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Thank you Miriam. Yes those posts did help and have set me straight on H1 tags.

Thanks MiriamEllis

I've had two quite different comments on this and I think the key bit is your point about bots not caring so much about H1 tag. How much don't they care? I thought H1 and TITLE still were of high importance. If my goal is to get best rank for a client and MOZ page optimiser gives me a better grade with an exact keyword H1, I'm feeling more inclined to go with it and as David-Kley says above...

"If people are looking for PLACE, in CITY, and the first thing they see when they hit the page is PLACE serving CITY, state...might be that they say "This is just what I was looking for""

Well this does make good sense. I search for something and the website instantly tells me I've found what I was looking for.

So I've actually decided to go with "Boston Physiotherapy" although I do think a more sales and customer focused H1 would look less manipulated. It's a difficult one.

What's is the best way to go about optimising a page for a regional search phrase. E.g. 'Physiotherapy CITY' and keep the text looking natural and not manipulated?

Previously I've added the search phrase 'Physiotherapy CITY' to TITLE and H1 but this can look clumsy when used in the H1 tag.

If I grade a page using MOZ on-page optimisation it will suggest I add the search phrase to the H1.

What the recommended way of doing regional on-page optimisation?

I've done 2 link cleaning exercises and disavow requests so far but haven't removed those. I can see they are bad links but they're actually from decent, relevant sites in most instances which is why I haven't touched them yet.

What do you think is most damaging, run-of-site links or keyword link text?

So if you can't have too many nofollow links to upset Google, does Google respect the nofollow 100%?

I've been trying to recover from a Google algorithm change since Sep 2012, so far without success. I'm now wondering if the nofollow on external links in my blog posts are actually doing me damage. http://www.smartdatinguk.com/blog/

Does anyone have any experience of this?

I don't know if removing bad links will work for me or not as I've only just completed the process. I now plan on using the disavow tool to remove the links I didn't get removed by my own efforts.

The removeem.com tool did help me identify potentially harmful links. It's a tedious task so using a tool like Removeem over Site Explorer and manual removal requests was the way I chose to go.

Hi

I'm in a similar position to you and have been trying to get my site back since about Sept 2012. Over the last 4 weeks, I've been through the process of requesting link removal of low quality links using the RemoveEm.com tool. I now have a report detailing sites I've contacted, how many times and whether the link has been removed. My site has lost rankings rather than being completely dropped from the SERPs so I may need to use the disavow tool rather than just do a re-index.

So my answer would be,

1. Try removing poor quality links yourself first and perhaps use a tool to help do this www.removeem.com. Then use the disavow tool
2. A natural policy going forward has not helped my site.
See http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-anyway-to-recover-my-site-s-rankings

Thanks, for your help. I'll give that a try

Well I'm not really sure how to clean up my back link profile. How do I know links are a problem? A lot of my links are perhaps questionable. I'd be wary of removing links that are of some use. How do you evaluate this?

In regards to content, the regular blog posts are user focused, well written and relevant but not link worthy particularly. Over optimised content has mostly been removed.

Hi

I'm in a similar position to you and have been trying to get my site back since about Sept 2012. Over the last 4 weeks, I've been through the process of requesting link removal of low quality links using the RemoveEm.com tool. I now have a report detailing sites I've contacted, how many times and whether the link has been removed. My site has lost rankings rather than being completely dropped from the SERPs so I may need to use the disavow tool rather than just do a re-index.

So my answer would be,

1. Try removing poor quality links yourself first and perhaps use a tool to help do this www.removeem.com. Then use the disavow tool
2. A natural policy going forward has not helped my site.
See http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-anyway-to-recover-my-site-s-rankings

I don't know if removing bad links will work for me or not as I've only just completed the process. I now plan on using the disavow tool to remove the links I didn't get removed by my own efforts.

The removeem.com tool did help me identify potentially harmful links. It's a tedious task so using a tool like Removeem over Site Explorer and manual removal requests was the way I chose to go.