Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Nope, its one of the meanest things someone can do to you, but it does happen.

ditto on Justin

Does the WP theme have a mobile version? I find that this seems to be a cause of this issue.

Sometimes if you specify a mobile site with a sub domain Google webmaster tools will not show you exactly what domain the errors are coming from. The reason is a user goes to your site then gets redirected to a mobile site.

For example

user goes to www.example.com/index.php then the mobile site redirects to m.example.com/index.php

Now maybe the mobile site may not have descriptions, but to Google they only report that index.php has missing descriptions. Check both.

Well think about it like this. Would you rather have a ton of 404's linked to your site? or would you rather risk the PA on each of those pages and redirect them to 1?

If you decide to not redirect to a single page then at least remove the urls in webmaster tools so you can seem a little better to google

Google (Matt Cutts) has specified that meta titles and descriptions do not impact your ranking, it could have just been a change to google's algorithmic code.

I still use blog posts as a link building strategy. I use the SEOmoz plugin in chrome so I can find the high quality blogs much easier. I find less of them now, but at least I can get some in there.

Can you paste what your code looks like. This sounds like to me that your canonical is dynamically gernerated by some code so it is taking the domain your page is located and using that instead of statically adding the domain. For instance with PHP some could add

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] in the header. This will take whatever the current domain name is being served. So if you are looking at your website on a desktop then your the URL is www.example.com then you would see that. If you are at m.example.com then that would appear as the canonical. make sense?

Code updates generally take about a week to update.

Matt Cutts (Head of web spam team for Google) himself said in a video I have seen that redirecting to sub domains within your own domain will not negatively impact your ranking. Google knows its you.

If someone can reply with the link for him that would rock. I am too tired to search and going to bed.

Is there someone else out there that obsesses about their rank and check it multiple times a day? Please tell me I am not the only one LOL!

" No other links appear to have been lost / removed. " you sure?

If you add the rel="nofollow" tag in your html in the surrounding container of the link then google will not let it effect your ranking.

I would definitely use youtube. Yes it can only help your SERP

Ask yourself this, "Is this going to benefit my users, or hurt them" go with that

Hard to see whats wrong with it, you have a good DA and PA. What keywords are you targeting? I noticed the keyword "nursing" appears 50 times on our homepage. Not sure if that would do it, but Google might be considering that to be over optimizing on a keyword.

Yes it was scary. I went from over 5k a month in adsense to 2k. But work hard on establishing rep with other and links just come to you

"Now I know that rendering text indent to -9999 is a black hat SEO tactic. But, would it be the same in this case? We're only doing this avoid bad UI. Please advise. "

I would definitely stay away from this one personally. This was and is a huge Black Hat practice. If Google sees it different than the user then stay away from it.

Without going to your site simply taking a look at your back link data at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.mortgagesbymark.com%2F you might being having a SERP issue. You have links from your own site but many of your one way links from other sites are low in DA and PA. Getting quality sites backlinking to your page is where you will see a major increase.

I too suffered a lose from Panda and recent Google updates. I lost about 75% of my traffic. Even though I had a quality site my rankings tanked. In reasearching my backlinks I noticed the DA and PA of most of them were pretty low. I then looked at my compettores and they were beating me in that area. Since then all I have done was work on establishing relationships with partnering sites, getting them to add links back to my site and just establish a rep with them. Since then I have almost completely recovered from the lose.

Back-links are key, don't do Black or Grey hat because that will bite you in the end. Work on quality links from other sites. Remember quality not quantity. I still catch myself optimizing my site for SEO rather than the user. Change your way of thinking and watch it work

You think Google would penalize for using the word "kickass"?

EGOL's "Free Beer" post is awesome. I think what I am suffering from is just the other sites are more authoritative than me. That's an awesome recommendation What kind of title you think I should go with?

I have several sites that I classify as "tool" based sites. These type of sites includes anagram solvers for word games, ip address lookups and other various based tools. I like to specialize in these kind of sites because frankly I am not a blogger and hate to write.

Before Panda I was doing fairly well, I had many users coming to my sites everyday. The Panda update "tips" that I read all over including on google sites seems to always refer to articles and how to deal with those. The only problem is that I am not an article based site. Yes I have content that describes my tools, but we are talking 1 to at most 2 paragraphs per page. I know Panda effected my ratings because I lost ranking with some big keywords. Since then I have been able to gain some ground, but I am having a hard time trying to figure out what exactly google wants from a site like me. The main path I am getting from Panda is concentrating on the users, and what will make their experience better. I focus on that whenever I make a change. I figure  the easier I make it for them, the happier they are going to be.

I am wondering what you guys think about some things I can look into creating or focusing on to enhance my site. I use social media heavily (FB, tweets, posterous, blog, RSS Feed) already, but is there something else I can look at that might help me that I am not seeing. I seem to be running out of ideas.

• Maybe add more content to my pages?
• Check link structure (its pretty basic as it is)
• add more article based blog posts?

Just want some ideas, I will send my URL to anyone who wants to take a look and see what I may be missing.

C

lol it's a robots text file. what are they going to do. Steal it? I should have clarified do a 777 to make sure that is not your problem, then yes change the permission to be tighter

File permission maybe? Change it to 777 and try it again

You are not kidding, that post from pointblank is amazing, so many ideas I had no idea I could do thanks

Here is another idea that I have come up with that I have not seen come up in discussion. In google chrome you can connect with your gmail account so all your bookmarks can be across all your computers. Any thought on google reading these bookmarks as well and a positive to your site. I have a "bookmark us" on my site for some time and after looking at that I started to wonder if google would be using that as well.

What are some of these trusted back linking sites?

I know after the Panda update it seems that back linking is a no no but its hard to believe that its not still effective. What about paid links? Are there any trusted sites out there? Thoughts?

I have a site where my homepage is a PR3. My main menu contains 6 links which are all PR1's.

Example: Homepage, link1,link2,link3,link4,link5,link6

I have figured a way to make things easier for my users by combining 3 of those 6 links to my home page. So basically link1,link2 and link4 will now point to my homepage where it will contain the content and tools all in one. I will do the proper redirects on those links to point to my homepage again so google knows I moved them.

My question is by moving 3 PR1 pages to my home page which is a PR3 will this increase my pagerank for my home page?

That is an awesome idea!

It is common, I have a site that bounces around for my keyword all the time. I even notice my competitors bounce around too but not as much. The stronger you are the less you will bounce around.

With the Panda update things have changed. Some of these practices are determined to be not quite as effective as they used to be. The key in optimizing your keywords is to make sure that at least your title and main header title contains the keywords. From there want to disperse your keyword usage. Yes try and avoid direct exact keyword over optimization so stick to other similar words that will best describe your content.

Also in Google keyword tools make sure you check "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms" and "[Exact]" to make sure you want these keywords.

Takes about a week, hang tight you will see results

One thing to keep in mind is whether you are going to link to their site as well. With links pointing back and forth you may be "Link Farming" its better to have one way links that 2 way.

I seem to be a little confused about how SEO has changed recently and what things should be avoided even though I am still seeing these things impacted on my site. The recent panda and penguin updates have scared many of us SEO'ers into thinking that keyword optimization is now a no-no as apposed to how it used to be necessary. Let me explain

Concerning keyword optimization in the past in SEO we would practice placing keywords into our pages to make sure we are properly optimizing for such keywords. For instance bolding keywords, placing them in content, titles and descriptions. With panda Google seems to be negativly impacting the use of over optimization with keywods and it is what is preached about on most SEO blogs now, but I have been experimenting with such things with my sites and have noticed a few things.

Before the panda update I used to rank with my main site on a particular keyword in second place. While the panda update effected me negatively with ranking it was not so much the ranking that hurt me as apposed to the adsense revenue. I used to place consistently second place with my keyword, since panda I have dropped on average to 4th - 7th place, almost changing daily. The ranking was not so much a drop but the adsense revenue difference a month is about 2,000 which did impact me. Since then I have been going over panda rules and making the appropriate changes like getting rid of low quality content, to many keywords, ad placement. I am one who likes to experiment all the time so there are a few things that I have discovered with my diligence. I have noticed that when I cross a threshhold of about 5 repeated keywords on a page I am safe, when I begin to add more than 5 I start to notice a drop in ranking. If I go back to 5 and under I tend to rank back up. As well with that I have noticed that the placement of the keywords also impacts my ranking. When I place keywords more spread out over my page I see better rankings, if I tend to optimize my keyword more on the top portion of my page I see a drop in ranking.

My question is even though keyword optimization is considered a no-no I still see that it will impact my rankings greatly. Since everything I read kind of goes against this I am wanting to hear your opinions about this.

Another issue is relative content and the amount of pages/articles. It seems that to many pages or articles will flag you as a spam site. Now the idea of less is more is the practice we see. If this is the case then what I am questioning is how is it that google can determine a sites quality based on less. With less to use, google would have to have some serious and definitive triggers to determine the quality of the site. Can one simple page really change your ranking that much? How in the world does google determine the quality with just a few pages as apposed to many?

My site freescrabbledictionary.com (and no I am not back linking right now :)) I am a scrabble based site that helps users find words and definitions for scrabble games and other word games. On some of my pages I have articles/pages which give users important info like 2 letter words, high scoring words and other stuff. When I show these words I place a link on every word to my dictionary portion so users can easily click the link and look up the word and its definition. Some of these pages show over a thousand words, so yes I have a thousand links on that page to other pages on my site. I want to keep this feature so users don't have to type in the word to look it up, but I am torn as to if this is hurting me as apposed to helping. I would love some info on this please.

On my big traffic pages I have "Do us a favor, if you like our tools give us a "+1" or a "like"  "

Do you think its "bad" SEO or maybe google might penalize if we encourage users to like or pages or give us +1 for google?

How do I reverse it so that google will use my desktop to rank my site on mobile? Do I simply redirect without the 301?

The results are the same on both pages for sure.

I was using a htaccess file to do it with a 301.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/m/.$RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "android|blackberry|ipad|iphone|ipod|iemobile|opera mobile|palmos|webos|googlebot-mobile" [NC]RewriteRule ^(.)$ /m/ [L,R=301]

On my site I redirect users when on a mobile device to be redirected to my mobile version of my site. In the last couple weeks I added that redirect in my htaccess file. I just realized today that I am doing a 301 redirect. In the last few weeks my ranking have gotten lower. I am starting to think that because of the redirect my mobile site is not as optimized as my regular site and therefor is effecting my rankings.

My question is how can I redirect my users to my mobile site but not use a 301 AND how do I get google to use my main site content for ranking on the mobile side. I want to go back to getting my search rankings on the mobile side using my main sites content. Can I simply remove the 301 on the redirect?

Hope that makes sense.

When it comes to optimizing my pages, I tend to rank them in order of DA first then PA. I start in that order going through my sites making sure they are ranking well for their keywords and if not what I can do it improve. But in doing more reasearch I am starting to think that I need to focus on the PA more than the DA. I am thinking as my PA increases, the DA wil take care of it self.

Am I thinking right here?

Yeah I have several sites that are in site explore all of them have links that point to it but still no luck, the twitter thing is a good idea. Ill make sure FB and G+ have them as well.  I need to know my DA and PA on those sites

Is there a site submission process like google.com/addurl for site explore?