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i'm seeing difficulty of 30-40 for cheap phones (depending on country): https://moz.com/explorer/overview?q=cheap+phones (watch the video that pop's up from Moz's chat helper)

Check out https://moz.com/help/guides/keyword-explorer for more in depth info on how the scores are calculated.

How is the Difficulty score calculated?

Keyword Difficulty takes into account the Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) scores of the results ranking on the first page of Google for the given query, as well as modifying intelligently for projected click-through-rate of a given page (putting more weight on higher-ranking, more visible pages and less on lower-ranking, less visible pages). The formula also accounts for newer pages on powerful domains that may have DA scores but have not yet been assigned PA values.

What is Opportunity score?

Opportunity Score is designed to calculate the relative Click-through-Rate (CTR) of the organic web results in any given Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Google SERPs that have very few non-traditional ranking features and are more similar to the classic “ten blue links” only model will have very high Opportunity Scores. SERPs that have many features - like images, ads, news results, answer boxes, knowledge graph panels, etc. - will have much lower Opportunity scores. We use an averaged CTR model derived from our anonymized clickstream data to build this useful metric and apply it based on the features we see in Google’s results.

You will lose some link authority that comes with 301 redirects but if the new domain is worth the branding and potential gain of future backlinks, you should go for it.

As BeardoCo said, you need to replicate/recreate the posts from the first two sites onto the third and have individual, page specific redirects set up. This would conserve as much relevancy and link authority as possible.

Also take note that your traffic will most likely tank for 2 weeks while G deals with the site transition. Don't panic, rankings will return within 3 weeks.

Make sure you tell google you changed domains and set up 301 redirects as soon as you do that. Otherwise, you can get hit with a penalty for creating too many pages too quickly + content is duplicate from the other two sites.

Good luck!

Panda = on page content.

They problem lies with your pages' content. Take for example - http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Lucas-Davenport-Silken-Prey-John-Sandford.html - the synopsis/description is copy/pasted and appears on many other sites. G see's this and devalues your website.

The other site may be hurting your rankings but I wouldn't disavow it if you first saw your traffic drop after panda. Fix the on page content first.

Try out http://www.semrush.com - gives you competitors and how they do in rankings overall.

Might have to do with canonical urls.. pretty sure SEOMoz report doesn't take that into account when they tell you which pages are duplicate.

Best thing to do is check out what pages are getting picked up by both sources and compare/contrast similarities/differences.

Can't vouch for any but here is a short list I found via G

http://www.ukfast.co.uk/linux-server.html

http://www.webfusion.co.uk/dedicated-servers/

http://www.eukhost.com/dedicated-server-hosting.php

Previously you would wait until the next Panda refresh to see if your website was unflagged from the algo penalty. A few months ago, they made Panda a rolling algorithm so you should see whether your site is fixed after its next crawl/reindex.

No need for a reconsideration request but a singing telegram would probably get Cutt's attention if your site doesn't rebound in a week or so

Cheers, Oleg

Usually you should outrank those site but I think you might have been penalized / hit with negative SEO =/

I clicked around your backlink profile and it looks like there are a lot of links with pharma anchor text (viagra in the philippines, tramadol 50mg, etc). I would recommend a backlink audit and removal of all of those negative links and see if that bounces you back up!

Cheers!
Oleg

Yes, rogerbot follows robots exclusion protocol - http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot

Check this out - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Basically, if the same page loads on several URLs, the canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the "real" location of the page.

Have a client in the exact same situation. Check to see if you are currently getting traffic for terms that would be specific to having separate pages (e.g. "50 blue bic pens" versus a more general "bic blue pens"). If you don't, then you should canonical to one page. If you do, I'd keep it as is and work on diversifying the product pages more.

New pages don't have any authority right away so the penalization is more noticeable, while your old articles have links/are more established and rank better than new ones in general (my guess).

I used OSE as well - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors.html?page=1&site=richclubgirl.com&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domain

Your best bet is to use the disavow tool.

Have you ever experienced a traffic drop? If yes, see what day that happened and if there were updates around that time.

Do you have GWT set up? Sitemaps submitted/updated with latest posts?

You can also use OSE to look up PA/DA of a page and it's backlinks (including internal links).

what's happening is that there is a 302 redirect to : http://www.toolsandmachinery.com/index.php?cPath=5883_8097_8110&osCsid=8a13a53a966400e3bef97cef001aa4e5

Then it's 301 redirected to: http://www.toolsandmachinery.com/jet-parts-5883/jet-dust-collection-8097/jet-jc-3-parts-8110/?osCsid=8a13a53a966400e3bef97cef001aa4e5

I'm thinking this is due to some plugin but i'm not too familiar with osCommerce so can't be positive. I would try to install a SEO plugin and see if that helps.

#1 - That's probably too many links to have in the sidebar. I would make a link to a "Useful Articles" page and categorize the articles there. This does depend on how you want your visitors to flow through your stie.

Yes to #2. Link with keyword rich anchor text too.

#3 - only if those articles help your website accomplish its goal(s).

Site is well optimized and has 25k+ pages indexed in G. Looking at his backlinks, he may not have many links but a few of them are very good (italymag, gohome.it, comproperty)/ Backlinks from .it domains are a huge plus when trying to rank internationally.

I don't know what your site is but you can probably get those same backlinks fairly easily. Just generate content and optimize your website for your terms and you should be able to outrank him.

If it link is a direct link to your site (view source and make sure its ), then only the top 3 points are taken into consideration if its nofollow or not.

MozBar takes all 3 into consideration (tested it on a site I have noindex in robots.txt on, assuming it checks for the meta tag and definitely checks for nofollow attribute).

On your competitor's site, to reach that page I...

http://www.badkamerconcurrent.nl/ > Click "Sphinx" link on bottom > Click '345' in left navigation

How do I get to that page on your site?

In addition, that page has the following tag: rel="canonical" href="" /> [you should either remove it or use the correct url]

I wouldn't redirect them all to the homepage as this is a common blackhat technique and G may think something fishy is going on. If you can redirect individual pages to relevant/similar pages on the new domain (and all the general ones redirect to the homepage), then that would be a very good strategy.

Just make sure that the links to the old sites are natural/healthy. If they are bad, the effects will transfer to the new domain as well.

Yeah, stick with either:

/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%postname%/

Personally, I like %postname% but if you don't plan on adding new posts, you might be better off taking some time and choosing the perfect category slugs to give you bonus keywords in the URL.

You can block the SEOmoz spider via robots.txt on the subdomain

<code>User-agent: rogerbot 
Disallow: /</code> 

So there are a lot more links on your sphinx page than your competitors so a lot less link authority flows to it (you have way more filters).

As Claudio mentioned, you should get more direct links to that page from your site... "featured products" on your homepage, link from a post in your blog, mention it on category pages (i.e. alle douche).

In addition, you should add rel="prev/next" on pages that have pagination.

Once again, it all comes down to "do you have real, natural, high quality links pointing to your site?" If you only have a couple, it may be easier to move domains and contact those link owners to point to new url. If you have many good links that would improve rankings, it may be easier to remove/disavow the bad links instead of getting all those links changed to point to new location.

First big problem - You have a bunch of pages that look like this - http://fastlocksmithdc.com/automotive/car-keys-made/ford/

Not only are they duplicate pages of the other car URLs, but the pages are also blank. This really thins out any links built to your site by having a lot of worthless pages.

Secondly, lock smithing is a local search and should be attempted to rank for using Google Plus for Business pages. You don't have your address anywhere on the site (I recommend adding it to the footer).

Your best use of $200 would be to optimize your homepage/site to rank for keywords locally, setup/optimize a Google Plus page and then build $200 worth of local citations.

If you focus on getting links from high quality, relevant directories, that will not hurt you.

If the directory accepts every link that is submitted to them, that's when you are going to start running into trouble.

Google considers link location for link authority (e.g. header links get more weight than footer/sidebar links). Maybe try adding a "Featured" sidebar widget above your filters and link to your hottest selling sections (would prob improve conversions too )

If you have entirely new URLs and set up 301 redirects properly, it usually takes about 2 weeks for the rankings to bounce back.

Also, its hard to tell if you did anything wrong during the transfer since we cannot see your old site.

If there are absolutely no differences at all between Belgium and France French, then I would just go with the language in the url (/fr/).

However, if there are pricing/location/banner/any differences between the two pages, I would split them up (/be-fr/ and /fr-fr/ - having both variables in one 'folder' be better than additional another subfolder).

"www.webshop.com/fr/french-product-name Would this have the potential to rank well in both the French speaking part of Belgium, as well as France?"

Yes

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Go to webmaster tools and do a "Fetch as Google" 

If you see the content in the source, it will be crawled.

Check out: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-affiliate-links-we-handle-majority-of-them-125859

I would message all your aff's and ask them to nofollow, make the new default URL you give to aff's nofollow and keep your 301 redirect thing. In your next RR (if you need it) mention all those steps you took.

Add this to header of each site. The following code is for the homepage:

If i had to guess... Your site forces https while OSE only looks up http (as represented by the 301 code in the "HTTP Status" column).

I wouldn't worry about it.

Your "SEO Expert" is wrong and the content is indexed. This is most notable in FAQs... clicking on the question drops down the previously invisible div with the FAQ answer. Both the question and answer is indexed by search.

Here is an example... searched phrase is in an invisible div but still appears in search.

https://www.google.com/search?q="If+you+can+log+into+your+account%2C+we+recommend+changing+your+password.+If+you+can%27t+get+into+your+account+you+can+secure+it+here."&rlz=1C1SKPL_enUS434US440&oq="If+you+can+log+into+your+account%2C+we+recommend+changing+your+password.+If+you+can%27t+get+into+your+account+you+can+secure+it+here."

Change the way your ecommerce site paginates so that it shows ?page=x

Then add tags to the headers

It is the right way to do it

According to this, looks like you should include the <loc>url as well, so add:</loc>

Organic visits to landing page would probably be the most useful

keep the url, change the name/keywords. nobody can really tell you what to expect.. if the competition is stronger than you for the new keyword, you might lose your current rankings and not be able to compete on the new term. Or if the competition is weak, you could start ranking for both terms.

Do some competitor analysis and compare the risk/reward of changing keywords.

Don't add paginated pages to sitemap.

You should not canonical page to page one... canonical to each of the paginated urls (just strip sessions ids and such)

rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:

Not allowed. See https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/2770285?hl=en

1 install across multiple domains can be done via domain mapping - and I recommend you do that.

The cctld domains will help you rank locally and having 1 wp installation requires much less maintenance. In addition, use a plugin like WPML to easily manage multiple languages and let it handle the SEO for you (by setting up proper sitemaps and hreflang tags)

Unnatural link messages = manual penalty, so yes. You should submit a RR. I would go through all of your links, disavow all of the bad ones that you weren't able to remove, then submit the RR. If you do it right, you shouldn't have any problems having the penalty lifted (its been a while and you seem to have been doing a lot to remedy the issue)

That's what the rel="next/prev" does. It tells G that these pages are part of the same list and just the items change.

Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ce9jv91beQ

English (default) desktop page has these:

http://www.site.com/">
http://www.site.com" hreflang="en">
http://www.site.com/es/" hreflang="es">
http://www.site.com" hreflang="x-default">
http://m.site.com/" >

English Mobile page has these:

http://www.site.com/">
http://m.site.com/" hreflang="en">
http://m.site.com/es/" hreflang="es">
http://m.site.com/" hreflang="x-default">

Spanish Desktop version:

http://www.site.com/es/">
http://www.site.com/es/" hreflang="es">
http://www.site.com/" hreflang="en">
http://www.site.com/" hreflang="x-default">
http://m.site.com/es/" >

Spanish Mobile version:

http://www.site.com/es/"> http://m.site.com/es/" hreflang="es">
http://m.site.com/" hreflang="en">
http://m.site.com/" hreflang="x-default">

My guess is that the penalties expired then. If you received letters, there would be a notification under the "Manual Actions" tab. They expire every year I believe.

If that's the case, I wouldn't worry about it.

EDIT: try accessing your site via https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration

You can install on windows but its more complicated than Linux.

The main thing you need to do it make sure the new URLs are the same as the old URLs (play with the permalink structure). If you do that, rankings shouldn't be affected.

If you can't get the URLs to match up exactly, make sure to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. You may lose traffic temporarily while Google adjust to the new URLs, but should bounce back within 2 weeks.

If there is custom coding involved, you'd need to convert to PHP.

Keep the hreflang tags but add your own layer of verification.

Look up the visitor of the country and redirect to the proper version of the site.

Google looks at hreflang as guidelines and sometimes doesn't follow it perfectly.

"if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects." -- what do you mean it will work? Where are your parking the domain? Do you mean domain masking it over the compname.com domain?

I recommend doing individual 301 redirects for the top content pages then doing bulk 301 to a relevant category or homepage for the rest. I would also recommend transferring all content from fullcompanyname.com to compname.com as it'd be a waste to just get rid of it.

I'd go with the parameter option:

1. Go to Webmaster tools > Crawl > URL Parameters > Configure URL Parameters and enter all of the sorting/filtering parameters there.

2A) If all of your items are on one page, you can set up a canonical URL for that page (which would ignore all sorting parameters)

2B) If your categories have multiple pages, be sure to use rel=next/prev for pagination

Make sure they are linked up with hreflang tags which would help search engines determine which pages are their language equivalents.

If you do a lot more promotion of the Dutch content, it will rank better than French pages (assuming equal competition). However, because there is a "these pages are the same but in 2 different languages" hreflang markup on the site, it should help you rank for the French pages as well.