Thanks Chris,

I appreciate these links.

I can't see an option for view 'lost' links in Open Site Explorer, but ahrefs.com has been very useful so far.

Cheers!

Thanks for your answers Chris and Kevin, I really appreciate it.

Chris, please forgive my ignorance, but how should I check back links? What tools do I need and what should I be looking for?

Many thanks

Hi,

A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact).

This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage.

Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion).

The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago.

My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take?

On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be?

I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past.

Thanks

Thanks Keri,

Our current experience is that search results from our site are showing up in Google results, sometimes quite high.

So, I'm reluctant to change anything too drastically - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But ... maybe we could get slightly higher rankings if we made some minor alterations?

Is there any 'best practice' guidance I could look at to learn more about this specific issue?

Thanks for your help.

David

Hello Baptiste,

I'm keen to know more about why you believe we would get penalised for this. What, specifically, should we seek to avoid in order to avoid the penalty?

Thanks for your help

David

Thanks Nemek,

I appreciate your answer.

However, as the site owner my instinct is to seek to get as many pages as possible indexed, so I'd like to get further advice about this before I take action.

The search results pages on our site often mirror what people are specifically searching for in Google, so we'd love our results pages to be highly ranked so as to help these people find what they want, quickly.

Does anyone else have an opinion on the best way forward for us?

Thanks in advance.

We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for:

Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour)

Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe:

find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour

There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g.

find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30

There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations.

This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz.

I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as:

• Setting canonical tag
• Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them
• Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present

However I am not sure which of these would be best.

As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different.

Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports.

Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content.

I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind Regards