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Michael - I disagree, if you are doing everything naturally then you don't need to worry about Google updates.

If you are producing, good original content then that people naturally link too then Google isn't going to penalise you. All Google wants to do is rank relevant content to keep people using Google happy and not going to other search engines. Play by their rules and you don't need to worry about future updates.

this is no use to you right now, but might be useful for future - using the Adwords API I download weekly all the data and store in our own databases, that way I can then quickly run the report you are after above.

As far as I am aware you can't do what you are trying to do in the interface - to say its the area where Google makes most of its money, I do find some of the most basic reports missing.

Hi Urkeman

I would have to partly agree with Robert, with what are the competition doing that is better what you are doing, but I would also look at the "produce the most useful content" like Robert said that is subjective - have you looked at how much of your great content is generating links to it, it could be as simple as that your competitors are better at using their "less useful content" but getting good quality links to it.

Writing brilliant, amazing unique content is only part of the content strategy you must outreach this content to gain links, mentions traffic to it.

I would maybe look at what links your competitors are getting that you are not.

I don't know about download able software - but why not look at the other marketing channels and see how they are doing in comparison.

What is your conversion rate for Direct traffic, email traffic and compare it against there.

There isn't going to be a magic number out there to hit, but comparing it to other marketing channels and aiming to improve it week on week is the best solution. Rather than trying to hit a mysterious number.

If you are classing as someone as competing a form as a conversion, have you set this up correctly so that you can accurately track conversion rate ( I am guessing so, just wanted to check that you had this in place).

is the new website completely down, or is it that they have just removed the content.

Either way once Google re-crawls then they wont rank - you could if you have access to the sites webmaster tools ask them to come and crawl.

When is it your site is ready to go live, you may be ok. Worth checking to see rankings when your site is live.

was the other website crawled by Google, probably not if it was new - in which case I wouldn't worry and even if it was, because the content has been taken down, you will be fine.

One way to check, search google for some of the unique text and see if your partners website is appearing in the SERPs listings.

Hi

You could start by looking at your domain authority and page rank of your site, and compare that to your competitors.

If you could share your domain name I can take a quick look for you.

Also might be worth looking at where your competitors are getting links from, and seeing how you could go about getting similar links.

That is the basic area I would start off with - but MOZ has some awesome features, get the basic's done first and then you can really start to get some value for your money.

Also watch the whiteboard Fridays, these are very useful and as they a video - a great way to spend Friday afternoons and you can quickly learn alot.

can I ask why concentrate on two different websites, without knowing what you would be selling / listing its a bit difficult, but as Moosa said having the same address / telephone number google might think they are the same business and link them, but more importantly why do you want two different domains.

In my opinion your spending time creating great unique content on two different sites, managing two different domains etc - why not simply put all the content onto one great site (rather than two good sites) and 301 one url to the other. It would be easier to get one great website higher up the SERPs rather than trying to get two good sites to link.

All your efforts would be to get links to one site, rather than two different domains, you would be ineffective splitting your domain authority (doesn't quite work evenly like that).

But if you really do need to have two different websites and are willing to put in the extra work, the best thing to do would be get them listed separately on Google places (ideally at a different address), have different contact details, names on their so that search engines don't try and link them.

then you could always be cheeky and if you still have writes to edit the website remove the "nofollow", but as Moz said in there Whiteboard Friday, these are seen as spammy links in the footer - not great SEO tactics.

I guess its a debate about getting footer links and ranking in google in the short term to long term benefits of creating more natural links.

Also they said Sitewide links as not great SEO and a link in the footer is usually site wide - so its 2/5 of the bad SEO steps. My gut feeling would be not to do them in the long term you will probably be peanlised, but in the short term you need to make a living.

If this is part of a larger SEO plan maybe include a few links in certain website footers, but with the long term plan of doing none and work on writing interesting, exciting content people naturally link to, but make sure its not the only way you are getting links to your site as you risk losing all your natural rankings.

If you watch the whiteboard Friday from last week:

http://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-friday

rule number 4 is don't link to external links in the footer. Hence linking to your website is external link building - but that said sometimes it is useful to find out who built the website.

My advice would be to put the link in - but as "nofollow" link - therefore you can still hopefully generate any sales from people who liked your site build skills, but avoid getting your own site penalised in Google.

Plus if the site you designed did any bad SEO tricks and get themselves penalised you don't suffer - I guess once you have built the site you have very little control over there SEO tricks and they might go for quick win black hat SEO tricks and you wouldn't want to get down ranked for something that is out of your control - nofollow would resolve all the potential issues, but wouldn't affect sales

I confirm this is currently a test - but there isn't anything you can do about it. They are always looking to show the most relevant web pages and in their eyes the manufacturer is the one of the best sources of info.

More importantly (and this is me guessing), you are going to pay more on Adwords if your natural listing are pushed down - hence they are driving you to spend more on Adverts. The more they can get you to spend on Adverts the better - in my opinion manufacturers rarely spend money on advertising so by pushing these further up the rankings, the more retailers have to spend on Adwords.

If they start pushing manufacturers to the top of natural search - even the best SEO, good DA, quality links, relevant unique content (all the things good SEOs have been doing for years) will have been wasted if suddenly manufacturers start appearing in position 1.

A little tip maybe if this is what Google does decided to do - contact the manufacturer and see if you can get listed on their recommend reseller listing, then you may not having to worry about getting number 1 listing, if you can get traffic from the manufacturers page that Google ranks in position 1.

Hi

Marty is correct there is no way of currently doing this, but I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't out soon, as they are always trying to get a better user experience for their users.

I will ask Google later this week and let you know what they happen to say, I will keep you updated as soon as I find out

I cant answer the about CCL certificate, but web hosting can potentially affect google rankings in the sense of load time.

If your hosting is on poor servers, throtle band width Google does take this into account when ranking websites, as slow websites lead to poor user experience and they want happy user experience.

Website load time is a higher ranking factor on mobile websites, so the slower to load has the potential to rank lower.

http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/10/how-load-time-affects-google-rankings/

There are many things you can do on the page to improve load time (and there are many articles out there), but hosting can play a part.

So in answer to your question a good hosting company can help improve your rankings. CCL certificate I don't know enough about to give you an answer - so I am hoping somebody else can answer that part for you.

It would seem I put the wrong link - the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw however I would still stick to my point and get the URL you are happy to rank for and then sort out the content on the page. While the URL may only be a small factor in google algorithm.

But if your unhappy with your url structure now, no matter what happens Ive found that in a year or so you will wish you had changed the url.

So I always recommend changing the url to something you are happy with, then work on content, link building and improving the page, but I would still argue that the little bit of page rank lost (and without knowing the page its going to be hard to know exactly the implications), its worth it to get the URL structure you are happy with and then work on the content.

What I wouldn't recommend is 301 a page, to another page which then 301 to another page - this is seen as bad and you will lose a lot of link power, google may follow 2 or 3 stacked 301s but after that they wont http://www.jamesburton.net/chained-301-redirects-google-search-impact/. So doing a 301 wont hurt your ranking if you have decent content and links built in, just don't start stacking 301s

I am guessing you mean free sitelinks - these are determined by google on how authoritative your site is in that area.

See googles link below exploring it in more detail, but a useful tip would be to build more links into that page, from relevant sources to show you an important retailer in that sector.

Site links can work for part of your site and not others.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

If your talking about Paid site links, its pretty simply to set these up in Adwords.

According to Matt Cutts you don't lose that much page rank for 301's.

http://www.seroundtable.com/redirects-links-pagerank-16419.html

I would probably recommend changing your url for the higher volume keywords and putting 301s in place and in theory you shouldn't lose ranking for your current rankings

in terms of 301 I would 301 them all back to FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips if you know just have the one page.

however on your site, you have:

http://www.floridadentist.com/

but then if you click on home it takes you to: http://www.floridadentist.com/default.htm which is the same page, just different url. Thats the first big issue I would fix, I would change the link to point to http://www.floridadentist.com/ on your page on the site, but also 301 http://www.floridadentist.com/default.htm to http://www.floridadentist.com just incase anybody has linked to that page, so you don't lose the link juice / traffic from those links.

Also I couldn't find the blog on your site - maybe you should link to it from the main site.

on a last click basis (as track in Google Analytics) we get very very few conversions - not to say that they come back through a different channel and buy, but we get very little traffic so its not an area we have looked at.

The people coming through from these pages, have a high bounce rate and spend very little time on the site.

I usually see people are trying to grab the images for their own sites.

However I do have a call with Google n 20 mins so will ask if they know of any case studies to prove either way

Update after the call. Google dont have any case studies and have not done any analysis on this.

Hi,

I don't know how many pages you have, but I would consider doing each page manually take the time and do it correctly, in my experience automated systems never go completely right so you would probably end up spending a lot of time checking the redirects.

Why take the risk in hurting your rankings / traffic for saving a little bit of time. Do it the correct way the first time - plus you may also find a few urls that aren't adding any real value etc so these can be pointed to the home page.

I would have to agree with SEO 5 team and get them changed, why take the risks of a ticking time bomb that could hit you at any time and without knowing your actually site potential destroy your listing.

I would go about the call slightly differently I would go about it in the sense of how by not doing this google could penalise his site and destroy his rankings and visibility. He is more likely to help and change his site, if he thinks he has got something to lose, which technically he has.

So explain to him, that Google are penalise site which take paid links and put "nofollow" on them.

It might hurt your rankings in the short term - but at least your then not worried about every update Google does.

If your playing by the rules, then you will actually come to enjoy Google updates as your competition suffers and you improve.

i don't know if it would be classed as Black Hat SEO, but its definitely not great SEO. Why not focus more on writing great articles about weight loss etc, but within the article itself mention the place. But if all your titles suddenly have Boston in them you are opening yourself up to being penalised by Google.

Just be natural, when talking in the pub would you say "Boston Tummy Tuck After Weight Loss", no more likely "tummy tuck after weight loss" - think of your titles in how you would speak.

Hope that helps

not sure how much of an issue this is, but you have a couple of your main anchor text in a foreign language and none with the search term you are after and maybe more content on the main page about "Butterfly body liners" you only mention this once.

Maybe look to send some out for reviews and hopefully they will link back to you with the anchor text as "Butterfly body liners"

Also you have some anchor text on your home page 'Skip to main content', I will consider removing this.

If I have understood the question correctly I would worry less about the product pages themselves, and focus more on the category pages, in the instance above Givency Bag - dont worry too much about the product description if your taking the page down within a few days, concentrate on getting decent unique content onto the category page, meaning the category page will rank high in SERPs for bags and when someone clicks on that page they see the latest deals.

Alternatively you could leave the pages up but just remove the option to buy, stating that this deal has passed, but you may also like these similar products.