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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?

We run a niche website selling sunglasses at www.aluminumeyewear.com.

I've been trying to resolve a 'Failed Quality Guidelines' message since May. My 4th recon request has just failed and I've exhausted all changes that I believe I need to make. I rely on this site to pay my bills etc so obviously I really need to get this resolved. I would be grateful if someone from Google could actually point out whats wrong instead of an unhelpful auto response.Steps taken.1. Rewrote content as it was a bit thin. Recon failed.2. Removed old products that couldn't be reached from every page. Recon failed.3. Submitted back link audit and added 'sitemap' link to footer. Recon Failed.4. Removed 40+ old urls that existed from old Yahoo! store (didn't realize they still existed). Recon failed.I felt sure #4 would resolve the issue so feeling pretty low right now that it didn't. That being said doing a site:aluminumeyewear.com it looks like I missed one of them which was http://www.aluminumeyewear.com/demora/black/, however it just returns a 404 which would seem harsh to penalize me for.The only other pages that I can think of are some dynamic pages that the store uses to create reviews such as:www.aluminumeyewear.com/product-reviews-add.aspx?product=2www.aluminumeyewear.com/resize.aspxI'm pretty sure that the reviews page is blocked via robots txt. The resize.aspx is a blank page with javascript as its needed by the PowerReviews Express system to work, and many many merchants use that platform so it would be hard to think its that.Thanks in advance.

waiting to see if they can be removed.

otherwise I'm kinda stuck as to how best acquire those elusive high-quality links.

GWT shows 101 domains linking in - probably 95 of those are all domains that are listing an article which points to the homepage and a product page. The two domains I mentioned earlier have 40 links each because of the way the article was tagged, all of the other domains a providing two links each.

I'm trying to find out if the guy who submitted those articles is able to pull them - seems like the easiest and cleanest thing to do.

Remember we're not Gatorz the company, just a very good dealer for them. I've found it very difficult in the past to get interaction with customers when your not the actual brand, with this particular product there isn't any dealer loyalty, customers just look for the best price.

I should also mention we did receive an 'un-natural links' message in GWT right at the time of the drop.

The top 3 entries are:

bbb.org - 103

northstarheadgasket.com - 46

4homebuilder.info - 43

At first I thought Google was referring to the bbb links as there should only be one inbound from them for our business listing. However the reason there is more is due to the way the BBB display results for each city. For example we are located in Tigard OR but will still come up for businesses in Boring OR - its because by default they return results for any distance from that particular location - if you use the pages distance filter then we'll disappear!

The other two are article directories I believe. A third party was doing link building for us and spinning some articles.

Is it possible this is the more likely cause?

At first glance content may appear thin but it isn't. All of our copy is unique and there are other useful  interior pages such as this and this. In addition our product shots are unique and we produced custom videos (see attached). Every other dealer use stock copy and photos.

I've been selling sunglasses online for 7 years and as a product there is only so much you can write about them unless they have standout features which in our case is something we have already covered in our copy.

I would love inbound links from both brands, however neither offer an online dealer list on their site.

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b4-OAGQC4xw

I agree I can tone down keyword usage - up until the algo change we ranked #1 for aluminum sunglasses and always top 3-5 for the two brand names.

We are the leading online account for Gatorz, so really it was people looking at us for ideas rather than the other way around.

Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully.

I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both.

I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us?

Thanks in advance!