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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • Discountvc


    I do not know what to do with this... and could use a bit of advice on this issue: "Doing things right", resulted in great organic rankings and a bonus by showing top of local search results for our area. Sounds great... until Google decides it was time to mix things up a little. I do not know if this applies to all types of businesses, but for ours it means that you will no longer get any organic page 1 listing if you are a local business that (un)luckily ranks in local results too. One day G will include local results on a keyword, the next they won't... making our SEOMoz Campaign rankings weekly a true yo-yo of "50 keywords declined by >48 and >49 places", and "30 keywords improved by <47 and <49". It turned this feature in campaigns completely useless for me (ever since SEOMoz decided to include the local result light bulb that is) Some traffic dropped from 240 a day for one keyword, to 30 now for that same keyword. Frustrated? You bet. I do not understand why Google seems to create a war with local businesses. Should we get out of Local results or does anyone have any ideas, suggestions? Thanks a bunch guys!

    | Discountvc
    3
  • akim26


    Rolling out a mobile site for a client and I'm not positive about the following: Do these mobile pages need to be optimized with the same / similar page titles? If we have a product page on the regular site with an optimized title like "Men's Sweaters, Shirts and Ties - Company XYZ", should the mobile version's page have the same title? What if the dev team simply named it "Company XYZ Clothes" and missed the targeted keywords? Does it matter? Along the lines of question 1, isn't there truly just one index and your regular desktop browser version will be used for all ranking factors on both desktop and mobile SERPs? If that regular page indeed ranks well for "men's sweaters" and that term is searched on a mobile device, the visitor will be detected and served up the mobile page version, regardless of its meta tags and authority (say it's on a subdomain, m.example/.com/mens-department/ ), correct? Are meta descriptions necessary for the mobile version? Will the GoogleBot Mobile recognize them or will just the regular version work? Looks like mobile meta descriptions have about 30 less characters. Thanks in advance. Any advice is appreciated. AK

    | akim26
    0
  • A_Q


    Hello, A bit of an open question to start the week... What do you think are the key differences between Google's mobile search and web search algorithms? Obviously greater importance on site speed for mobile search!?

    | A_Q
    0
  • RealmindTechnology


    They are only appearing on Bing and Yahoo, can anyone share some insight?Help? Here is the URL: www.aaexs.com

    | RealmindTechnology
    0
  • gazza777


    Hi all, How does should one treat mobi sites which have a separate set of files to the main site - with regards to the sitemap? Doe we tell Google about them?

    | gazza777
    0
  • bronxpad


    I've put in a lot of time on my site to make sure it is full of good relevent content and has a healthy back link profile. I rank well on google but not on Bing. How do I go about optimizing my site for Bing and what does Bing look for that makes them rank sites differnetly than google? Also what other search engines should I be looking to optimize for? As a note I am a Realtor with a Real Estate website.

    | bronxpad
    0
  • rdominey


    I’m not sure where to start so please bear with me. I apologize now for the length of this question.Like so many others that I have read about over the past few weeks I lost my presence on Google search results beginning on April 24th. My website iswww.getyourphotosoncanvas.com  .I have spent the past few weeks trying to figure out what the problem is and have read and participated in many forums and have read and re-read Google Webmasters Help and anything else I could to try and resolve this problem. I have submitted my website for reconsideration by Google twice and have gotten the following message: Reconsideration request forhttp://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ : No manual spam actions foundMay 23, 2012Dear site owner or webmaster ofhttp://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ , We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.I read this carefully and have tried to address all aspects of the message. I am not a SEO or website expert and have been learning along the way.First, we did not just loose ranking on Google, we went away from the top 100 on all key phrases searched including specific page titles that all rank #1 on Yahoo and Bing. Example: "Free Digital Proofs Photos on Canvas". This search returns our Like Us on Facebook page #5 and our webpage Free Digital Proofs  is not listed in the top 100?Like Get Your Photos on Canvas on Facebookwww.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/like-us-on-facebook/UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS TODAY! WE PROVIDE FREE DIGITAL PROOFING OF YOUR PHOTO CANVAS BEFORE WE PRINT! Customer Favorite Example... Basically get back what they think you want and not necessarily what you had in mind.The description text above is taken from the sidebar that is on all pages of our website and not from the title and description meta tags._Page Title: Like Get Your Photos on Canvas on FacebookPage Description:_Like Us on Facebook and keep in touch with Special Offers and information about Get Your Photos on Canvas!This page also shows up for other title page searches? It’s like Google is all confused?Sorry this is long, if you are still with me; Thank You for hanging in there!I have followed all of Google’s Rules, I’m not perfect but not bad either:I have not participated in link buying or building schemes, I have not used hidden text or Keyword stuffing, I use rel=canonical tags, I use noindex, nofollow on pages such as privacy policy, terms of use, and order confirmation pages, and blog comments.I have not considered a server problem with Gooblebot but maybe? The server seems to work fine for Yahoo, Bing, Ask and SEOmoz.I did change a significant number of page urls in January when we rebuilt the website and changed to a new WP format and Bluehost. That didn’t seem to effect Yahoo, Bing or even Google before April 24<sup>th?</sup>Using the tools at SEOmoz the website has no Errors, had a few warnings, fixed and in all looks OK.The On Page grade for "Free Digital Proofs Photos on Canvas" is "A" Here is an interesting test:Search: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap (we show up as number #2 on Google)Search: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap Canvas (we are not in top 100 on Google)Search: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap Photos (we are not in top 100 on Google)Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap Photos on Canvas www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/gallery-wraps-vs-museum-wraps/****Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap, two options for your Photo on Canvas Prints. Find out the difference between Photo Canvas Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap.**I have considered the possibility that Google may see us as keyword stuffing. Our url has photos and canvas, our website title is "Get Your Photos on Canvas" and in our content we talk about "Canvas" allot, how can you not?  We have used Picture and Photographs in content to reduce the number of uses of Photos. The content was not written for stuffing it is well written and reads well. I can’t think of substitutes for "Canvas" it is what it is.
    My Question is simple, Can anyone HELP?
    What else can I do to try and find and fix the problem**

    | rdominey
    0
  • JosephGourvenec


    Hi All, I would really like a second opinion on my current issue and I'd be very grateful for the communities knowledge please . I have a been running a successful campaign for one of my clients, increase in natural SERP's, etc. But since the 24th of April they were hit and hit hard and continued to decline now. They had many top 5 listings for terms and now most are not in top 50 serps. Openly I know they have a bad or not great backlink profile which was inherited from the past agency, but we're working on this using white hat techniques, contextual copy, brand etc. The copy is a great, contextual and no where near spammy at all...  Very nicely written, factual, etc. What I don't understand is this SEOmoz's On-Page report card gives an A rating for the target term which is also a secondary term but was ranking high. Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>6 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>2 / 5</dd> <dd> On-Page Keyword Usage for </dd> </dl> Title 1 URL 0 Meta Desc 1 H1 1 H2-4 0 Body 1 B / Strong 1 IMG ALT 0 Total Keyword Usage for this Page = 5 Fall from grace is SERP 5 to 25 and still going down. So the questions are: 1. Has this happened to you? 2. Could it just be down to their bad backlink profile which now needs much more attention? 3. Is this Penguin for sure? 4. What would you recommend? If anyone requires any further info please let me know and thank you in advance. Cheers,
    Joseph Gourvenec
    SEO and Search Specialist

    | JosephGourvenec
    0
  • DotCar


    Im planning on building a small utility widget that my site will distribute to related sites.  I plan on implementing this with JS and including a small anchor link back to my site. In the new penguin world, will the possibly be destructive to my SEO efforts? Any do's or don'ts when developing a widget/badge for distribution to lets say a dozen sites?

    | DotCar
    1
  • TimHolmes


    Hello All, Just a quick question. Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings. The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change) I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories. Put in place before I started here 🐵 Any help truly appreciated. Regards Tim

    | TimHolmes
    0
  • SEOcandy


    Hello Friends, I have a website, www.bollywoodshaadis.com. On 1st may we changed our servers and revamped our website as per SEO updated guidelines. For some strange reason Google is not showing site Meta Title when you search the website on Google. All it shows is the domain name in the meta title. However, when you search info:www.bollywoodshaadis.com it shows the right Meta tags. Any reason for this happening? I have never seen this before. Thank you in advance.

    | SEOcandy
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    Hey mozzers, I'm trying a post-penguin experiment with a brand new website. New domain, separate hosting from all my other stuff, all that. It is run on an article script that allows new authors to make articles and post them. It is all health related and there are no other topics. I'm trying to see if a brand new site can get something to rank quickly with no SEO being done. No links of any kind, just social media sharing of articles. Authors can put links in their articles to anywhere they want, so if you want to help your health site out with a link, go for it. I'm looking for any writers who want to join us in this experiment. i figure if we get a lot of content on there, all original, no spun, natural links, we can do well. if so, I'm abandoning all penguin hit domains and starting over. And you all can get some links out of it. I've already got me and my employees, so the more the merrier. Just let me know if interested.

    | DanDeceuster
    2
  • copywritingbuzz


    Only 4 out of the 12 pages of my blog/site have been indexed. How can I ensure all the pages get indexed? I'm using a wordpress site, and I also wondered how could I speed the indexing process up (I have submitted a site map) Thanks!

    | copywritingbuzz
    0
  • RobertHill


    Hi all, One of my sites http://henstuff.com/ has seen some ranking drops for major keywords over the past few weeks and I was wondering if it was something to do with Penguin not taking a positive view of link-filled footers. It is something we are looking at phasing out but wanted to get the opinions of the SEOMOZ community. Thanks! Rob

    | RobertHill
    0
  • sportsman87


    Is it better to focus on getting as many backlinks to your homepage as possible or to create links to a variety of pages within your site? Is one better for over all domain authority? Thanks!

    | sportsman87
    0
  • PLP


    Hello, A site I'm working on ranks well in Google, but does poorly in Bing/Yahoo. Is there anything I should look at? Thanks,

    | PLP
    0
  • Tug-Agency


    Hi All, I have 3 sites; brand.com, brand.co.uk and brand.ca They all have the same content with very very minor changes. What's best practice; to use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or to have unique content written for all of them. Just wondering after Panda, Penguin and the rest of the Zoo what is the best way to run multinational sites and achieve top positions for all of them in their individual countries. If you think it would better to have unique content for each of them, please let us know your reasons. Thanks!

    | Tug-Agency
    0
  • bronxpad


    Hello, I'm trying to figure out why my site and a competitors site literally trade places in the SERPS every week? My site has a boatload of content with an active blog with a lot of links versus a competitor that has virtually no links, limited content, 404 errors on the site. The links I have are all natural links with the exception of directories like JoeAnt. The only thing their site has is Domain Age where as mines is 4 months old. Any insight?

    | bronxpad
    0
  • InkCartridgesFast


    Please remove threadPlease remove thread

    | InkCartridgesFast
    0
  • shanky1


    Hi, We have our main website and our blog on blog.practo.com. Now what I see is that we wish to write in content to grow our seo keywords and links. Should we put the blog as www.practo.com/blog and then begin writing all the content or we should put the wordpress blog as www.practo.com/(wordpress blog here) and then begin writing the content. For best practices I suppose we should have content lined up as www.sitename.com/category/article name etc  or www.sitename.com/article name etc - am I correct? Our main site consists of few html pages and then we have our software on a different sub domain. What are the best ways to publish content and get it crawled at a faster rate for growth? I would also wish to understand how to measure the number of growth in % to our content we are writing. Only via google analytics or some other tool? Say I wish to see the growth of 10 articles from month of may and compare it to the month of april or march 2012. So what tools could I use to see if we are progressing or not? Thanks

    | shanky1
    0
  • HeIsHere


    I think this is an interesting topic to discuss though I'm looking for answers too. One of my well performing domain deindexed by Google today. Reason: Redirect from a 9 year old Deindexed domain (Must be penalysed) I believe this is done by one of my competitor. What you people suggest me to do now? Don't you think if this is the way Google treat the redirects after Penguin anybody can use this technique to harm their competitors?

    | HeIsHere
    0
  • JFritton


    So according to CNN an hour ago regarding new Google update: "With Knowledge Graph, which will begin rolling out to some users immediately, results will be arranged according to categories with which the search term has been associated" http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/tech/web/google-search-knowledge-graph/index.html?hpt=hp_t3 Does this mean we need to start optimizing for Categories as well as Keywords?

    | JFritton
    0
  • NoahsDad


    I wanted to share this with everyone for two reasons. 1. To try to figure out why this happened, and 2 Let everyone be aware of this so you can check some of your pages if needed. Someone on Facebook asked me a question that I knew I had answered in this post. I couldn't remember what the url was, so I googled some of the terms I knew was in the page, and the page didn't show up. I did some more searches and found out that the entire page was missing from Google. This page has a good number of shares, comments, Facebook likes, etc (ie: social signals) and there is certainly no black / gray hat techniques being used on my site. This page received a decent amount of organic traffic as well. I'm not sure when the page was de-indexed, and wouldn't have even known if I had't tried to search for it via google; which makes me concerned that perhaps other pages are being de-indexed. It also concerns me that I have done something wrong (without knowing) and perhaps other pages on my site are going to be penalized as well. Does anyone have any idea why this page would be de-indexed? It sure seems like all the signals are there to show Google this page is unique and valuable. Interested to hear some of your thoughts on this. Thanks

    | NoahsDad
    0
  • dawsonski


    Hi Guys There appears to be a  discrepancy between our website’s  on site analytics  and google anayltics.  For  the period from the 16th of April 2012 April to the 16th  of May  2012 ,our onsite anaytics shows a total of 5036 visitors, whereas Google is showing a slightly lower amount at 4759 visitors. Both figures include unique and returning visitors. Does any body have any ideas as to why there maybe a discrepancy? Analytic discrepancies

    | dawsonski
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  • freestone


    Does anyone else see their organic rankings fluctuating wildly.  I have been tracking a few key keywords by literaly typing them in each morning and looking at results. The pages I have been doing this for where without any doubt affected by Penguin as you can see the huge drop in traffic directly correlated to the Pegnuin deployment. What is strange is one day these phrases will be on page one position 3 and two days later but on page3 to 5 or not ranked.  Four days later back on page 1.  These are wild fluctuations so it appears to me that I am observing Penguin tweaking ?  Just wish the tweaking would stop on one of the days were our phases for this particular site are on page one. Most people would check rankings weekly, monthly or quarter and would not perhaps be observing these crazy swings? Thought?

    | freestone
    0
  • PerriCline


    With the recent announcement of Googles new Knowledge Graph, the SERP will be different.  Will this present a new set of SEO best practices?

    | PerriCline
    0
  • shanky1


    We have our site www.practo.com We have our blog as blog.practo.com We plan to have our main site in a months time from now as www.ray.practo.com The Issues - I will then need to direct all my existing traffic from www.practo.com to www.ray.practo.com Keeping in mind SEO and also since I will be generating new content via our Wordpress instance what are the best ways to do this so that google does not have difficulty in find out content 1. Would it be good if I put the Wordpress instance as ray.practo.com/ blog(wordpress instance comes in here in the directory) /  article-url 2.Would it be better with www.practo.com / ray / blog/article-url I am using wordpress to roll out all our new SEO based content on various keywords and topics for which we want traffice - primary reasons are since we needed a content generation cms platform so that we dont have to deal with html pages and every time publish those content pages via a developer. Is the above - what soever I am planning to do in the correct manner keeping SEO in mind. Any suggestions are welcome. I seriously need to know writing seo based content on wordpress instance and have them in the urls is that a good idea? Or is only html a good idea. But we need some cms to be there so that content writers can write content independently. Please guide accordingly. Thanks

    | shanky1
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  • shanky1


    I have recently begun with my content and keyword selections. I used the Adword's keyword tool and for eg: got a few keywords like laser skin treatment dermatology dermatologists cosmetic laser surgery The competition for these are low and medium. Now what I understand is. If I wish to use them in my articles on content generation I can have them as medium and long tail keywords to write around. So for eg: laser skin treatment   = " Benefits of a laser skin treatment in India" and the url for this article could be /laser-skin-treatment For dermatology = "best dermatology practices"  url could be /dermatology-practices Do the above  happen to be the medium and long tail keywords? Am I going in the correct direction. How do I judge and come out with medium and long tail keywords. Please suggest Thanks

    | shanky1
    0
  • BeTheBoss


    I work for a network of sites that offer up country exclusive content. The content for the US will be different than Canada, Australia, Uk, etc.… but with the same subjects. Now to make navigation easy we have included in the header of every page a drop down that has links to the other countries, like what most of you do with facebook/twitter buttons. Now every page on every site has the same link, with the same anchor text. Example: Penguins in Canada Penguins in Australia Penguins in the USA Because every page of every site has the same links (it's in the header) the "links containing this anchor text" ratio is through the roof in Open Site Explorer. Do you think this would be a reason for penguin penalization? If you think this would hurt you, what would you suggest? no follow links? Remove the links entirely and create a single page of links? other suggestions?

    | BeTheBoss
    0
  • bilsonx


    Is there any tools that provide information on how many results there are for a given keyword? Also, would this be a good way to do research for which keyword I should optimize my page for google SERP, basically to find a less competitive keyword. My thinking was that if the search results were lower it would be easier to rank for that keyword with SEO.

    | bilsonx
    0
  • shanky1


    We have our saas based website - most of our online customers are those who keep coming back to us and my GA is full of their footprints. I completely want to concentrate on getting hold of those who might really need our software and as of now are not able to find them . Including keywords through which people might want to find us is one of the ways. Next how do I publish that to the majority of the users to find and get traction better on that article or post? Would posting links to facebook twitter etc and getting people to find those articles there and link back and come on our main website to read it - will this help? We sell cloud based software but have various domains where our customers can make use of it. There are at least 5-10 of them. We don't have content at all on our website. In a few simple steps how can I get started with this - Content generation **Linking back the content ** Generating good foot falls from users to those cotent Notching up on google for those content page A detailed insight would prove much helpful Thanks

    | shanky1
    1
  • cDNAInteractive


    I have a shopping website with thousands of products, and the sitelinks that google has chosen for me (for a long time) are random product pages, which makes no sense to me. I do not emphasize those products on the home page, and I have a sitemap that clearly lists the directory of all the categories. I also added a "nofollow" attribute to almost every link on the home page that is not important. These products in the site links seem completely random and there isnt even a sitelink for "about" or any of the footer content! What gives? Also, my sitelinks never updated to the new, better version. Any suggestions?

    | cDNAInteractive
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  • APICDA


    Hey everyone! I am looking for some opinions on organizing website content. Here are two thoughts.  I am open to alternative suggestions as well.  Thanks for any consideration in this matter! **Aviation Supply Store   Thought A  ** **Helicopters                                          Airplanes                                 Rockets   ** Helicopter engines                     Airplane engines                              Rocket engines Helicopter Fuels                          Airplane Fuels                                  Rocket fuels Helicopter Accessories               Airplane Accessories                  Rocket Accessories Aviation Supply Store  Thought B Engines                               Fuels                                  Accessories Helicopter Engines            Helicopter Fuels           Helicopter Accessories Airplane Engines                Airplane Fuels               Airplane Accessories Rocket Engines                    Rocket Fuels                 Rocket Accessories I simply chose aviation as an example.  I'm just having difficulty deciding on how best to catagorize. Thank You!

    | APICDA
    0
  • holmesy


    I recently joined a retail company who have been using an SEO agency for a few years.  Having done a bit of link profile analysis i'm more than a little concerned that we're a sitting duck for the dreaded penguin. My main question is should i focus more on the number of actual links pointing at a page or the number of linking root domains? For example one of our pages has over 18000 links pointing at it but from only 39 root domains (immediate alarm bells!!). Most of the links are exact anchor text fro one particular term. So far we haven't been hit but i'm not naive to think we're out of the woods yet.

    | holmesy
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  • ArgosSEM


    We have been marketing a website for a client with a domain name example2.com. Their main site example.com is used to post information about their services and example2.com is their eCommerce site they use to sell their products. After the Google Penguins update, we have lost all rankings for example2.com. We did not do any unethical, black hat SEO and I am pretty sure its wasn't just mistakenly blocked. We use the same strategy for our other clients and they have not been impacted. Do you guys think the domain name has anything to do with it? Whats odd it example.com is now ranking for some keywords that example2.com used to rank for. We have never marketed that website or anyone else for that matter. I have been scratching my head over this one for the past week and this is the only feasible problem I can think of.

    | ArgosSEM
    0
  • Anthony_NorthSEO


    I've been reading about and helping a lot of people who were hit by the Penguin update over the last couple of days, and the update seems to be accomplishing what Google intended it to accomplish... it's scaring people straight. I've picked up two new clients this week who now only want to practice "Good SEO" and "Do it the right way." This is a good thing for me and for the quality of the net, don't get me wrong. It does make me a little nervous though that the SEO industry is going to be tarnished a bit. Google is making a pretty clear statement with Penguin, which I think boils down to "Don't do anything other than create good content, provide accurate descriptions, and establish good connections to SEO your site... or beware ." (other than technical stuff - 301/ canonical / crawler management / etc). So riddle me this Batman... As a proud Journeyman, how is the followed backlink on my SEOMoz profile page going to appear to Google? This is an SEO site with SEO content and SEO tools and SEO in the URL. The site listed below the first followed URL on my profile is an SEO site that's in development. So there's a link to my site and every bit of context around it screams SEO. But... it is a very nice link indeed, I really do like it, and this is a white-hat kind of place. Do you think Google will start penalizing sites with inbound links from pages that are related to SEO, even if the page promotes respectable tactics? If so, I'll be having nightmares about a very round Danny DeVito with a pointy nose and creepy hands chasing me through the sewers for weeks to come...

    | Anthony_NorthSEO
    1
  • squareplug


    Has there been any tests or studies that associate writing in the first person or using "emotional" feeling phrases to higher rankings.  More specifically to a blog structure. I'm trying a blog option with a  local telecommunications company, however I'm having flashbacks of writing those 5 paragraph essays when taking the SATs.  The owner decided he should take on the responsibility and it's like he just can't bring himself to write from a personal perspective. He's a bit stuck in the "professional" mindset and worried about appearing unprofessional.  I empathize with his perspective, but I know it's not going to work..or maybe it will? it's just not going to be interesting to readers, but perhaps google will appreciate the fresh content.  I don't think letting an employee takeover will be an option as he's very protective of the company's image. So would you ditch the blog? or continue with the dull posts?

    | squareplug
    0
  • galis42


    We've been hit hard by the Penguin update. To start - we have never paid for a link or participated in any link scheme. Never. I'm sure you've heard that - but in this case it's true. Our site - www.annuity.com - has been in existence since 2004. Because of our name, we've always been ranked on page 1 of Google for the search term "annuity". Now we aren't even on page 50. We got the dreaded letter about links, but we've never bought, exchanged, paid, etc. or participated in any link scheme. We have not needed too. We are referenced  by sites such as Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bankrate.com, etc. Our content is original and our own. We've spent years writing it. Because of our sites name - Annuity.com -  we get a lot of web spam. Looking at some of our inbound links - companies are linking to us because of our name (keyword - looks like a auto link generation or something like that) or our reputation. Any suggestions or advice on how to get our ranking back without becoming the Web Police? We don't buy, purchase, spam, or need links that are not earned by the quality of our content. I'm at a loss.

    | galis42
    1
  • WEB-IRS


    Hello fellow internet go'ers! Just as a disclaimer, I have been following a number of discussions, articles, posts, etc. trying to find a solution to this problem, but have yet to get anything conclusive. So I am reaching out to the community for help. Before I get into the questions I would like to provide some background: I help a team manage and improve a number of med-large eCommerce websites. Traffic ranges anywhere from 2K - 12K+ (per day) depending on the site. Back in March one of our larger sites was "filtered" from Google's search results. I say "filtered" because we didn't receive any warnings and our domain was/is still listed in the first search position. About 2-3 weeks later another site was "filtered", and then 1-2 weeks after that, a third site. We have around ten niche sites (in total), about seven of them share an identical code base (about an 80% match). This isn't that uncommon, since we use a CMS platform to manage all of our sites that holds hundreds of thousands of category and product pages. Needless to say, April was definitely a frantic month for us. Many meetings later, we attributed the "filter" to duplicate content that stems from our product data base and written content (shared across all of our sites). We decided we would use rel="canonical" to address the problem. Exactly 30 days from being filtered our first site bounced back (like it was never "filtered"), however, the other two sites remain "under the thumb" of Google. Now for some questions: Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content? Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"? Why has only one site recovered?

    | WEB-IRS
    1
  • eladlachmi


    Hi, I'm kind of an SEO noobie, so please bare with me 🙂 On one of the sites I'm working on I got a request to move large blocks of content, just placed on the page currently, in to tabs. This makes sense. We tried it and it makes navigating through the information much easier for visitors. My question is: Will Google consider this as hiding information? It's not loaded dynamically. It's all their when the page is loaded, in the source, but not displayed until the visitor clicks the tab. Will this cause SEO issues? Thank you!

    | eladlachmi
    0
  • allan-chris


    Hi guys, hope your all OK and thanks in advance for taking a nosey at this. OK where to start - my rankings for the last 12 months have progressively improved every week, usually of the 300 KWs i track the last few months has seen approx 70 up/70down per week, but the improvements usually outweigh the declines. This week I saw a sudden drop though - 35 improvements and 112 declines. The strange thing was though, the improvements came on the more competitive KWs, and the less competitive words I haven't done much or any back linking for dropped. Seems silly me asking this question when I run that through my head ofcouse KWs you don;t work on will drop like flies? It should be plainly obvious those words would drop off but all have been improving on there own slowly over the last 6/7 months. Now if this was a penalty (nothing showing in webmaster tools) I would have expected it to come through on my KWs I have over done the backlinking for, but these are the 1's that improved. So is it just the Google Dance? I normally see some words such as the big 1 we target DJ Equipment go from position 13 - 24 can change hourly sometimes! Could it just be quite a few have dropped all at once and will pop back up this week? Also if anyone could give us any pointers in general on where you think we should be taking our SEO it would be much appreciated. I know we have been a little lazy with our backlinking and could do with some much better/ industry related websites linking to us, and there are title tags/metas on product page that need sorting.. aside these couple of issue's? DJs Only

    | allan-chris
    0
  • ahw


    I'm comparing our best search traffic month in 2011 (March) with our current traffic (April)and have seen significant declines in traffic, despite no change in our rankings or even improved rankings for the same terms.  Trying to sort out an explanation. We have been a white-hat SEO site since our inception over 10 years ago.  Our SEO consultant doesn't think we've been affected by any algo changes, at least not to any significant degree. My only explanation for this possibly anomaly is: decrease in the use of the KW terms in search over time (how to determine?) generalized increase in PPC instead of organic search driving traffic possibility that Adv Web Rankings is no longer accurately collecting SERP rankings Does anyone have any other thoughts or considerations that might explain the decline in traffic, despite maintenance or improvement in rankings? Thanks.

    | ahw
    0
  • airnwater


    Hello, I work with a conglomerate of 10 or so different websites.  In the past year or so (but especially in the past few weeks) we've seen a drop in traffic to our smaller microsites and have found that it's time consuming to rank well for these sites.  With the recent changes that Google has made, would you recommend consolidating our sites and focusing our attention on one or two main sites? Also, if we were to redirect the microsites back to our main site, could that effect the rankings of our main site?  Would the demoted rankings get passed along? Thank you!

    | airnwater
    0
  • Digirank


    We've started to notice some changes in the rankings of Google UK and Google pages from the UK. Pages from the UK have always typically ranked higher, however it seems like these are slipping, and Google UK pages (pages from the web) are climbing. We've noticed a similar thing happening in the Bing/Yahoo algorithm as well. Just wondered if anyone else has anyone else noticed this? Thanks

    | Digirank
    0
  • Resultify


    As of today we got huge drops in SERP across all our pages. We can see a drop between 10 to 80% on most of our pages on this domain: http://www.meresverige.dk Some background info: Never bought any links Yes, did optimize the site, but only in fair way, using SEO moz On-Page Optimization. Most pages get an A-grade No cloaking, all pages do look exactly same to visitors and Google Any input on what this could be? We are hugely grateful for any input that might lead us in the correct direction Have a nice day Fredrik

    | Resultify
    0
  • WPMUDEV


    Hola All, This is a update of http://www.seomoz.org/q/gah-unfaorly-hit-by-massive-google-penalty Updated because: Google webmaster has gotten back to us that there have been no manual actions taken against us Results haven't improved one jot We're completely flummoxed as to why this is happenin Quick summary: We run the larest WordPress news site on the web, WPMU.org We're completely legit, a team of 4-5 great writers, amazing original content, massive fanbase on twitter and facebook, a 60k email list etc, established for years and years. We're absolutely not and haven't done anything gray or black, the worst we've done is including links in the footers of some themes we've distributed Since the 24th April our google referrals are down from an 8.5k daily peak to 1.5 - see the attached. Articles which have consistently attracted several hundred referrals per day have disappeared from the rankings to be replaced by republications or just links to the, for example, here's one on the dangers of searching for free WP themes, decimated: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/ Check out how legit we are! http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=wpmu.org And the problem: How to get our google traffic back? We're completely stuck 😕 We can't find issues within the site content, or even particularly within the backlinks (we've removed all links from Edublogs) We haven't been manually whacked, so we can't get that changed. Absolutely nothing within the penguin update should have hit us... in fact by their reckoning we should have had a massive improvement over all the trash that competes with us in the WordPress space. Help / Ideas / Feedback / Criticism / Anything desperately sought. Thanks for your time, James Screen-Shot-2012-05-03-at-10.49.40-AM.png

    | WPMUDEV
    0
  • MikePatch


    I think the the theme of this question should be "Is this worth my time?" Hello, Mozcon readers and SEO gurus. I'm not sure how other hosting networks are set up, but I'm with Hostgator. I have a VPS level 5 which (I think) is like a mini personal server. I have 4 IP addresses, although it is a C block as each IP address is off by one number in the last digit of the address. I have used 3 out of the 4 IP addresses I have been given. I have added my own sites (some high traffic, some start-ups) and I've hosted a few websites that I have designed from high paying customers. -one man show, design them, host them and SEO them With the latest Penguin update, and with learning that linking between C Block sites is not a great idea, I have "No Followed" all of the footer links on client sites back to my portfolio site. I have also made sure that there are no links interlinking between any of my sites as I don't see them in the Site Explorer, and I figure if they aren't helping, they may be hurting the rankings of those keywords. Ok, so...my question is:  "I have one IP address that I'm not using, and I have a popular high traffic site sharing it's IP with 5 other sites (all not related niches but high quality) Is it worth it to move the high traffic site to it's own IP address even though making the switch would take up to 48hrs for process to take affect?  -My site would be down for, at the most 2 days (1 and a half if I switch the IP's at night) Is this really worth the stress of losing readers? Will moving a site on an IP with 5 other sites help the rankings if it was to be on it's own IP? Thank you very much ps- I can't make it to MOZcon this year, super bummed

    | MikePatch
    0
  • HelpingHandNetwork


    With the new update to google focusing on link spam and multiple anchor text ? If you have incoming links that you would like to block or make no follow?

    | HelpingHandNetwork
    1
  • SimCaffe


    Since a couple of days I have the problem, that Google Webmaster tools are showing a lot more 404 Errors than normal. If I go thru the list I find very strange URLs that look like two paths put together. For example: http://www.domain.de/languages/languageschools/havanna/languages/languageschools/london/london.htm If I check on which page Google found that path it is showing me the following URL: http://www.domain.de/languages/languageschools/havanna/spanishcourse.htm If I check the source code of the Page for the Link leading to the London Page it looks like the following: [...](languages/languageschools/london/london.htm) So to me it looks like Google is ignoring the <base href="..."> and putting the path together as following: Part 1) http://www.domain.de/laguages/languageschools/havanna/ instead of base href Part 2) languages/languageschools/london/london.htm Result is the wrong path! http://www.domain.de/languages/languageschools/havanna/languages/languageschools/london/london.htm I know finding a solution is not difficult, I can use absolute paths instead of relative ones. But: -          Does anyone make the same experience? -          Do you know other reasons which could cause such a problem? P.s.: I am quite sure that the CMS (Typo3) is not generating these paths randomly. I would like to be sure before we change the CMS's Settings to absolute paths!

    | SimCaffe
    0
  • thestudio4


    Hello, I have a question regarding a couple of our in-house domains & rankings. We have our main site which we've had for 3+ years, moderately optimised. And our separate site for another publication, this was it's own stand-alone site but now that site has been removed off our servers & the old domain a straight forward http re-direct via 1&1 to the main website. The old site was removed & forward set up before October 2011, however when searching Google for 'specification online' the old domain appears position #1. We have many other domains which are http re-directs with 1&1 and none of these have causes us this issue. What else can I do to get the old domain to stop showing up on Google? Domains in questions: Main site: http://specificationonline.co.uk Old site: http://housingspecification.com If you  need any further info I'll be happy to provide as we owned both domains & hosting from day 1 so can access anything required.

    | thestudio4
    0

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