Hi Robert

According to Algaroo, a tool that tracks the level of volatility in Google AU, there doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary in the last few days.

I jumped into MajesticSEO to have a look at their backlinks, and what struck me was that out of their top 50 links (according to Majestic), around 20 of them have been deleted on the 21st and 22nd of September.

I'm also looking at their links on a whole - there are a lot of blogroll links, which looks quite unnatural, plus a number of directory links (which aren't necessarily bad but may have been devalued).  A number of these blogrolls were site wide, so the deleted ones will have resulted in a very sharp fall in the number of links.

I can only speculate as to why those links were removed - whether prompted by Google or not - but it's clear that either removing them has caused the drop, or they have been prompted to remove them by Google after finding out about their link scheme (if it was one). Similarly the massive amount of directory links could be the cause - not because they're penalised, but because they have been devalued.

Hope that helps.

Hi Edmond

You'd be able to use the copy without any problems, but you won't be able to rank for it specifically.  If that's not an issue, then read on.

What I would do is add a canonical tag on your page back to the original press release.  You can read up on canonical tags here in this Moz guide.

So say the press release is at this URL: http://www.pressreleasecompany.com/yourpressrelease

You can take the press release and publish it on your own page, such as: http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpressrelease

On your webpage, you would need to have the following code in the section of your HTML:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.pressreleasecompany.com/yourpressrelease" />

With that bit of code, you are letting Google know that you have taken the press release from elsewhere and that the original copy can be found there.  You are using the copy just to feature and add user experience to your website, and not to try and rank for any terms.

Google will acknowledge the tag and will not penalise you (or reward you) for using the duplicate copy.  I think it's also a good idea to include a brief introduction to where the press release came from and what it is about before using the copy, just to show that you are citing your source.

With those steps, you will be fine in mentioning external press releases about your company on your own site without risking being penalised.  Always a good idea not to overdo it, but with the canonical tag you won't be seen as duplicating content for nefarious or ranking means.

Hope this helps.

Hi Virginia

Your last point really clinches it for me. Hosting with a template/CMS provider is something I'm really not happy with (especially given the price). I find the CMS and the resulting website very friendly to use and I think it's quite well SEO-optimised, but the limitation of hosting with Squarespace is just counter-productive to me.

If your client really likes Squarespace, there are a number of parallax scrolling Wordpress themes you might be interested in. Here's a selection at Themeforest.

Hope this helps

A dofollow link will pass the SEO strength, or "PageRank" of the page to the site that it links to. A nofollow link, in theory, will not do this.  That's the main difference between the two.

By that logic, you may assume that a nofollow link will not help you rank for a keyword, but I don't think this is completely the case.  Having a link to your site in any capacity may improve the "authoritativeness" of your site.  SEOMoz uses Page Authority and Domain Authority to measure this and, while not an official Google metric, it stands to say that if you have 2 identical sites, one has 5 nofollow links from newspapers and the other has none, Google may well think that the site with the links has more authority or trust and may treat it more favourably.  We all know how much Google loves to promote real brands.

As for seeing if a link is dofollow or nofollow, you can either inspect the element in the source code, or a convenient and hassle-free way to test is with the SEOMoz toolbar. That toolbar contains an option to highlight the links on the page - green links are dofollow and pink links are nofollow.  If you check previous posts on any website, you should be able to see a pattern of whether they allow for dofollow or nofollow links - but in the end, this is at the discretion of the webmaster.

Hope this helps!

Hi there

Wordpress can be very SEO friendly when set up correctly, but setup incorrectly it can be a bit of a nightmare.

Let's be clear - Google hates duplicate content, not certain CMS's - particularly one of the most popular ones in the world.

Sounds like you're well on your way to fixing any problems that may have occurred, but if you're still looking for help, I'm always reminded of Dan Shure's excellent blog post on how to optimise WordPress for success. Have a read through there to see if it helps.

Panda is being integrated into the general algorithm as we speak/type, but it may still require a refresh to lift any Panda penalty on your sites. These have been monthly, but expect them sooner in the near future now it is being integrated.

To double check to see if your penalty coincides with the panda penalty, check out: MyTrafficDropped and Ryan Kent's great blog post. If you can't see why your site is being penalised, you may find that your penalty is down to something else.

I've tested this a couple of times and each result has been: no.

If you 410 a page, Google does a bloody good job at never bringing that URL back.  I've changed the response code back from a number of 410s, socially shared the page, built natural links to it, even blasted links to it (for testing's sake of course!) and Google has never reindexed it.

It's both good and bad - good in the sense that it really uses the 410 response code properly, but bad in the sense that, if you make a mistake and want to reuse the URL, you're pretty screwed.

If you're going to use it, be absolutely 100% you wouldn't see any use in using that URL again (such as offering the product again in the future etc.).  If there is any doubt, leave it as a 404 or redirect it.

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem.

When you use an image on a page, you are embedding that image from somewhere else - it's own URL.

Therefore, if the page itself is "noindex,follow" - that does not apply to the images (or anything else like a video, pdf etc) that is embedded into the page.  Provided that the URL holding the image is allowed to be indexed on your root domain, which it will by default, you can index the image.

You can test this out by uploading images to your root domain and then, in the next few days, performing this site search:

site:yoursite.com filetype:jpg (or png/gif/whatever you used)

That will show any of the images that you have on the site that are in the Google index.  If that does not work, try this search:

site:yoursite.com inurl:imagefilename

Replace those details with your real site and what you named the image when uploading and it should show you whether or not it's indexed or not.  If not, you could try sharing the image on Google+. G+ is ridiculously effective at getting web pages and content indexed.

But just because the page where the image is present on is instructed to be noindexed does not mean that the image itself will inherit that quality.  By default, it should be indexed properly.  You can also create image sitemaps to help with indexing (I believe you're running Wordpress, Yoast's SEO wordpress plugin can help with this).

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Well yes, a CMS can have an effect on SEO performance.  If the CMS makes elements on the page uncrawlable, or the website load very slowly, this could have an adverse effect on your performance.  Similarly, if the CMS produces a lot of duplicate webpages, URL or content, which can often be a problem with e-commerce sites, that could lead to algorithmic Panda penalties.

However, looking at your homepage, the Googlebot sees this on the page - so it looks as though everything is fine with its crawl there.  In addition, your site load speed appears to be good.  I also can't find any obvious duplicate content or URL issues - the search function works well and each product listing looks to have good unique content, with no duplications of the pages (at least at very first glance).

So your CMS, at first glance, looks to be working really well.  The issue that I see is that, as a result of your bad backlink cleanup, you have a very small amount of links pointing to your domain.  Majestic SEO is reporting that you have gone from a peak of 9000 backlinks and 1000 root domains to just 69 backlinks and 25 root domains.  That is a huge reduction in links.  While being completely necessary, it essentially means that your off-site SEO is back to zero and so you need to earn more links. Now, it's about quality rather than quantity, but to give you a quick example: the top 5 results for "specialist paints" each have over 10,000 links to their domain.

You've done a great job with your onsite optimisation and an extremely thorough link removal process.  What you're left with, however, is a site with very few links and so not a lot of power to help it increase its visibility in organic search.  I would say that you need to replace the bad links you have had removed with strong, contextual and high-quality links in order to start performing well again.

I hope this helps.

Hi Peter

Both are viable options.

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

Hi there

You don't have anything to worry about with this.  Having a hashtag query after a URL is widely recognised as the denomination for an internal page anchor.  Simply put, Google won't attempt to index a URL like http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree as it knows that it is linking to a point on an existing page, rather than a completely new page or URL.

To put your mind completely at ease, you could set up a canonical tag on the http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ page that points to itself - instructing Google that any variations of that URL with #'s or ?querystrings etc. should not be indexed or considered duplicate content.  I consider this good practice in any case and so would recommend that you do that anyway.

Hope this helps.

Hi Lee

Would I be right in saying that the client would like to rank in both UK and US?

If so, this is possible.  What I would recommend is to create a new geo-location subfolder for the US site.  Something as simple as website.com/us/ would do.

From there, you would set up the US subfolder as basically its own website.  That starts with adding the right kind of hreflang schema code for the subfolder.

There is a fantastic guide here on Moz by Aleyda Solis on how to set up an international SEO structure.  You can find it here.

This hreflang generator tool, also from Aleyda, can help you generate the right code to add to the subfolder.

From there, as mentioned you're basically treating the subfolder as it's own individual site.  That means you can build new links to it, you should have unique content within it, and you can even set up its own individual GWT account - meaning you can set the geolocation settings in there too.

The benefit of this approach is that it would allow your client to keep the current site as-is, and not jeopardise it, while also setting up a site for the US audience.  Of course, you could do exactly the same thing on a new TLD - but that might be difficult as you're using the .com already (and besides, I like global sites using a .com /country/ subfolder setup)

Hope this helps, let me know if you'd like anything clarified.