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Good morning SEOMoz. I have a huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages.

The websites theme is mobile phone downloads. I want to create a better URL structure.

Currently an example url is /wallpaper/htc-wildfire-wallpapers.html

My issue with this, first and foremost is it's a little spammy, for example the fact it's in a wallpaper folder, means I shouldn't really need to be explicit with the filename, as it's implied.

Another issue arises with the download page. For example /wallpaper/1234/file-name-mobile-wallpaper.html

Again it's spammy but also the file ID, is at folder level, rather than within the filename. Making the file deeper and loses structure.

I am considering creating sub domains, based on model, to ensure a really tight silo. i.e htc.domain.com/wallpaper/wildfire/ and the download page would be htc.domain.com/wallpaper/file-name-id/

But due to restrictions with the CMS, this would involve a lot of work and so I am considering just cleaning up the url structure without sub domains.

/wallpaper/htc/wildfire/ and the download page would be /wallpaper/file-name-id/

What are your thoughts?

Somebody suggested having the downloads in no folder at all, but surely it makes sense for a wallpaper, to be in a wallpaper folder and an app to be in an app folder? If they were not in a folder, I'd need to be more explicit in the naming of the files.

Any advice would be awesome.

That link is really bothering me. I have never personally used that dirty piece of software, and I've contacted the guy who owns the website several times asking him to remove that link.

It appears other links have been built without my knowledge but nothing OTT. So I don't think that's the issue. The drop on Jan 20th is just too much of a coincidence.

I've lost over $20k. Fortunately Adsense ecpm is a lot higher, after decreasing bounce rate etc.

Despite how it may appear, I've actually got quite a lot of experience fixing Google penalties. This is the first time I've ever been stumped and with it being my own site and getting desperate, I've made some choices against my better judgement.

I've also hired a couple of other SEO's, which is actually how I ended up on a wild goose chase, trying to combat Panda, when I was certain it wasn't the issue.

I did submit a reconsideration request and got the automated response that there was no manual penalties. I may take the loss and remove the ads for a week, at the end of the day, I need to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks a lot for all your input Ryan.

If the site is based in the UK for example, it's most likely to show on the 25th. Looking at the back link profile, you can see why penguin would hit. I'm not denying their aren't a ton of on page optimisations that can't be made, but overlooking the actual cause of the drop, would be pretty stupid.

Thanks that helps a lot. You've definitely been hit by the Penguin update on the 24th. There is a steep decline in traffic on that day and the trend continues.

If you look at your backlinks, most of them are for the term "get your photos on canvas" and I appreciate that is your brand name, I don't think this term would be used as much as it has, naturally.

You need to analyse your backlinks, the ones you've requested your friends to ad in their sidebars, footers, etc etc and tone down the anchor text.

I've not looked at the site, so I'm not sure if there are improvements that can be made their too, but the backlinks are likely your issue here.

Hi Ryan, the site was hitting 30,000 uniques a day. The pages are very image heavy and also serve tens of thousands of downloads a day. We have 2 quad core servers, with 28GB ram. 1 is a dedicated web server and the other dedicated SQL. We also have a dedicated, but much less powerful backup server and finally 20TB traffic allowance.

The blog page in question, wasn't supposed to target any terms. It was to boost morale while traffic is down. I appreciate I could have still targeted terms but I figured I'd just tone things down a little. Most of the other pages are highly targeted. http://www.tehkseven.net/theme/nokia-c3-themes.html for example, is targeting Nokia C3 Themes.

The download page is currently a complete, utter mess. It was previously very similar to this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rockstar.gta3&feature=top-paid#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDIwNiwiY29tLnJvY2tzdGFyLmd0YTMiXQ..

But after losing so much traffic on January 20th, I've ripped it inside out. I removed the large intro banner that members usually spent hours designing, moved text around the page, moved the ad up, down, left and right. It's rather sad and my members aren't pleased that the pages which display their work, have been destroyed, but they are fortunately supportive and understanding of the situation.

I need to start putting it back together and pay extra attention to keeping the ad below the fold, while focusing on my users. As much as I want to fix this issue, destroying my website in the process, isn't what I want to do.

Our bounce rates are 20-30%, which are among the best in the niche, we average 12 page views and 8-9 minutes per visit. Yet none of this seems to matter, all Google cares about is this bloody advert.

I'll checkout the Wikipedia page, thanks.

Ray do you have analytics installed? Could you provide a screenshot of April traffic?

Hi Ryan, I must ask what you mean by "unfocused" content. Do you mean unfocused in that the subject matter for a theme is unrelated to the next? Or do you have an issue with the architecture of the website? Cheers

Hi Ryan, I'm not looking for confirmation, I think it's a given, that ATF is the update that hurt us. Sorry for lack of info, finally at a PC now.

I agree regarding the alt text of the attachments. We are using invision power board and on the attachments system they use terrible alt text. It's likely possible to hack though. In this niche, the top sites all lack textual content an I believe Google is smart enough to understand that.

What I was hoping for, is for somebody to be able to look at the page with the ad and say "oh yes, there's your issue, I've seen this before'. Wishful thinking?

The drop in traffic is site wide and the drop in ranking appears to be across the board too. The drops aren't typical of a normal penalty, we've not been knocked back several pages, just all pages dropped several spots, which has had a devastating effect.

It's not any specific content type, or section of the site. The entire site was hit late Jan 19th, GMT, which would be midday US. If there's any information I can provide, that you feel may assist you in offering help, please ask and I'll provide it.

Hi Ryan, thanks for taking the time to look, once again replying via my iPhone. So please excuse lack of formatting. Ad is on the download page, click any item in the gallery. Prior no major changes other than an update in the cms which did introduce a couple of duplicate content issues that were quickly fixed. But since I have noindexed a lot of content and traffic has spiralled. My gut tells me that this ATF update works on a sliding scale, based on the ratio of pages with the offending ads. My noindexing pages without the ad, has increased that ratio.

Grr seomoz isn't mobile friendly. It's stripped all the formatting. Sorry for the long sentances.

That's nonsense. Talk to Google about what? The automatic penalty that was applied? That apparently they cannot do anything about.

It's nice that you presume those that have been hit, have done something wrong. It seems common among those who have managed to dodge Panda, to presume they safe and that the rest of the world has done something to deserve their fate.

In my niche, it's image heavy and low on textual content. This is by nature and not due to any wrong doing. My user metrics are amazing and yet my website was hit by Panda recently.

I don't want to come across as being harsh, but I do feel your response was a little presumptuous and insensitive.

Might be worth bringing this thread to your clients attention, to show them that the tactic the other company used to falsely gain their trust, that it isn't unheard of and is in fact common practice.

Then diagnose the issues, come up with a solid plan and offer to bring their SERPs back up to the point they were, before the new client come along.

Reinforce that for years, you proved yourself again and again and no sooner had this new company come along, their rankings drop.

To be honest, if the client still cannot see the light, walk away knowing you've done all you can. Their fate will be in the hands of the dodgy SEO company.

They'll come crawling back some day, asking for you to fix their mess.

Rankings drop and traffic increases, most logical explanation is because you're ranking for more keywords or other sources are sending traffic. Check analytics, see how people are finding you, for what keywords etc.

If you have no sudden drops in traffic, it's unlikey the issue is Penguin.

However, moving forward, buying cheap links, from spammy sources, is building a foundation that won't get you far.

Before building links, do as much research as you can. You need a solid strategy to achieve long lasting ranks and avoid penguin.

Google treats sub domains, almost as different domains.

I would keep sitemaps relative to their own subdomain.

http://www.google.com/ Tribute to Steve Jobs on the homepage of Google.

I couldn't help but check to see whether it was do follow.

RIP Steve Jobs, a true visionary and pioneer.

Can you give an exact date that traffic dipped?

Because late April there were several changes:

Panda 3.5 — April 19, 2012

Penguin — April 24, 2012

Panda 3.6 — April 27, 2012

The best starting block is to know which beast you're dealing with. It maybe none of the above, but I think it's important to know whether any of the above, effected you.

Then we can try to unravel the mystery.

It's a pretty terribly thought out tool and not at all helpful.

It definitely needs some work.

I just get a massive list of links to the homepage.

Ideally, it would group them and state how many times each anchor text is used etc.

Hi Roberto, to conserve your back link profile, you must conserve your websites archetecture. Most importantly your URL structure.

If you have a page on blue widgets, /category/blue-widgets.html that has 10 back links and your new url structure is /category/blue-widgets/ then you'll lose the back links and history. /category/blue-widgets/ will be seen as a brand new page.

Wordpress has various permalink options, but whether any of those fit in with your current structure is another thing.

This will mean you'll have to do 1 of 2 things.

1. Create a custom solution, to ensure url structure is kept the same.
2. Create 301 redirects from old pages to new pages.

Both solutions will work, but number 1 is definitely most preferable. But if all else fails, number 2 is at least going to forward the link juice to your new pages.

Hope that helps

Paul

Hello Aidan, welcome to SEOMoz.

As with all link building, keep it natural. Avoid link pages.

Only link to relevant websites within your niche. When you do, it's best to mention them within a blog post or similar. I'd avoid sidebars and footers.

Google will only have an issue, if it appears that you're trying to be manipulative. I personally also link with brand name, rather than targeting keywords.

Hope that helps.

Hi Gavin, I assume you're talking about the moz toolbar? I've not used it for a number of years.

However, from what you've said, is it possible that the data in the tool bar i.e 3,000 internal links is looking at the domain as a whole and when you click page attributes, it's figure is relative to the page?