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Hi Jane, thanks for your response.

Yes, the sections that are ranking better do not have as many products listed in other sections.  That is why I originally thought we might be getting dinged.  But have products in multiple categories is very common, so it is likely a coincidence.  I have made some changes to experiment, so I guess I will find out soon enough.

I also realized that I may be getting hurt by the tabs on our item pages.  While our descriptions are getting indexed, because they are tabbed I am told they may be carrying a much lower value.  So I am changing this as well.

Can you elaborate on what you mean be the structure without category URLs?  The vast majority of products should be in a category (trophies, plaques, etc.).  I guess we do have some that are not which I could remove or put in a category, but I want to be sure I know which ones you might be looking at.

Thanks again!  … Neil

Thanks, Lesley.  What you are saying makes perfect sense and putting products in categories seems pretty pervasive.  I don't really think this was the issue, but I am running out of things to change. (-:  I am definitely suffering from a Panda penalty, but still not sure why as I have cleaned up all of the common issues.  I have a couple of phrases that came back to page 2 or 3 (not where I want, but it's a start), such as Award Ribbons and Award Plaques.  So I tried to compare those pages to my other ones and this is what I came up with (these products are not in multiple categories). Again, like you I don't think this is the issue, but I figured I would test it as maybe Google is somehow getting confused with how the categories are created.

Again, many thanks.

PS  If you happen to see anything else that looks funny, please let me know!  We have been in business since 1999, so it is hard to have virtually no traffic from Google!

www.trophycentral.comHi, we were hit very hard a few years ago by Panda and have been try to recover.  We completely revamped our site (structure, canonical, duplicates, content, etc.) and had a couple of keywords recover. However, most traffic has not comeback and still cannot be found in the top 30 pages or so for major phrases.  We have compared ourselves to major competitors in our industry and see very few differences. The only thing I see as a difference is that many of our products are in multiple sections. For example, we have all baseball awards (trophies, pins, medals) grouped together.  We then have just baseball medals together and just baseball pins together.  Is this something that could be causing us not to rank?  I am asking because the phrases that are ranking are the ones that don't have multiple categories.  We have no manual penalties, but now I am thinking this is what Google might consider a doorway page?As an experiment, I just noindexed all but one category for baseball and soccer to see what happens.Does this make sense?  Has anyone else seen this?Thanks!

Got it - thanks!  i am optimistic that the duplicate pages I fixed will make a big difference and I will be able to tell, but well see! ... Neil

Sorry - one related question.  What is the best way to know when the Google update took place?  If I see a change in rankings I could probably guess, but if I don't, then I will not know if my changes didn't work or if the algorithm update didn't happen.  I hope this makes sense!  Thanks

This is very helpful - thank you!

Hi,  I recently found a large number of duplicate pages on our site that we didn't know existed (our third-party review provider was creating a separate page for each product whether it was reviewed or not - the ones not reviewed are almost identical so they have been no indexed.  Question - how long do you have to typically wait for Google to pick this up On our site?  Is it a normal crawl or do we need to wait for the next Panda review (if there is such a thing)?  Thanks much.

Hi Matthew, thanks very much for your reply.  I wish I knew where some of the bad backlinks came from - I have hired a couple of seo companies over the past 10 years but thought they were highly reputable.  In terms of the dropped links over the last year, this was done after the problems with Google started.  We had hundreds of links coming from two sources - our search provider who was saving search pages with our header, etc. and our hosting site where we store our engraving files, etc.  I was actually pretty sure these were causing the problem, because there were over a thousand links from these two locations.  I thought they might have viewed them as spam even though they were not, but removing them didn't seem to do anything.

Out of curiosilty, how were you able to see the change in links - is there a sw program that you recommend?

In terms of the new backlinks to the site, I "panicked" and started adding more (at the recommendation of someone on this site!) and hired network solutions to add us to more directories.  I stopped the service last month.  I also have been writing a bunch of articles and press releases.

Is there something that can help tell me which backlinks are "bad"?

Thanks again!

Thanks, Stephen.  I will look at the links to see if I can increase the links back to the home page.  In terms of the speed, there must have been something off on my site when you looked - it is slow, but using google webmaster tools appears to be much less (under 2 seconds).  Thanks also for th referral to Alan...

Hi, for about a year now, our home page seems to have been "removed" from Google (except for our branded keywords).  The home page is clearly indexed, but none of the keywords for the home page rank in the top 500 (again, except for our brand, trophycentral).  Other pages in the site are fine and we rank in the top 10 positions for hundreds of keywords.  We are also okay on Yahoo and Bing.  So the issue is the home page from non-branded words.  There have been no manual penalties, but since the words, such as trophies and trophies and awards are all but gone, something is going on.  It has been almost exactly a year now and I have tried everything from removing backlinks (although I still can't tell which are "bad links", to changing titles, to improving speed and structure.  I have had quite a few really nice people try to help, but their suggestions don't seem to work or are too vague.  I really need an expert as the impact to the business of not having a home page performing is very damaging.  Thank you!!!

Hi,  I ran the seomox link report and see that I have an entry for our home page (http://www.trophycentral.com/) and http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html.  The index is shown with a 301 redirect.  Does this mean that a redirect is already in place to http://www.trophycentral.com/?   I want to ensure our traffic is not being split between the two urls, but not sure how to confirm this.  Thanks!

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| URL | HTTP Status | Total Links | Page Authority | Number of Linking Root Domains |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/ | 200 | 5746 | 53 | 244 |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html | 301 | 5123 | 42 | 4 |

Thanks, Lesley.  What you are saying makes perfect sense and putting products in categories seems pretty pervasive.  I don't really think this was the issue, but I am running out of things to change. (-:  I am definitely suffering from a Panda penalty, but still not sure why as I have cleaned up all of the common issues.  I have a couple of phrases that came back to page 2 or 3 (not where I want, but it's a start), such as Award Ribbons and Award Plaques.  So I tried to compare those pages to my other ones and this is what I came up with (these products are not in multiple categories). Again, like you I don't think this is the issue, but I figured I would test it as maybe Google is somehow getting confused with how the categories are created.

Again, many thanks.

PS  If you happen to see anything else that looks funny, please let me know!  We have been in business since 1999, so it is hard to have virtually no traffic from Google!