Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi James,

I see this in the source code of the URL you referenced:

<meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots">

That might do it

Sha

Hey Joel,

Happy Friday!

Sha

Hi Dana,

No problem. Glad you have sorted the problem now.

Have an awesome weekend

Sha

Hi nurit,

The best thing to do would be use the feature request page to let the help team know what you would like.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Dana,

I believe SEOmoz utilizes Amazonaws services for crawling, (or at least they did a few months ago) so that may well be your problem.

The best (and quickest) way to confirm this is to go to the SEOmoz Help Hub and click the button at the top of the page to contact the Help Team directly.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Kevin,

Once you have searched for instral and actually gone to the site, personalization will ensure that you get the result you were looking for.

I confess, there's a mean girl inside me who's tempted to sit all day and search instral, then instaloans, then instral...instaloans...instral...lol

Is it possible to push the boundary and get some kind of different result?...hmmm

Sha

Hi Kevin,

The problem you are seeing is that Google does not recognize Instral as a highly sought after term and since they pride themselves on being "oh so helpful", the results returned are for the term "instaloans"

If you click the link to say "no, I really did want to search for instral" then you will get the result you were expecting.

Time to get a few dozen of your mates searching for your name and clicking the link from all over the place (oops, did I suggest that??)

Sha

Hi AutoGlassRescue,

The report you have made available here does not provide sufficient information to make an informed decision on your backlink situation...this report provides only the domains that link to your site.

Within this list I see root domains that may well be hiding large numbers of hosted sites that might have been created for manipulative purposes.

For example:

1. wordpress.com could host just a few subdomain.wordpress.com blogs, or perhaps hundreds or even thousands. Without the actual URL list, (as you would get from the most recent links report in Webmaster tools), it is impossible to know.
2. yahoo.com could be playing host to some harmless posts from answers.yahoo.com, or it could be concealing an orchestrated effort to manipulate search results via bogus posts on the groups.yahoo.com subdomain. Again, there might be just a few, or hundreds, or even thousands.

There are a number of sites that offer individuals the option of claiming a subdomain which is essentially independent of the domain owner. These also include blogspot.com (and a range of country specific duplicates), tumblr.com and more.

This Link Removal flowchart from the Bruce Clay blog will give you an idea of what to look for when analyzing your backlink profile, but you will need to be looking at individual URLs to get a clear picture of your situation.

You could also take a look at our October Webinar recording and slide deck which focused on link analysis for some more information.

Hope that helps,

Sha

OMG NO!!!

This entire thread is now feeling like one of those "elephant in the room" situations, so I am just going to come out and say it - that is called C-L-O-A-K-I-N-G!!! Don't do it!

The only result you are likely to see from that is a manual penalty from ALL search engines

As for your clients, the problem you have is that they think they know better than the person they hired to provide professional services. This is a situation that will not end well and the quicker you resolve it, the less damage it will do to your business and your peace of mind.

Whenever our company encounters a client who wants to call the shots like this, the response is to send them a legal disclaimer form that they are required to sign. The document basically says that they acknowledge and accept that due to their having chosen not to accept our professional advice with regard to their website,  our company can not be held responsible for any failure to achieve the desired results, including rankings, sales and/or other forms of  conversion. The document also includes an indemnity against claims as a result of any perceived failure of the campaign.

When presented with such a document and asked to sign it, the response is generally that the client either wakes up to the fact that they are hurting their own business, OR they demand to know why we would expect them to sign such a thing. The polite, but firm response is "you are making it impossible for us to do our job the way it should be done, so without this agreement in place, we will have to refuse the work". At that point, if they are not prepared to either sign or rethink, it is time to part company.

Don't fall into the trap of trying to keep a client like this unless you are protected. This sort of client will never own their mistakes and the worst thing in the world would be to find yourself being sued for a failure of their making.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Incidentally, we have only one client who has ever chosen to accept that their stipulations are likely to prevent us from achieving good results.

Hi Daniel,

I hope that by now your penalty situation has been resolved.

Was just a little concerned when I read this thread that there might be a little confusion over the need to remove those paid links from your site.

I just wanted to clear this up for any new people reading Q&A who might take away the wrong idea from the thread.

If the paid links are now nofollowed, you don't need to remove them (unless they are serving no other worthwhile purpose).

Matt Cutts talked about this in the webmaster help video Why do paid links violate Google's guidelines while other ads don't?

As Matt explains in the video, there is nothing wrong with having paid advertising on your site, as long as there is disclosure (usually in the form of a nofollow tag).

For those who might be reading this thread because they too are wondering what to include in a reconsideration request, we have created a Checklist on our site that might help. http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php

Hope the penalty is now far behind you,

Sha

Hi Antonee,

There are many, many different reasons for duplicate content and while Darin's comments about Roger not discounting pages with noindex tags are spot on, my recommendation would be to read Dr Pete's epic post Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World before going any further.

You might also find some value in this overview video about the Pro Tool with Adam Feldstein.

There is also a great deal of information in the Help Hub, but if you are unsure of what your Pro Tools report is telling you, you can contact the Help Team from there.They will be able to take a look at the specific campaign for you and clarify anything that is difficult to understand.

Hope that helps

Sha

Hi Steven,

Alan's suggestion of installing the Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin is right on target.

This plugin allows you to create a 301 redirect for any post and also to add the canonical link element if you prefer (only for single pages and posts).

With the plugin installed, to add a 301 redirect, just click the Advanced tab and scroll to the bottom. Enter the URL you wish to redirect the post or page to and click Update. Obviously, the plugin writes the .htaccess rule for you, but if you do want to edit the .htaccess file directly, the Yoast plugin also allows you to do this.

This plugin also includes a number of other features that allow you to deal with some of the technical shortcomings of Wordpress from an SEO point of view (duplicate content issues etc), so adds a lot of value.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi James,

Everyone has their own view of Google and what interacting with them might mean.

My personal view is that anyone who thinks they are clever enough to fly under the radar when everything they do is aimed at making themselves visible in Google is probably mistaken.

often people have said that this just raises an alarm bell to google if not totally necessary?

If you are seeing keywords that have dropped below page 100 in the SERPs, I would think those alarm bells have long since rung.

Sha

Hi James,

I would start out with cleaning up damaging links first, then lodge a reconsideration request. It is important not to appear to be trying to get out of a situation without making any real effort. That could put you on the back foot if you need to make future requests.

Keep in mind that some links may be totally within your own control to remove - I recently cleaned up links from more than 160 sites for a client by getting hold of a list of login information from a previous SEO vendor. I was then able to log into all those sites and either delete bogus profiles (where that was an option), or delete over-optimized body text and signature links that had been created within them.

Over-optimized links from article directories and syndicated content are another area that is usually within the site owner's control. I am stunned how many people I see sending email to the owners of Article Directories asking them to remove links when they could just log into the account and fix the problem themselves.

Once you have removed all the links that you can, you can use the Disavow Tool to inform Google of any links that you have not been able to clean up, then lodge a reconsideration request and include a link to the information in the Disavow list that you uploaded.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi James,

Google's Disavow Tool is not a first line of defence, but the last.

Matt Cutts made it quite clear when releasing the tool that Google still expects webmasters to make a "good faith effort" to remove as many links as possible before using the Disavow Tool.

If you read Dr Pete's post using the link that Smart Lock Solutions provided in their post you can see this. If you have not seen the video from Matt Cutts about the Disavow Tool, you can watch it and read some views on the release of the tool here.

The only way to confirm whether a manual penalty has been applied is to lodge a reconsideration request. The webspam team will respond to a request, either advising that there is no manual action in place, or that a penalty exists because the site violates their search quality guidelines.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi James,

My immediate response would be DO NOT place any reliance on the presence or absence of an unnatural links warning from Google!

I have clients who never received an unnatural links warning of any kind and were actually suffering impact from a manual penalty. The penalty was not revealed until I decided that we needed to lodge a reconsideration request because something more than Penguin was going on there. Sure enough, the message that came back from the webspam team was that the site had a manual spam action in place.

Since our company developed the rmoov tool, I have been responsible for customer support and spent many hours talking to site owners who are trying to clean up their backlink profiles. During that time I have heard from many, many other site owners that have big problems with no unnatural links warning message received. A number of these have also found on lodging a reconsideration request, that they have a manual penalty applied to their site.

Basing your assessment of what is happening on whether or not you have received a message from Google is a big mistake, and unfortunately one that is being made by way too many people

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi there,

Thanks for participating in the survey

You're absolutely right - with such a long history there are always going to be some dodgy links that turn up without you having any idea what motivated those webmasters to do that.

Already some interesting insights coming out of the survey. Looking forward to sharing the results.

Sha

That's awesome!

I happen to know you have at least 1 follower apart from your son!

Have a great day,

Sha

Hey Robert,

Thanks for participating.

I have a feeling there might be a few surprises to be found amongst this data...early results already showing that Google's Disavow Tool is getting a real workout, while the Bing tool seems very unloved.

Good to catch up,

Best

Sha

Thanks for helping out!

Looking forward to sharing the results.

Sha

Hi,

There is so much opinion out there about Link Removal and Google's Disavow Tool, but it's really hard to get hold of reliable data about what people are actually doing in this area.

Through my involvement in rmoov, I've become really interested in participation and cleanup rates when it comes to Link Removal campaigns.

So, I've put together a quick survey aimed at getting a real indication of what is happening out there. The survey is here

The recent introduction of Google's Disavow Tool has opened up another area I'd  really like to understand more, so there is a question on this included.

I'd love to pull together a blog post with a decent snapshot of participation, success or failure for those trying to remove links and hope Moz Members might help out by answering this quick survey.

Sha

P.S. I'll update this post once results are available for those that are interested.

Hi JW,

There are lots of reasons you could be seeing links like this.

I have seen entire websites with hundreds of pages suddenly appear with links to a client's site and even been able to find references to a competitor amongst the hundreds of harmful linking URLs. While this was ringing every "negative SEO" bell for me initially, after careful investigation it became obvious that it was in fact some random person who decided to capitalize on a valuable niche by creating a site using hundreds of spammy articles that had since been deleted from directories by my client and their competitor...

Webmasters have long tried to get exposure for sites by adding links and clicking them or injecting referral data into server logs in the hope that curious site owners will click the referral link to check out the referring site.There are also quite a number of posts out there suggesting that linking out to quality sites can help rankings...as a result there are also people out there with poor sites who are trying to use this to improve their situation.

Most important of all, it is well known that data offered by Google through WMT is notoriously out of date ... I have seen several instances where newly surfaced links have been in place for more than a year.

If there is a mantra to adopt when working on link removals, I would say it is "nothing is ever as it seems".

Hope that helps,

Sha

...and neither did my first link removal client, but the penalty was revealed when I insisted that he needed to lodge a reconsideration request.

I have heard this story repeated over and over while talking to rmoov users over the past few months...I am quite sure there are way more people out there who are under a manual penalty than anyone realizes.

I have my own theory as to why this has happened, but that's probably for a blog post some time.

In a nutshell, I absolutely agree with Ryan's take on the subject except for one thing...hard earned experience does not in any way amount to bias.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Serge,

Well it's not impossible to get to use Pro for free!

If you spend some time helping out others here in Q&A and can earn 200 mozpoints in a month, SEOmoz will credit you with a free month in the future to say "Thank you" for your contribution to the community

It does take some time and generosity, but you do get repaid in kind.

Look forward to seeing your around in the future.

Sha

Hi Anderson,

Just took a very quick look at your source code and my first reaction would be that there is something "unique" happening with the naming within your site structure

To be more precise ... you have multiple instances like this in the code:

http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com/sites/tile-pompanobeach.com/files/logo.png

since the keyword you are targeting for that page is tile pompano beach, it is not much of a stretch to think perhaps the repetition could be an attempt to manipulate rankings.

Given that you are saying rankings have plummeted to as low as page 10, I would guess that the repetition of your keyword term (exact match domain) in the source code is being seen as keyword stuffing.

It would be interesting to know exactly when the rankings went into freefall, but my guess would be perhaps around the end of April.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Stephanie,

Sounds like a situation where you really need to go straight to the Help Team and get them to take a look at the specific domain to diagnose the issue.

I would start at the Help Hub and click the big pink button.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Brian,

The popup where you choose who to share with when posting on Google+ has an option that says something like "email this post to X people not using Google+" ..it is usually checked by default on mine. Maybe this has something to do with it?

Sha

Hi SEOscar,

Your question sounds very much like a feature request that should be highlighted for SEOmoz staff.

If you go to the Feature Request page and add it, staff will most likely see it more quickly and you can check back every now and then to see if there is any news.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Broadbeach Media,

Nice to hear that people were recommending RMOOV - just a quick update - the free trial option is now Free Basic membership, which is 1 Campaign at a time.  Some SEOmoz TAGFEE rubbed off!

Sha

Disclosure: rmoov was developed by our company's Software Division

hmmm...I went looking on your profile to see if you had listed a URL and having run your domain through Open Site Explorer, I can see that it is very likely that the bulk of your problems are coming from your site's external link profile.

Here are a few more blog posts that might help you to get a clear picture of things:

Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo by Dr Pete Meyers.

Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization by Geoff Kenyon.

Bad Backlink Checking by Richard Baxter

and for something a little less intense, but that can help immensely if you are trying to get a picture of your own situation, Link Removal Flowchart by Bob Meinke.

Hope that helps,

Sha

P.S. The Google Algorithm Change History can also be very useful in checking whether changes in site traffic, rankings etc coincide with changes at Google.

Hi Sorin,

There are a couple of very comprehensive blog posts that will give you some very good information on identifying and removing problem links. Both talk about issues and successes.

The first of these is Identifying Link Penalties in 2012 by Ryan Kent.

Ryan also provided some very detailed information in this Q&A thread.

The second post that provides real detail on a recovery is How W.P.M.U. Recovered from the Penguin Update by Ross Hudgens. As you will see from reading all of these, recovery will be heavily influenced by the actual elements that have contributed to the problem.

The most critical part of a recovery is in accurately identifying the issues that are contributing to the problem...one big thing to remember is that Penguin came accompanied by another Panda. I have seen instances of people making the assumption that they were hit by Penguin, when in fact Panda finally caught up with them. This is not to say that your problem is not from Penguin, but to emphasize that you need to make an informed analysis and be sure of the real issues before going down a path.

If you are unsure where to start, then you could post the site URL and those here can take a look and give you their thoughts.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi bewoldt,

If the change in domain authority has occurred with today's Mozscape Index update, it is most likely that the change is a result of the reduction in the number of links crawled this time around. This just means that the links are not calculated because they are not included in the crawl, but of course, they are most likely still there.

Rand has explained the difference in the latest Mozscape numbers in this post.

Something else that may impact your domain authority may be link removals as some people have undertaken in the wake of Penguin. If you haven't been actively removing links prior to June, then it is most likely just the change in index size.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Rick,

While I know that Ryan decided to drop the https:// protocol problem, I just wanted to explain why it could be an issue for you.

It may not be a concern  for a lot of personal sites, but for those where the site may be serving a strongly recognized brand it definitely should be a concern. That recognition could be coming both from your online visibility and/or from your involvement in offline communities or activities. Basically, if you have a reputation or following, people who know of your site will be much more likely to type your URL straight into a browser to go there.

I, for example, have come to know and love noahsdad.com through your involvement here in SEOmoz Q&A. I've visited the site, love your work and from time to time it crosses my mind to drop in and see what Noah has been up to lately. Since I know the site's domain, when that happens, I click inside the field at the top of my browser and replace everything after the www of the site that is open with noahsdad.com.

Now, in the event that the page I had open in my browser when I did that happened to be using the https:// protocol and I didn't realize that (which often happens), I would actually be asking my browser to go to https://www.noahsdad.com...and I think now you see why this could be an issue for you.

Hope that helps

Sha

Thumbs up for the catch too Ryan!

URL rewrites effectively change nothing from the SE point of view - the URL stays the same in the browser & the server just loads the alternative page content.

By the same token, just using 301's for both stages as Stephen suggested is not going to create a problem for the domain either, UNLESS there is already a chain of 301 redirects behind the existing domain.

If your client is super concerned about adding more than one 301 redirect, they might know something that you don't. Matt Cutts talked about chaining 301's together in this webmaster video.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Yes, sorry...I tend to refer to them as "simple" rewrites because a lot of people get confused by the difference

Sha

...or use simple rewrites (without a redirect statement) until you are ready to move the site and then apply 301 redirects as normal. Such rewrites simply serve the alternative page content when a request is made for the target URL.

Sha

Hi Mister G,

.htaccess files are the means used for creating redirects in a LAMP setup using an Apache server.

To create redirects on a Windows box you need to use a quite different method.

This quick reference chart for creating redirects should give you the information you need for most normal redirect situations.

However, when working with .htaccess we would normally create a single rule that redirects all .html files to the .aspx file of the same name. Ours is a LAMP shop, so Windows is not our forte, but I believe you can do the same thing with the proviso that your server is set up for it. A little hard since I don't know exactly which Windows Server setup you are dealing with, but This link might help you out in doing that.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Steven,

Don't you just love that moment when you realize that you were clever enough to figure out the answer without help from anyone else?

Very nice of you to "take one for the team"  by leaving the post to help others who might follow in your footsteps

Sha

Hi Sean,

There are few things that could be at play here ...first of all, it is not unusual to rank well for terms that are not particularly competitive. (Competition is measured by how many pages are out there that are actually optimized for a term).

The other thing to be aware of is that the standard reports you might receive in your email often give you the On-page Grade for keyword terms against your home page. If you have actually optimized a completely different page on your site for that term, you would not expect to get a fantastic grade against the home page.

If you look at the list on the left side of your reports it will tell you the URL of the page it is grading against. To check how the grade looks against the actual page where you optimized for the term, open the On-page tool and run the keyword term against the  specific URL.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Marc,

Good to see you here in Q&A.

If you're still finding your way around SEOmoz, this post has a few resources that will help you figure out where things are.

Have fun with it,

Sha

I think that the appearance of thin content / over optimization may be affecting your ranking for the term.

If you make some small changes on the things I mentioned you may find that the rankings improve.

Sha

Hi again,

Since there are a lot of directives in this that are specific to certain conditions in your site that we cannot see, you should leave them alone.

Your redirect should appear at the beginning of the .htaccess anyway, so your best course of action is:

1. Make a copy of your existing .htaccess file with a different name so that you cannot accidentally lose it by overwriting
2. Place your redirect code at the beginning of the .htaccess (remembering that "RewriteEngine On" should appear only once)
3. Save and upload your new .htaccess file
4. Check in your browser to see if the redirect works (as many known pages as possible)
5. If it works, CELEBRATE!
6. It it breaks, replace your file with your copy of the original and ask the original developer, or one with access to the detail of your site to sort it out for you.

Incidentally, the rule you have above will redirect from www to non-www...just to be sure that is what you intended.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Guido,

I would agree with comments from eyepaq and Saijo with regard to redirects. Since there is a slight loss of link value with a 301 redirect, it is best to always send links to the target URL.

As to why the page is not ranking, I just wanted to add a reminder that there is more to that than just pointing links to the page. From that point of view there are a few things to consider with this page:

• There is very little content on the page, but when I view source I see a significant number of exact match instances of your keyword term.
• Most notably, there are several alt tags which offer no descriptive value for the user and are simply repetitive use of the exact match term for each photo. This is likely to be seen as manipulative. There is nothing wrong with including your term in alt tags, but they should always serve as short explanation of the image content.

We need to be even more careful of search engine sensitivity to signs of over optimization when there is very little text on a page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi designsecrets,

I'm assuming that you are referring to the SEOmoz bot (Roger) and seeing only one page of your site crawled.

If this is correct, then there has been a similar known issue in the past.

You will need to go to SEOmoz Help and ask the Help Team to look at the campaign and sort out the problem for you. Make sure that you provide them with your campaign number and/or domain to make it easy for them to locate the problem.

You can also access the Help area by clicking the Help link at the top right of any page on the site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Adam,

I am also seeing social interactions as blank, but my growth rate data is showing as normal.

Obviously something happening with the tool.

Best thing to do in a situation like this where you have a problem with campaign data is to email the SEOmoz Help Team direct help @ seomoz.org.  by clicking the "Help" link at the top right of this page to discover the swanky new SEOmoz Help Hub!

Make sure you give them a list of campaign numbers affected (u can see the campaign number in the URL when inside a campaign).

I'll be doing the same for my own campaigns.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks Daniel,

Lots of additional features & improvements still in the works - updates @rmoov

Sha

Hi Tim,

We just opened free Beta during this last weekend on a link removal management service that we developed.

The free trial will allow you to run a campaign including the domains you mentioned in your post.

The tool allows you to drop in a list of URLs, pull contact information from ICANN (the whois data mentioned above)  for each of the domains, customize emails, send follow-ups, receive notification of cleanups from webmasters etc.

Hope it helps,

Sha

Hi Donnie,

Probably the best place to get good information on optimizing for any of the comparison shopping sites (including Google & Bing) is the CPC Strategy Blog.

While the company offers management services for those wanting to pay to have someone else run their comparison shopping feeds, they also share huge amounts of information about what they do through the blog and occasional webinars.

There is quite a lot being discussed there at present about Google's new "Trusted Stores" program, which is definitely worth a read too.

Hope that helps,

Sha