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Okay will do, is their an efficient way to remove all of these links at once? From what I se WMT only has a 1 link at a time option, and we have like 9,000 to remove.

Hello Everyone,

I made a post a few months ago about one of my sites, Poker On A Mac dropping off the face of google. I found out that it was hacked, and redirecting traffic from google to other, pharmacy websites. Doing some research, I found out it was the WordPress PharmaHack, and we ended up recovering from it.

Now, since October 23rd traffic has went down again mainly organic traffic, I tried to see if it was hacked again, with the same thing and their was nothing I noticed. I was wondering if anyone could give me any insights as to why this happened?

Thanks

Zach

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301 redirects basically tell browsers (and search engines) - "Hey this page no longer exists at this URL it is now located here" statistically, you also lose 1-10% of link juice when you 301 redirect a page, and, for duplicate content issues, should be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary.

The rel=canonical tag, however, is a way to tell search engines the preferred version of a given URL. The good thing about this is that you don't lose link juice, and generally it is the least intrusive way to implement a fix to duplicate content issues.

If you were to implement a 301 redirect, you'd have to consider that all of these URLs are different (duplicate content wise) and would need a redirect implemented to a single url:

http://domain.com/sample-page

http://domain.com/sample-page/

http://domain.com/Sample-Page

http://domain.com/Sample-Page/

etc...etc...etc...

You can see that it can get tedius. By setting will get you the desired results much easier, than implementing tons of 301s.

Hope this helps

It really depends, I've seen pages rank in a matter of days, and others take months. One thing to consider is findability. By earning more (legitimate!) links to your site from reputable sources, it is more likely that Google's Spiders will find your site. I'd also make sure that your not doing anything like blocking search engines through robots.txt, and submitted a sitemap to Google through WMT.

Hope this helps

It really depends, I've seen pages rank in a matter of days, and others take months. One thing to consider is findability. By earning more (legitimate!) links to your site from reputable sources, it is more likely that Google's Spiders will find your site. I'd also make sure that your not doing anything like blocking search engines through robots.txt, and submitted a sitemap to Google through WMT.

Hope this helps

Hello,

I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos.

I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way?

I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it.

I'd appreciate any help on this matter,

Zach

Hello,

Now i'm not an expert in this area, but if you look in the GA iOS SDK I believe that their is a way to track entrances by "bookmarks" Please check this out https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/devguide#trackingModes they have the utm_soucre paramater that should be able to be set to bookmark.

This means that the hack was removed.

What it would do before is redirect people to their ad sites. With it 404inf, that is fine, google just has to remove this from their indicies now.

I am in the middle of optimizing sites for SEO, and am wondering how big of a factor it is to get page load speed under 1.5 seconds?

I am prioritizing tasks and I want to know how much this could affect trafiic?

Thanks

Hello,

The site i'm referring to is http://www.pokeronamac.com, it was hacked via something called the "WordPress Pharma Hack" http://theblawblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/restoring-a-pharma-hacked-wordpress-site-wp-3-4/

We restored it as far as I can tell, but if anyone can confirm this by doing a site search and not getting redirected it would be appreciated. You will see that some search results still show up as spam, but when I click on them, they 404.

I want to know If I should submit a reinclusion request, I wasn't notified by WMT of malaware, so I want to know the SOP here.

Thanks

Zach

You are correct, that's why I'm doing a huge linkbuilding campaign focusing on .edu TLDs. The .edus should help us recover from what we were losing before, especially since they are high quality domains, with a high DA.

Irving,

Thank you for your response. I understand what your saying. MacPokerOnline.com isn't an online betting site, it's simply a site where users can get reviews and discount codes for online casinos, but specializing with Poker on the mac OS.

Please be aware that when you search google (in an incognito window) for "mac poker" (broad match), that our site is #1 there, with Google Authorship. We never lost rankings on our main pages, it is just for longtail phrases.

Just thought I'd let you guys know this.

Okay. I'll see what I can do with that. We can't to PPC since were promoting gambling unfortunately. Maybe well wait it out a few weeks to see what happens. Our site isn't deindexed and we have seen an increase in traffic the past few weeks of 5-15% week over week. I think this is penguin penalties getting lifted as google detects more links we've removed.

I'm actually working in house for the owner of this website, a larger marketing firm screwed him over from a Penguin and link perspective. I live in Philadelphia and know some employees from Seer, do you think I should ask them if this would be something Seer could take on?

So what should I do now?

Hello,

On 9/11/12, we submitted a reconsideration request to Google for http://macpokeronline.com, at the time we received penalties from both penguin and manual removal. We have since worked on cleaning up our link profile, and  got this response from Google:

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.macpokeronline.com/.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

I honestly don't even know how to take this, we always showed up #1 while doing a site search, so it is kind of irrelevant to us in this case.

Is this the reply of them accepting our request?

Thanks

Zach

You need to remember that SEOmoz is constantly changing their ranking algorithm, just like Google is, I think that they have a place to track changes.

Hello,

I would agree with what was said, this is DEFINITELY duplicate content, and is also exteremely Spammy. I unfortunately see this as well on a lot of sites, especially for local SEO, without getting in to detail of these strategies. My view of this is that these concepts are adding absolutely no value to the web, and really should not be done by any legitimate online marker as a means of increasing rankings.

Here is a recommendation, since I don't belive that the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach would be helpful, why don't you create specific pages for each zip code/locality, and create unique content for every page. As a rule of thumb, I try to have 55% of content on any given page unique. Some strategies that work for me is to use local landmarks and events.

I think as google's algorithm progresses strategies like this will be beaten down, but who knows how long it'll take for that to happen.

Hope this helps

Zach

I didn't realize that it was still redirecting. Do you recommend we completely replace the WordPress core? and then go through the plugins?

In a previous post I made, I was able to determine that one of my sites; http://pokeronamac.com/ was hacked and was feeding spam perscription drug content to search engines, then redirecting to another site when clicked on Google.

I then contacted my web host, and, after they did a scan of our files, they determined that something within the wp-includes directory was compromised and malicious. They removed the file, though they weren't able to determine the source of the attack, or how they god in (should we be scared?). Anyway, its been several days now ~5 and if I do a site search the spam pages still show up, but the redirect is no longer working.

At this point, I am at a standstill, because i'm loosing traffic on my site by about 90%, and google hasn't sent us any warnings of malaware or the like. I know I was recommended against this before, but should I attempt to submit a reconsideration request, or should I just wait it out?

Thanks for your help,

Zach

Yes, we are actually doing that now. We have a dedicated box hosting a few of our websites. The developer doesn't have the permission to speak and the owner stepped away for a few minutes, but that is our plan, and if they cannot help us, we will go through and reinstall the WordPress core and the like.

Thanks

Travis,

I think we all do this from time-to-time. I can take a look into this more if you'd like, all you need to do is provide us with the URL(s) and we could look into it for you.

We have seen a drop in organic traffic by about 68% over the past week. This is according to SEOmoz.

Okay,

Thank you guys so much for your help! I really appreciate this, and I can hopefully get this solved quickly. I'll keep everyone updated on what course of action I take, and the results the reparations make.

Thanks
Zach

As far as I know the limit was 10. That article on the APIWiki says the same. I do know, as a premium subscriber, that the # of batch requests per second is 200, however.

Quote from the API Wiki:

"You can submit up to 10 URLs for every batch request. Larger batch requests will return an HTTP 400 response."

I'd just be careful, because if your not getting a 400 response, they may end up throttling you.

Hope this helps
Zach

ADDENDUM: It looks like the redirects of the hack are not working anymore?****

So our options here are to:

1. Revert to a backup before the drop in traffic
2. Locate & Remove malicous code

Google didn't report any malaware on the site in WMT, but I see what you mean, should I still submit a reconsideration request either way once this is fixed?

Thanks,

Zach

Hello Everyone,

After looking at one of my websites, http://pokeronamac.com/ I noticed that there is a significant drop in all traffic to my site. I cannot figure out what the exact source is, as we received no warnings in WMT, and as far as I know there are no major updates released in the last week or so by Google.

I took a look at the content section of GA and I saw that virtually all of my content was seeing a decrease in traffic, meaning that it isn't specific to a few pages, which leads me to believe that it is an algorithmic penalty. My confusion was that there was no changes made to the website in the past few months, although, on September 10th (5 days after traffic dropped) I updated the meta descriptions and titles site wide.

I don't believe that the penalty is from Panda or Penguin because we actually experienced a positive influx in traffic during the week of April 25th.

I'd appreciate any insights into helping me recover from this so I can get the visits again that I had before. If any other metrics are required, i'd gladly provide them.

Thanks

Zach Russell

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Agreed, displaying prices via GeoLocation is definitely the way to go

SEOmoz recommends batch requests of 10 URLs according to their API wiki http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/url-metrics it states that any batch request larger than this will output a 400 error from the server.

Hope that helps!

Zach

I agree with what Streamline Metrics said, I just want to add to this by linking you to a great SEOmoz post on canonicalization which may help you clear things up more.

In your case, having 1 rel="canonical" tag per page is what you want, so you should be fine with that, just make sure that the canonical tags (listed under canonical 1 in Screaming Frog) is the actual URL that you want.

Hope this helps
Zach

I do not have enough specific experience with this to speak from an authoritative position on this topic. My experience is manly with the hReview ritch snippet. Hopefully someone else here has more knowledge than I and can help you fix these errors.

We literally just wrote on the same error I ran through screaming frog, and there is definitely duplicate content because of non-canonical URLs.

Hello Richard, I just ran your site through a tool called screaming frog, which instantly crawls your site and allows me to view errors such as duplicate titles and the like. Here is what happened, when Screaming Frog, and SEOmoz crawls your site, they see both URLS: http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html http://weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html Both have the same title: "Wedding Dance Lessons Sydney | Dancing Lessons to couples to learn their first dance and to look confident at their wedding." Even though to humans there is little deliniaton between the two, it is exteremely important to search engines. The solution to this is to use the rel="cannonical" tag check out this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not, it's dated but still relevant to your case. Once all of your pages have that tag, your SEO issues should resolve themselves Please let me know if you have any more questions Zach

I agree with kadesmith,

If you have a PRO Plus or higher ($200+/mo) then you can upload your own logo. You will be prompted for this if you create a new campaign in SEOmoz, and I also believe this comes up when you create reports as well. SEOmoz also has specific things for image sizing recommendations, so just be aware of that.

Hello Everyone,

I've been using Google Analytics for some years now, and I never really used it in an advanced way (alerts, goals, conversions, etc...) I was wondering if there was a good place for me to learn GA so I can start using it to it's full potental.

Thanks

Zach

Hello,

In this case a 301 Redirect would be the smart move. This is where some issues come in with plugins with many of the mainstream CMSs, some things tend to have a mind of their own and make new URLs and the like.

You definitely want to remove the English content from the multilingual pages or disallow search crawlers for the pages that would be considered duplicate content, as you don't want your English pages suffering for Spanish content (or lack there of).

Hope this helps

Zach

I do agree that you may want to elaborate more, but "IF" it is a banner that has an internal link, meaning that the link on the banner is to your own site, you should be okay. If you don't have it already, I would suggest making relevant alt text for the image though.

Hello,

First off, congrats on adding Schema.org rich snippets to your site, it is exteremely helpful, and has been proven to increase clicks on search engines.

The first thing I would do would be to validate some pages via Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool this will ensure that the code that you implemented into your site is actually formatted properly. I have had errors a few times waiting weeks just to find out it was a syntax error.

The next thing you need to know is that there is no guarantee that Google will actually show the rich snippet on the SERPs, even though they typically do. In my experience, it takes about 1-3 weeks for it to show, but this is just an estimate, the sites that I implemented them on already were large and established sites that were crawled often.