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Are you able to share examples? Maybe PM me?

It doesn't sound like these links will be good for your website. Anything done "Just for SEO" sounds like a bad idea. These "link building" tactics used to work pre 2007 ish. I would focus on building great content that relevant sites link to.

Do you have any competitive insights available? Do your competitor's product images show up in Google Images? Do Product Images show up in the SERPS?

+1 to what Ross said. Subdomain hosted elsewhere won't have any impact. However, you should consider moving your subdomain to the sub-folder if that makes sense for your SEO Strategy.

Have you also seen any impact in traffic during the same timeframe?

Take a look at this post on Moz - https://moz.com/blog/seo-changes-using-google-tag-manager. Also, take a look at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/tag-manager/Ilxks3tQKrg. Personally, I wouldn't recommend doing this via GTM. Noindex and Schema specially. They are both important for SEO and are better off done via the CMS.

Depending on the following questions, the answer might be very simple or very complicated. I don't think there is a 1 size fits all answer. Some details would help:

• How big are the old sites?
• Are they all same/similar topic?
• Why are you merging them?
• Is it fair to say that Content from Site1+Site2+Site3+Site4+Site5+Site6=New Site?
• Are there any duplicate content issues between the sites that you are merging?

If your AMP is setup correctly, I wouldn't worry about this. Do you have the correct amphtml tag and the reference back to your canonical?

Sounds like it's the same company, right? If yes, you could do Homepage to Homepage only. That should atleast solve the issue for the right Homepage ranking, for your brand name searches in the respective countries.

It's been a while since I tried Moz's crawler. This new "major refresh" looks great Dr Pete and Team Moz. Cheers.

Eric, Have a few questions for you:

1. Do you have executive buy-in to do SEO Work?
2. How much SEO potential is out there for your website to rank?
3. How well does it rank today?
4. How big are your Top 3 competitors? Have they been growing last 1-5 years?

If you can demonstrate the size of the opportunity you have and prove it's achievable with a smaller project, test or experiment, you might have "unlimited resources" ;). Just saying :).

I highly recommend Screaming Frog on top of Moz. It can do a lot of Ad-Hoc crawls and help you diagnose potential issues. Try and play with the free version. Depending upon the site of the site, you might be okay with the less than 500 pages. However, at $200 a license, it's not much for a larger site. Imagine what a bug could cost you? 

Directory links are the "manipulated" links of yesterday. I would strongly suggest to ignore them. Great details Alick300. I would suggest to spend some time reading Moz's Link Building and SEO Guides i.e. http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

It's very easy to get in trouble with the wrong links.

Is there a reason to host it in Singapore vs India ? Are you having any performance or site speed issues on this server currently ?

Are you being beat for all your keywords ? Or let's say most of your head terms ?

Long story short, if you can host your sub-domain in a sub-folder, it'll be better. However, a lot of times for security issues and hosting constraints, companies end up hosting blogs on separate domains or sub-domains. I'd suggest you look into reverse proxy. That can make your blog URL look like yourdomain.com/blog

I hope that helps

Looks like a problem with Wordpress. Are you using any SEO Plugins like Yoast or something ? I'd suggest reaching out to your Wordpress Guy and have them look into it. It's clearly an issue, and needs to be fixed. You can also download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl your website with it to see where Google is finding these links from. It could also be an issue with your Theme or Permalinks. These are the only areas I can think of. You are using the latest version of Wordpress, so you are good from that point of view. So has to be a Plugin, Theme or your Permalinks settings.

Was this a Wordpress blog and did you install a plugin to do these changes ?

I agree, it's more of a personal choice and what you consider "clean". I'd vote for #1 as well.

This could be for multiple reasons. If you are looking at raw total links (not unique domains) linking to you, one blogger linking to you with a sitewide link and if that person change his blog's link display from sitewide to homepage only can impact numbers like that. Have you also been monitoring your competitor links ? How have they changed ?

Also, the quality of the sites OSE uses it's in index would improve over time, in which case spam blogs etc might get dropped, thereby causing in reduction in the number of links.

There could be a number of things. See OSE Stats below from their update on 9th Oct, 2014

• 166,012,290,869 (166 Billion) URLs
• 14,298,548,989 (14 Billion) subdomains
• 168,560,672 (168 Million) Root Domains
• 836,560,885,910 (836 Billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.51% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 63.17% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 36.83% are external
• Rel Canonical - 19.74% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 105.24 links on it
  • 87.45 internal links on average
  • 17.79 external links on average

I'd defenitely recommend not to use keyword rich anchor text. Just use your brand name and diversify your link profile.

The first and the foremost suggestion would be to clean the underlying code and see if you can change the 302s to 301s. Can you post or send via private message the example URLs ?

Yes, it will. Also looks like custom code, it depends on how the header is coded. But it should work. Test it, if you can. This should solve your problems relatively easily. If nothing works, you can always do a robots.txt deny for /property-search-page/?* pages, but that's not a recommended solution. Try the canonical way to see if it works first.

I checked the homepage and the housing page and both have the blank description tag. It definitely looks like a plugin/theme issue. Looks like your All in One SEO plugin descriptions are showing alright. Check in your theme files, specially header.php and see if there's an empty description tag in there. You never know, it happens sometimes

Would you say page 2 is a subset of page 1 ? Is there duplicate content between the 2 pages ?If yes, you can consider doing a canonical tag to page 1 on both page 1 and page 2. This way only your page 1 will rank.

Are any of those links built by you ? Specially the Article Directories or the Automatically Generated SPAM sites ?

Garret, it would help if you can share example URLs. If you can't share in public, feel free to PM me.

I agree with Federico one hundred percent. Figure out what your primary SEO friendly URLs are for these kinds of pages and canonical them back to that page.

Think about your overall domain authority and how you can increase it. Also, continue to invest time on how to build more content / articles that these profiles get internal links from. Are these articles contributed by the users ? How many profiles are you talking about ? What more can you do to get internal and to the profile pages as well as the article pages ?

I have seen this happen in GWT several times. I wouldn't worry about it. Keep crawling your website with a crawler like Screaming Frog to identify any of these kinds of issues.

Interesting question, there are obviously 2 scenarios.

1. Device Category (iPhone/iPad/Android) > Games (Sub Categories)

or

2. Games Category > Device iPhone/iPad/Android

What platform are you using for your website ? Or is this custom ? I'd suggest you do some sort of an analysis and see how users perform searches and prefer to navigate sites like yours. In either case, provide both ways of navigating if you can. Survey a group of audience if you can and get real insight, again...if you can.

Denise

If you'd like to share/post your URL, I am sure somebody (including myself) maybe able to look and help diagnose the exact cause in your situation.

Are you seeing any 404s in Google Webmaster Console ?

Also, it might be worth submitting an XML sitemap into GWC and seeing what percentage of your pages are indexed. Is there an unintentional noindex or something like that ? What I am trying to identify is, are your new pages 100% indexed ?

The pages those links link to, were they removed / changed by you at some point. Do you have a page you can redirect those URLs to ? If yes, setup 301 redirects on your server for those URLs to the correct new pages that you may have. If you do not have that content anymore, think like the user who might click on the links from those external links and redirect them to the page that is most optimal for that user.

I hope that helps.

You have gotten some great answers. What I would like to add is, reverse the process of thought a bit by thinking where your customer is. Go list with directories where your customer might be looking for a company like yours. If you are looking to register with any directory, do it for the value of the traffic or exposure that directory might be able to pass on to you and not the SEO/link value. If we do that, you'll get the best ROI and it'll be a safer approach in terms of SEO in 2013. I hope this helps.

Honestly, the ones that you can pay to remove, pay them and be done with it. There's a lot of companies that were out there and still exist before Google's disavow tool even existed. Worst case scenario, just submit a reconsideration request after you have done what you can and move on. Spend your time and money building new content and enhancing existing content and whatever else is part of your online marketing strategy. I wouldn't worry about these 15-20 links out there. Don't let those 15-20 crappy links haunt you. You did your best in trying to remove them.

Also, if you were to change your URL, it will technically work for your URL, but not for your domain. As others said, the links will not point the benefit to your tshirts.html page but will to your domain name. Also, the redirect in case you delete the page and redirect to the homepage will actually hurt your homepage. So I would let it be a 404 if that's the route you'd prefer.

This is a very very common problem. What you need to do is step back for a minute and think of this not like a website, but like a real business.

1. Are the search engines seeing the signals they are looking for from a real business from your website ?
2. If you are targeting one and only one primary keyword, that's a wrong approach. Think beyond one primary keyword.
3. The points you mentioned about directory links, anchor text links and link "bombing" are obviously clear signs of problems.
4. Do you control those links ? Are there any natural links ? Have you received a unnatural links penalty ?

Do a complete audit of your backlinks and clean up what you can.

Robert, I have actually seen that in Chrome for several weeks. Try it for other domains and you'll see the same thing.
Try Yahoo.com  Bing.com slickdeals.net amazon.com ebay.com orientaltrading.com and so on.

Do those pages help the user ? Are they being used/browsed by your users ? Or are they just like an Archive. Are they limited to 10 pages ?

If I were you, I'd also look at other areas, both on-page and off-page and do a competitive analysis to see what is it that your competition is doing that you are not that is outranking you.

Those 1-3 words should not be hurting you. Do what's right for usability and how your customers want that page and the 2 maps or whatever else is needed. As for JS, search engines are continously advancing and Google does a decent enough job of reading a lot of JS, not all...most. So without actual examples of what you are looking to do and see how they are coded, it's not possible to say for sure whether it will help accomplish what you are trying to do.

If I were you, I'd put second thought into it and do what's right and the best for your visitors.

I completely agree with Chris's comments. You can do well with Local Search. It again depends on the competition. There are always agents out there. So I would suggest you get started with your website and initiate your Local SEO ASAP, specially GetListed.org

What CMS are you using ? Looks like Joomla. Can you make your URLs Search Engine Friendly ? You have 3 querystrings in there.

As for adding rel=prev, next for Joomla, see this page:

http://www.jsnippets.net/snippets/php/add-link-relnextprev

I hope this helps.

Do they have great content ? Do people like the content ? Do actual users share or interact with your content ? Is it ideation of your e-commerce products ? Or is it more like information about your products ? Does it add value to your customer ? How much content do you have on your microsites ? Are they same/similar topics ?

It depends case to case, but you could indeed consider doing what you are thinking based on the answers above. Just make sure it adds value.

Also, have you ever received a penalty or unnatural links warning ?

You also need to do a complete SEO Audit of your website along with a Keyword Analysis to ensure you are using the right set of keywords, industry keywords, brand keywords, competitive keywords and see if your website structure supports it. I agree with Mihai on your backlink profile. It looks like for the past year and a half you have been caught in pretty much each algo update, primarily because of your back link profile as well as your site structure, optimization techniques.

Start with a complete SEO Audit of your off-page as well as On-page structure.

It's not possible to use that information alone and say for sure that those reasons are connected. They very well may be, or absolutely not.

The links could be a variety of reasons. What if they acquired another big company and did a 301 from the old to the new. Could be the tool you used for the backlinks data crawled more. It could be organic links. It could be something that went viral. There are too many things that could happen. So without digging into the details, I can't say anything for sure.

Look at fresh web links and see what you see there. If you are concerned about that competitor, download their backlinks from OSE and audit them.

Go to Google.co.uk and do a site:yoursiteurl.com to see if you are indexed in Google UK. You can also check the cache using cache:yoursiteurl.com

If I were you, that's what I do. You can use the Crawl Test Tool - http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test but that is more of a crawlability check, not whether you are indexed or not.

Go to http://pro.moz.com/campaigns and click on** Archived Campaigns**. That should show you what's available inside your account. If you see an archived campaign and you have open slots, you should be able to activate it.

I agree with Keri. If you are doing it for branding or other advertising reasons, just have them include a rel="nofollow" inside the link. Also make sure the FTC disclosure is there.

I hope this helps.

Noah,

Did you ever received any unnatural links warning or a penalty from Google ? Are you verified in Google Webmaster Console ? I agree with David, try to clean up those directory links and see if you can build some real links like a real business would have. There are some great articles here at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building if you need some ideas.

I totally agree with the suggestions from Marissa and Tim. You obviously understood the problem and were concerned, therefore you posted the question.

Definitely only build 1 page for these 3 keywords. I love Tim's title suggestion.

Managed IT Services and Support | Company Name or

Managed IT Services and Support by Company Name

You are good to go.