Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thanks for your help - much appreciated.

Does the markup need to be on both versions or just the international one?

Is it still worth 301'ing to the com.au to the subdomain?

thanks for the reply!

Just so happens I can't add the required markup to elements because of restrictions on our ecomm platform. I can certainly add it to the page though, just not where it should be.

Will this be a problem?

Our website is AluminumEyewear.com and we're considering launching a specific version for Australia, naturally I want to avoid any dupe content issues but the content would largely remain the same.

I have read through this post and wondered if the options given here are still relevant?

I'm currently leaning towards using a sub-domain, i.e. au.aluminumeyewear.com or should I go for aluminumeyewear.com.au? Will there be dupe content issues if I do that?

Confused and hoping for help!

Wow - what is it with people? Yes - they've copied that text from our site. They probably think we are Gatorz and hence copied it. Thankfully they have left our product descriptions alone.

Whats the best way to deal with this?

I've spoken to Marie privatly and she does feel its a back links issue, she's going to take a proper look tomorrow and get back to me.

Very frustrating because some of the issues have been created by the firms that were hired to help me.

Attached are some of the info from GWT.

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Yes, it would seem that way. I've been in ecommerce since 2005 but never had hassle like this before.

Whats the best way to document everything? I'm guessing I can put a spreadsheet together stating success or failure in getting the link removed, but not sure about emails? Perhaps in a word doc and post them all on Google docs and include links to them in the recon request?

Lastly, how do I know its a manual penalty and not an algorithmic one?

Hey Marie,

I saw some of your other posts and was hoping you would reply!

Yes, we did receive two of those notices but firstly a bit of history.

We never did any actual link building ourselves however at the start of 2010 an 'SEO' wrote an article for us (back when that seemed ok) and submitted it. The article had exact anchor text in it and it got spun to several article directories. Things seemed fine so we left it at that. Then in mid April this year we got whacked with the unnatural links notice.

At the time GWT reported that our biggest source of inbound links was from the Better Business Bureau, around 90. This is because we are listed in their business directory as an internet business, and for internet businesses they list you in every city in your state with a link to your primary domain. Thinking this was the links they were referring to we got in touch with the BBB and got it amended. We then contacted the guy who had written the article and requested he get it removed. He replied said he had gotten it removed from the directories he had submitted it to, but couldn't do anything about the other sites that had spun the article.

Not long after all this we started getting the other message from Google re quality guidelines, so naturally we started thinking it was something to do with the content on the actual site.

Fast forward a couple of months and we used the services of another SEO whose advice was to dilute the crap links with good links and swing the link ratio. So we hired them to do that. In July we got another unnatural links notice so we had an audit done by the same company. Their audit recommended getting rid of links from sms-jok.com as there were over 500, but here's the kicker, those links were from an article THEY HAD POSTED BY MISTAKE! arrghh - why can't people just do their jobs?

So they got rid of the article from that site and it seems the site has now been de-indexed. We submited the rest of the audit along with a recon request to Google but it still failed.

So now I'm in a situation where paying the mortgage is getting very difficult because of the lost revenue we are experiencing.

I also don't know who to trust.

We have a number of e-com stores and honestly I don't think it makes any difference, Google is pretty good at figuring out what are 'store' pages and what is actual content. If you don't want those links to pass link juice just no follow them although I think there was something a while ago about no longer needing to do that. Perhaps someone else can clarify that.

Bottom line for me though would be to just design the site that makes the most sense to the customer and not worry about Google.

Why use that platform then?