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OK, so here goes.  We have an odd situation on our hands.  Our website sells a product technically known as "nail polish strips".  We are a small player at the moment, but the reviews we've gotten in "side-by-side" comparisons vs. the big boys have been crazy, and literally always in our favor. Now the issue..... The best way to describe our product as mentioned above is they are Nail Polish Strips.  Our domain name includes the term "Nail Strips" in it.  Of the 200+ bloggers that have done reviews and provided us links, about 80% or so have linked to the home page, most just using our websites name, some have been nice enough to actually use keyword terms like nail polish strips. Moral of the story, for the term nail polish strips, our link profile would indicate to the google machine that our home page is stronger for this term. THE BIG ISSUE HOWEVER...... Our main category on the site that shows products is the page we originally intended to optimize for the term Nail Polish Strips.  And our aim was going to be to optimize our home page for something else, like maybe plain old Nail Strips. THE BIGGER ISSUE...... At any given moment, Google is having a hard time figuring it out.  Based on our link profile, we should be on page one, but what we're seeing is today, it's our Nail Polish Strips category page that ranks for that term, and tomorrow that listing will be replaced with our home page.  Literally, last night the home page was on the top of page two, and today, the category page is on the middle of page two.  They keep flip flopping.  Sometimes they both appear within the first 3 pages, sometimes only one appears on page two, the other drops out of the top 10 pages. OUR THINKING IS....... Our home page obviously has more strength and if the google machine is even implying they like it for that term, we might as well accommodate that.  Keyword spy shows this term has a volume of around 18,000 searches.  The term isn't hugely competitive, so we planned to 301-redirect the current category page URL that is competing with the home page, to the home page, and re-create and optimize the category page for something different, like Nail Polish Stickers or something to that effect. THE FINAL ISSUE....... The term stickers in this industry as it relates to our product has been the victim of a negative PR campaign because the big boys (or girls) are trying to say "Nail Stickers" are garbage as opposed to "Nail Polish Strips".  The problem is Nail Stickers gets a lot more traffic.  So we figured, we'd optimize the category page for Nail Polish Stickers, and explain in the text, that despite what some of our competitors say, just because we're using the word "stickers" to describe them, doesn't mean they are bad, so on and so forth.  I ONLY MENTION THIS SO YOU SEE WHY I'M HESITANT TO PULL THE TRIGGER ON OUR ABOVE FIX. I know this is long, and I'm not doing a great job of putting it in to words, but any insight will help.  I'm supposed to pull the trigger today or tomorrow on this re-direct and new strategy, but don't want to do so until I get some of my fellow ninja's opinions.

We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers. We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit.  They are for women.  Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50.  Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40.  So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive. Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs.  We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything.  We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it. Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs". Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation.  It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out. Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews.  A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review. So what are all ya'll's thoughts?  I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.

We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff.  Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor. The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause.  I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion. Domain:  bonitaj.com My Thoughts On Possible Issues... 1.  Text Content & Panda Update I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content.  I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content.  Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy.  THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text.  Do you think this is hurting us?  THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages. 2.  Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured.  I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages.  Do you think this is hurting us? I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic.  In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages? 3.  Lack of a sitemap? We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore.  We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools.  I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank? IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?

So we have operated one of our retail sites, BonitaJ.com for many years now.  Through a lot of work, link building and optimizing around 2009, we were in a prominent spot on the 1st page in google for just about every main term we were targeting. Towards the end of 2009, nearing December or so, we started slipping here and there, and began being displaced for our main terms by newer sites that according to several factors, don't have near the strength our site holds.  And by strength, I simply mean, based on link volume, mozbar stats and many other factors, it seems we should rank well above most, but still find ourselves just hanging to 8-10 positions on page one, and in many cases somewhere on page two for terms it seems like we should be in the top 5 positions for. I believe some of our slippage is due to google's devaluing of many of our incoming links.  We achieved our early ranking dominence off a lot of directory links and things like that over time, but ever since 2009 when links began getting devalued we immediately broke into getting quality blog links via LEGIT blog relationships where we'd offer up contests, bloggers would review our products and so on, and these relationships continue through today.  We also do a lot of guest blog writing, article postings on various networks, as well as press releases, all with the goal of keeping our link profile happy and healthy.  So we still have work to do there, but we're on the right track. So my thought is that to get back over the hump, we simply need to continue with the legit link building methods, but I'm also thinking that maybe we need to improve some things navigationally. Things I was hoping people would chime in on are.... 1.  If we're mainly trying to target bridal/wedding related jewelry terms, should we ditch the "Jewelry Sets, Pearl Jewelry & Swarovski Crystal Jewerly" terms from our main navbar.  They are featured inside each of the categories, and in the end, we don't rank or pull traffic for them anyway.  Would ditching them from the main nav, help pass more juice from home page and other pages to the pages that better target our niche? 2.  A while back, we ditched including actual product on each of the main category pages.  I'm leaning towards breaking the main category pages up into sections, for instance once on the "Bridal Jewelry" page, it would list each of the sub-cats, with a 5-10 product sampling of the most popular items, with a link that says "view all necklaces" at the end of each sub-section.  Do you think that more wise than just trying to direct them into the sub-cats with no actual product offering? 3.  Anything else you see glaringly wrong with what we're trying to do?  This site is just on the edge of blowing up from a ranking perspective if I can just get some confirmation on some things that I know I should do, but I'm wary due to fear of screwing things up.  If I can get some solid feedback, the rest is history.

Now, I'm not a stickler for pagerank, and actually haven't checked the pagerank of ANY of the sites I own and operate in the last year or two, but one of my cronies noticed the other day that our BathroomGetaways.com websites pagerank is 0, despite the fact it ranks well and gets a decent amount of traffic for a great deal of the terms we target. My guess is that we still just don't have the quality links we need, and we're working on that, but is there anything glaringly obvious that anyone else can see that can be the cause of this? One thing to note, we did take the site offline for 2-4 months or so towards the end of last year and just relaunched it in January of 2011.  It climbed right back into the rankings almost immediately after our re-launch, so maybe that has something to do with it?

We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name.  So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link?  We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy.  It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.