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Forgetting all other issues, I am assuming you are using a PHP redirect to accomplish this and that you have three sites: .co.nz, .co.au, and .com which you are using the geo targeting preference for US.

Given that you have three sites, they will be indexed individually based on all the normal ways a site is indexed. So, links to site A will bring a googlebot. Sitemap of site B will bring same. Etc. If you are using some type of cross domain canonical or have any redirects of one site to the other for any reason, they will be followed across as well.

All domains will be crawled independent of one another. So, you need to get links to each.

Best,

Maxime,

While I agree the speed might be different with in country hosting given they are both European countries. (Not true in some others.) But the question was around content duplication.

Again, I think your intent is good. But, since he has two separate domains. ExampleSite.be and ExampleSite.nl, he has no need of hreflang="x" since both are in Dutch. If he had Dutch and English it would not matter if it were the same domain or not:
From Gianluca Fiorelli mozPost

**if Page A (US version) exists also in Page B (Spanish), C (French), and D (German) versions from other countires, no matter if they are in the same domain or different, then on page A you should suggest the last three URLs as the ones Google must show in the SERPs in their respective targeted Googles. **

Again, since they are ccTLD's and they are already geotargeted by virtue of same and since they are both in Dutch, there is no other worry re duplicate content.

I am open to being shown I am wrong as it will not be the first time

Best to you, thanks so much for your replies,

Robert

Eyepaq,

You do have a point (and thanks for pointing out how it's CTR that is affected and not buying behavior). That said, I do not think the drop would be anywhere close to even 20% given you are switching to a .com. The world is used to .com's. What would be affecting it initially would be the movement of link juice, but he is not going to drop right away with the old domain even with the 301. So, organically he will see some diminution likely, but I doubt a lot.

Again, all of this MUST be weighed. There will be trade-offs. He must decide with the client what the tradeoffs are they want to achieve their goals.

Best,

Sorry, but had to take care of clients.

1. Again, not that they don't want to purchase from, just there would seem to be a hesitation to click on it vs a .com.

2. What risk is there in a 301? First, you mention throwing away years of work, how? The loss of link juice for a 301 is generally said to be 1 to 10%. However, my experience is and I have done more than a few on sites from 25 page professional practices to 800+ page ecommerce sites (I have not done a massive ecommerce site but would without worry as long as I was clear as to what I was doing and why.) With the sites I have done I have NEVER lost even 2% of the link juice. It usually takes a couple of months for all to transfer and that could present a problem if the site is going to dip for a month and lose some revenue. (Remember, all alternatives have costs so you have to measure each and look at modifications - e.g. if you are going to fall a bit in rankings as 301 works, you might increase PPC). As to domain age, the last one I did was 10 year old domain and the client is quite happy to be getting more customers.

3. You would not need subdomains. The best thing I can do for you is to direct you to an expert with a recent blog here on the moz. Gianluca Fiorelli lays it out brilliantly in International SEO: Dropping the Dust. 

Understand, with any of what you are doing, experience will help and you might consider getting assistance and working with someone while looking over their shoulder.

Hope this helps,

Robert

Kate, Chenzo is right re the 404 but you are likely not getting any real juice from a profile page. That said, a 302 is a temp redirect and does not convey juice. To me, I do not see a reason to do a 301. You could use either.

Can your developers instead put a 302 redirect that goes to the same page that says,,, this member profile does not exist?

Seems simple, unless you have a vast membership.

Would love to see other answers.

Robert

Yes, It was crossed out by Google WMT, the rel=alternate hreflang="x" replaced the use of canonicalization to fix the problem. Some say it was because people were having too much problem with the canonical. Not matter, this is an easy solution IMO.

Best,

Maxime,

I have to question this as you have it. The intent is there, but you are throwing everything at a problem and some of it does not work:

1. for a ccTLD, there is no geotargeting in WMT: from GWMT:

Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location.

2. He does not need this in a cross domain setting.

3. Given he has ccTLD's this is an unnecessary expense and will add no value.

Hope this clarifies for you,

BenVer

In a short answer, not much. This is from GWMT:

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries.

Since you are using ccTLD's, Google already knows that you are targeting that specific country. 

While this will not guarantee that the .nl doesn't outrank the .be in Belgium, it will take care of your duplicate content concerns.

LBM

As to how long does it take for a full crawl, it will depend on how long it was taking before the change. Depending on how many pages you had to fix, there are a couple of avenues you could take: resubmit the sitemap or if less pages, you could fetch as Google for those.

As to the example question, that depends on the site, pages, etc. If the concern is to optimize for only the main ticket page to rank, it is possibly a good idea. The problem will arise as in this example with what if the searcher is searching more specifically? (For a given date - bears tickets 10/15/2012, etc)

Hope this helps

Dr. Ian

Great question. The first hurdle I see with a desire to be in the US using a .co.uk site is one of perception from the searcher/customer more than one of ranking with Google. While it is talked about more with some other countries, people here still look at the .uk and ponder it. I will tell you I have quite a multi cultural family(Syrian wife, son born in Paris, etc.) and when searching personally for a product, the idea of purchasing from a .uk vs a .us site is part of the decision. Not from a quality/etc pov, but what about the shipping? (I think that before digging into the site.)

Now, when you say, "acquire the .com and insure all the pages are very different to the UK site (a lot of work)...", I would ask why does it need to be "very different" and why does it need to be a "lot" of work? What if instead, you acquire the .com or other gTLD, 301 redirect from the .co.uk to the .com, and have a single English language site that is out of the UK? Then, for pages that are more US with US $, etc. you could use rel=alternate hreflang="x" to distinguish for Google. Because all are used to the generic TLD, you do not have the perception issue. (You would need to do a 301 redirect to the new domain to maintain link juice, etc.). This would also allow you to use same for Australia, etc. as the site grows.

In this way, you could have duplicate or near duplicate pages, have a single site, and grow rankings on both sides of the pond.

Hope this helps,

Robert

edit to add GWMT link

IMM

My first suggestion will be that you take a step back so you can save a few steps.

You need to be clear as to what you are targeting and here is why: If, your intent is to use Spanish words on English search here in the U.S. (I am in Texas, speak Spanish, handle multi lingual sites, etc.) you need to know which terms are going to return for English, Spanish, or both. Unless you are using a term that readily goes across both languages you need to go either/or there is no Spanglish to speak of. Examples are search on ropas (see screen shot) and you will get both types of languages returns. Change the search to vendes ropas or vender ropas and it is almost all returned as Spanish. Then, search on abogado and you will see English and Spanish sites. (Dumb English speaking sites, yes).

Another question is when you say hispanics, what are you targeting? People from various Spanish, Latin American, or South American countries who now reside in the US and speak Spanish only? Those who speak Spanish and English and are from a hispanic country but living in the US? Or a specific geo target area  of hispanics within the US? Remember that the majority of hispanics in the US speak English as their primary language.

So, to do KW research, you need to get clear on what it is you are selling and to whom you are selling it. Then you can become a laser for the language.

But, I would also say you need to be clear as to how you are translating and what is needed with regard urls, etc. When you have two languages on a site, you need to make sure you handle it correctly.

Hope this helps,

Ryan

Thanks for your input on this. The client is a seller of very big ticket item and the developer/seo she had was very clever at creating his own link farm/pyramid/etc. 
The good news for her was that she had a lot of industry cites that linked to her site and she has always done a great job at her own PR which brought in more quality links.

I was not trying to draw a corollary to specific links and PA/DA but show a broad picture around all the links (of which at least half were poor/bad) and how as those go away things change - which is I think a portion of what you are saying.

What I am showing with the images is that the links start going away and as the result DA/PA drops...but, we begin to see a concomitant rise in mozTrust which I believe can be taken as a signal - how exact I could not guess - that things will improve. It would appear that based on your comments I was a bit less than clear - thanks for the assist.

The reason we did not go into aggressive link removal with the client was due in large part to her relationship with past dev. She was very concerned about how they perceived their treatment. We had to be a bit cautious and we understood (and told her) the possible consequences.

Thanks for your clarity; I do believe there is more to come from Google around this issue.

All the best,

Robert

Well, the site looks good to me. But, my question is what are they contacting you for? Are they going to allow you to place a link back to your site, etc.? If so, give it a go.

As to cautious, I have been at this a while and I am just that way now.

Best to you though,

Luke

Even with 4 out of 24 I would think your issue will likely fall into line with this post by Barry Schwartz with SearchEngine Roundtable about manual link actions

Even if they were to go to this degree, the only pages that would be effected would be the ones with the links. And, it is likely the degree of that effect would be the mitigation of any algorithmic impact from the "bad" links.

I still think that by taking a bit less drastic approach, you can achieve your aims. Understand, there is no guarantee in that, I am telling you what I would do. I can tell you that I was looking at a client site yesterday and when we took on the site in Jan/Feb, she had some of the worst looking link pyramids, etc. I have seen. It was junk.

We changed hosting which changed IP and obviously linking C blocks. But, we did nothing but watch the links. We did not go after dropping them, etc. In May, Penguin arrives and we see changes begin. But, we did nothing but watch.

As you can see there are changes, but on the whole even with all the BS there is nothing totally detrimental. NOTE: This site sells an extremely high dollar product (7 figures) so a minor fluctuation in ranking does not effect it on the order it would an ecommerce site for example. But, I am encouraged at seeing how the effect on DA is negligible and it is now rising, etc. Also, look how we have lost LRD's but mozTrust is rising. Interesting at least.

So, I do not know if this is helpful, but I certainly hope it is.

Best

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You have already answered your question... You need a break  
Just kidding, but you can't draw any SEO conclusion in a day or three. You have to look at how long had the page been on page one of SERPs? If it is a newer page you will see much more fluctuation than with an established page. The same is true with lower competition keywords where most pages are low PA/DA.

So, if you want stability, my advice is to slowly add relevant content to the page in some way. You can also change the content (within your given framework) or have an area in the content where you talk about that product and link to more info on your site (this "more info" could be an ever added to blog, etc.).

As you get links to the page, show you are fresh, relevant and wanted by searchers, the fluctuation slows to a near halt.

Hope this clarifies.

Noah keeps it succinct here and it is good advice: "optimize for the user first..."

Luke,

The first thing I see is this sentence: These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.

So in answering you, I will treat it as I would a client. Do these pages bring you business, improve your ROI, etc.? If the answer is yes, I am going to approach the problem very cautiously. Let's assume they are important.

For those pages that are offending you say there are a couple (I will guess that means not more than 5). If your site is fairly large 50 plus pages for example, I do not see these pages impacting the site negatively in our current environment. But, you could simply send a few messages out to those linking and request that they remove the links.
Keep a record that you did and send more than one request. At the same time, go out and get a few good links to the same pages to make the weight change a bit toward better links.

If you change the urls of the pages there is no need to change 404. Simply leave it as a search for what you were looking for. Those directories won't be searching. You are correct in not doing redirect involving old urls in this case.

Hope this helps and provides a bit of perspective.

best

Swiftseo

I, personally, would not have two sites with varying domains that are near identical. No matter what the reason, I think there is more negative than positive. I can name multiple reasons for why using this for testing is flawed, first and foremost. 
I would pass on the canonical and instead use a 301 redirect of "testing site" to main site. That way, if there is anything in the way of link juice to pass it gets done. If you need help with how to on 301, there are various places to go or place a question in Q&A.

The main thing you are hurting with this methodology is yourself. You have two sites competing against each other.

hope this helps,

Craig,

Your answer is yes. OK, so both are correct. One mistake I see made is the overuse of the geolocator (Edinburgh). First, you need to insure that in Google + for business you have set up your business in Edinburgh (assuming that is where you are). Not knowing how many pages you will have for bespoke kitchens, I would suggest if you want to include Glasgow and Fife you create separate pages for each of them. This will be more likely to garner traffic from there than having them in places on the site but unfocused.

If your business is in Edinburgh and someone in Edinburgh searches for bespoke kitchens without you having used the geo locator over and over, you will still have a likelihood of showing in the searches. Having the word Edinburgh after bespoke kitchens every time is hard to read and makes the reader want to leave the page. That is not good SEO. Have it once in the title tag (but not everyone unless your brand has Edinburgh) and place it in the URL, the H1 and a couple of times max in the text. You should be fine.

Hope it helps.

LittleBigman

Without a bit more info there is no answer to exactly what the problem was. Given that you mentioned pages, and the last refresh of Panda was on the 18th and effected very few queries, I would guess that it was not (and given the quick reposition).

I would look at my traffic flow in analytics, etc. to see if there is something I could be missing on. Sometimes, even with the best site there will be a traffic drop for a day that goes unexplained. You did not mention how much the rankings changed, domain, etc. so it is hard to tell what could have been the cause. Glad for you it's back.

Robert

Mark,

That will depend on whether or not you place a link back to your site and whether or not they allow it. But, I would be cautious as the many of these are those who are not trying to contact you for great hair products.

Best,

Carrol,

Oh if it were that easy. Being at A+ for the on page is a good start as that, typically, will put you ahead of a lot of competitors. There are a lot of factors that go into who ranks where on page one for example. If after one week you are "stuck" in positions 15 to 20 you are likely on the right track.

Now, you need to look at the other factors that affect what is going on. What types of links do the sites above you have? How does the quality of your content compare to theirs? How long have their domains been established? Do they have exact match domains? Etc.

In SEO, I like to say we strive to be at 100% while understanding that is unattainable. Therefore, we are going to get as close to that as works for the client and the needs of the site. So, what you have to do is understand that there are other factors you must look at. Here is a great infographic from SearchEngineLand with a table of all the factors.

Look through these and you will find bits of knowledge that will assist you. Then, I would suggest that first you go about finding who is linking to your best competitors for the term and see how you can get some links from them. I would also track the traffic coming to the page and see if the CTR is reasonable, are people spending time on the page/site, etc. Every little bit of help will move you closer to your goals.

I hope this makes you feel a bit better about the good work you have already done.

Wayne,

I hate to say it, but it is because like life, Google is not fair... Not that it is their fault, you can only do so much even if you are Google. 
When I went to the site in OSE I was surprised to see what they are getting away with. I cannot suggest to you what to do, but if they were my client I would work on making sure this in some way changes. (Hope I haven't said anything that offends anyone engaged in this type tactic).

Best,

Edit: One question I would have is are they doing the same in PPC? If so, then you really have an actionable issue given the sites are all the same.

You are looking at two different measures. One is PR which is a Google product and the other is domain authority/page authority which was developed by SEOmoz. As such, they are not comparable. Just because google chooses to "punish" a site/directory does not mean that it impacts the way in which moz looks at it.

I hope this assists,

Kaustubh,

If I am forthright, I would say that first you are defending changes. What I would approach the problem from is what can be reverted that would correct your drop. Remember none of us here are your customer/community. We can only speak to what we know or see and as such we have little or no emotional involvement in the site.

I went back to your original question and pulled this:

_"Point To Note: _Since September 4, I've been noticing significant drop in our traffic to the'community' forums. The traffic is down almost 40-50%."

Where does traffic "...to the community forums." come from? Is it direct to that landing page? Or, does it come from the home page?

I am guessing that with Dana and I that we both were assuming the traffic was originating at the home page. (Traffic to our community forums). Unfortunately, I could not see a cached page of the forum for a side by side.

So, unless you can lay it out in more analytical fashion, there is little to offer in the way of assistance. Your changes are likely what caused the drop. That is the only place I can think of to correct it.

Hope it helps.

Kasutubh

I think Dana gives some great places to look. The first place to look from my vantage would be Google Analytics (GA). I would go back to the good old days and start moving forward to find what happened when. Especially if you know you made change one on day one, change two on day four.

That said, I think it is a cautionary to any who are changing site structure/architecture or anything within the realm of UI/UX that results of changes can only be tracked to the degree that a single variant is isolated/isolatable. (Yes, there could be an argument to this-I am speaking broadly).

By making one change at a time, you are able to insure you have no oops moment that is lost in 5 changes of redesign.

I would focus on what most likely effected the ability of the user to get to the site. Did you change meta descriptions, were any outside the site changes made; do you advertise somewhere and now have halted it?

At the end of pondering I keep coming back to the ad changes and am wondering if the look of a month ago and now is so different you are getting people to the site but they are not going deeper (analytics will tell)? OK I have a thought. AH HA:

Using the wayback machine, I looked at home page cache from July vs Now. I like July 100% better. (Dana, don't think it was the tag cloud even though I am not much on them.)

I think you have messed with a UI/UX issue and need to slowly step back. when I look at both pages I just do not like the look or feel of the new. It is sterile, too news oriented. There is not a community feel at all. On July cache I have the FaceBook app showing people who are a part of your community (a good example of this is a site called SEOmoz), below that I have what an engineer said. They get to be involved. I was just looking at wired magazine and I had no sense of community but I did not pick it up for that. Here I came for community, saw a question that intrigued me, liked what Dana was saying and wondered if there was anything I could add. THINK ABOUT IT.

If I had to place a $100 bet right now, it would be that this is where your problem lies.

I hope this provides some direction,

All the best,

As to your 1, I would agree and suggest that it is important on a couple of SEO levels. If you have just updated a story and by virtue of that you have freshened the content. I would want that indexed quickly to move it up if at all possible. However, if you can tell in GWMT that the site is being indexed a couple of times an hour, I am not sure it strengthens your argument.

As to your 2, I would say yes, but if you did a canonical or a 301 on the previous URL - as you should have - it is irrelevant.

Best,

Happy to hear all is well. Good job on the micro data. More should use it.

Robert

Jon

You state you are a news site and you are moving to a new CMS. Assuming the Domain, URL's are the same, I can understand the dev team resistance. This is from WebMaster tools around news sites (bold is mine):

A Google News Sitemap can help you control which content Google News crawls and can speed up the inclusion of your articles in Google News search results. You're welcome to submit your sitemap in your Webmaster Tools account prior to submitting your site for inclusion in Google News. However, only sitemaps associated with an approved site will be crawled without error by Google News.

So, assuming you are already a Google News approved site, you can most likely move forward without immediately submitting a site map. Call me old fashion, but I still think a site map submission is important. But, again, I do get the dev teams resistance. Hope this at least assists your argument.

One added bit of info, You could use a sitemap generator to take a load off of them. Here is a list of many sitemap generators. Since I am not in the dev shop, I cannot recommend any, but I do use the Screaming Frog Spider (never used their SM Generator) This way the Dev team would have a bit less work.

Hope it helps you out a bit,

For me, when it comes to directories, I am very careful not to overdo directories for links (very few period) and with what you are describing, I would not place a link from punished directories. The reasons are obvious. Think of it this way:

If I know you and see you with someone who many say is "not a good person," I may ignore them because I see nothing wrong with you. But, if I then see you with a second or third or fourth person described as not good, I begin to draw a conclusion. I think the links to "not good directories" works the same way in the eyes of search engines.

Good Luck,

Dana

Great and informative question,

Jared

Great Answer

Nakul,

Rocking good answer.

Many use these sites and my experience with their sales staffs is that they can say SEO more times in a minute than anyone I have ever met. Yes, they can have some impact on backlinks, but the vast majority of that impact flows to them.

The biggest problem with these as I see it is that the vast majority of "press releases" are actually flagrant BS ads for a company, etc. So, if you are going to do them, write real press releases and do not let their people interfere. For example, if you are a dentist and there is a new teeth whitener that guards against cavities do not put out a press release about it and how you use it. (Every other dentist will do the same). Dentist Jones announces XYX teeth whitener, blah blah blah... This is the most common PR they all put out. It is of little or no value.

Also, they all ask for $$ up front, which I don't like and then want to control how often you put out a press release which just struck me as odd. IF they were really press releases, how would they be timed?

That is my two cents.

Nile

As an agency we see this with clients from time to time. It sounds like you are doing a lot right to regain position. One thing to look at given you are at ten, is what are your competitors doing who are above you? Have they gained a lot of links, have they got fresher looking web pages, are they more optimized for local or have they gotten more reviews?

For me, the first place I go to improve a client where applicable is google + for business. Then its content, links, architecture, etc. Always making sure we are staying fresh. I don't know that a daily blog is important, but changing, adding, improving content on a weekly to monthly basis definitely is.

Hope this helps,

Red or Blue,

Having not seen Linkdex prior to your answer, I will first say that I have no experience with it.

I went to the site and read a bit of the data then downloaded their "white paper."

I also joined on the free trial and would suggest to Vince that he can do the same. (I like the sites where I don't have to dig out a credit card to try it out for a month and this is one.) NOTE: GeoRanking is not available on the free trial????? What's the point?

Unfortunately, I do not see how this could assist Vince given that the software is geared toward showing you where you rank and not toward showing traffic for the given keywords in a specific industry in individual cities. If, you are doing market research to determine an expansion, you would not have a site up and your competitor ranking in that city cannot be compared to where you are (because you are not there).

I appreciate you providing the info on Linkdex and will try it out for the month. If I am missing something as to how it could be used for the purpose Vince wants, please let me know.

Dan

Depending on your abilities within Analytics/coding, here is the link to Google Developers that explains how to do track multiple sites as if tracking one. 

If you are tracking a single parameter, like visits for example, you could simply download each into a .csv file then aggregate in Excel. Again, this is for less robust needs.

Best,

Vince,

This is an oft asked question and I will give you my best work around. First, there is no really good software I have found that does this for you. (Yes, there are some that say they can...)

What I would do is to utilize the keyword tool in AdWords and use it as follows:  Assuming you sell vegetables, search first on the basic terms you would use and the basic term plus the city you are checking. I live in Houston, so will use that.

Beets

Beets Houston

Fresh Beets

Fresh Beets Houston

farmers markets

farmers markets houston, etc.

For the broader terms like farmers markets, I usually see a number that is large and then a smaller number when the geolocation (Houston) is used. That will allow me to derive a general impression as to the efficacy of a vegetable market in Houston. If I am also seeing Geo Located searches on the more narrow terms, I assume that means more interest in that area.

Hope this helps,

Edit Note: For city to city, if you have a baseline city that is in same general geolocation and you want to see how city A is versus city B, use the same keywords and then append the location and compare A to B. So, for Texas: Austin Farmers Market vs. Houston Farmers Market. If there are 200 monthly searches in Houston and you are thinking of going to Austin, it could be assumed that a result for Austin of equal to or greater than Houston would be favorable given that Austin is smaller. (don't use a city in Texas against a city in New York as the data will likely have a location flavor).

Evers, the good news first - the change is not permanent. Good move on sitemap resubmit. One thing is that it will depend somewhat on how long the noindex was on: If you had a top ranked site in a very competitive vertical and rebuild occurred a year ago it is much more problematic. If it was two weeks ago, it is much less. 
One thing I would look at is the pages indexed in GWMT and see how they look pre change and post to track if you are getting back. (This way if you are not seeing reindexing, you will act faster). Depending on the size of the site, you could also "fetch as Google" for some of the important pages as a way to speed up the indexing of the more significant pages.

I am assuming that if there were url changes you took care of them with 301 or canonical.

Take a breath, but keep an eye on it all.

Robert

Luke,

It sounds like your keywords are around nightlife and the city. So, I would first look to see what people are currently searching on to find your pages now. You can find this in analytics or GWMT. If there are other keywords that are more searched, then you decide what you want as titles.

The Club Nights (does not sound like a term someone uses to search on - but I am in US), and promotions (sounds like it is someone searching for a deal on something) are not really terms to target and should be included in the description as you suggest. But, upcoming events may well be a term someone searches on.

Remember, do the KW research to know what people are looking for and let that drive your actions. You are on the right track though.

Best

ATMOS,

From what you have written, this is what I hear: You have content that is PDF that is accessible as HTML also, you want specific how to examples from start to finish, you desire no references to prior info on moz, and again, a specific start-to-finish example is what you are looking for.

From everything you say here, it is still a bit difficult to discern what you want to accomplish with the content. Is the content a teaching guide for the aesthetic/salon industry and you want it to as many students as possible? You want it in the hands of owners of salons/spas? You want to use it to get traffic to another site that it resides on?

I believe without that info, it is difficult to provide any actionable assistance.

Hope that will help clarify and provide you some guidance.

Robert

Martin

It should be accessed no matter what is placed in the navigation bar. The thing to look at is whether or not you have a preferred domain set in GWMT. (Google Webmaster Tools). To do that you simply go to GWMT, Dashboard, configuration, settings, and set preferred domain as one or the other.

In terms of an "error 301-redirect" I am not sure what type of error you are showing. Typically, any error would be problematic.

Hope this helps,

Robert

Stephen,

Open Site Explorer does not crawl as "deeply" as Google. It hits roughly the top 25% of the web and therefore will not show everything that you will see in GWMT. Obviously, to have that type of depth would require a lot of bandwidth and servers and that is what makes Google, Google.;)

Also, it would depend on when your links were established as it can take up to 60 days for OSE to show the links. One thing you can do is check when the last crawl was by moz and compare that to when the links were created. I believe the last one was Sept. 12.

Here is a post by Rand regarding the August mozscape crawl  which will give you a lot of info as to what is crawled, etc.

Hope it helps,

Arthur,

When you say the drop started on 2/2011 and is now down 90% we are talking about 18 months of tracking. So, for 3/2011 where was unique organic traffic/Google compared to 2/2011? Or, better where was 01/2011 compared to 2/2011. then where was 1/2012 compared to 1/2011? Last, where was 8/2012 compared to 8/2011 and to 7/2012?

That will give you a bit more of a picture as to whether the traffic is dropping gradually or if it is as the result of penalties. You can take the algorithm change dates from moz: (Thanks Keri) and compare them to your traffic at those times. Are you seeing specific dips at those times. So, for Panda one which was in Feb 2011, do you see a specific drop in ranking/traffic?

What you have to watch is if you have a problem that is not the result of a change at Google, and you are blaming Google changes, you will attempt to correct the wrong thing and lose time and business. There are a ton of questions that need to be asked when you are looking at 18 months of decline. I am not sure they can all be asked here, but to the extent that you can provide a bit of direction, I will attempt to provide an answer(s).

Best,

James, 
I noticed no one had even attempted to answer you and it has been 7 hours. I think there are a couple of reasons for this: the technical level required for url rewriting, the vietnamese language makes understanding a little more difficult (and good move on the url format in english), and there is no reason given as to "why" for the rewrite. So, what do you want to accomplish in making this change?

No one wants to give direction that could potentially lead a site like this down the wrong road. From looking at it, you are getting traffic to it and it seems to do well for you. One note, you might want to get some of your bilingual members to assist google in translating vietnamese as I am sure from using Google Translator, they need the help;)

Here is a link to a post in youMoz that appears to have some excellent info on rewrites. Note that you should also read the comments below as they seem to add a lot to what was posted.

I am fully open to any of the more technically skilled to smack this down, but I wanted you to at least have some direction. Note: If this is your first time at this level of technical change, you might want to consider at least hiring someone to assist you who has been down the road before.

All the best, I hope this provides you with at least a bit of assistance,

Robert

PS - If you do not get what you need here, as a pro member you can use a private question straight to moz. As you will notice from many of the associates to moz that answer here, their level of expertise is very good and they have assisted me on several occasions with good direction to a source or other info.

The "rule" has been 100-150 but in this YouTube video Matt Cutts talks about that as being no longer valid. So, the number is somewhere above that, but I look at how does the page look in terms of internal links. Are there a ton of affiliate links, advertising links, etc. 
Your site does not seem to have that.

Arthur,

It appears you understand what Panda was and that it was about content that was too thin, duplicated, too many advertisers on a page, etc. Many think it was about links due to misinformation.

So, I looked through the site and checked several pages for duped content and saw none. Yes, it is a little light, but given the type of site, I don't see a need for a lot more content on product pages, etc. The only thing that requires a bit more checking is the internal linking that you have but from what I can see that is well within limits per page.

So, the question arises: what drop did you see? Did you receive anything in GWMT from Google regarding any type of violation, etc.

Hope this helps a bit

Lindsay,

I am afraid you may be suffering from either Pandaphobia or Penguinphobia and, hopefully you have not yet risen to chronic Googlephobia as it is harder to treat.

Seriously, without being able to know what the site or page is it is next to impossible to tell what is affecting the page. I will tell you that with newer pages big ranking swings are not uncommon and that you have to monitor it over a couple of weeks.

One thing you can do to help any ranking page is to be sure to maintain its relevance with a link from a blog (even internal from your own site), add a bit of content or change it up a bit (caveat of remember you don't want to do something that changes it wholesale), add or change an image, etc. Here is an example:

We have a client site that is very narrow and has about 6 pages. One of the key pages fell to page two in Google for the key term. I had an article written on that term, about one paragraph, we added it to the mid copy portion of the page and within about two weeks, they were back on page one.

I will caution you that my anecdote is "correlation does not equal causation" sensitive, but I think it has an effect because we create a lot of content for clients and see the effect it has.

If you can send info on page, I can look deeper, but I understand if there are reasons you can't.

best

Pravin,

Think about it this way: If a low ranking "carried over" none of us would ever be able to increase rankings. Especially those of us in agencies who go into large sites that cannot be rebuilt at this time. So, don't worry about that.

A couple of things are these: Redo the content and if the site has a blog, feature some aspect of that page in the blog and link back so that someone reading the blog who might not go to the page again sees it, they can go to it from the link.

Then, if you can change an image or  add to the page in some small way each month, do that.

If the other on page is good, you will likely see a rise. Yes, still do work on getting more links, etc.

Hope this saves you a bit of work.

Ryan,

This is excellent and clear:

"The message Google is sending is very clear: stop building links and start earning them."

As to expecting Penguin to keep improving over time, Google has already said it will, just like Panda.

There are a ton of ways to earn links, the first is to create great content that people want to link to. Look at how Google News works in terms of ranking articles. One of the SEO variables considered most valuable by those using Google News per Search Engine Land survey was cites (links) from other high authority Google News sources. Those sources don't link unless it is quality content.

Great point.