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Anyone?

Just an update.

Our site eventually returned to the 1st position for our main keyword.

The competitors site seems to have levelled out in position 9
There are other long tail terms we'd like to rank for that these are still dominating which I think is still a little crazy based on their link profile. I'd have expected them to have been hit a lot harder by Google?

Thanks to all who contributed to this post so far, I will continue to watch and update this post should things change drastically.

While researching ways to optimise images for SEO and quick load speeds, I've come across this:
https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/download

Is anyone using this and are you seeing any SEO benefits?

Hi Egol, I understand why you responded with this.
However what if you have a board of directors asking you, why you have been over taken, what you're going to do about it and how long will it take?

P.S. mine has been that they shouldn't be there for too long as they have used poor seo practice that Google "should" penalise them for. But I have to be honest, I am concerned that if they are still there in 3-6 months time, I'll look stupid.

FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you?

We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd.

So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab.

There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings)

Their links are made up of:

• Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links
• Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc)
• Profile page links
• Low quality Press Release sites
• Classified ad sites
• Bookmarking sites
• Article Marketing sites

Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include:

• t-shirts
• sports news
• online marketing
• anti aging
• law
• christian guitars
• computers
• juke boxes

Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places.

So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them.

As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them!

So what steps would you take next?

Hi I'm just wondering how specific the targeting can be for an adwords campaign that targets youtube videos.

Specifically if the following scenario is possible...

If I was to promote a car alarm, is it possible to have my adverts show up before news stories of car thefts? i.e. can I pick and choose individual videos?

Thanks

Thanks Tom,

I have looked at a number of other pages and it does seem that certain keywords have all dipped around February (some have bounce back to where they were before) However it doesn't seem to be the pages themselves as other keywords for the same page have moved up over this period into position 1.

I posted an infographic back in April, 2012 on my company blog. 
I added embed code at the bottom, so people could embed on their websites (not many did that I can tell) I also submitted it to a number of Infographic directories and got links back from around 5-6 of them.

The title of the Infographic is exact match long tail search term.(6 words)

By July it had hit Position 6 in Google.co.uk, where it stayed in the top 10 until December fluctuating between positions 6-9. I haven't done anything else to the post and yet since December it has started to trickle down the rankings, in the past 3 weeks it dropped from 15th on Feb 3rd to 93rd on Feb 17th, then bounced back up to 33rd on the 25th of Feb and has now fallen again to 89th yesterday.

Is this normal or have I been hit with a penalty of some sort?

Not sure if this matters but I have the word infographic at the end of my title??

Also when I run it through OSE I don't see some of the backlinks that I can see from GWT.

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your speedy response.

In answer to your 1st question, our website sits on Hubspot's CMS which allows us to track the rankings for our main keywords in Google.co.uk

This tells us that we currently have 239 Keywords ranking in the Top 10 and 138 Ranked in Top 3. (Many of these are for our long tail keywords that are less competitive)

Driving close to 4,000 visitors per month to the site via Organic search.

I see the reasoning behind the GPS but our competitors also have these terms on their sites but don't have similar results?

It doesn't bother me necessarily but thought it may have indicated that Google couldn't really place what our website is about. Which does bother me.

I've entered my the following search query into Google.co.uk

related:mywebsite.co.uk

However the resulting website that are brought back are on the whole nothing like our website, nor do they offer similar services to us.

If I run this same query on my competitors websites they all bring back similar websites to each other.

I read somewhere that gaining links from the websites that Google believes are similar/related to our own website is beneficial. But looking at our results it would seem that Google can't place what our site is about and which sites are similar.

So I'm guessing this is a more pressing matter than link building right now!?

Other info about our website:

We rank fairly well for a lot of our target keywords.
Domain age = 11 years
PA =38
mR= 4.77
mT= 5.74
DA:= 31
DmR= 3.78
DmT= 3.84
PageRank = 3

Example of how random the results are the 1st website that comes back in our related websites search is for Doctors GP Practice. Our website sells GPS Telematics Solutions.

Can anyone shed any light on this or just to confirm how much of a problem this is?

Over the past 6 months I've noticed an increase of 404 errors being picked up by Google Webmaster Tools.

When I look at the errors table and review these errors the links are invariable made up likes being generated from what looks like scraper sites or sites with search results embedded into them.  Below are some examples of them.

Broken Link                                           URL Generating the Link

www.mysite.com/rwickenhauser      http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/guest                       http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/windows                 http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/..app                        http://213.174.143.40/
www.mysite.com/ht..                            http://de.aguea.com/

None of these pages exist on our website.
So do I need to setup redirects for these or can they be ignored?

Hi Marcus thanks for your help so far. I've emailed you my URL's for a better look at the issue I'm facing.

Hi Marcus

So here's what I've done...

So I've navigated like so:
Campaign>Crawl Diagnostics>Errors (68)>Duplicate Page Content Errors (61)

Once this page loads all of the links, I've clicked on one of the links and it shows

1 Error
X Duplicate Page Content
   Read More

Clicked on Read More then on the number 2 link that shows under the heading of Other URLs

This displays my two urls:

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-a

When I navigate to this page and view the source code I can see the following code:
href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" />

So I'm confused, do I have a duplicate content problem or not?

NB If I remove the trailing slash from my url it will show the same page. It does not do a redirect to the url with the slash. (I've highlighted this to Hubspot and they have said that it is not a problem?)

I'm trialling seoMoz at the moment and so far I have 61 duplicate content crawl errors showing in one of my campaigns. This has sent me running to my CMS provider (Hubspot) to query this.
They've advised me that they automatically sort out canonicalisation.

So I'm left in a state of not knowing where to focus.

Are Hubspot wrong or are the seoMoz reports broken?