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Unless you can be sure that you have been actually hit by a penalty (manual or algorithmic) I would also take time to look at:
1. Google update collateral damage - your link profile could be full of devalued links which takes time to filter through.
2. on-page SEO is weak - page load speed, chained 301's, possibly indexed duplicate tag/query string pages etc etc (i've had over 50% improvement on organic traffic ensuring this area is spotless and as optimised as possible)
Generally speaking if you have site-wide do-follow links (typically footer) I would switch to no-follow immediately. If you are purely inter linking your portfolio Google is likely to spot those links are there trying to game the system.
Even if those links are offering real value to the visitor I would set to no-follow, but the way you describe that does not appear to be their primary purpose. What context and how do they appear on the page?
Also you say that you have been hit. Was this a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty? So you are fighting the right fight have you compared your analytics with the algorithm history dates?
You are there but further down in the results. I would be astounded if you started a site and consistently ranked at the top from go. You might get some rogue results and then settle down.
What you do need to do is to develop your link profile which will take time but help your rankings. The domain could be considered an exact match domain (EMD) http://moz.com/pages/search_results?q=EMD without some solid content on there, and that content should not be spammy and chock full of keyword stuffing which yours seems to be. Have natural content that adds value for the user rather than words wrapped around your keywords.
Google is looking for quality and value for your visitors and links coming back to your site from trustworthy and authoritative sources.
Note: keyword spammy on page I looked at 
It will take a lot of effort in time and money for negative SEO to have an impact. I would suggest contacting the site and request the link/s be removed if the site is not relevant and spammy. At the same time to negate any negative linking you should be continually developing your link profile so any single instances like this are watered down by an excellent profile.
Even if the 'design' part was not flash the textual content is pretty much identical. There is no benefit for it to be indexed so canonical to the main directory URL would make sense. Then add some good text to those main pages.
Personally I would only use H1 for user experience rather than keywordy as they don't carry much weight.
There is no defined time limit for a 302, rather than a clear header response for search engines that the redirect is temporary not permanent (which is a 301 header response). By default at some point you should correct to a 200 response or a 301 response. You could in theory leave the 302 but it is not good practice.
Having said that my thought would be how trusting a visitor would be being sent to a different domain mid way through browsing.
On a brief view:
http://www.customgia.com/fashion-beaded-jewelry/shop-for/beaded-bracelets/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 looks like it is a unique product page with potentially unique description? If so leave as is.
http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 looks a duplicate of http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/ so I would set rel canonical on any http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/CODE page pointing to ...design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/
I hope this helps.
If you add rules to robots.txt that does not mean those directories will be removed from the index. You will also need to remove them in Webmaster Tools >> Google Index >> Remove URLs >> set Reason to Remove Directory.
Having said that why not use canonical tags on pages like /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 - http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
This is more of an observation than anything else.
Has anyone noticed any strange results in Google News, in terms of very old content hitting page 1? My example is football, I support Newcastle so keep checking for the latest transfer failure or humiliation. First page for couple of days is showing old articles (April, May) from the same source rather than the usual spread of tabloid and broadsheet news.
A negative exact match should not exclude your search term. For example:
**-[online payment] **will allow online payment gateway to show.
Check this post by Google and look at the chart of possible combinations - http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/adwords-optimization-tips-more-on.html
You have a robots.txt file in your root - http://www.in2town.co.uk/robots.txt >> add
Disallow: /staging1/
In Webmaster Tools go to Google Index >> Remove URLs >> Create a new removal request >> enter http://www.in2town.co.uk/staging1/ >> Continue >> set Reason to remove directory >> Submit Request.
For canonical refer to http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I hope this helps.
Why don't you put /staging1/ in your robots.txt, then remove that directory from index in Webmaster Tools. Backing that up with canonical tags in case any similar slip through the net.
I'm not a Joomla expert but if you have nothing in your .htaccess like 'ErrorDocument 404 index.php' then Joomla is probably handling the error redirection internally in maybe 'templates/system/error.php' or 'sef.php'
I understand settings in these files can override your .htaccess as well.
You can have any page as the 404 page as long as the header response is 404 - that is all Google needs to know. The potential downside is user experience - I normally would suggest a custom 404 page with your menu system, or 301 permanent redirects to suitable alternatives (possibly homepage), as you suggest.
Webmaster Tools is not the best place to check current 404s. I would do some live checking using say Screaming Frog and spot check the exact header responses using Fiddler. I've seen some strange header codes coming from a problematic Joomla setup.
I suspect if URLs are being changed then they are either worried about Penguin or have fallen foul of it. Either way those sites are probably not the best type of links to be hunting out and changing to no-follow has probably done you a favour in the long run.
I suppose you could argue that no-follow links are more important than do-follow. A thinly veiled bought link not set to no-follow can cause more problems to a domain as opposed to the good ten good do-follow links can do.
But no-follow links do not pass any link value.
Also bear in mind that for a natural looking link profile you will want a mixture of both.
"As it's a sidebar link, it shows up for every page on the site (easily thousands due to all posts having a page, tags, categories etc)."
Irrespective of Googles stance on sitewide links you have to ask yourself does that look natural and is the link there to offer value to the visitor. Invariably it looks spammy and planted - and ignored.
I would definitely avoid without no-follow.
I've noticed a possible discrepancy with my data and the figures in the Ranking Report >> Rankings which leads to this question:
Is this meant to mean 10 of the 19 are in the top 3, or after the 10 top 3 there are 19 more keywords on first page?
In Google Keyword Tool you are set to broad match not exact match which brings the total down to 480.
This is what made me question. Competitors are typically returning their homepage so the content is in a different format to this internal page and don't have the rogue keyword.
My gut feeling is to try to reduce the rogue and increase slightly the desired keyword in the content. I might be able to create a key CP = Credit Points and use that just populating CP. I don't have any big problems with ranking and need to get some links going but i'm interested in this specific aspect so I can put it to bed.
I don't think that is what i'm after.
I'm looking for the impact of a rogue keyword that is just within the content and is very popular, but not the keyword i'm optimising for within the content and tagging. The rogue keyword is out of context as a bona fide keyword itself but is required and works well in the content.
I'm not too worried about keyword density but is there a point when a keyword phrase breaches a certain % even though it is not used within any tagging.
So if my keyword is 'blue elephant' but within the text I have a disproportionate amount of 'credit points' would it be prudent to try and reduce the level of 'credit points' - or ignore as there should be no impact?
I have a page that is optimised - title, URL, content etc for the chosen keywords.
However, within the content are some batches of bullet point text that has repeated text throughout. So for example I have 5 instances of my chosen keyword within the content and 24 instances of the two word text within the bullet points. Does this kind of scenario have any impact on ranking?
I'm working on a site that is built on DNN. For some reason the client has set all pages to convert to HTTPS (although this is not perfect as some don't when landing on them).
All pages indexed in Google are straight HTTP, but when you click on the Google result a temp 302 header response to the corresponding HTTPS page for many. I want it changed to a 301 but unfortunately is an issue for DNN.
Is there another way around this in IIS that won't break DNN as it seems to be a bit flaky? I want to have the homepage link juice pass through for all links made to non HTTPS homepage. Removing HTTPS does not seem to be an option for them.
No Shailendra is saying you want a 301 rewrite mechanism so that anyone looking for example.html is redirected to example.
If you have been using example.html for some time what happens to the guys who have linked to these pages, or any links you have created - they need to be handled by a 301 rewrite. The snippet of code below placed in your .htaccess should fix. Take a backup copy first to restore if you hit any problems.
If you want to get rid of the html files you could try the following in your htaccess file. The rule looks for anything (.*), until it gets to the .html then rewrites the first part dropping the .html
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)+.html$ $1 [R=301,L]
For me longtail keywords are purely more finely focused keywords cascaded down from the big money/focus keywords whatever they may be. So it doesn't matter if they are model related or how any words etc, they are just one way or another the closest thing you can get to a finer granularity exact match the next level from the big volume main keyword. I think the target is selecting the ones with modest competition and a search volume.
They want to keep ownership so they have the classes, framework or whatever for reuse for future clients, increasing their profits. But I think that is slightly different to having a licence agreement and as you say with that model you could become prone to unreasonable fees.
I'm sure you will get some more advice but I would take a look at your link profile and all the sponsored links you have. They should be no-follow - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html
It depends how many visitors hit that landing page on that day. In Analytics if you drill down Content >> Landing Page to the page in question then Secondary Dimension select say keyword that may give you a clue.
Otherwise if you have an event set up for the contact from that specific page you can track back to the source.
Before using Disavow you will need to make a concerted effort to manually have the links removed. A good tool to coordinate this would be Rmoov. I would use Disavow as the last thing, if all else fails.
I would make sure you check the links in any case using something like Backlinkwatch.com, there might still be toxic links in there as well as the good link you mention.
Did you get a message in Webmaster Tools and if you did what did it say exactly? Also what is the domain?
I agree with David and Moosa.
Redirect to the category page if it is genuinely useful for your visitor. So in some cases you might want to put user experience above retaining link juice within that category and either redirect elsewhere or create a custom page.
You can add negative keywords to your campaign. If you are aware of the names to remove add them straight in, otherwise it might have to be a bit of research and monitoring the keywords used to trigger the ads to work out what to add as negative keywords.
In Webmaster Tools go to Health >> Fetch as Google and check your homepage as well as a few others indicated in your problem. If they can be fetched then Google can crawl your site ok. This will not effect your PR.
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions.
A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters.
Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either
will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet.
So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group.
Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
The domain name www.standingnudes.com is a bit suspicious. I did a site seach for standingnudes.com I don't see any pages other than the main site.
hehe. yep a site i'm working on had that one.
That is another domain of a group of do-follow that seem to have been very popular as easy link targets 3-4 years ago. The other one I referred to in my reply was lutonengineering - the web directory?!
I'd take a close look at the link profile on OSE.
There is one domain (elusively named directory) there that seems to pop up with every site i've looked at also with several problem sites reported on here. Full of dubious links.
There are no 301's that this could be happening with .
Yes it's organic. Just tracked it through GA via both landing page and keyword.
Not sure about de-indexing URL (as it would be several with similar issues), and I don't want to affect real results to those URLs.
Thanks for the replies.
Yes the URL is on the domain and is the landing page. Not sure how custom search could work to skew this way as it's the stats for landing page.
As mentioned this occurs more than once where the landing page is accessed via an irrelevant keyword. The only pattern I can see is the browser with the bulk of visits is Safari, but then there are other browsers and locations grouped in. In the first example google keyword tool gives about 22pm phrase match and looks in line with the real URL results. GA is reporting around 300pm.
Confused!?!
I've got more strange results. Rogue keywords, disproportionate visitors to the unrelated URL and mainly from Safari users, so it's not just the one keyword/URL
Looking in GetClicky the keywords are not coming up at any point.
I've started to look at ranking and visitor behaviour within a specific product category and I've come across this strange data in GA that i'm struggling to get my head around.
The landing page is not anywhere in the results for the given keyword (nor does the keyword appear anywhere within the page). The data is spread out to date since Dec 2011 and the landing page accounts for about 97% of the traffic for that keyword.
I then looked at browser which is 95% Safari (different versions) and breaking that down into City about 30% is (not set), 30% a single city and then there is a spread of locations. It might be fair to assume that therefore 60% could be the same location but there is still 40% to take into consideration.
What I can't get my head around is how the landing page is being accessed so regularly for the wrong keyword. The correctly ranking URL only accounts for 5% of the traffic which is more in line with the estimated search volumes for that keyword. I've checked versions of the page going back and none contain the keyword.
Am I missing something, or any ideas how to fix?
There are site-wide footer links too.
ok let me rephrase some of this.
How will Google view these 3 URLs and subsequent titles in the same format?
http://www.example.co.uk/bracelet-24kt-gold-vermeil-a.html
http://www.example.co.uk/bracelet-24kt-gold-vermeil-i.html
http://www.example.co.uk/bracelet-24kt-gold-vermeil-o.html
The single characters are excluded from searches unless using "a" etc, but will they be excluded when crawled and be considered duplicate (forgetting content for the moment)?
That is definitely a 301 redirect to the trailing slash URL. Good tool to check with is Fiddler.
Unless you have amended the htaccess file directly then a plugin must be making this setting, possibly something like the Robots Meta plugin.