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Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).

The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.

Starting at June 8 of this year (the exact date of the Panda 3.7 update) the organic search engine traffic to our website dropped by about 30%. We're talking about a fairly new domain (about 8 months old) that has (or at least is suppost to have) pearly white SEO, and no outside parties have ever done any SEO for it. Organic search traffic was very stable in the weeks prior to June 8. Organic search visits have dropped pretty much across the board (due to dropped ranking at the SERPS, as reported by our SEOmoz campaign). The (not provided) keyword has dropped 25%, while traffic from keywords related to our core products (joomla templates) have dropped almost 50%. Knowing that June 8 saw a Panda update, I dug up some of the old Panda posts (never thought I'd need those for one of my own sites) to see what factors trigger a Panda hit. Based on the factors mentioned in this article at SEW, I'll briefly discuss what is going on at our website. Affiliate links and ad units Not a single affiliate link or ad unit can be found on our website. Low-quality or thin content Only 163 URLs from the www subdomain have been submitted in our sitemap, of which 152 are indexed. About 25 of those pages (the individual questions on our FAQ page) could in my opinion be characterized as 'thin content' pages. Canonicalization Every single page on our www subdomain has a rel="canonical". Given that the demo subdomain is based on Joomla, we have less control over those pages (and there will probably be some duplicate content issues there), but nothing more than any clean Joomla website would have. Site speed Our www subdomain receives a near-perfect 97/100 on YSlow, the demo subdomain scores a 83/100. Quality In the past months several popular resources (blogs, infographics) have been released that were well linked to by other (significant) players in our niche. Social signals Our site received about 25 +1's, several dozen (or more) tweets and a few Facebook Likes. Search result pages We don't have those. Questions: Can anybody spot potentially Panda-triggering issues on our website? I'm aware that our link profile isn't perfect (not very bad either), but to my knowledge Panda was/is an on-page driven algorithm update, right? We're also running a demo subdomain (click 'demo' in the menu), hosting there five full Joomla installations to showcase our products (just like virtually all other template providers do). This subdomain seems to also have taken a hit, but less than the www subdomain (about 15% decrease in organic search visits). Is it possible that the demo subdomain has triggered this issue (and if so, what changes would you advice)? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

After having answered quite a lot of questions here, I figured it was about time to ask one of my own. Can anybody point me to decent (experimental) research articles or blogs that actually show variations in meta descriptions influence the Click Through Rate (CTR) of searchers? On dozens of websites on the internet it is stated that 'meta descriptions affect CTR', but (good scientific) sources for those statements are nowhere to be found. The only research I can find that comes closest to providing any evidence is a translated study by dynamical.biz, which states that searchers LOOK a lot at the meta description, but this study (atleast in the translation) mentions nothing of searchers actually CLICKING it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!