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I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst. If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen). Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today. I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is: | URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html | | Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated 🙂

A few months ago, we launched the website www.gunnersdirect.com. The main keyword target for this website was "arsenal shirts", which you can see is at the very start of the page title. In fairness, limited work has been done to the link building, etc due to time constaints so I would not expect it to rank at the top. However, it does not appear to rank even in the top 100. This gives me major cause for concern, as surely Google should at least recognise the website, albeit in a lowly position? Does this point to some underlying coding issue or penalty?  What would you recommend we do to turn round it's fortunes?

We have just completed the redesign of our product page, which you can see here: http://www.uksoccershop.com/p-19045/2011-12-Chelsea-Adidas-Away-Football-Shirt.html Because we want the select size / add to basket section to appear prominently, you can see we are showing only a snippet of the product description in this section and then user has to click "more" to see it. My question is, can Google read the product description here since it's in Javascript? The code is as follows: 2011-12 Chelsea Adidas Away Football Shirt £44.99 Item Code:379606 Brand new, official Chelsea away shirt for the 2011/12 Premiership season, available to buy in adult sizes S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL. This football shirt is manufactured by Adidas and is black in colour.[ More...](javascript:void(0);) Brand new, official Chelsea away shirt for the 2011/12 Premiership season, available to buy in adult sizes S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL. This football shirt is manufactured by Adidas and is black in colour. Cheer on the Blues in style in the new adidas Chelsea Away Shirt, featuring a striking blue blocked design on an imposing black background complete with the club crest and adidas logo embroidery across the chest for a great style on or off the pitch. The new Chelsea Away Shirt is designed with adidas' ClimaCool technology to bring moisture away from your skin, keeping you cool, comfortable and performing at your best as you emulate the skills of Frank Lampard, Fernando Torres and John Terry on the pitch. Customise your shirt with Premiership shirt printing for your favourite Chelsea stars or choose your own custom name and number. Adult Football Shirt
Short sleeves soccer jersey
Chelsea club crest to left chest
adidas logo and stripes
Print sponsor to centre
ClimaCool technology
Machine washable Product code: 379606 The 2011/12 Chelsea away football kit is released on 7th July 2011. <form name="currenychange" action="http://www.uksoccershop.com/p-19045/2011-12-Chelsea-Adidas-Away-Football-Shirt.html" method="get">
          <select class="topselectbox" onchange="this.form.submit();" name="currency" style="float:right;">                    <option value="USD">US Dollars</option>                    <option value="EUR">Euro</option>                    <option value="GBP" selected="selected">UK Sterling</option>                    <option value="AUD">Australian Dollars</option>               </select>
              </form> Available Now [Be the first to ask a question](javascript:void(0); "Ask a Question")
         [Be the first to review this product](javascript://) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars <form name="cart_quantity" action="http://www.uksoccershop.com/p-19045/2011-12-Chelsea-Adidas-Away-Football-Shirt.html?number_of_uploads=0&action=add_product" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> Which parts of this is Google going to be able to read? Should we make the product title our H1 header for this page and can it currently read that within the code above? </form>

In an attempt to improve the speed of our site, We have installed Cache_Lite extension for PHP. Its a PEAR based system which converts dynamic pages into static pages. The system is set to delete the temp files every 15 minutes, at which point any changes / new content will appear on the system. I don't see any risk of doing this but thought it safe to double check if there could be any impact on Google by doing it?

One of the largest stores in USA for soccer runs a number of whitelabel sites for major partners such as Fox and ESPN. However, the effect of this is that they are creating duplicate content for their products (and even the overall site structure is very similar). Take a look at: http://www.worldsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.foxsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.soccernetstore.com/23147.html You can see that practically everything is the same including: product URL product title product description My question is, why is Google not classing this as duplicate content?  Have they coded for it in a certain way or is there something I'm missing which is helping them achieve rankings for all sites?

We are in the process of launching a couple of new sites and while we know it will be a long process to get them to rank, achieving some long-tail keywords would be beneficial. What sites would you recommend for getting some easy links to start with that can help the indexation and ranking process along in the preliminary stages? Or another way to put the question - when you launch a new site, what steps do you go through?

One thing I have noticed recently is "review ratings" appearing in the Google search results. I have attached a screenshot which shows an example of this. I think this is a really good feature and helps make a listing stand out in the SERPs, I would certainly be more likely to click this one. My question is how do you code for it so that Google will display it?  The URL of the page in question is http://www.footy-boots.com/inter-milan-away-shirt-2011-2012-9430/ 4nXyk

Hello, Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong. After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are: ru.gg/ gogopzh.com/ 0575bbs.com/ This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us. What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.

We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem. We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting. However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not. Does this indicate some coding problem with the website?  I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?

Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
David