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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?

Hi Ty, I must admit, I had problems following you properly.

If I understood correctly. You're simply redirecting from /old to /new

However, you renamed old to old2

If that is correct, then the answer is no, there will be no issues with renaming the old url to old2.

You could also completely delete old2 and it will still work. The server doesn't check for the existence of the page, before it does the redirect.

I have a question though, why did you create new pages and not just improve the content on the existing page?

That's true Ryan I guess it is coding related really.

Issues like this are a real pain in the ass. And most people don't even check WMT to realise the issues exist. TBH, I don't check as often as I should.

1.6 million links, from 224 root domains, means that some or many of those domains contain links site wide. i.e in their sidebars, footers or even main navigation.

So basically you have 224 websites linking to you, but between those websites, they're sending you 1.6 million links.

This is itself could be a problem, especially if the anchor text for a lot of your links, is over optimised and not very well distributed throughout your pages.

Take a look at the 224 websites linking and figure out which are likely to be causing a problem under Penguin.

If it has inbound links, I would 301, assuming the topic is at least the same.

If it has no inbound links, I would probably delete it and allow the page to 404.

It seems webmasters keep creating new pages on the same topic, rather than improving the content on the older page. It doesn't make sense.

Hi Ben, the titles don't effect how things are linked internally, that's all dealt with in other ways.

I could of course roll back the titles to exactly how they were before. But as I'm changing them, I just wanted to ensure they were as optimal as possible.

Thanks

Thanks EGOL, I appreciate your kind words.

Gavin it could be an error, or it's just talking about your domain as a whole. Either way, the 112 is the number that's most likely correct. I cannot imagine you'd have 3,164 links on a page.

A simple test, would be to view another page. Does the 3,164 figure change? I'd fathon a guess, that it will stay the same.

Find which of the domains are linking to you so aggressively, are they using overly optimised anchor text? It could be that you've been a victim of negative SEO.

Regardless of what some SEO's will tell you, it's negative SEO is very real. Google is NOT smart enough to know whether you paid for the link, or a competitor did.

Hi Sarah, just a thought, rather than looking at your competitors pages to see what they're doing, why not look at what you're not doing.

What can you do, to add more value for your visitors. User reviews, videos etc etc.

In terms of content, are your product descriptions the same as your competitors? If so, Google will be viewing both pages similarly and then something tips the balance. It can be inbound links, extra perceived value or even internal architecture. Perhaps their internal linking is better?

Spamming with <h>tags isn't the best strategy.</h>

Do you have a URL we can look at to compare?

It's surprising the lengths some companies go to, or maybe not.

What's your relationship like with the client? Who are they blaming for the drop?

I would offer to get to the bottom of what's going on, find out what the competitor SEO company have been up to (if anything), diagnose the reasons behind the drop and fix them.

Glad to have helped Gavin, I hope you manage to find those links causing the problems.

Good luck!