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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!

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, 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 have used open site explorer to review our back links, but I don't know how to determine which ones are bad?  For example, I think I am getting penalized for links from strictlygifts.com, but not sure.  StrictlyGifts is a second site of ours that has a web hosting plan (our main site does not have hosting - long story).  We use this site to store things that link to our main site, trophycentral.com.  As an example, we have several online catalogs with hundreds of pages that link to products on trophy central.  I have a gut feeling that this is hurting us, but I don't know how to confirm it.  I can easily remove the links but don't want to if they are helping us. Can anyone help?  Thanks!!!

website:  trophycentral.com Back in February of this year, we took a huge rankings hit on Google.  We thought it might be Panda related, but realized it was before the big change.  We also thought it could be related to our Mobile rollout and a wholesale system we put in place, but were not sure. Most pages were fine, but our home page was hit hard and taken off line, included for branded terms (although the branded terms came back in a couple of weeks). There were no manual actions against us. We made a ton of changes with the mobile site, crawl issues, reducing links, reviewing and removing potentially bad outside links, etc.  After a few months (long time!) almost all of our keywords came back except one, trophies.  We used to rank in the top few positions and now are not in the top 500.  We believe we are being penalized, but have no idea why this one keyword is being impacted.  It is obviously a huge one for us and we want to get it back. Does anyone have any ideas as to why Trophies is not ranking on our home page.  We are grateful that we have many other words and phrases in the top 5 positions (not pages) of google, yahoo and bing, but on Google, we cant seem to get trophies to even show up!  Please help!!!  Thanks!!!

This is going to sound like a strange question, but I am trying to understand which version of our site is in the index.  You might think this is an obvious question, but here is why I am asking: 1. Today I searched for a specific keyword and found the listing. 2. I liked on the right arrow next to the listing and checked the cache date.  It says 6/28 and shows the site as of 6/28. 3. I expected to see that we were just indexed as we jumped several pages since yesterday and I had just checked two days ago and we hadn't moved at all. It seems like Google may have taken the changes we made on 7/2 but since it is showing 6/28, I am note sure. Since this is confusing, here is the chronology: 1. Made changes 6/20. 2. Site appeared to be indexed on 6/28. 3. Made changes on 7/2. 4. Checked the site on 7/2 and we were in position 60.  Checked the site on 7/4 and we were in position 61. 5.. Checked the site today (7/6) and see we are in position 8.  The cache date shows as 6/28. I suspect that Google just indexed us yesterday and is reflecting the changes I made on 7/2.  But the fact that it says it was cached on 6/28 seems to sugges otherwise.  I want to be sure I know which version got us the good rankings - is there any way to be sure? Thanks!!

Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall.  We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help.  We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened.  We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously. We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties. Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit). We have made countless changes (please see below). Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered.  Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed. At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year.  Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords.  Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did. We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes.  We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming.  For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point. The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working.  We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business. Thank you! Changes Made: 1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly 2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file. 3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file. 4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content.  This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar: 
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes.  Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products.  We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less. 5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic. 6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow.  We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual). 7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile.  For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url. 8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did 9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects 10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1. Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords. We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse).  I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself. Our website is trophycentral.com

I happened to notice that trophycentral.com and www.trophycentral.com have two different page ranks even though there is a 301 redirect.  Should I be concerned? http://trophycentral.com Page Authority:  47 Domain Authority:  42 http://www.trophycentral.com Page Authority:  51 Domain Authority:  42 Thanks!

Hi, I have been trying to understand our page rank and domains that are linking to us.  When I look at the list of linking domains, I see some bigger ones are missing and I don't know why.  For example, we are in the Yahoo Directory with a link to trophycentral.com, but SEOMOZ is not showing the link.  If SEOMOZ is not seeing it, my guess is Google is not either, which concerns me.  There are several onther high page rank domains also not showing.  Anyone have any idea why?  Thanks! BTW, our domain is trophycentral.com

Please help!  We got clobbered by Penguin and are at risk of having to close down after 10 years.  We have been trying to figure out why and believe now it might be because of duplicate content.  We added 2" inserts in March (over 500): http://www.trophycentral.com/inserts1.html Even though each is a different products, SEOMOZ is saying they are considered duplicate content.  Given the timing, we think this might be the cause, even though it is totally legitimate. Question - since these are now indexed and since we can't easily add content quickly, what is the best way to handle this situation?  A no-index tag? Is there a way to let Google know that their algorithm is detroying legitimate businesses??

I have several large sections that SEOMOZ is indicating has duplicate content, even though the content is not identical.  For example: Leather Passport Section - Leather Passports - Black - Leather Passposts - Blue - Leather Passports - Tan - Etc. Each of the items has good content, but it is identical, since they are the same products.  What is the best practice here: 1. Have only one product with a drop down (fear is that this is not best for the customer) 2. Make up content to have them sound different? 3. Put a do-no-follow on the passport section? 4. Use a rel canonical even though the sections are technically not identical? Thanks!

Hi, our company name is trophycentral, but many companies are linking to us as trophy central (with a space in betwen trophy and central).  We are seeing this in many links and I have a feeling that google is penalizing us for it (since we used to be on page one for trophies and tophy and now off the charts).  Is there a way to let Google know this, maybe some sort of tag?  Thanks!

Hi, we have products (trophies and awards) that can be catagorized in many ways. Using Award Medals as an example: - Medals by type: 1 1/2", 2", etc. - Medals by sport Baseball, Basketball, Cheer - Medals by Style Color, Gold, Silver, Bronze Right now, we have an Award Medals section off of our home page. The section has a decent page rank, but should be much better (I think). My guess is that we are loosing page range since we have separate sections with the groups above as we want our customers to be able to find the medals easily. Unfortunately, when we setup our site 10 years ago, we organized by type and this is what is hanging off the home page. The other groupings we added more recently. I have attached a snap shot of what the sections look like. We would like customers to find an individual medal when they do a Google search. For example a search for Baseball Medals. In Goggle, they likely would not search for 1 1/2" medals. My question is this: Can we keep the same structure we have today (to enable customer flexibility) but improve page rank and also have the sections like basball medals rank well? I have thought about using canonical tags, but the pages are not the same - in one case it is all baseball medals, in another it is all 1 1/2" medals, etc. Thanks for your help!!

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! <colgroup><col width="294"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="81"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="80"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="77"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="214"></colgroup>
| 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 |

Hi, we have about 6500 products, almost all with descriptions.  SEOMOZ is showing about 2500 of them with duplicate content.  The reason for this is that only one or two words are different for each product.  For example, we have 500 award certificates.  All are the same size and have the same description. But one is swimming, one baseball, one reading, etc, etc. Apparently the 1 word difference is not enough to differentiate.  We have the same issue with our trophies - they are identical, except for figures.  Does anyone have any good tips on how to change the content to avoid this issue and to avoid making up content for 2500 items?  Thanks! Neil trophycentral.com

We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them.  We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links. 1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad? 2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site? Thanks!

Hi, we ranked very well for keywords trophies and trophies and awards on our home page, trophycentral.com for quite a while (many years).  Recently we dropped off the charts, but are not sure why.  So we posted this issue last week and got some great suggestions and are in the process of addressing them.  However, we are now wondering if we caused this issue when we launched our mobile site a few months ago (timing makes sense).  Has anyone had trouble with a mobile site impacting their traditional site?  I am wondering if maybe google is splitting the traffic to the trophycentral domain and the m.trophycentral.com domain?  Here is the code we have< script type="text/javascript" src="http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/sportsawards/mobile-redirection.js">script>Appreciate your comments!