Todd - Thanks for your message.  On the bright side - a quick response to my request. Today I received a message back that Google removed the manual penalty for outbound links.  Apparently they agreed with us.

Again, many thanks. M

Todd - Great answer. I do appreciate the time you've taken to compile this list. I hope I can reaward a best answer because this deserves one.

Frustration is putting it mildly but thanks for the empathy. You wouldn't know this but I've actually torn down the entire site and rebuilt it trying to find these alleged "unnatural" and "manipulative" outbound links. I removed/disabled registration on the directory for many months and that had no effect. I've killed much of the income stream and have had people question why so many parts are disabled for so long to the detriment of the reputation of the site. I've invested a colossal number of hours reading, learning and inhaling SEO. The question unfortunately becomes whether to abandon a great site and many years of work because Google has us perpetually in the penalty box and the cost of trying to guess in the dark why this happened is far above any potential benefit. Anyway - I'll answer your chart:

1. Great suggestion: Already done but I'll run it again for the last time.

2. Will do although I know that the one way out of the site to an affiliate contains all nofollow links and I confirmed this numerous times. I'll kill that revenue stream and deindex about 80 pages to so we can kill almost every outbound link, even the pages with nofollow links too.

3. No warnings in GWT except the single one years ago about unnatural outbound links. GWT did let us know once that there was a "big traffic change" for a "top URL" on our site. No kidding Google. That's what happens when you slam a site with a manual penalty, lol.

4. We have virtually no widgets on the CMS. Most are basic functional, created by donnacha at Wordpress (who is beyond reputable), custom developed or absolutely clean.

5. Every business listing is noindex and nofollow (except mine, which has one link on one page to my own personal blog - I'll kill that one too.) If you look in a search, everything directory page is robots.txt blocked as well as noindexed. But I'm going to delete every single entry in our directory - and that's lots of them. We'll kill it again to prove the point.

6. I don't know what you're linking to. Our publishing section is dead because of my hunting this issue instead of launching yet another part of the site. I've had to cut the amount of content produced by well over 50% just to deal with this. There are only 4-5 authors on the site at the moment, almost all work is mine. None of the authors are follow links and I am absolutely sure.

7. There are virtually no website urls in the profiles in the forum. I disabled that ability and regularly clean out every profile from links (e.g. home page) using mysql queries. Nobody except super moderators can have a signature. Mine is an internal nofollow link. If there is another one or two, both are nofollow but I'll kill that link as well for this, much to my supermod's likely chagrin.

The thing that kills me is just finding out that I've made a colossal effort chasing a possible algorithm issue to find out this is a manual action - and nobody will tell me how they could possibly think I'm engaged in an outbound links scheme. So it goes. Speaking of which, I'll let you know how it goes. Many thanks.

Todd - Thanks for your response.

The very troublesome aspect of this is the manual action taken by Google about something someone may have been clearly mistaken about. They have forgotten about it and the issue hasn't resolved over time like Matt Cutts insists it should as per his blog. But the kicker is this -- if more than a dozen very smart and experienced SEOs, webmasters of very large community sites and even people in the Google Webmaster Help forum can't find any reasonable problem, then we can't assume that the webmaster is always to blame.

As of right now, the only links any of us have identified are three links - yes, three links. Let's say there were seven just to be on the safe side. Let's be reasonable... do I really need to explain this? If this happened to your client's site, you probably would be thinking "are you kidding me?"

Google needs to explain exactly what issue it was that one of its employees found that was reason enough to manually decide give us a prolonged prison sentence. Until we spot truly "wrongful conduct" there isn't any crime for which to ask forgiveness. All I'd be doing is tap dancing about a handful of links that no sober person would confuse as a questionable or irregular link building scheme. I want to know what will have lifted this manual penalty, even if it's "oops".

Thanks guys, I thought those 3 links were nofollowed. I'm getting rid of our_ one singe page_ that gives credit to the three companies that help us that have a total of three outbound hyperlinks. It's absolutely insane to even think this is the problem among 100,000+ pages of unique content, carefully moderated and created over 15 years. This is why Google owes us a full and complete explanation for the manual penalty, which appears to have lasted for a very long time.

If this is considered problematic, Google might as well penalize 99.99% of websites, including moz.com - all dofollow, lol!!!

http://moz.com/community/recommended

It would appear this "manual action" against our site is an error that has never been corrected automatically and plagued us for a long, long time. I'll await to hear what Google says if they eventually get around to reconsidering our site. Thank you guys for scouring this large site in all directions and confirming what I've found and now making the argument airtight.

Sheldon - Thanks for the suggestion. I actually posted in the Google Webmaster Help Forum on this issue several months ago - both the zero page rank and loss of all +1s. The best anyone could find (from some smart SEO experts there who were generous with their time) were the handful of links I mentioned and nobody had answers. This new manual actions information from Google helps greatly in an unfortunate way - it seems to confirm an ongoing anomaly that appears to be a manual Google action for outgoing links that has never been lifted. The only warning I've ever received was about outgoing links from my site - and that was a long time ago.

I appreciate you guys giving the look over that it appears everyone has confirmed independently. Perhaps it's long overdue to camp out on Matt Cutts' doorstep, lol.

Sheldon - I will look into the redirect issue. Regarding the directory, no, it is not fully deindexed although virtually every entry is deindexed. Search for any name (other than one) and you won't find any of them. Robots.txt blocks those pages and every page has a "noindex" on it. But most importantly... there are virtually no outbound inks. None!

Yes... this is a puzzling issue that has hit us for many months and nobody has been able to solve it. There is a zero or no page rank at all on every page in the site - thousands of them. The primary domain was a 6.

Anders - thanks for spotting that but it's not the problem. That was installed 2 days ago - actually, not even that long ago. The error message predates that plugin. In addition, I think those are only 10 pages in total right now -- but thank you for reminding me that this is still there.

Apparently there is a discussion on it at Wordpress.com. Incredibly devious.

Anders - Thanks. Yes, I used Xenu. The penalty is on the entire site.

Dates of noticeable traffic changes:

• Mid June 2011 (Panda - extremely significant)
• Mid August 2011 (significant)
• Mid March 2012 (slight)
• End April/Beginning May 2012 (significant)
• Mid August 2012 (somewhat significant)

The only warning was practically the same warning a while ago. That's it, nothing else. An earlier reconsideration request back in August 2011 resulted in no response from Google and was done because actions taken to combat Panda as recommended did almost nothing.  All concerning outbound links from the site. Even back then we didn't have any link exchanges or anything that seemed remotely related to the warning.

The only thing that helped us - removing Google Analytics for 1.5 month's time. During that time traffic increased noticeably and traffic grew until the End of April issue.

Todd - Thanks for your response:

1 - Yes, I can confirm that the message is from my site, which is what puzzles me. Google just released its manual actions field in Webmaster Tools and that was my first experience with it today. I suspect that this action may have been taken a very long time ago but let's hold off on that for now:

Unnatural links from your site
Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes

2 - There is only one directory on the site. http://legal.nu/kdlu

Apparently Google suppresses some of the results (and it recognizes robots.txt blocks the pages) but has included about 10K entries in its index if you add the additional results. Every page has a noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file in the subdomain also has a disallow. Regardless, there are virtually no outbound links. Other than 2 entries, most do not have outbound links to websites and, if they do, every link is nofollow. So I don't see any outbound there.

3 - There were 2 personal websites and 1 partner website - yes, a total of 3 sites - that's it. They were removed at least 2 months ago. They represented my professional personal blog, the website of our development company and the website of our hosting company. This was the most anyone could guess that might even be an issue so it was removed entirely, as innocuous as it seemed.

4. I have no idea how long but it could be a penalty since Panda. Panda came and virtually nothing made a difference. You could add good original content and there would be marginal gains although Bing and Yahoo reported gains. The odd part is that the directory grew in traffic while the best content on the site dropped. Thus the whole directory was deindexed. Go figure.

Other information:

Ranking drops - about 5 months ago all page rank from the site went to zero or unable to be ranked and now only two pages are ranked. Every +1 on the site was gone. http://legal.nu/kdlv - check this link. It gets a good number of page views every month. The pagerank cannot be determined. The site used to rank very, very well. Several pages lost their Facebook Likes too but not all across the board like the Google +1s.

That's about all I know. Backlinks disavowed (some are the remnant of 15 years on the web, scrapers, people with blogrolls of sites, some others were there and not our doing but we disavowed those that were gone, which was only a few hundred entries in total.)

I can't find the outbound links that it appears Google may have penalized us for a long time. Neither has anyone else, at least nothing substantial and most benign at best. Thanks for the look over.

So I was just surprised by officially being one of the very few to be hit with the manual penalty from Google "unnatural links from your site." We run a clean ship or try to. Of all the possible penalties, this is the one most unlikely by far to occur. Well, it explains some issues we've had that have been impossible to overcome.

We don't have a link exchange. Our entire directory has been deindexed from Google for almost 2 years because of Panda/Penguin - just to be 100% sure this didn't happen. We removed even links that went even to my own personal websites - which were a literal handful. We have 3 partners - who have nofollow links and are listed on a single page.

So I'm wondering... does anyone have any reason to understand why we'd have this penalty and it would linger for such a long period of time? If you want to see strange things, try to look up our page rank on virtually any page, especially in the /gui de/ directory. Now the bizarre results of many months make sense. Hopefully one of my fellow SEOs with a fresh pair of eyes can take a look at this one.

http://legal.nu/kc68

I can no longer reply to this 3+ year old thread since I am not a "pro" member but figured I'd update this topic with an edit, since it is available.

First -- It turned out that my analysis, observations and conclusions were correct. While there are a good amount of well intended and quality suggestions, none of the above made any difference and were not the crux of the matter. I cannot and won't disclose the issue here but it was remedied.

Second - It was disappointing that, in spite of the fact that I cloaked my domain for the obvious purpose, others did not follow. Instead they used the domain so that it can be indexed by search engines. I hope they can and choose to edit their posts and that a respectful practice here can be maintained. My original response remains below.

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I do believe that any of these companies can fix your website site. I know that because I have worked with many of them and these are people who get results time and time again....I can tell you most likely they're going to charge you for such assessment it would be in the thousands most likely....Now normally and it's bad practice to guarantee anything in stringent opposition because Google can make a change overnight and nullify everything....I can tell you without a doubt that these guys can fix your site.

My website isn't broken.  I do think you're making some assumptions. If SEO was pure cause and effect and my PR is zero everywhere because of something I did wrong per se, then all these SEO companies will be glad when I pay them after my PR returns to a 6.  You are overlooking one big possibility - that some sites just may fall inside the "acceptable margin of error" and nothing you can do will make a dent despite every SEO swearing it will. It may also be a mistake which does happen among a multitude of variables. Hence you have to carefully screen whom you work with and come as prepared as possible so that every dollar goes right into providing the highest ROI. Site owners are responsible for doing their part too. What's disturbing is that this such an extreme PR death penalty that on another very well known site everyone was swearing I MUST be selling links and Google knew it somehow... as that is the penalty.

I'm not knocking your host just letting you know that anyone who specializes in WordPress and only WordPress knows a lot more about it than the guys who post everything... now hosted on Zippykid with dual CDN's F5 load balancers, private cloud architecture with a Cisco enterprise-level firewall along with the option for a free optimization every site is optimized by Net DNA or Google engineer designed around the Nginx Web server instead of Apache the amount of memory saved his incredible.

It's clear you know a lot about the subject - truly. Ideally, I agree. I'll give it some thought about moving my two dedicated servers but that is a lot of work and $$$. Right now Google has me needlessly chasing a ghost since nobody can point a finger at why I've received a drastic result usually only reserved for the most serious offenders. When we solve that, perhaps we might have money to tinker with perfection. (When I say I have some understanding, I was directly involved in creating and running a site that had to handle 10 billion annual page views. Your suggestions are excellent for fine tuning.)  FTUm Webpagetest just reported that an article loads a page in 2.5 seconds first view and a mere second and a half for repeat. That's quite good.

If somebody guarantees that they can fix something on your website in order to make it more search engine friendly that I could see a possible guarantee....I know that unless continuous work is done to keep Google happy essentially campaign then a ongoing relationship that keeps your website to where you are making a positive ROI otherwise it should really not worth it right?

Read what you're writing to me here. In your enthusiasm, you keep saying how these companies will fix my problem. From my perspective, that's why on earth Google still has my entire site stuck at a PR 0. What you're saying now is that for a hefty fee of several thousand dollars, someone will fix errors on my site which include many cosmetic ones that I really don't care so much about if they will make a marginal difference. The real problem I have in choosing people to work with is that in this industry (and I'm not saying you), there is a tendency not to take a look at the problem and provide a reasonable estimate. It's about finding one or two items that are technically wrong and then hypothesize to a client why they could need to bill hundreds of work hours just to fix them all because anything is possible, Google obsesses about this and that, etc.

I've been looking to invest in a long term relationship doing SEO and very importantly, SEM. But what I needed to know before I speak with anyone is whether (and why) nobody can even remotely identify the major area that resulted in the Google PR death penalty. If most said "I can see that the X area is the one where most of your problems are" then I'd be able to have much more confidence that hiring an SEO who agrees and works on remedying X will provide the best chances for the recovery. As of right now, all I'm hearing is that I need to spend thousands on an assessment and only then I might need to spend many more thousands on a crapshoot to see what works by tidying up everything. That's my hesitation. I'm writing to ask Matt Cutts if Google has a scholarship program, lol. I'll eventually choose one but the fact that there is no concensus at all on some good signs of how 17 years of work was reversed to PR 0 or less in one day is very disconcerting.

Want to Improve your Website but don’t know where to Start?
https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/
Regarding your robots.txt
I used a tool that pulls any robot text on the website sometimes it's a more than one place for instance somebody can putt two plug-ins that each control the same function robots.txt in this case... I also think the site map is set up incorrectly it should just be simply one index sitemap_index.XML I don't know that you even need one for your form however that's something I would needs more time on. However I would ideally put into the same index.

I appreciate all the info. You could be right and will need to rereview it all. FYI, all the robots.txt files are generated by (drum roll please) Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. It's an amazing tool. The reason for the multiple sitemaps is due to multiple blogs with each one generated by the tool. On the surface, I'm told that there is nothing wrong with that and Google specifically provides you with a tool to submit each sitemap you have.

Thanks for the explanation about the robots.txt issue. I don't disagree with you there and am familiar with it. One problem also is that Google doesn't document when it provides data that they know is wrong or, more accurately phrased, not properly identified. For example, much of what you see was an attempt to rid myself of numerous 404s I'd see in Webmaster tools. After wasting months of time someone informed me of a Google rep who explained that Google doesn't necessarily crawl the 404s it reports that it crawled on a recent date. Why this isn't in documentation is beyond me but at least I stopped trying to mess with the robots.txt to try to stop the spider from reporting it spidered successfully non-existent directories.

I will send you a private message and the choice is yours I would strongly suggest using one of the companies I suggested. you can also get Yoast to look over your site for $1100 and tell you what's wrong.

Joost is awesome. I should have had him do it long ago when he offered me the review at a discount before everything totally exploded for them, lol. I still may contact him and had considered doing. However, I didn't want to waste his valuable time and my money on a report that might only provide him with time to point out all the obvious things I should have seen by expending just a modicum of time. I wanted to get the site cleaned up so that when I hired someone, he/she could use that same block of time to provide a much higher level and useful review. And once I get that high level review, I can use the remaining money on recurring work so that my SEO/SEM is doing the more results oriented work they want to be doing and I, as a client, will feel like I'm really getting good value for the money. As I said, even clients have to get their act together if they want to be able to honestly appraise the value of what their SEO consultant is doing for them.

I will do this if you would like please feel free to call me tomorrow I have an appointment at 11 o'clock Eastern time I'm not looking to try to get business trust me however I feel that when people discuss things over the phone they tend to get worked out much faster than any other method.

It's always awkward in this position so don't sweat it.  You've given a lot of your time here. I know there is some altruistic motive. There is nothing wrong with hoping to land a client as well who will be appreciative of generosity and willingness to be the first to help reassure that you know you can do the job and prove a little faith on your own time. Thanks again, much appreciated and will also respond to you off-forum as well.

Thomas - thank you for your very sincere words. They are much appreciated.

_I know Matt and could understand where he was coming from. __I am not in any way trying to be confrontational I simply believe _**from my many years of SEO that while somebody who has then a part of your niche in the past or still is may have more insight into your day-to-day business however when it comes to how websites deal with Google it has never mattered at all whether or not the person actually has worked in the industry In which the website focuses on. **I think you're right if one party says red any other said blue sometimes green wood be the answer however it is not the norm.

I truly appreciate what you're trying to say - truly. But again your still not seeing the subtle but very important point I've been making. From many years in business I've come to learn (not always the easy way) that it is 100% necessary to accept the fact that you will have blind spots and ask questions so  you can identify them and learn how to deal with them.

I'm glad that you and Matt were willing to take some time to do a quick "review at a glance" of my site. Inherent in a free review (thank you again) is that you can't afford to fully concentrate and digest more complex sites as you would in a paid consultation. It's totally understandable you might gloss over something and miss the significance. I reminded Matt that I've been around a long time so that if he saw something that looked preposterous, e.g. that I'd be stupid enough to plagiarize content word for word, he should question me first instead of implying that I'm just not versed well enough in SEO to appreciate the implications. Here's a hypo that is right on point. Being a cardiologist doesn't make me know much more than the basics about podiatry. What if there was a 30 page podiatry guide every specialist made available online? Then all of you are in the same boat, it's a zero effect on SEO versus your competitors and the content isn't plagiarized at all. Matt didn't answer what he was looking at but, if it was a word for word copy of something he found on a non-scraped site it's almost certainly in a separate subdomain that has some public domain resources. However, it all looks very much like the rest so I'd recognize it instantly but you guys wouldn't.

Believe me I did not mean to make that personal and I know that you want what is best for your site and you have every right to question people's opinions. I wholeheartedly apologize for my remarks if they offended you in any way.I'm happy to move on and continue helping you find a solution if you would like me to.

First - thank you very much for your very generous words. Do know that I never once took anything personally. I totally appreciate what you guys do and the time YOU spent on your post specifically. Totally forgotten here and I'll get to the good stuff in the next post. These forums are mostly filled with tense people with problems and unfortunately much of the time it's people that don't want to accept obvious problems, e.g. you're fortunate to rank well for SEO spun content in the poker niche.

_ I have to agree with Matt on this one for a few reasons. His niche is search engine optimization I respect that you've been running your own site for 15 years and I think what's being missed here  is Matt is giving you a a lot of his time and resources to look into. I would be spending my time looking at the robots.txt it's a nightmare Yoast suggests using this for WordPress _

Thomas - thank you for taking some of your valuable time to post as Matt did twice. I don't understand why you're under the impression that I'm not appreciative, which I will say yet again, of course I am thanking you guys. It's not your jobs to help me out. This is not being missed.

I will confess being a little frustrated. To repeat what I have tried to express - If we are looking at a problem and you say that you see green but I say blue, we need to figure out the reason for that discrepancy before we can talk about a solution, right? All I've done (stating my experience) is kindly request that you guys assume that I have a good amount of knowledge in this area, despite the fact that I fully understand and appreciate that this is your core competence. That's not lost on me.

So I am in total agreement with you that the robots.txt file would be a total "nightmare" - if it was the same as what you've posted, which it is not. I cannot account for whether it's being seen wrong or your extraction method isn't pulling the file correctly. Here it is:

vBulletin forum sitemap

Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/forums/xmlsitemap.php

WP

Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/guide/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/articles/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/journal/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/review/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/daily/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/log/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/app/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/jobs/sitemap_index.xml

Support desk to be added

User-agent: *
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: exabot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: gigabot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

User-agent: JikeSpider
Disallow: /

User-agent: YoudaoBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BoardReader
Disallow: /

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Yoasts gets 1 million visitors a month and he only needs this

I love Yoast and Joost is a very nice guy and quite witty! But I'm assuming you realize that there are many difference between my site and Yoast, not the least of which is a very large forum and other scripts. I much appreciate your explanation of the Wordpress portion of the robots.txt in the Codex. So while I understand that what you've proposed is an improvement, what is it that you're trying to say here? No disrespect, just not sure what you're suggesting.

_ every one of them would be able to solve your problem. It's most likely that you're blocking the search engines in some form or combination of many things but it's not an impossibility to fix. If you believe spending a few thousand dollars on something that you've worked 15 years for is to much I don't know what to tell you._

You state great certainty that any of them would fix the problem. Would that mean that these SEO consultants would be paid part after completion of the fix and the problem solved? If so, it's a no brainer and I'd hire them immediately since the return on investment pays for continued investment. But I will tell you that from my experience most spoke with same certainty of fixing the problem as you do along with great projections but they didn't reflect that same degree of certainty when it came time to talk about billing.

I certainly do need the SEO/SEM help and have been looking for it. If Matt was available, he'd probably be ideal since he's already familiar with what I do and the niche. Finding someone who is honest and has experience in creating long term relationships that work isn't easy in this business. What I am trying to do is to get my ducks in a row so that the work that needs to be done isn't elementary but that which is about moving the dial. I'm willing to put out the money with the right group. The choices are more difficult than you realize. Anyways, thanks for sharing your opinion and knowledge.

_Fact: I graduated law school in 2002. I can read your articles just fine... When I said your articles were being spun, I did what most half-intelligent SEOs do and copied text in quotes. I'm not guessing at this. I didn't say it because it sounded like something SEOs say.  I put sentences into Google in quotes. It returns exact matches - you don't need to have a copy of Black's on your desk to understand that. _

As I asked, what sentences are you referring to? What pages? While I appreciate you went to law school, ran a similar site, etc. it has no bearing on the fact that I _know _that I wrote my own articles. When you tell me that my articles are copies of Black's and all spun - that is incredibly insulting and embarrassing... and it's a wrongful assumption. It's possible you might not realize that you are referring to the dictionary subdomain rather than the guide subdirectory. If so, then we can get both of ourselves on the same page and discuss how this may or may not be a problem at all.

I sorted your OpenSiteExplorer link export by Anchor text, removed 10 or so links of the top 50 and this is what we find...

OK. This is more useful. Thanks, I appreciate it. There's no way this alone should destroy the entire site's PR but it's not so trivial. It ticks me off that someone would do this and it will have to be disavowed and I'll do what I can to have some of these things taken down. We already caught about half of the list you've got up and disavowed them and sent takedowns. I'll have them look again in another tool and don't think (hope) that there are too many more. Disappointing.

_Fact: Your site has duplication issues.  This is a fact. Somewhere in this mess is your "atomic bomb."  _

It would appear you didn't click through any of the links. If you did you'd realize that it's an RSS feed for one article and the title and sentence will appear on a few other pages on the site. For example, the home page of the journal has the title "Gangnam" and the excerpt. You also got the article page itself. You also got the home page which has the titles of the latest articles in each section. This isn't an atomic bomb because at one time we might be talking about 20 articles in total whose titles and 2 sentence excerpts appear as a teaser on the site. You may not have realized this.

_Look at the results Google returned. 1, 2, 6 and 8 are exactly the same link, yes?  Why would Google return the same link FOUR times?  Not variations of your link - THE. SAME. LINK. _

They aren't the same link.

1 is the actual article URL.
2 is the category page for our journal which has the "recent posts" that contains the title and excerpt.
4 is the excerpt in the RSS feed page.
8 is a whole other article that contains the title with "Gangnam Style" in it as a related post link that is probably in the sidebar at the moment.

Regarding the robots.txt message, read it again more closely. I'm not sure it says what you may have thought on first impression.

Fact__: Your "Contact" and "Help" pages are identical.
Fact: SEO is made of up hundreds of small ranking factors.
This is what I mean by needing to chill and realize that if someone seems pretty knowledgeable, chances are what seems like a large difference of opinion on a simple issue is probably a result of misunderstanding of something. The URLs are different but unfortunately the actual contact page was redirecting to the same page as a result of a recent change. Yes, I'm perfectly aware that SEO is made up of many factors but this is, once again, something you'd want to correct but - IMHO - there aren't a multitude of these trivial items (by themselves) which wouldn't take down the site to zero.

Fact: Your suggestion that some glitch has "dropped an atomic bomb" on your site is incorrect....You rank #3 on page 1 for this term.  That's not exactly getting slammed by Google.

That is not what I said. Now I appreciate the entire lecture and how you went to law school, etc. But the fact is that I said that the page rank dropped like an atomic bomb. I never said anything about one search term.

Let's talk about one obvious place among many I disappeared from - the search for "Law Forum". The title used to be "The Law Forum" and I wasn't even listed at all for many, many months. A handful of good competitors also dropped like a rock and total junk walked in. If you do a search now I'm off the first page. One of the entries on page is a horrendous sites with duplicate content up the wazoo, missing navigation, a blatant link exchange and has been gaming the system. It's the worst site my guys had seen last year and couldn't explain why it keeps ranking. We can talk about that separately but it's a good reason why I'm ticked off having watched Google let this guy game the system in the most blatant way. And for years, lawfo rum.net was the #1 or 2 result and that was nothing but an adsense page for each "forum" with no forums. Now it's an SEO company.

_Fact: Subdomains are treated as separate for SEO purposes. You have a site-wide link to a subdomain in every menu. (lawyers.thelaw.com, forms.thelaw.com, dictionary.thelaw.com)  I'm sure you'll tell me this doesn't hurt you so let me cut you off at the pass.  _

I agree 100%. What do you mean "hurt"? I don't want to jump to any conclusions about what you're trying to say. Without being sarcastic, since you went to law school and do SEO, perhaps taking another look might lead you to realize why those items are on subdomains rather than subdirectories. It's for all the reasons why Rand mentions. Perhaps we can discuss further when you take another look.

_**Quick facts: **_Pagerank is not a valid metric for measuring your site in 2013.

Once again we have a communication problem. I never said it was a site metric. What I said is that the Pagerank dropped through the floor and it concerns me greatly. Whether or not what you said is true is irrelevant because for the purposes of marketing, many people DO feel it has value. And it does have value. And apparently Matt Cutts takes it seriously too.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/

Many were suggesting that our Pagerank dropped - even further than this site - because of selling links. Everyone has parroted that Google must be thinking this but can't point to anything because we don't sell links. So the only question here is why has Pagerank gone from 6 to zero and, in some cases, unranked altogether and NOT on spam articles. It's the whole site.

+1s drop off and reappear on pages literally every day.  Sometimes for technical reasons, sometimes because they're spam to begin with, sometimes because Google updates something and you don't.  Search "google +1s missing" without quotes.

Of course I searched before I posted. And if you read through the webmaster forums you'd see that others reported Google problems where all their +1s disappeared and later returned after something was fixed. A Google employee responded to a couple of these to say they were technical errors on Google's end. The fact is that, once again, you aren't reading what I wrote carefully. ALL of my +1s disappeared from the entire guide section. We are talking hundreds of pages where every single plus one disappeared - and it has been weeks.

Anyways... thank you for taking some valuable time to try to help out here. As you can see, I think there is far more of a misunderstanding than you realized. If you'd like to continue the conversation, I'm hoping we could dial it back a bit. Sometimes what you see at a glance might have been different than your original impression. I spent several months in Melbourne a long time ago. I remember thinking for a moment that I must have walked into the red light district because I saw all those four X signs, wondering what is more hardcore than triple X, lol. Thanks and regards to you around the globe.

Matt -  

Take a deep breath. Relax. If you read my reply to you again you'd realize that I was in no way being disrespectful to you. I thanked you for spending some valuable time doing something you had no obligation to perform. Two things before I reply:

I have worked on my site and in this niche for over 15 years. It is certainly possible that I might be far more familiar with its workings than yourself, as well as how things work within my niche. That's not a slap to your professionalism or condescedning. It's just saying that the short time you spent taking a look - which I appreciate - might not have been sufficient time to see what I'm seeing. Take a look again and we can talk about it.

Second - I'm sorry you took my friendly ribbing the wrong way which was actually a response to your surprise that I had two SEO experts look at this and found nothing. That's not at all what I said. Look again. I said that they didn't find anything that would explain the earth shattering. It's a subtle but very important difference and changes the answer dramatically. I could have really taken that as condescending but laughed and chalked it up to forum-type discussions that sometimes get lost between people.

I have a lot to offer and plenty to learn. I've been doing this a very long time too. So... with no disrespect, no need to hold your breath and reply.... I'll respond.  Please understand that I'm not going to try to tear you apart but agree with you on some things and politely and firmly disagree with some things you believe to be "facts". Thanks and I look forward to a helpful, productive discussion with another professional in the industry.

This is a good answer that just led me to think about some items that are not necessarily URL related. I'd do what Nick suggests firsts. The wisdom around the water cooler is that the most important content should be placed towards the top of your pages to ensure that spiders reach it and can get a good indication of what a page is all about. What I've seen are "professional recoded pages" by great designers who really aren't great coders or great coders who focus mostly on browser compatibility but not on how spiders might prefer the format.

What am I getting at? What is in your sidebar and where is it located in the source code of your page? I've seen two significant changes that might make a difference:

(1) Your sidebar that has lots of secondary and promotional content is appearing at the top of your page and your post content is underneath it.

(2) The page looks great but there is a ton of other junk that loads in your header tags well before your content areas on your pages. You would be incredibly surprised how "professional themes" will have options to make things so convenient for webmasters. Wordpress themes that have special options are notorious for having clickable buttons that suddenly load lots of code in the header tags.

(3) Custom javascript in the header. Typically you can load something common like jQuery and there won't be an issue or everyone would have it. You get into trouble when someone custom codes an awesome thigamajig for you not knowing what else is on your site and which may lead to errors in your header and trouble for spiders.

This is all speculation but I've found these issues crop up in the past. Good luck.

This is a good question. I think "spammy" needs to be defined since sites like ours, up for many years, have links in numerous places that cannot be "fixed" because at the time there was no such thing s "nofollow" and the like. To punish for old links would seem harsh although it might be done. Our problem is that we're listed on long pages of "link resources" that many are saying is spam and penalty but this is what was done in the 90s and 2000s by people wanting to put up useful websites. Here are a few I saw on possibly relevant articles that appear knowledgeable:

• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271305/Google-Penguin-2.0-Casualties-Why-Sites-Got-Hit
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-penguin-beginning-to-flex-its-muscles/63416/

I find Barry's articles very helpful and ostensibly honest: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-upcoming-penguin-panda-link-networks-updates-151273

To begin, it's difficult for anyone to tell you what the problem is with your site without providing your site. It's a horrible feeling (I know) but that will give you the best answers, unless you prefer to pay for that privacy by hiring an SEO consultant to manage the issue. You may want to post some of the links here if you don't want to post your site and see what the group says. Regarding blogrolls - another issue that affects the 2000s and it's crazy for Google to think we can "clean" that which never really needed cleaning and only the large companies with staff will survive. Hopefully there will be clarity. Best of luck.

PS - If it makes you feel any better, your traffic drops are small in comparison to some others.

_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty.  A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update.  The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back.  Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links.  This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.   _

Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories.  You definitely got slapped.

Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.

As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.

The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)

I'll be honest. I run a legal site and it is large and one of the oldest online. Despite the fact that it would be an incredible shame for it to disappear and not be updated thanks to the miserable way Panda and Penguin are dealing with it, I don't think Google cares about this issue that concerns a minority of sites and that there is no avenue for us to practically do anything. Nor do I think people will revolt, despite the fact they like me and our honest and very helpful site a whole lot. This is because most will get something similar elsewhere, say "oh, that's really a shame what Google is doing to them" if they even realize what's going on (and they don't except a few people here) and go on their way.

Our junk competitors have caught up with us and surpassed us in some respects solely because we've been dealing with Google issues that should not exist since Panda 2.2. All the advice made no difference and still we're dealing with people saying what it "might" be but nobody sees any huge issue that would take down our site. It's incredibly painful but Google collects Adsense revenue whether it's us or someone else. Until they get hit in the pocket or someone else takes them on in the search engine business, you're better off focusing on fixing the problem - if it's at all possible - or just accepting that life isn't fair, this completely sucks and you'll have to find something else to do. How bad can it get? 18 years after our first true "website" Google has given all of our content a page rank of zero - yes zero. This has gone on for weeks. We'd get better results scraping our own content!

Bradley's response is spot on. I coincidentally manage a large site in the legal area that has had errors like yours although the error isn't law related! As Bradley implies, this is typically the unintended result of code that is spitting out the unintended line feed in the CMS. I'm guessing that what you're seeing is probably the result of something related to PHP rather than an error in user input. Typically entering white space into user editable areas will result in it being stripped. When you have actual code like this inserted, it's the result of some line of PHP someone edited and saved without realizing the effect. I've had this happen before with RSS feeds where one little glitch will put a forward slash to the end of a URL and connect the beginning of another. Good luck with finding the solution, which shouldn't bee too tough.

Matt -

Thanks for taking the time to take a look, it's much appreciated. Yes, I had two SEOs look at this who know my niche and said they cannot find anything glaring at all on a large site like ours that would explain the atomic bomb being dropped. You provide some useful stuff (and thanks!) but haven't really either found too much to complain about. The +1 votes missing just seems to further suggest we've been caught in some glitch. I'll reply to your points.

1. Title Tag - Very minor issue appearing that only affects a few pages if you look closely. Fixed and thanks.

2. The internally linked jpeg - There is practically no way Google thinks I'm suddenly in the link selling business because one single link was named "banner" with an internal link to my own stuff. If that's the cause to blow up the entire site, I should have received a warning for a link selling penalty and it's goodbye to the 99% of the Internet that is way more obvious!

3. There is no duplicate content issue on the site - In addition, numerous sources have long reported that there is no duplicate content penalty (I think Matt Cutts himself may have stated this.) The article you refer to appears once. Scrapers shouldn't reduce your forums from 5-6 to a zero. In addition, if Google can figure out artificial link building, it surely must know a scraper if it sees another site suddenly grow quickly with content that it indexed from another site for the past 13 years. I point at a likely error affecting my site because we have a zero PR and Google gave the scraper a PR 2 - who is now down due to my takedown notice. Google's failure to figure out something a 5 year old could (the Wordpress scraper's site was bare bones, obvious scraper site) then I'd hope to have a dialogue with someone to understand why.

4. My home page experience is quite clean. Perfect? Nothing is perfect. The link you pointed out was a recent change, no biggie. The copyright statement is in no way telling Google anything related to PR or of much value for that matter. I've updated it to use the right footer. Note that the scraper had no copyright year - yet ranked above our site - so there goes that theory. The oldest game is for scrapers to predate their Wordpress posts, forum posts, etc. ) Google should know this. And the two links in the footer are for UI. Too many users are lazy so as not to submit a ticket to the right department. Similar area but not the same link, not a UI issue. I think the most often parroted phrase is "Google obsesses about this and that" - I think it's a great selling phrase to say you've gotta hire me because you have to sweat even the smallest stuff. But hey, I know what you're trying to say.

5. Old links pre-2010. Well... the first web page I put up was back in 1995. I don't think Google expects every website owner to require a full SEO staff to try to remove links from pages that are dated directories and the like which weren't created by us and just a sign of the times. Some of the "spam" you refer to are just very dated pages when compiling lists was popular. My backlinks may contain RSS aggregation sites, true. But as Google points out, you had better be darn sure to disavow well or it will work against you. Funny thing is that most SEOs today always assumed sites had "link building campaigns" when it was really just organic. I'll look again and only for the comment spam, which should absolutely not appear and there might be some negative SEO efforts here.

6. One comment spam link - not generated by us. Will get it disavowed an try to scour the rest of the backlinks. There just isn't enough of this to justify a PR 6 to 0 for hundreds of thousands of pages, even with someone's negative SEO campaign.

7. There are no spun articles - you'll need to point to something specific. I know because I wrote most of them. Will they look similar to other law sites - yes.That's because the law is the same. The terms of art used will be the same. So will the general content. What you're not realizing is that my articles are generally more than 500 words and far more comprehensive than the other "article sites." I don't blame you for thinking this at first glance as I'm familiar with my own niche. Could some be in the realm of more general? Sure - the couple in the articles section which is user submitted (just a dozen or so.) But we are far, far away from an article directory and this requires closer observation. If you're talking about the anchor text to our lead gen page, that's our niche and it explains what it is. If you have a suggestion, glad to hear it. Otherwise, this too isn't taking down the whole site or 90+% of the Internet would unquestionably go to zero PR.

FYI - the largest area of the site - by far - is the law forum, well cared for with much useful information. Why is that now all a page rank zero? There is no explanation for an indefinite death penalty. Now if you want to know why my "competitors" are catching up it's because since Panda 2.2 Google has me chasing nothing and I've wasted years of effort on nonsense like this instead of producing awesome content. _I'll show you three sites in my niche that have blatant link exchanges, spammy titles in their forums, RSS feeds in their forums to increase Google's indexing, a horrendous UI and duplicate content from other sites -- and those sites have been making serious gains on my traffic. _The fact is, as I stated above, is that Bing, Yahoo and the others have allowed my content to consistently grow without egregious, death penalty measures with absolutely no way to easily determine why and nobody at Google to begin to explain the above. They are simply not reachable. Unless someone can point out something that might explain the atom bomb being dropped, I'm going to have to resort to doing the only thing that worked post-Panda 2.2 and see if that changes something. If it does again, it will be a rather remarkable indication and potential confirmation of what some theorists believe.

Thanks for your response. The truth is that if a few bad links sets you back to the dark era, it's not worth the effort of putting out content whatsoever. I'm under the impression, as are most, that you'd have to do something pretty severe to blow up a legitimate website up for 18 years with hundreds of thousands of legitimate posts.

I've looked through the small stuff. If there are a couple of bad links, we'll get rid of them and use the disavow tool since there is little we can do to control what happens outside of our site. But the issue is that Google never warned us that there is any problem. Don't know why they would. But the real indicator that something must be wrong is that a scraper was rating a PR 2 for our own posts and we went to zero for an extended period of time now. The missing +1 votes even further suggests some problem.

I can tell you (I have significant legal experience) that chances are you will need to spend huge sums of money trying to prove your slimy competitor libeled you. Libel cases are the most difficult to make and you will almost certainly need to put the money up front to fund your own lawsuit. So let's answer this question - how will you be able to identify who put up all those bad links to cause your negative SEO? Send information subpoenas to every site, hoping that they have IP address info for every bad link that was posted? This is why slimy companies will do this - very difficult if not impossible to prove and the money taking you down is worth the investment and price of doing business. It's tough and dirty. Perhaps best to worry just about keeping clean.

Thomas -

Thanks for your comment. Much of the general information you're sharing I've been through for quite a while, although I know it is well intended. Scrapers will target my site periodically and no matter what program I'd use, takedown notices are just a matter of what we need to do periodically.

I just replied to someone else about the links you're pointing to above as "junk" and spam. Sites like mine have been around since the 1990s and what you call "spammy looking junk" looks more "dated" to us. We've seen this back when the web was young. Take a look at every link you've listed above - none of them are obvious garbage. In fact, they look more like lists someone compiled on their site long ago and they typically neglect them or don't bother to update their look for the new millennium. FYI, I use a backlink checker that uses technology from another service similar to MOZ.

• http://www2.pair.com/budg/ - I notice several high ranking websites around for a long time (like lectric law.)
• http://www.srikumar.com/freebies/freebies.htm - Has all my major competitors, include some of the largest you've missed.

The pages you've pointed to aren't a horde of blog spam, which is true spam. And even assuming some backlinks might be bad, you don't exactly go from a PR 6 to a zero, lose all your +1s for that.

I know my competitors very well. Lawyers.com is billion dollar company. You've missed a few others who can afford to pay the SEO firms you've listed $150 an hour or what they are asking to patiently inspect links and eventually remove some, add others and, in many cases, plant articles on very high PR sites in order to build traffic. Some of the links back are in directories. It was common for people to try to populate them with popular sites to grow them. Why do I have to audit these directories and disavow websites that aren't great but not necessarily spam? (e.g. linksnow). I don't think these are devastating our site. We didn't lose some PR - we lost ALL value. That's an insane result. If a few bad links knocked me to zero, 90% of the Internet should be well into the negative PR numbers and that isn't happening - as scrapers are actually ranking for my own content. That is easy to spot but for some reason, Google is still rewarding this.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to try to help. With a death penalty like this, there has to be evidence of a lot larger a crime and it should be conspicuous. I'll review the links but it's not likely the cause is here.

Regarding the issue of bounce - I will only say that IMHO Google may severely penalize you for what you let it see (Analytics, Adsense, etc.) I've always wondered whether having bots thrown at your site that would increase bounce rate would affect a site. Call it paranoia but my data seemed to indicate that the less Google knew the better this site did. Nobody would know how Google really takes into account except Google. Almost everything else is our speculation. Good luck, truly.

While I'd love to comment (and I know you're hesitant to provide a URL), I don't think that you'll get any truly useful advice that would help since there could be so many reasons why you'd encounter issues after a site design change. The useful advice comes from those who will analyze your site, see what changed and determine what changes (or open items poorly done or overlooked) might be a good indicator of how your rankings dropped. Everything else is speculating in the dark. There is no substitute to taking a good look, IMHO.

This is a short response but you should make sure that you look at where you are in the SERPS:

1. Logged into Google

2. Not logged into Google (that's key!)

3. Using different countries' search engines since your rank will probably vary between US and CA.

I'm suffering from a similar problem such as you. My first site was up back when people didn't know what a search engine was. There are a couple of things I'm noticing that give me cause for concern based upon SEO people researching my links and coming to the same (and wrong) conclusion.

Frequently these SEO experts would check backlinks, see domains that had pages that looked like extremely poor. Cheap looking design, missing images, sometimes with long blogrolls too, etc. They told me I was getting significantly downgraded because of these spam pages from my obvious link campaign. After review, I realized that all the links were legitimate (we didn't do a link campaign.) The sites they spotted had pages that probably weren't changed in at least a decade, similar to that geocities look. Blogrolls were really popular many years prior to anyone even knowing what a nofollow link is. I'm wondering whether I'm getting penalized by Google as a result of these because I can't find any reason for our severe penalty and you're suffering from the same.

One other item - those with the gold will make the rules and get content placed everywhere, obviously for a payment behind the scenes. Large SEO shops are selling these placements and there seems to be little the small to mid sized websites can do to maintain their position before the domino effect kicks in. I'm wondering whether you need to increase backlinks to at least remain in the game.  Wishing you the best of luck.

18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6  Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery.

Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s.

I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank?

What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.