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I don't see this being a problem directly. You will have some advantage in the way of citations and links to

www.website.com/PublishersPage from the affiliate websites, but then these links will then redirect to the script via .htaccess and then back to your website.

How many affiliates are we talking ? If you think from the affiliate perspective, they'd like it as well I am guessing because if I am the affiliate, I would love to link to www.website.com/PublishersPage vs http://scripts.affiliateprogramme....../..../....)

Do yes, definitely consider doing it. Your affiliates are going to love it. I don't see a lot of merchants doing this. This is definitely something unique.

Yes, you are 100% on the right track. You do need the canonical tags in place ASAP. Both on the category and the product level.

And yes, duplicate content is also a very important consideration, so I would definitely suggest creating a business case to get unique copy done for each of your pages.

Both of these points are high priority and I am sure that's why you posted the question...to confirm. You are right.

Well, could you do a sub-domain on your existing website ? How do you have then structured in your website right now ? Is it easy to detect, something like yourdomain.com/en, yourdomain.com/es ?

If I were you, I would check to see evidence that the spanish translation of your website living under the same domain indeed caused the penalty.

Is it a natural link ? It really depends how you are getting it and what the context of the link is. Let's say you designed a professor or a departments' website hosted on a .edu, yes, it makes sense to have a Designed by link. If the professor has a list of web design resources and mentions your website, that's also a great link. But if it's a comment link or on a forum or something else...that would probably mean there are a lot of other unrelated links as well and therefore not a good link.

I hope this helps Shashank.

Hey Gaurav, I agree with danatanseo. Just watch your SERPS for the next couple days and see how the traffic and rankings evolve. How is your traffic and ranking for other keywords besides this ? I also noticed that the page 1 for Hindi Comedy is 8 video results with just 2 other results. Do you remember if that's how the SERPS were before Sep 12 ?

John, yes, nothing to worry about it at all. As long as you are not interlinking the websites, it's just an IP address hosting multiple websites.

You might want to consider adding a new IP (which would also be required if you will be installing a SSL certificate for this new website). A new IP is not required at all, but I usually like to if I have the option.

William, considering your answers, here's what I suggest. Find a few of your friends, family etc and ask them to place a test order on your website. Have them choose a random product and then complete checkout either by using your credit card or a test credit card and cancel those orders, do not process them.

Just quietly watch them while they place an order. Don't guide them. See if they encounter any issues. Sometimes we don't see the issues that customers might be seeing them.

This exercise can't hurt right?

I agree with Gerd and Marisa. I would recommend you to consider doing a Cross Domain canonical tag on your buyproduct.com product pages and any other duplicate content to your product.com pages or vice versa, depending upon whichever one you want to keep in the search engines.

Since both your websites have strength and our gaining the SERPS (which does not guarantee that they can't fall tomorrow for getting penalized for duplicate content), I would suggest you take the opportunity to put a plan and strategy together and get this taken care of sooner then later.

Does your competition offer Free Shipping ? Are people looking for Free Shipping ?
Trusted Seals / Logos during Checkout Funnel ?

Look at Competition in your niche and see what's different in terms of prices, user experience, security issues and so on.

Sure, have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

Using reverse proxy, there are no technical/security concerns.

I agree. However, if it was a media release, I would prefer to release it on my website first and then the media outlets, otherwise it's just duplicate content to me.

And yes, I agree, if it's make sense for your users, by all means, you should post it in the press/media section of your website. Whatever makes most sense.

Consider looking into the possibility of doing a reverse proxy, where technologically the blog could be hosted externally anywhere and still be a sub-folder and yes you are right subfolder is the best.

Do you have a videos index page ? Do you have other videos that you maintain ? Is there another video you can redirect to ? To me, I think it might make sense to redirect (301) these pages to the videos index page. That makes most sense to me rather then a 404 or a redirect to the homepage if you really do need to delete these videos.

James, You might also want to look at the cached version of your page and then click on Text-only version and see if it shows up correctly. If it does, no need to worry from that perspective, but definitely worth checking from a usability, accessibility etc.

Think of these metrics as relational. As Google tweaks it' algorithm, based on what's going on in the world of search, OSE/SEOmoz might update the criteria of discounting certain kinds of links, and the flow of internal and external link juice. Their dataset also is expanding and as they read and discover more data, the overall metrics change, impacting the scores. I would relate them to your competition and see how you are doing to get a big picture rather then worrying too much about the movement within your website. It's very very useful data regardless.

I hope this helps.

If I were you, I would just retweet that message. It kind of adds to the credibility.

Yes, it has to be a configuration entry in your host file with your website hosting company.

Yes,that's right. They can check what's wrong...

Google or a particular server could have the DNS cached, they might have multiple DNS servers etc causing it to be working with no issues.

If you have another domain with no similar issues, it could be a minor mis-config within the DNS entry for that domain only. Raise a ticket with your host with a screenshot of the issue from Google and their techs should know where to look.

I hope this helps.

Build them,forget them. It's a natural process of the web. You will always be loosing some links, but then you should always be gaining some links. That's just like any other company/brand should be. That's what natural right. You advertise on TV, Radio,Run a contest, do something creative in your community, industry and bloggers, website owners are linking to you. You start working with a company, a product and they run a press release...those are links. A very small percentage of your links get dropped for whatever reasons. People shutting down their websites, getting acquired...or whatever other reasons could be.

So concentrate your time on Good content, good links. Don't worry too much about your existing links. Some people may disagree and that's fine. It just depends on how you think about SEO as a whole. I think of SEO as a Best Practice on what you need to feed the bots as well as Brand Building...which leads to success.

I agree with eyepaq. There is no recipe for success. It varies on case to case basis.

Think about questions like:

1. How old are those sitewide links ?

2. How many of those sitewide links are somehow related to each other ?

3. How good / natural is the rest of your link profile ?

4. Are the links related ?

5. Are those sitewide links around specific anchor text ?

The answers to these questions should lead you to come up with an opinion. Go with what makes sense.

Too many of any one kinds of links is a problem. Don't overdo anything.

Are they producing a lot of good content and the blogs are just the locations where that great original content which users are interacting with, is located ? If they look like they are there just for SEO, the search engines will catchup when they see patterns of artificial links. They just have a lot of other spam to catch-up with first :).

I would not look at that technique and start doing it yourself.

Do you have any other sites hosted with the same DNS ? It looks like a DNS issue for sure. If I were you, I would move my hosting. Maybe I am being paranoid, but I don't like DNS issues. It's not a SEO issue, it's a site up-time issue. If bots can't access my site 50% of the time, could it be that a lot of my user's can't access my website either ? 50% is a very big number. If possible, I would transfer my domain name to a different registrar and a different hosting company. Just trying to be safer.

Well, technically you could. But to me it would be more important to optimize these pages to rank, rather then use the strength to link to other pages.

So it's your choice ;). I would rather milk the cow here....

Keep in mind that these pages are probably already linking to your other pages as well via the common header, footer and other navigation links.

Yes, it syre can be the optimized copy, internal links, theme of your site. So if your site is only about Widgets, you have 100 different kinds of Widgets and that's all you sell. In that case, all your internal links, categories are focused around Widgets. That gives you an edge if your other factors are strong, you could be ranking better then your competition, the stronger competition.

Also, the volume of links do not matter. In this case, you might have 10 Widget related links from other Widget sites, which the bigger competition does not have, making you a better suited site ranking for that term. This logic might be totally different for another term.

For a lot of niche products / categories, it can be better. The rankings are dependent on multiple factors and although a site like wikipedia could be ranking for everything towards the top...similarly like amazon or pinterest or ebay and so on. The stronger authority domains do have that advantage, like a brand would. But then a niche product/category might have much better focused copy, a lot of internal links to this page from within the website, making this a stronger page.

Does that help and make sense ?

So is this a page on your domain that is ranking ? Just making sure. So it's the wrong page ranking for the right keyword ? If yes, does it make sense to add a canonical tag on this wrong page to the right page, which is like a 301 and that should do it. The question is whether it makes sense in your case. Was this all naturally done...was it like a linkbait or an info graphic or a widget kind of something that brought these links ? Once you have these answers, you should be able to act on whether it's okay to do the canonical change. Let me low if that helps.

I agree with Rob 100%. It's "Okay" for some links to be 404. You do not have to redirect every single page from the old site to the new site structureI would make sure if any of your old pages have deep links coming from other "strong" sites, consider redirecting them for sure to get the most link juice flowing correctly to your site.

It would be best to update the canonical URLs to go directly to the new location. Having too many redirects, canonicals can often create these complex situations causing issues in the long-run. The intent of the canonical tag is to pass the bots a strong directive about what the correct URL is. So it would be wise to use the correct URL instead of a URL which does not exist (301'd). I hope this helps.

Yes, you can use the crawl test tool here at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test It's limited to 3,000 pages and you can run upto 2 reports per day. I hope that helps

I agree with Pat. Great detailed answer. Love it. I am sure others will find it useful as well.

Move whatever content makes sense and do 301 redirects. If there's no reason for that content to be there and if it's not bringing in any traffic, or if it is, either wya, it makes complete sense to move/migrate content that's relevant and then do 301's. Make sure you check where most of your backlinks are coming from and if you can get any of those links changed to the new website. I would also check for deep links to the old site and make sure, whatever URL those deep links were going to, are redirected to the new page on the new site. I hope this helps.

You need to look at what other things are needed to strengthen the pages (On-site SEO) as well as building domain authority so that pages from this site show up in the SERPS. It sounds like your problem could be either of those 2 or a combination of both.

If I were you I would look at the quality of the content, strength of the pages as well as do a complete SEO audit of your client's website to make sure your site is indeed rankable. Try a combination of both the factors and see where you get the most impact.

I think it makes sense to let the user select the currency and see the changed price or use the geolocation to automatically display that price. It would be a considerable amount of time and effort to try and make the different set of pages unique, so in short it does not make sense to make different urls for different currencies. However, if you plan in the future that you are trying to translate the content in other languages as well, then it's a different story. In that case you are targeting different countries and it's best served by country level domains for the countries you are targeting. I hope this helps.

Sara, I would strongly recommend to stay away from doing 30-40. That's a little too many. If you are doing sites like:

Red Widgets

Blue Widgets

Green Widgets

I would recommend them being combined into 1 Widget site, Widget.com/Red-Widgers, Widget.com/Blue Widgets and so on.

And considering this, if we are talking about 2-5, yes, it would make complete sense to host them on separate IPs.

I hope this helps.

Shashank, does it make sense for you to have the plugin link to your personal site (if you have one) and then you could have a portfolio page that links to your website. In my opinion, that makes a little bit more sense. Think about it: XYZ Wordpress Plugin by Shashank Shekhar Mishra or XYZ Wordpress Plugin by Interior Design Blog.com You know what I mean. And definitely a sub-folder, not a sub-domain.

Sara, are you talking about microsites/satellite sites or mini-sites intended to promote a specific set of products, contest, sweepstakes or a promotion ? How many sites are you talking about ?

Give it a few days. Looks like your site was indexed under your dev/old/tenporary URL.

Go to Google and search for: site:http://79.170.44.98/dobermandeen.co.uk/

I see that you know it's gone and you also have canonical tags in place. So you should be good. Just verify your website in Google Webmaster Console and submit your sitemap. You'll be indexed pretty soon.

I hope this helps.

There are multiple ways of solving this. However, the best solution is to implement rel=canonical tag in your pages.

You could technically do a robots.txt exclusion for such pages, but that's not recommended. Just use one primary URL. So for example your URL is http://www.example.com/red-widgets.php and you have sorting options for that URL, the template/header code should contain:

on all the sort URLs. This acts as a very strong directive to Google and acts as a 301 from all such URLs to your main URL for that product/category.

Just use your links in those press releases like "Brand Name" linked to "http://www.example.com" and so on. You can also do plain links like http://www.example.com and so on. I hope this helps.

P.S. Any one kind of links, when you over do them, they become unnatural links. Specially when they become a higher percentage of your overall link profile.

It's usually a combination of both. Sometimes you see gradual movements in SERPS, but then what you may be seeing is something like a "Getting out of the Sandbox" effect. It's what used to happen very very widely and to some extent, still does. Brand new site tend not to rank for a considerable amount of time, often referred to as the Sandbox period and then once they get out of sandbox (after attaining some domain authority), you'd technically see a spike in traffic and rankings and your situation might be something similar to that.

I agree with Mat. You never know, but yes Chrome could be another major source. It also depends what you set as your privacy when you setup Chrome (Send anonymous usage data to Google, Yes/No ?) and so on.

Well, the copy on your pages and any other content often leads to combinations of keywords, long tail that you end up ranking for that you did not / could not even target, because a lot of times, you don't even know those keywords exist.

So yes, when you have SEO optimized content or any content for that matter, as the pages/domain gain strength and authority, they tend to start ranking for a lot of keyword combinations.

I hope that helps.

The discovery can be from multiple mediums. Do you or the client have Google Toolbar installed ?

I would also like to add that since you are talking about just "External Links", and obviously there can't be any "paid" links, you need to ensure there's a good diversification of the kinds of links you attain. There are companies out there that do Press Releases, Directory Submissions, Guest Posts and so on. If you as a client only has "links" as deliverable, it's going to be tough. And I don't think it's your best measure of success. It might make sense to hire a full time or part time person local that is either already a link builder or can be trained.

Doing too many links of the same type often leads to problems and then a few months later you might be looking for somebody trying to get rid of some of the bad links built in the process. It's always in your best interest to try and hire somebody inhouse if that makes sense and if that has not worked for you or is not making sense financially, I am not sure if an agency or a firm out there can build quality links with the kind of quality control one may need on incoming links. You know what I mean.

I hope this helps.

OSE is working now. Thanks Moz.

I would suggest to do exactly as Matt says. Do them slowly and start with your lowest traffic domains/websites. As you see the new site starting to pickup the changes and the affects of the 301 from the old domain and the rankings start to show up, do more...gradually. Rather then all in one day.