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Ouch, sorry to hear that. I just added the htaccess code to one of my dev sites and it seems to redirect just fine (200 when visiting www, 301 when visiting non-www). I'm guessing that Google is going to the non-www page and is being redirected to the www version. Maybe switch the code to do the opposite (assuming your goal was to canonical/consolidate the urls). Message me if you want the htaccess code.

For fixing your site rankings, they will most likely bounce back on their own in due time so the best thing to do is try to get G to recrawl all the pages ASAP. I would:

1. Make sure you add and verify both the www and non-www urls of the site in GWT, then choose which one you want to be primary.

2. Change you sitemap to have have frequency/priority crawl rates, have the correct www/non-ww links and resubmit your sitemap in GWT.

3. Share links on twitter (they are crawled very often)

4. Create an rss feed with your pages and ping it

Good luck getting it ranking again.

-Oleg

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

Check out the Alexa ranks for the top sites you are considering submitting to and see what kind of an effect Penguin had on their rankings & traffic.

In general, if people are using the website (not just bots/spammers), then it is fine to submit to. Bonus points if it is relevant to your website.

Note: This is not meant to be a complete link building strategy. If the only links you are building come from "web design review" sites, you're gonna have a bad time ranking.

Make sure you are using the asynchronous analytics code.  Once you've added it to the site, view the source and make sure it appears exactly as you input it. Make sure you select today's date in the analytics range (default is yesterday).

False. If Google crawled the website and found the link, it is "activated". Google cannot track link clicks for the majority of websites. It would be unfair and erroneous to only support links that they can analyze to be clicked.

In addition, Matt Cutt's claims that the webspam team does not use Analytics for SERPs - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZoesvNUPDQ

Yeah, having the same listings across multiple domains isn't doing you any favors. The best set up is to have all the languages on one domain and make use of the multilingual canonical support. Not sure if that can be applied across different domains.

The August 10th update was not related to Panda. It is named the Emanuel Update and it affected the rankings of sites based on the number of valid copyright removal requests.

So unless your site has a lot of copyright infringing material, that wasn't the source of your traffic drop.

1. Check the links of your competitors and see if they increased.

2. Check your own backlinks and see if you received any negative seo.

Can't really tell you much more without knowing the site.

Cheers,

Oleg

The rest are most likely put into the supplemental index (are duplicates). I'd review GWT and analyze crawl stats, crawl errors, and html improvements.

Do you have 165k pages on your site? If not, it's probably some sort of error.

The update is nicknames the Emanuel update and it affects the sites on this list: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time

It's not getting nearly as much attention as Panda/Penguin because it affects a very small subsection of websites.

Pretty comprehensive post about the update (by Danny Sullivan) - http://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googles-ranking-algorithm-130118

Personal note: I have analytic access to a HUGE torrent site that has had 6k+ url's (<1% indexed urls) requested to be removed - Aug 10th had no change in organic google traffic. Based on this, I feel like there were close to no changes in serps.

1. Same way you would SEO any other site. Why do you feel it there may be different techniques involved?

2. I highly recommend you read https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/ - In addition, I would consider the difference in PC v mobile website users - what are they searching for? Mobile users should be given immediate access to the most trafficked pages and phone/contact info.

3. Check out http://searchengineland.com/5-seo-tips-to-get-mobile-apps-ranked-in-serps-104595 for tips on how to have your app page rank higher in serps. If you are referring to having your app higher in Google Play/ iTunes - use your main keyword in your title and within the product description. Test different searches to see where your app appears and adjust the app info until you are satisfied with the results. I believe ratings also play a big part (apps are not my forte).

Search site:yourdomain.com, click on "Search Tools" in the left column and choose "Last week" (or within whatever period you saw the increase in indexed pages).

Or, you can choose "Past Year" and then choose "Sort by Date" - this will give you the latest links indexed in order.

https://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75569

If you try to verify your business listing by phone and it doesn't work, this could be for one of several reasons:

• You have an automated phone system or phone tree.

If you encountered any of the reasons above, please request the PIN to be sent to you by mail.

Whats odd is that you don't have postcard verification option. I recommend you post this problem on their local business forums at http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business

Good luck!

I recommend you consider changing ecommerce platforms as it would benefit you most.

If that's out of the question, you should set a canonical to your most popular color (i.e. if red shirt is the top seller, make blue, white, green, yellow shirts have a canonical link pointing to red shirt). This would scrap the duplicate content issue, but would also get rid of those other pages from the index.

If you do that, the H1 tags wont really matter much. I would even have the H1 tag be more generic (i.e. don't include color) so that it applies to all various of the product.

See "Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?" on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

In a super helpful mood today

I would either incorporate nofollows to pages that arent as important or moving them lower down the page. Sitewide quick links would give it more juice than the "popular cities & town" box on hp.

This is also a great time to examine your analytics heatmap and see how users interact with the site. Use it to help determine what people are looking for/what they are clicking on and make it easier to them to get there. This will help you remove duds and promote high value pages (like the east long accomodation page)

Good reads on internal linking:

Link placement v power http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2185977/Anatomy-of-an-Internal-Link

Link juice distribution http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2179376/Internal-Linking-to-Promote-Keyword-Clusters

Multi-city specific
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond 

Cheers,

Oleg

Changing 1 word / page will result in duplicate content. Instead create 1 page about "Lyle & Scott Polo Shirt" and have color selections on that page.

Not sure what you mean by the last part. Your H1 tag contents should be the headline of the page (closely related to the title of the page). In your case, I would identify the name of the products as the H1.

You can read about DA/PA fluctuations in the 2nd August Mozscape update post

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/two-mozscape-updates-in-august-and-more-info-on-why-pada-fluctuate

Why do Domain Authority & Page Authority Fluctuate?

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

1. The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.
2. Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.
3. The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.
4. Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Congratulations! Honestly, you should be ranking up top. Can't see any problems with it not being indexed. The last cache date was Aug 11, 2012 17:03:18 GMT.

Was it ever ranking? If so, when did it drop?

I'm thinking that Google's freshness algo is bumping all of the newer articles publishing news about your article to the top. When the news dies down, your page should jump back to page 1. Hope I'm right! Pretty curious myself so I'll keep an eye on it.

You should only worry if GWT reports them as duplicates. I believe SEOMoz tool does not take canonical into consideration when they report duplicate pages.

Just don't approve porn, illegal, and spam filled website urls. If a company's website is deemed acceptable to be placed on your website, I see nothing wrong with giving them dofollow links.

Follow links you have to approve. If people can sign up and get followed links without any editorial review, you will be spammed sooner or later.

G recommends you nofollow all user submitted links (to be on the safe side).

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

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

If you have GA on your .com site, it should pick up visitors that are redirected from the .ca domain.

If that isn't the case, another thought is to process the redirect via htaccess and shoot off the tracker code before the page redirects.

The most powerful links currently come from guest blog posts.

Other ones that work well - ppt sharing (slideshare), document share (scribd), videos, press releases, relevant blog comments, local citations

To a lesser extent - web2.0 properties, article submissions

The key is quality, not quantity. Develop strong profiles (completely filled out, multiple entries, high quality content) on top sites instead of spamming thousands of sites. These give you direct traffic and even rank on their own in serps (if you choose the right keywords).

Couple that with high quality, fresh content on your own site and you're golden.

Yup, you can't control the bad links coming in so your best bet is to develop your brand (buy building high quality links w/ brand anchor text) to reduce the impact of spammy links.

I feel you, working with crappy legacy setups is the worst! Some notes;

There are a LOT of links on the page diluting the power of this page - you might even have more links than text. In addition, that page isn't being linked in the quick links sidebar - this most likely signals to G that this page isn't one of the more important ones on the site.

The paginated pages should have canonicals set up --> rel=next and rel=previous. As it stands, your pages are near duplicates.

I would recommend is new site design and setup though.

Yup, they are counted. Yelp won't show up because it uses a redirect but I see merchantcircle, urbanspoon, manta, etc in my GWT links list. OSE is reporting less but i still have a urbanspoon and yellowpages backlink.

Are the search result pages being indexed? If you just have the car listings indexed and have correct multilingual alternative tags set up, you should be in good shape. Change up the content to match the specific countries language & currency.

Multilingual search might be more difficult to manage since they use different search terms.

Social is taken into account but is currently not very influential in SERPs. Expect its significance to increase.

Check out

Chat w/ Matt Cutt's saying social is not a strong factor but is considered
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2199092/Spotlight-Keynote-With-Matt-Cutts-SESSF

Danny Sullivan & Matt Cutts - Social v Links debate
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-social-15396.html

Analysis of impact of links, mentions and shares on rankings http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-impact-of-authoritative-links-mentions-and-shares-on-rankings

Looks like you vary up the anchor text and link to page - if you didn't do this, it might be considered sitewide (which is no bueno). The way you have it now (and since you don't have that many category pages) should help with SERPs.

If your site is seo related, yup (in fact I just left a comment). Also note that these backlinks are nofollow. Why would you think this is a bad place to leave a comment on?

If there were 6817684 comments with shitty, spammy links - I would say no.

Either one works, as long as you tell G which one you choose via rel="alternative"

Either is fine - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html

Mark up multilingual - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

I am having the same issue, must be a coding error

You should be fine SEO/crawler wise. The most common & recommended structure for wordpress blogs is to just display the post title without the category in the url (i.e. site.com/post-title/) while the category pages are site.com/c/cat-title.

More than anything, you might have trouble your own site/script to differentiate categories from products if you use the same url structure (what page would you mod_rewrite to? would you have to process all category AND product slugs?) - that's the reason for the /42003836/ part of the link you mentioned. Unless you have limited categories, it might get complicated.

Sure you can merge them but doing it to a brand new site will probably 1) sandbox it and 2) carry over the penguin penalty.

Penguin is a page based penalty - so if all of the bad links were built to the homepage, you can still redirect the sub pages to relevant equivalents on your new site. This would give you a boost without transferring over the penalization.

If the bad links were built everyone, I'd just take the content and link to your site instead of 301 redirecting it.

Inside the wordpress loop on the homepage/category/archive theme pages. right now it probably has the_content() --> replace this with the_excerpt()

Easiest way is to sort by domain authority or page authority and just go down the list. View each page > If the page's content has 1) real content, 2) low outbound links and 3) is relevant to your site, its probably a good link.

You can also write more unique content - although I'd build more links first since you say that your current site is all unique content already.

Could very likely be the case. The H1 of the page could be the alt tag of that image instead of the 2nd H1 tag. Although it shouldn't drastically effect ranking, try removing it and see if your site rebounds.

Build more links? http://bit.ly/OAhzDI

The previous domain was also more keyword rich so it ranked easier.

Quick tip - go through the old site's backlinks, pick out the good ones, and ask the webmaster to change the URL to the new site.

Ah, I misunderstood. You probably want post excerpts.

Go to a post in dashboard > top right click on "Screen Options" > check the box that says "Excerpts" > textarea box will appear below post textarea. You can pop in your unique text there and call it via  (); ?> from within the template file.

Maybe it just wasn't crawled by OSE (especially with a low twitter presence). Try running OSE on your twitter page to get it crawled.

I double checked my OSE backlinks and I have my twitter is showing up as well.

Go the the category creation page in the dashboard and there is an option to create descriptions for each category (your unique snippets).

Then edit your category theme file to include the following code wherever you want the description to be displayed.

Emanuel penalizes sites for excessive copyright infringement, nothing to do with content quality.

The best course of action is an on page audit + content/link building plan based on your strengths/weaknesses.

Good question.. I'm not sure but inclined to say that googlebot wont accept sessions either. They used to have many problems with sessions and would index pages with session ids (don't see those anymore). Hopefully whatever they changed would help you too.

I don't see how  "Welcome to Our Site" is keyword rich but you can make the message changing cookie based instead. Since Googlebot doesn't accept cookies, it will always see "Welcome to Our Site".

Googlebot can't read cookie experiment - http://www.danclarkie.co.uk/googlebot-javascript-ajax-and-cookies-its-complicated.html

Probably a coincidence.. rankings do fluctuate. If you were hit by Emmanuel, you probably wouldn't be on the front page, let alone #3.

In additional, your competitors could have just improved their rankings (and as a result, your's dropped)

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.anvelope.ro&comparisons%5B0%5D=www.vanzarianvelope.ro&comparisons%5B1%5D=anvelope-x.ro&comparisons%5B2%5D=www.anvelopeweb.ro&comparisons%5B3%5D=www.jantesianvelope.ro

Yes, you probably wont do too well in rankings if you just have a single number/name difference for many pages. Maybe add in more unique information related to that person? e.g. where you got your information, where you got information from, last 3 tweets/status updates, etc. Although this is all aggregate content (which Google still considers inferior to unique content) it should help you rank in addition to giving your users more useful information.

I wouldn't say there is a limit but you if you are writing about a limited topic, the more you write, the less focused your content may become. Although it will improve long tail, could hurt the target phrase you are trying to rank for.

In addition, if you just start repeating yourself over and over again, it wont do you any favors. You are better off writing more succinctly with high quality so that people looking to solve a specific problem can visit that page and find a solution (and hopefully link back to it!). If its too long, it might be harder for a person to find what they are looking for.

Not sure if that would work, but you can test by changing your robots.txt and running a test in GWT > Health > Blocked URLs

You might also be interested in specifying specific URL paraments (e.g. /?sort=name&order=asc > can block sort and order parameters) from within GWT (Configuration > URL Parameters)

Learn more about parameters - https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687