figure out what was wrong. I set everything that's not the home page or the actual post as noindex, follow, we started working on writing more, better titles, better seo urls, removed the pagination plugins etc.  We're often the originators of content and sourced as such so it's not necessarily an original content issue.

Google bot came back, but it's still not ranking us like it was and now ranking people above us who link to us, source us, or copy our content.  When I check site:dajaz1.com now it's at least pulling posts, but it's pulling posts with numbers in the url, or very old urls. Our newer posts are not ranking.  We were getting 5k-8k unique visitors a day organically, now we're getting less than 1000.  I'm still at a loss as to why and how to correct.

This is what I have

The reason I have it set to noindex, follow for category is because it's ranking my category pages over my actual blog posts. I wouldn't have an issue with having the categories indexed, but I do have an issue with posts going no where and my category pages showing up in search results.

I keep getting conflicting information on this so I'm not sure what I should with that.

What concerns me is that it seems to be crawling everything, but it's not dumping the old url structure for the new. I realize that it loses a small amount of link juice on the old urls, but on the newer urls it shouldn't and those are ranking lower than were. I can't figure out for the life of me why.

I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions.

I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title  to just /post-title  and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url.

1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index?

2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before.  We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche.  We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today.

Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com

A few examples -  if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them.

http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/

google search jadakiss consignment mixtape  3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us.  The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now.

original content here

http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/

I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again.

It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question

How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content?

I lied one more.  For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music

is that preferable or is this causing me issues?

Any feedback is appreciated.

Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't.  Should I be concerned about this?

Gd9i6

Well google made a strong return yesterday.. so that definitely helped. Not sure if they're indexing us (though my sitemap no longer says 16 indexed and now 2000 indexed. And still not positive how many of those are pages and categories, but it looks like some of the posts are starting to make it under site:dajaz1.com

Thank you so much for your help. I'm not sure the issue is fixed ( I currently have all SEO plugins disabled and I'm too scared to turn them on) but at least google is crawling again and the next few days should tell the tale.

Another thing I did was got rid of the sub categories and turned them into tags. Hopefully this will help with the site structure, even if we take an initial hit with 404's at this point I don't want the tags indexed anyway since I want google to focus on the posts.

jeuWV

I removed the pagi navigation and just left it to the older and newer links to take care of that issue. Lets see if that works at all. I removed all the drop down navigation, though to be honest I'd added that in after this all started hoping to set some type of site structure.. which I clearly didn't do a good job of.

I'm ok with radical at this point, I just want our posts to start getting indexed again.  I really appreciate the suggestions..

Thanks for the response. Honestly I don't know why it's indexing the pages like that. I was told to make the categories and tags noindex, follow because google is indexing us, but it's indexing our pages, categories and tags. We've even had search results pages show up.. But it doesn't seem to like our actual posts.

I've turned the wp seo plugin off because honestly I'm just confused and not sure what to do.  The site was innocent, so I would think that it wouldn't be penalized for it. It was (and still sorta is) a case that's mainstream media and they are fully aware of the situation all the way up the food chain at google. We were very active in the anti SOPA/PIPA and used by companies like google and the eff as an example of why it was a bad law. I can't see google penalizing us for that.

searching site:dajaz1.com  none of our blog posts come up. I don't understand why it's not ranking them, but it will rank our pages with numbers behind them, or categories and tags nor do I understand how to fix it.

we've been noindex,follow on the categories, tagged, pages, search, and author pages for about a week now, and it's not indexing new stuff, and it's still not indexing our actual blog posts.

So if II should put them to index our categories in the nav bar, what's to stop them from indexing them over our blog posts.. because our posts are not ranking at all. (but our category pages are? )

That scroller at the top I think you're talking about is a gawd awful Nike Ad. We're on a ad network so we're stuck with it.. however that occurred after all this ranking stuff started.

I'm confused about the site speed, it loads very quickly for me, scores a 86/100 on google page test, 87/100 on webpagetest.org.. but yet shows slow load in analytics, webmaster tools, and occasionally people will tell me it loads slow for them.  Unless it's that ad, in which case there's not much I can do about it. We're in a contract with the ad network (which is very  a reputable and well known one)

When I post something on the internet, freaked out or not, that's never an invite to go looking for my personal contact information to contact me outside of this medium.

Anyway.. thanks for your help.. My situation might not be like yours, I was looking for actual advice tips and knowledge on things that might really be wrong. What I got was google hates your guts, but hey I'm in the same boat maybe they just manually told you to screw off.

How does that help me in any way when what I'm looking for are things on my site that I can use to improve my situation.  I know you're well meaning, but you're not giving me any answers here.  I'm trying to improve the SEO on my site.. not get phone calls from guys telling me their story in the middle of the night because I made a mistake in putting my url. I'll ask my question in another thread elsewhere.

Thanks

Yeah well, I prefer to think it's not that since that would be a pretty big deal not to mention there is nothing going on on that page that would be worthy of a penalty... having said that I'm pretty disappointed with Seomoz in that nobody else is responding to this. certainly not worth the money per month..

And the phone call from you at 130am to the number listed on our DMCA page was really REALLY creepy..

Anyone? I've posted this here and on google's webmaster forums and so far all the responses I've gotten are that google has pretty much told me to screw off and marveling at how drastic a fall it was.. but nobody can give me any real indication as to why. It's very frustrating.. granted we don't write big long drawn out paragraphs on a lot of our content, and it's content elsewhere, we're usually first or close with a lot of things, and we've earned enough respect by being quick with the exclusives that we're linked in Huff Post's from around the web, linked to as a source from Spin and MTV... we ranked high on things like the superbowl, whitney houstons death.. so the sudden fall is shocking as we're certainly not a scrape copy and paste site.. We get scraped and copied and pasted a lot.

Well considering that the domain was seized for 13 months by the government and then when they had to give the domain back the timing was such that it kicked the ball rolling on a internet uproar that cost them 2 bills. I'd say we've got some enemies..

But in that case wouldn't we get some sort of notification from Google in webmaster tools? There is nothing showing there..