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  • Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck
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  • If we have one page on our site that is is only linked to by one other page, what is the best way to block crawler access to that page? I know we could set the link to "nofollow" and that would prevent the crawler from passing any authority, and we can set the page to "noindex" to prevent it from appearing in search results, but what is the best way to prevent the crawler from accessing that one link?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
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  • Are sites like ReviewMe or PayPerPost white hat? Are follow links allowed within the post? Should I use those aforementioned services, or cold contact high authority sites within my niche?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 10JQKAs
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  • Is it bad to present a link to SE robots as a no-follow link, while normal users see it as a do-follow link?

    On-Page Optimization | | MBLT
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  • If we have pages on our site that link to search results is that a bad thing? Should we set the links to "nofollow"?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
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  • I am trying to understand why google isn't indexing key content on my site. www.BeyondTransition.com is indexed and new pages show up in a couple of hours. My key content is 6 pages of information for each of 3000 events (driven by mySQL on a wordpress platform). These pages are reached via a search page, but no direct navigation from the home page. When I link to an event page from an indexed page it doesn't show up in search results. When I use fetch on webmaster tools the fetch is successful but is then not indexed - or if it does appear in results it's directed to the internal search page e.g. http://www.beyondtransition.com/site/races/course/race110003/ has been fetched and submitted with links but when I search for BeyondTransition Ironman Cozumel I get these results.... So what have I done wrong and how do I go about fixing it? All thoughts and advice appreciated Thanks Denis

    Technical SEO | | beyondtransition
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  • How long? a.) 500 words b.) 1000 words c.) As many as I need to get a link How good should it be? a.) Digg/StumbleUpon worthy b.) A decent article that the webmaster wouldn't mind posting. c.) Good enough for a link Who should you go for? a.) Go big or go home! High authority b.) Start small Other thoughts and strategies?

    Link Building | | 10JQKAs
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  • I see that GoDaddy offer a 'Certified Domain' option. Does this help SEO at all?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy
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  • I would like to start up another blog which has more of a "technical" topic coverage vs my regular blog, which appeals more to non-techie business folks.  If the goal is to drive traffic ultimately to the main site, should I do this second blog on a different domain, a subdomain, or try to incorporate it as a separate-but-equal blog on the same domain as the currrent one?  What would you do?

    Content Development | | JMagary
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  • I have a client with a htaccess file that is a total mess! What are the best practices to organize all the re-directs, and make it more manageable in the future. Any resources would be appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave
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  • Hi - I have been using the following URL for getting anchor text's.
    http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/anchor-text/www.howdyhonda.com%2Fblog?Scope=term_to_page&Sort=domains_linking_page&Cols=2 But this is not giving the results like the one shown in the Open Site Explorer -
    http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.howdyhonda.com Can you put me in the right direction here?
    Thanks.

    Moz Pro | | ananthg
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  • hi all, I really loved using the juicy link finder for my link building activity, but I've just noticed it is now no longet available redirecting me to the tools page when clicking on: www.seomoz.org/link-finder Can anyone recommend a tool i can use that offers exactly the same information or alternative tools out there? Essentially I just need to understand what/which websites to target based on entering a keyword Thanks! Simon

    Link Building | | simonsw
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  • We run an e-commerce website that has been online since 2004. For some of our older brands we are getting good rankings for the brand category pages and also for their model numbers. For newer brands, the category pages aren't getting rankings and neither are the products - even when we search for specific unique content on that page, Google does not return results containing our pages. The real kicker is that the pages are clearly indexed, as searching for the page itself by URL or restricting the same search using the site: modifier the page appears straight away! Sometimes the home page will appear on page 3 or 4 of the rankings for a keyword even though their is a much more relevant page in Google's index from our site - AND THEY KNOW IT, as once again restricting with the keywords with a site: modifier shows the obviously relevant page first and loads of other pages before say the home page or the page that shows. This leads me to the conclusion that something on certain pages is flagging up Google's algorithms or worse, that there has been manual intervention by somebody. There are literally thousands of products that are affected. We worry about duplicate content, but we have rich product reviews and videos all over these pages that aren't showing anywhere, they look very much singled out. Has anybody experienced a situation like this before and managed to turn it around? Link - removed Try a page in for instance the D&G section and you will find it easily on Google most of the time. Try a page in the Diesel section and you probably won't, applying -removed and you will. Thanks, Scott

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scottlucas
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  • Hi everybody, for some of our keywords we saw a huge drop in ranking in the Seomoz Dashboard, yet when performing a non-personalized Google US search we still hold our old positions. Now, I am worried whether this is an upcoming Google penalty or just some bug in the latest crawl. Did anybody ever experience something similar and how could we find out if we were indeed penalized by Google (as we did some major linkbuilding campaign for these keywords recently)? Cheers and a major thanks for your suggestions, Tobias

    Moz Pro | | space56
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  • Hi, I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!). I need something that will:
    1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
    2/. Do header status checking
    3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
    4/. Multiple alert possibilities. We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case. Thanks

    Web Design | | James77
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  • hi Please see the URL http://news.oneindia.in/2011/10/22/tech-gmail-to-get-a-makeover-soon-google.html
    The corresponding mobile version is http://news.oneindia.mobi/2011/10/22/886893.html If we search for "Google video leaks; Gmail to get a make over soon" on Google the mobi version comes up instead of the web version. One reason could be because of the browser title. We do use meta title in our web version of the article. For the past few months our mobi version of the file comes up higher on SERPs when compared to the web version. What could be the reason? regards

    Technical SEO | | greyniumseo
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  • I Have a Wordpress Site, and just realized that the search results are being indexed on Google creating duplicate content. Whats the best way for me to stop these search result pages from being indexed without stopping the regulars and important pages and posts from being indexed as well? **The typical search query looks like this:  ** http://xxx.com/?s=Milnerton&search=search&srch_type AND this also includes results that are linked to the "view more" such as:
    http://xxx.com/index.php?s=viewmore Your help would be much appreciated. regards Stef

    Technical SEO | | stefanok
    0

  • At the minute 12 out of my 16 clients are Local SEO clients.  I'm new to SEO Moz and still only at the low level subscription which gives me 5 campaigns.  It seems to me (and I may be wrong) that SEO Moz is more suited for my clients that want to rank nationally.  SEO Moz seems like it might be a little overkill for using up a campaign for local seo.  I'm going to stay with SEO Moz as it is great for the few clients I have that want to rank nationally.  So my question is does anyone know of a similar company to SEO Moz that focuses soley on local seo? Does anyone have experience with Bright Local?  How about shedding some light on what reporting software is good for LOCAL SEO? http://www.brightlocal.com/seo-tools/ Thanks
    Gary

    Image & Video Optimization | | fun52dig
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  • I usually don't sweat a lot for ranks and such but last couple of days, our rankings have been moving drastically. 'Rank Tracker' shows 1st position for many keywords and the "keyword difficulty tool" shows 2nd and 3rd positions.  Is is just me or this is a common thing?

    Moz Pro | | Syed1
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  • The SEOmoz Site Crawl indicates that we have too many on page links on over 9,970 pages. This is an ecommerce site with a large number of categories. I have a couple of questions regarding this issue: How important is the "too many on page links" factor to SEO? What are some methods of reducing the number of links when there are a large number of categories? We have main categories with dropdown menus currently and have found that they are used to browse and shop the store.

    Moz Pro | | afmaury
    1

  • My sister has a store page on etsy.com where she sells home made crafts. And I want to help her rank higher on google with some of the other etsy stores. So i started to look at the other etsy store pages that are ranking well on google and found that they have a page authority between 48 to 52. So i looked at the backlinks of the ones ranking well on google with high page authority and found that many of their best links came from the internal search results page on etsy.com, and some only had one link from just an arbitrary etsy.com search page. I'm thinking this is because another product being listed on the seach page has a high page authority which then passes some of its link juice onto every other product on the page. But what is interesting is products are always being sold or getting added so even though you are on a search results page that happens to benifit from the link juice of another product the next time the page gets crawled you will be on a different search page. So i am thinking in order to maintain high page authority to you just have to have a lot of products listed so that there is a greater likely hood that you will find yourself on the same search page as another high authority page. I have not been doing SEO very long so i would love to hear what others think. I really have no idea, am i on the right track with this? (edited post) Thanks

    Link Building | | doug565
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  • I hear a lot of conflicting opinions regarding when to use pages over posts. If you were using wordpress mainly as a static site and less of a blog would you use pages over posts? Let's say it is a yacht review site. Would you set up most of the content (boat review pages) as pages or posts? I hear some say in that case you would want to use mostly pages and use posts for news related items. Then there are others that suggest only making the few (contact, about, privacy, terms) as pages and everything else created as posts organized into categories. Any thoughts? Also, is there a tool to find out if a website that is not yours is using a page or a post? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | PEnterprises
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  • Is it possible to make your site un readable by the back link checkers such as open explorer ? Or would it have a negative effect on search engine rankings. Sorry I have been in the business for 10 years and it has never crossed my mind. Figured I would say that before I get all the "I can't believe you don't know that" type comments 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect
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  • Does anybody recommend any book about content writing?

    Content Development | | echo1
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  • I'm trying to find a program or a site that will give me quality traffic data. If I'm going into a presentation or simply a round one meeting I like to prepare a 1 pager with info I've found. Without authentication access to their Google Analytics I feel like I'm a step behind. Any Help would be greatly appreciated. -JoeGrrrcia

    Technical SEO | | JOEGRRRCIA
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  • I have a domain name that is in use and has a domain age of 4 years.  My question is this, will taking that domain name and promoting it under a completely new business in a completely different industry with a totally different business model hurt getting this new business to rank? The domain name is my first and last name.  I've been promoting videos that I like under this domain name.  I would now like to use the domain name to promote my local SEO services.  Will this hurt my efforts to rank with search engines since Google and others have been indexing the site for a certain industry and topic? Thanks
    Gary

    Technical SEO | | fun52dig
    0

  • I'm seeing a duplicate title for the home page, both the static file name and the domain. like: http://domain.com
    http://domain.com/index.cfm I know how to set this in Google Analytics but how would I make sure this isn't seen as an error? It's accounting for both a duplicate title and duplicate content. Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | joshcanhelp
    0

  • My first thought is no. But I am definitely looking for some loopholes. If there is any way to make this work, please share your thoughts.

    Image & Video Optimization | | itrogers
    0

  • I have a client with page 1 rankings for several keywords. He wants to make some updates to his website. He is offering a new service and wants to show before and after photos of the procedure. He is an OB/GYN, so the before/after pictures are very explicit and have full nudity. How will this affect his rankings? Is there something that I can do to tell Google and other SE's that these photos are medical and not pornographic? Should I host them on another domain? Just looking for thoughts and insight. Thank you in advance!

    Image & Video Optimization | | itrogers
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  • Hello I am reading SEO ranking factor (very good informations) and I want to ask: what does it mean: of linking C bloks to page I think that: how many(#) links from the same server (C block) links to your homepage or some pages of your web... of linking IP adresses to page how many web links are going to my web and every links are from another server. if I understand it good, it is no different between, if you have links from webpages in one server (one C block) or from webpages on another servers as your web is,  because both correlation is  0.25... THX Could anybody expalin me, what does it mean:  # of External Links w/ Partial Match Anchor Text http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-5 The number of external links and all these external links contain partial match anchor text from my query: (I am finding in Google "tennis" and see in SERP domain www.usta.com. # of External Links w/ Partial Match Anchor Text: tells me the number how many external links contain partial match anchor text "play tennis, tennis school, tennis info..."? )

    Algorithm Updates | | PeterSEO
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  • Google webmaster tools just started showing some strange pages under "not found" crawl errors. www.mysite.com/Cached www.mysite.com/item-na...  <--- with the three dots, INSTEAD of www.mysite.com/item-name/ I have just 301'd them for now, but is this a sign of a technical issue?  The site is php/sql and I'm doing the URL rewrites/301s etc in .htaccess. Thanks! -Dan EDIT: Also, wanted to add, there is no 'linked to' page.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evolvingSEO
    0

  • I just got my first seomoz crawl report and was shocked at all the errors it generated. I looked into it and saw 7200 crawl errors. Most of them are duplicate page titles and duplicate page content. I clicked into the report and found that 97% of the errors were going off of one page It has ttp://legendzelda.net/forums/index.php/members/page__sort_key__joined__sort_order__asc__max_results__20 http://legendzelda.net/forums/index.php/members/page__sort_key__joined__sort_order__asc__max_results__20__quickjump__A__name_box__begins__name__A__quickjump__E etc Has 20 pages of slight variations of this link. It is all my members list or a search of my members list so it is not really duplicate content or anything. How can I get these errors to go away and make search my site is not taking a hit? The forum software I use is IPB.

    Moz Pro | | NoahGlaser78
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  • In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.? I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?

    Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets
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  • How can I create multiple white-labeled website SEO analysis reports using the SEOMoz software? I'm speaking at a workshop and want to provide this as a giveaway to attendees to start the discussion on improving their SEO. I'm looking mostly for an overview summary of a site's key SEO data points including inbound links, on-page SEO details including page titles, and basic recommendations for improving. Websitegrader.com offers this but not white-labeled. I'm not sure about how SEOMoz handles this. Thanks

    Moz Pro | | bshanahan
    0

  • Hello Everyone, What is the best strategy when it comes to optimizing a website that services more than one city. So, say I'm in computer fixing business and I have offices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Miami & Dallas. (took me a while to come up with some US cities) - how should I structure my website so that I look relevant for every city? Is it possible to display specific information for users coming from specific cities, say someone browsing from San Francisco will see my main page optimized for San Francisco (containing a real address, phone number all the necessary stuff). I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance, Alex

    Image & Video Optimization | | pwpaneuro
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  • Hi everyone, The company I work for has two domains, one for the english version of the website and another one for the french version. Example: www.digitalmusic.com (in english) www.musiquedigitale.com (in french) (these are examples***) I would like to know if on SEO standpoint it would be better to only have one domain so all of the links link to the same domain. Would it increase the domain authority and our rankings ? We will then have: www.digitalmusic.com/fr/page1 for pages in french www.digitalmusic.com/en/page1 for pages in english with all the 301 redirects required... Thank you in advance for your answers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum
    0

  • Can someone point me to a list or just tell me specific search bots that use referrers?

    Algorithm Updates | | BostonWright
    0

  • I am in a limo service industry where people are not looking for great content or product description, all they want is a nice Lincoln Town car and a competitive price. Because I need to get more pictures in front of my customers rather than more content I am not sure if by not having the content high up in the page will affect my rankings. We are transitioning to a new template where we have more control over the layout of the website but because of the slider that we have on the homepage the content needs to go further down.  We could insert some content in each of the slides but the page would start looking too "busy". We want the customers to see very clearly what we offer. They see the picture, click for more info and book the service. How important still is to have your keywords in the first hundred words on a certain webpage? Can we get away with having the content read by search engines after 3 - 4 slides and their description (about 20 words total) ?

    Web Design | | echo1
    0

  • We've just discovered that there are multiple duplicate URLs indexed for a site that we're working on. It seems that when new versions of the site was developed in the last couple of years, there were new page names and URL structures that were used. All of these seem to be showing up as Duplicate Meta Descriptions in Google's WMT, which is not surprising as they are basically the same page with the same content that are just sitting on different page names/URLs. This is an example of the situation, where URL 5 is the current version. Note: all the others are still live and resolve, although they are not linked to from the current site. URL 1: www.example.com/blue-tshirts.html (Version 1 - January 2010) URL 2: www.example.com/blue-t-shirts.html (Version 2 - July 2010) URL 3: www.example.com/blue_t_shirts.html (Version 3 - November 2010) URL 4: www.example.com/buy/blue_tshirts.html (Version 4 - January 2011) URL 5: www.example.com/buy/bluetshirts.html (Version 5 - April 2011) Presumably, this is a clear case of duplicate content. QUESTION: In order to solve it, shall we 301 all of the previous URLs to the current one - ie. Redirect URLs 1-4 to URL 5? Or, should some of them be NoIndexed? To complicate matters, there is Pagination on most of them. For example: URL 1: www.example.com/blue-tshirts.html (Version 1 - January 2010) URL 1a: www.example.com/page-1/blue-tshirts.html URL 1b: www.example.com/page-2/blue-tshirts.html URL 1c: www.example.com/page-3/blue-tshirts.html URL 4: www.example.com/buy/blue_tshirts.html URL 4a: www.example.com/buy/page-1/blue_tshirts.html URL 4b: www.example.com/buy/page-2/blue_tshirts.html URL 4c: www.example.com/buy/page-3/blue_tshirts.html URL 5: www.example.com/buy/bluetshirts.html URL 5a: www.example.com/buy/page-1/bluetshirts.html URL 5b: www.example.com/buy/page-2/bluetshirts.html URL 5c: www.example.com/buy/page-3/bluetshirts.html Since URL 5 is the current site, we are going to 'NoIndex, Follow' URLs 5a, 5b and 5c, which is what we understand to be the correct thing to do for paginated pages. QUESTION: What shall we do with URLs 1a, 1b and 1c? Should we apply the same "No Index, Follow" OR should they be 301'd to their respective counterparts in 5a, 5b and 5c? QUESTION: In the same way, since URL 4 is the version just before the current live Version 5, does it make a different on whether the paginated pages (ie 4a, 4b and 4c) should be No Indexed or 301'd? Thanks in advance for all responses and suggestions, it's greatly appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | orangechew
    0

  • Anyone know what can be done about this when it happens to one of your own domains? On the Google SERPS page, underneath the Title, next to the Description, Google has added "Block all results from this domain?". I understand that this is a new "feature", aimed at allowing users to filter out results from low quality, pornograhphic or offensive sites. But the site in question is none of the above - any ideas how to tackle? Couldn't find anything yet by searching.

    Algorithm Updates | | Understudy
    0

  • Hello It's worth getting links nofollow? It will count for google? For example links from Yahoo! Answers.

    Link Building | | eder.machado
    0

  • Does anyone have any recommendations of a very cheap web design company from India or other countries where the work is also high quality? I can project manage the development and provide a set of web standards such as to use valid code, no meta keyword tags, no flash, etc etc. I am looking for companies I can trust to perform the actual work. The web is full of companies but examples of quality work with WordPress, Joomla and particular ecommerce platforms is very thin or non-existent. If you can share any companies which you have personal experience with, I would appreciate it.

    Web Design | | RyanKent
    0

  • I've tried a few proxy tools to try to see how my site looks from other global locations, but haven't found one that works very well yet -- or a list of reliable proxies around the world. I need to do this to test various geo-targetted ads and other optimizations. Can anyone make a recommendation? Thanks!

    International SEO | | Dennis-52961
    0

  • Hi all We're looking at moving our 2 websites onto a cloud hosting package. The content on our sites is very similar (but not duplicated) so at the moment they are on separate servers. If we move to the cloud, is it enough for them to have different IP addresses on the same cloud system, or should we host in separate clouds? Thanks in advance Heather

    Technical SEO | | heatherrobinson
    0

  • A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking.  I did some checking and can't see a problem.  She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either.  When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated.  This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland

    Technical SEO | | kdaly100
    0

  • Hello Everybody, Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Without further ado, I'll jump straight to it: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk is the web site of a UK based data recovery company. Historically the site has always ranked well for popular data recovery keywords in the UK, with page 1 rankings for most things data recovery related. However, lately things seem to have changed for our most important phrase "data recovery". We noticed several months ago that Google had started to favour the page  http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm instead of http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ when a search for "data recovery" (and similar) was performed. This didn't concern us that much as our rankings remained good. However now, neither of these pages seems to be ranking well when a search for "data recovery" is performed (I gave up at Page 5 - who looks past there when searching?). I would appreciate your input on this please - especially about the following points: 1. Why have these two pages now seemingly disappeared from SERPS when a search for "data recovery" is performed ? 2. Why has Google chosen http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm rather than http://www.dataclinic.co.uk  ? 3. Is this just something to do with UK results ? 4. Other sites I would expect NOT to see in the top results have started appearing - despite their link profiles etc remaining poor - perhaps Google is doing a bit of reorganisation with SERPS related to data recovery at the moment ? 5. And perhaps, most importantly - do you think we need to do anything about our current lack of visibility ?? As I mentioned, we've always ranked well, so these results are puzzling... Should search results revert "back to normal" in a day or so, or am I missing something and need to take action ?? Thanks for any input on this - we would be very grateful indeed for you help ! Kind Regards, Sue

    Search Behavior | | 3Amigos
    0

  • My site was hacked and that seemed to have a pretty big effect on search rankings.  I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hack completely removed (as of 10/16.) During the hack and even now, all of my posts created after Aug 1 don't rank in regular Google searches at all even if I search for the titles in quotes.  But I can tell they are indexed because I see them when I do a site search in Google.  And I see that they are cached.  Posts from before Aug 1 rank well in Google searches. The issue with August and after posts no longer appearing started in mid September.  Prior to that the some of the August posts were actually performing very well.  The September date corresponds to when we first started working on removing the hack. It looks like the August and after posts all have a pagerank of 0, whereas the mozrank is much higher.  I've request reconsideration from Google and was told that no manual action was taken against my site. I know that's a lot of background, but I'm wondering how long do I need to wait before the August and after posts start ranking?  Is there anything I can do in the mean time to address this pagerank issue?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris-at-Magoosh
    0

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