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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.

  • CrakJason


    WARNING : The follow question is for an adult website.  If you are at work, near children or are offended by such material, DO NOT CLICK Hey guys, This one has had me stumped for awhile.  I operate www.deviantclip.com.  Its a very old and trusted domain by google with loads of history.  However, in the past year, Google has been giving me the cold shoulder. One major problem I've noticed is that I've lost all longtail traffic.  Its even gotten to the point where aggregators are outranking me in google for my own custom titles and content. **Example A : ** Google Link 1 This search has my own sitename in the title and my site ranks somewhere on page 2 or further. **Example B : ** Google Link 2 This content originated from our site and has a unique title, yet we're dead last in the serps. I submitted my site for reconsideration a few times, and the outcome everytime is that Google tells me they have not applied any manual penalty. There are a TON of issues to adress with this site, but obviously, getting my own content to rank first is the primary problem I would like to fix. Your time and advice is greatly appreciated.  If you need furter info, don't be afraid to ask.

    | CrakJason
    0
  • smorrison


    I have Domain A (main content site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 91, and Domain B (blog of the first site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 82.  I'm merging the blog into the main domain.  Would it be best to keep it as a subdomain, or under a directory?

    | smorrison
    0
  • guidoboem


    Hi, my problem isn't solved and nobody was able to answer my question: why isn't my page poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it indexed for the keyword poltrona frau Brescia? The same page on another domain was four on the ranking reluts... And now it redirects to the new one... An you explain me how to proceed? I trust you... Help me...

    | guidoboem
    0
  • craigyboy


    I am a little confused! I use vidahost  whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)

    | craigyboy
    1
  • DRSearchEngOpt


    So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains.  Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content.  Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site.  They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would  be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new.  My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup?  I mean on one hand I am saying
    "Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?

    | DRSearchEngOpt
    0
  • SEODinosaur


    Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.

    | SEODinosaur
    0
  • apogeecorp


    Our main website is Top 10 SERP with google.co.uk for photocopier and photocopiers. Every morning we disappear from SERPs for Photocopiers, while Photocopier is doing fine. Several people were able to duplicate the following issue: 1. Google.co.uk -> search photocopier -> we rank Top10 2. Google.co.uk -> search photocopiers -> we do not rank in top 100 3. Click on our website from the photocopier search results 4. Google.co.uk -> search photocopiers again -> we rank Top10 (which is what we usually get. After I do this once, the problem goes away.) Results are consistent with me using a proxy service, or being logged in / out of my Google account. Note that SEO Moz keyword history does not show anything special with these two. My link profile is practically the same and I am certain we are not experiencing the Google dance. Has anyone been experiencing something similar? The problem happens in the morning just before regular working hours and while night traffic is low, it is by no means zero. There is one known issue, as every now and again we are unable to access our website externally. Either our web server or the DNS server gets lazy and enters a state similar to power saving mode. As soon as someone gets a remote desktop connection going, it is back up. Since we are updating our website more often, I fear that we get crawled more often and Google might record these hicups. Still, external website monitoring tools say we have 100% uptime 😞 Any ideas would be appreciated.

    | apogeecorp
    0
  • Paul78


    Hi there, My webpages seem that they have been de-indexed, I have no page rank anymore for my webpages, my homepage which was a PR4, is now saying N/A, plus lots of my rankings have dropped, what check should I been making to identify that this is the case? Kind Regards

    | Paul78
    0
  • guidoboem


    hi everybody, i'm trying to understand why my page http://poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it isn't ranked for the keyword poltrona frau brescia even if is indexed on google. the page gets authority and traffic from the page www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.html that is already ranked in fourth position for that keyword. should i continue linking the previous or the new page to increase the page authority? i don't know if is a good way to link a page not ranked despite a ranked one.. Please help me.... thanks a lot

    | guidoboem
    0
  • 678648631264


    If I buy a new domain and do forwarding with masking to my blogger post URL what would happen to the backlinks that were pointing to my blog post exactly? Will the power link back to this new domain or will it stay there? I have a blogger account, a domain from godaddy, and hosting? People are telling me that forwarding with masking is bad for <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> so I should set blogger with godaddy or something like that I don't know. I need a hosting though in order to do that and free ones don't offer changes to the CNAME records? so I got hostgator. I am up to the part where I need to set the records in the CNAME for hostgator but every time I try to list ghs.google as the whatever, it won't work! It keeps telling me the record is already there when this is my FIRST time using this! How can it be there when I haven't even touched it? Please help me This is the tutorial im using : http://support.google.com/blogger/bi...381&page=ts.cs I get stuck here: Find the control panel on your domain registrar’s website, and locate your DNS (Domain Name System) settings. In order to link your blog to your custom domain, follow the instructions below to enter your "CNAME" and "A-records."
    CNAME
    Where it says Name, simply enter "www" and list ghs.google.com as the Host Name. See our detailed instructions on providing CNAMEs for various registrars. If yours isn't listed, or if you run into other difficulties, contact your registrar directly and they can help you out.
    A-records (optional)
    The following action links your naked domain (example.com) to your actual site (www.example.com). If you skip this step, visitors who leave off the "www" will see an error page.
    Enter your domain name in the format example.com, and list the I.P. addresses shown below in the "A" section. You'll need to create four separate A-records which point to four different Google IPs. 216.239.32.21
    216.239.34.21
    216.239.36.21
    216.239.38.21     Could I just leave my forwarding with masking on with my domain + blogger to make everything easier or what? And, is there any benefit in SEO if I don't have an EMD but it's something like this www.General.com/Keyword 1 www.General.com/Keyword 2/Posts/etc

    | 678648631264
    0
  • SCW


    So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?

    | SCW
    0
  • adriandg


    So it seems with the recent shift to google plus for all local listings, it is no longer possible to leave a review for those locations from an iOS device.  Is this true? has anyone found a work around?

    | adriandg
    0
  • markc-197183


    Hi, I run 4 websites London, New York, Singapore and Dubai. Same company but some of our products are different in each region. Each domain is registered in the relevant region and I have google webmaster tools set so they know the location of each website. The problem is that our Dubai and US websites are appearing higher that the UK website in google.co.uk organic. Does anyone have any ideas why? Thanks

    | markc-197183
    0
  • Webpresence


    Roger (the SEOMoz robot) is reporting 1000’s of duplicate pages, duplicate titles and overly dynamic URL’s. These are being caused by our dynamic forum/shopping/testimonial pages. I appreciate Roger’s efforts and for making me aware of the situation, but should I be worrying about this too much? I believe that this shouldn’t affect rankings or SEO performance.. but then again I want to make Roger happy and see ‘0’ next to all errors and warnings! J Many thanks in advance! Lee

    | Webpresence
    0
  • jasarrow


    Hi, We have a client who has a fairly large e-commerce site that went live quite recently. The site is near enough fully indexed by Google, but one thing I've noticed is that filtered search results pages are being indexed, all with duplicate page titles. Obviously this is an issue that needs to be looked at ASAP. My questions is this - would we be better tweaking site settings so that page titles are constructed from the filters (brand/price/size) and therefore unique (and useful for searchers who are after a specific brand or size of a given item). Or should we rel=canonical the filtered pages so that they are eventually dropped from the index (the safer of the two options)? Thanks in advance for your help!

    | jasarrow
    0
  • Alick300


    How to create better rich snippets and where to place HTML code in the web page.If anyone answer with example on webpage location of code that would make me understand eaisly.

    | Alick300
    0
  • guidoboem


    hi, I recently recreated the page www.zenucchi.it /ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.html on the third level domain poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it  by putting it on the home page. The first page is still indexed for the keyword poltrona frau brescia . But the new page is no indexed for that keyword and i don't know why ( even if the page is indexed in google ) .. I state that the new domain has the same autorithy and that i put a 301 redirect to pass his authority to the new one that has many more incoming links that did not have previous .. i hope you'll help me thanks a lot

    | guidoboem
    0
  • csknight


    My search terms are highly visible on Google but is hardly visible on Yahoo. This has been the case for a few months.  What can I do to boost my ranking on Yahoo? Thanks!

    | csknight
    0
  • BeytzNet


    Hi, On each product page in my e-commerce site, I have a link to show a certificate of authenticity for the product. (similar to any guide in an e-commerce site). I also have the details as plain text on the page, but this is required. What is the correct way to show it, using PDF or JPG? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0
  • WebWise1


    If one were to write something like this, "I cannot over-empasisize the importance of branding, branding, branding." on a marketing page that talked about all the types of Internet marketing, would Google consider it keyword stuffing?

    | WebWise1
    0
  • seo-wanna-bs


    I cannot find any decent information on this update. Everybody appears to reiterate what Matt Cutts posted. I understand what the update was 'supposed' to combat and achieve. I also understand what those abusing ads above the fold, are supposed to do. But I need to know what to do, when you don't have too many ads above the fold. One of my websites was hit. Several professionals have tried to convince me it was Panda, that was released on 18th January. But I am now 99.9% certain it wasn't. I'm in the UK, traffic on the 18th was normal, little better than expected actually. Traffic on the 19th was normal until around 10pm GMT and there as a noticeable dip, compared with previous days and weeks. January 20th continued this decline and at the end of the day, there was a 25% loss. I have 1 Google ad, that is above the fold. Most of the pages have no ads at all. No affiliates or anything else. I have always prided myself in keeping my website clean and ad free. We also have the lowest bounce rates in the niche, by a mile, as far as I can tell, from speaking to other webmasters. I cannot remove this 1 ad, the servers alone, cost a couple of grand. The advertising supports the website. Nothing I can find online, gives me any indicators, as to what might be tripping this filter. But I need to figure it out, as traffic has now reached a 50% loss, which equates to about 15,000 visitors per day. I have tore my pages apart, removed functionality, added functionality and yet traffic has continued to decline. Can anybody shed light on this? I worry that perhaps Google is seeing the images on my website as ads. The images open a bigger preview in lightbox, but with JS turned off, opens a new page, with nothing but the image on it. I am at my wits end. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Paul

    | seo-wanna-bs
    0
  • NileCruises


    Our website was hacked last night and all data lost. I've worked over night to replace the destroyed data which was essentially things like all of our prices, testimonials, etc, etc. Got that sorted but now notice that all our page meta data has disappeared, title, description, etc. I'm worried that if I dont' enter the correct data that corresponds to Google "records" that we will lose our page one ranking. I've gone into Webmaster Tools and also I've used SEOQuake but the pages found have their meta data stripped when I go into "source". Before I start re-entering what I think would be the correct data I wondered if anyone had any advice please? Thanks, Colin

    | NileCruises
    0
  • kadesmith


    I'm looking for a coach who can help me get to the next level with SEO and help me determine what's junk and what's true advice.  Are there any recommendations any of you have out there on where to find such a person?

    | kadesmith
    0
  • jpgprinting


    Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?

    | jpgprinting
    0
  • BeTheBoss


    What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles? Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons? It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it? How say you? Update: I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?

    | BeTheBoss
    0
  • jpgprinting


    How can I deal with other websites that have a keyword domain name similar to my client website? I get a few domains similar to my client domain name just to avoid the same issue, but there are a few others ranking for the same keywords and I don't want posible customers get confused with a similar domain name. I have social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and etc), but they are not ranking on the first page. This is the situation: www.domain.com that would be my client's domain. And the competition: www.bestdomain.com www.thedomain.com www.domaincomapany.com And a few more. At this time my client is ranking #1 position, but all the others ar 1 or 2 positions bellow.

    | jpgprinting
    0
  • ukss1984


    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 🙂

    | ukss1984
    0
  • Steve25


    I was having a discussion with someone (who doesn't work in SEO) today and they asked the question why don't you have seperate pages for product sizes? I answered with the line "it would make the site huge" but I have been giving it some thought and I was wondering what others think. The scenario is that you have a polo shirt in black, white and blue and in sizes small, medium and large which gives 9 variations (small black, medium black etc). Currently we have one page for each product with the variations available for selection. Would keeping the current system and having links to a seperate pages be a good or bad thing? So in the above example we would have the main page and then links to each of the variation pages. So what do you think - good or bad? Steve

    | Steve25
    0
  • quickmobile


    I'm hitting a roadblock: I've successfully optimized our company website for 5 keyphrases, 3 of which we're ranking #1 in Google.com for, and for which monthly search volumes in the US are > 10,000. Yet, our CTR for those searches is below 1%!!! In plain words: people are looking for our industry, find us on as the first result, yet don't click on us! It's the first time I've experienced this in SEO and I'm wondering what is going on - and if anyone has suggestions. Any help is appreciated...

    | quickmobile
    0
  • seo-wanna-bs


    I'm not sure what the correct term is, but I've visited websites that require me to like page 1 of an article, to view page 2. Little annoying but fair enough, they wrote the content, I clearly find it of value as I want page 2. I run a download website, with user generated content. We used to only allow downloads to members, this resulted in 5,000+ new signups per day and a massive userbase. We now allow guests to download content, the majority are freeloaders, not even a thank you to the artist. I am about to employ a system for guests, that forces them to like, tweet or G+ the download, for it to begin. If they don't, no download. Are there any SEO considerations here? The page this will be implemented on, isn't a crawlable page. Cheers.

    | seo-wanna-bs
    0
  • StickyRiceSEO


    Both versions of the page has essentially same content, but in different order. One is for users coming from Google (and google bot) and other is for everybody else. Questions: Is it cloaking? what will be the best way to re-order elements on the page: totally different style sheets for each version, or calling in different divs in a same style sheet? Is there any better way to re-order elements based on search engine? Let me make it clear again: the content is same for everyone, just in different order for visitors coming from Google and everybody else. Don't ask me the reason behind it (executive orders!!)

    | StickyRiceSEO
    0
  • CapitolShine


    I was short on fund for my company when I set up my website. I used a company that was just starting to get into website design and they charged very little. Now that I'm starting to pursue different forms of SEO it has come to my attention (because of SEOmoz reporting) that my website wasn't coded correctly on the backend. For instance the website sometimes uses a trailing slash in the the URL and sometimes it doesn't. This redirects it and creates a duplicate content issue. I need to find someone to audit/evaluate (I guess that's the word) the backend of my website and reprogram it where there are problems. I need to make sure my site is set up in the best way possible to be crawled by search engines. What type of firm do I talk to? A website designer or web developer? Or do I talk to a SEO person who also can code the backend of websites? My website is www.capitolshine.com

    | CapitolShine
    0
  • Hyrule


    Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂

    | Hyrule
    0
  • BrowserMediaLtd


    We have been having a bit of a nightmare with a Google penalty (please see http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/2012/04/25/negative-seo-or-google-just-getting-it-painfully-wrong/ or http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10093-why-google-needs-to-be-less-kafkaesque for background information - any thoughts on why we have been penalised would be very, very welcome!) which has highlighted a slightly alarming aspect of Google's reinclusion process. As far as I can see (using Google Analytics), supporting material prepared as part of a reinclusion request is basically ignored. I have just written an open letter to the search quality team at http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/2012/06/19/dear-matt-cutts/ which gives more detail but the short story is that the supporting evidence that we prepared as part of a request was NOT viewed by anyone at Google. Has anyone monitored this before and experienced the same thing? Does anyone have any suggestions regarding how to navigate the treacherous waters of resolving a penalty? This no doubt sounds like a sob story for us, but I do think that this is a potentially big issue and one that I would love to explore more. If anyone could contribute from the search quality team, we would love to hear your thoughts! Cheers, Joe

    | BrowserMediaLtd
    0
  • mindflash


    Hi, We are creating a section on our established existing website to display our new marketplace product & associated category pages. This marketplace will be a section of the site where our users can sell online training courses that they've created.   It will be branded on our site as the Marketplace. Is it important to include 'marketplace' in the URL? Or would it be better to include a relevant keyword such as 'training-courses' instead? Or both? I've assumed I shouldn't use both as that would increase the length of the URLs and number of subfolders.

    | mindflash
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience. Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • 858-SEO


    I'm trying to dilute the link profile for a website. But have a couple of questions on the best way to achieve this. Current link profile, www.mysitename.com Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword 4 Keyword 5 Keyword 6 Keyword 7 Keyword 8 Keyword 9 Keyword 10 Keyword 12 Keyword 13 Keyword 14 Keyword 14 Keyword 15 mysitename.com Desired link profile, www.mysitename.com mysitename.com www.mysitename.com http://www. mysitename.com/ My Site Name http://mysitename.com Click Here my site name More Info mysitename.com/ www.mysitename.com/ Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword 4 Keyword 4 Keyword 5 Questions 1. Do you think Google looks at this on a domain level? Or do you think this needs to be done with every page on the site? 2. What would be a good way to build links fast to the pages, need to build lots of links to be able to dilute the profile. I was considering Dripable, or a similar service, but decided i really don't want to create more spam.What would you do? 3. What would you say the % threshold for anchor text is, i have read on different sources that at least 40% - 60% of links should be branded, url, or generic anchor links. Do you think this is accurate?

    | 858-SEO
    0
  • GrouchyKids


    One of my clients has a bunch of articles on the normal article syndication sites. They have duplicated these articles on their own site. My instinct is to implement on the offending pages of the clients site. Anyone with any experience of something similar? Is this the right way to go? Thanks in advance. Justin

    | GrouchyKids
    0
  • notnem


    One of our pages seems to have disappeared from Google SERPs, I did some analysis/research into this to try find out what is going on. Nothing jumps out.. -        No noticeable traffic drops, especially on/after the Panda & Penguin updates. -        Thorough checks on related keywords – no noticeable drops -        Anchor text – brand name & natural anchor texts -        2/3 word phrases Keyword density 3-5% in content -        No Google Manual Penalty with Notification in WBTools -        Robot.txt checked -        Checked sitemap.xml (recently updated) I expect if the page has dropped in SERPs then the traffic would drop also.. Anyone had same experiences or ideas how this page is affected?

    | notnem
    0
  • inhouseseo


    I want to add some script to my site so that a given page publishes a different paragraph of text every time the page loads. Something like randomly displayed testimonials (but with more text). So, when you look at the page source, you would see all the text (e.g testimonial-1, testimonial-2, etc.), but the user would only see one paragraph randomly. Would this be considered hidden text (one code for search engine, one for use)? Is there a safe number of words you can do this with without setting off red flags? I appreciate the help.

    | inhouseseo
    0
  • trophycentraltrophiesandawards


    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

    | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
    0
  • xoffie


    http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-content-replaces-ads/41452/ We have a Google plus page, but the results aren't coming up there Do you need a certain amount of people in your circles, what is the criteria to get your brand here? Any links?

    | xoffie
    0
  • Alick300


    I have a site and i registerd for local listing in google but i have not received any letter from google.It is second time i request for pin one month back and this time also did not received letter from google. what should i do?

    | Alick300
    0
  • GRIP-SEO


    Hey, mozzers!  My first question ever...  I have a client who has (fictitionally) WickerPatioHomeStore.com, which features wicker home decor.  Not too long ago, they wanted a shorter, easier URL, so they redirected to another domain they own, WickerPatio.com (again, fictional).  They saw somewhat of a drop in traffic, and wonder if there's a correlation with the words "home store" not being in their domain any more.  When considering the two, I figure that relevant factors would be age of domains, history of content of the domains, and inbound links to each domain.  Any thoughts on other things to consider?  Thanks very much!!  ~ Scott

    | GRIP-SEO
    0
  • GeorgeLaRochelle


    I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks

    | GeorgeLaRochelle
    0
  • Stromme


    Using open site explorer, what parameters will best narrow down low quality back links(or back links that could be viewed as un-natural by Google)? ie. blog networks, link schemes, etc.

    | Stromme
    0
  • BostonWright


    Option 1)      In the browser, we use javascript to determine if you meet the redirect conditions (referrer not mydomain.com and no bypassing query-string).  If so, then we direct your browser to the subdomain.mydomain.com URL.  Googlebot would presumably get the original page. Option 2)      In the browser, we use javascript to determine if you meet the redirect conditions.  If so, we trigger different CSS that hides certain components of the page and use javascript to load in extra ads.  Googlebt would get the unaltered page. In both scenarios the page content does not change. However, the presentation is different. The idea is that under certain conditions users are redirected to a page with more ads. The ads are not too severe on the redirected page and will not cause an above the fold penalty. That said, will either option be considered cloaking by Google?

    | BostonWright
    0
  • Gaadi


    This is little weird. We run a website specific to mobile phones called as 91mobiles.com. The site has gained lot of user interest and trust in the last 2 years [pre-dominantly indian users]. Lot of our users type mobile phone model and 91mobiles as the query. Example "Sony Xperia P 91mobiles". Google is showing gsmarena.com results on top and then shows our own results below! What's annoying is the fact that google also bolds the term gsmarena [denoting that it's a synonym]. Any idea why this is happening? We are very sure that we are not doing anything wrong..We have worked really hard for the last 2 years to reach where we are..and it's kind of hard to see gsmarena siphoning away our traffic for no reason at all [even when customer types in 91mobiles a part of the query to quality it]...Can some experts here demystify this? Thanks.

    | Gaadi
    0
  • symbolphoto


    Hello All, I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher"  i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position. Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog. He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file. He also installed the following plugins: Link Juice Keeper NoFollow Free The SEO Rich Snippets Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Robots Txt WP-PageNavi Add Meta Tags These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help. My blog link is :  http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/ I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located. Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.

    | symbolphoto
    0
  • Alick300


    I have a site with tld .com but my target country is United kingdom so i want to show United Kingdom in SERPs.How can i show it ? I have already set target country United Kingdom in Webmaster tools but still it is not showing.

    | Alick300
    0

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