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Sounds to me like you're seeing these rankings, then you're trying to 'tweak/optimize' these same pages to go higher in the ranking and so those 2-3 weeks are w/ index A and then your new 'tweaked' page Index A version 2.0 gets indexed and throws you into a new ranking/tailspin
here are two questions from myself regarding local that may help you a bit
G+ places/local - Company Categories and Pages question (including write-up questions)
Local Citation Help - New Business in Old Location of same type of business
While these may not fully and/or exactly answer your questions i believe you may find some valuable info from knowledgeable sources which could help you at least get on the right path until someone else(more knowledgeable than me on this topic) has time to really answer you fully.
Wow, thanks this makes perfect sense.
If i'm reading this correctly, you're saying that in the description field - no location based info whatsoever.
the actual example is home inspection which i've been steadily climbing over time and is actually a pet project of mine. Which I'm currently in a rework/push to clean up any 'spam'ish' material/loose ends.
So going back to the description -
Certified, Licensed and Insured Home Inspector --- MORE text Here [offering services x, y, z?]--
-Would be the right way to go, and not -
Certified, Licensed and Insured Home Inspector --- MORE text Here [offering services x, y, z?]-- Located in City, St
On the site i'm updating, I've done the schema format in the footer for the address/business and hcard via the contact page.
This leads me to the content pages, should not be geocentric beyond service area/contact pages
-- Once again i appreciate your help, and I'm really just trying to work out the kinks in this project, since a lot of articles cover this as a whole, but very few really get down to the very fine details that really dictate what that whole comes out to be. I'm a firm believer in 'it's the little things that count', and since I've seemed to of violated the 'measure twice, cut once', I'd really like to get back there 
Mariam,
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and what you are saying makes sense. I also agree with your gut, as that what i was thinking along the lines of.
Just as someone may have a 'heavy hand' when pouring a drink, I myself can get a bit overzealous with the optimization and sometimes finding that I have to stop myself and step back and look at the big picture...
I have two questions about google places/local and Personal/Company Pages
Regarding Local and the categories section.
Should you be using strictly the predefined categories they have? or should you be creating your own? Also say you're a car repair shop for instance. If you should be creating your own such as 'truck repair' should the city be in there as well 'Truck Repair New York/New York Truck Repair(keyword or location first?)'
When it comes to company and personal g+ places, i understand doing the rel author and its bennefits but what is the correct way about tagging this?
For instance in Wordpress, Studiopress has a section in the profile for the user g+ profile that will rel author it, and Yaost SEO says 'if you have a business page, insert it here and link your personal page as a contributor to the business page'
Should we be filling in both sections? or does this cause a conflict? Adding these items is very easy to do, but would rather do it right the first time then circle back and have to correct everything.
Any feedback/input is appreciated.
Thanks,
You can export all your data to csv/google docs? Then just run comparisons through excel or however you see fit w/ that data.
Thanks for hte help, but it seemed it was just a google ranking spike for some new content and now things appear to be returning to normal
the domain in question is www.bestpriceelectricity.com
www is set in wordpress and webmaster tools
Shortly after i posted this, I saw in open site explorer that the www. had more value over the non www .... These sites are super old, and still get 'some traffic' but haven't been updated in ages. So my main focus was to regenerate the content w/ all the proper tags and what not and submit for indexing. - > and yes i also did do 301 redirects on the .htm pages
Thanks for the response, I think the fact that it is a very old domain - that google had some type of stats on it for the domain, but no preference of www vs non www. Just had never seen this before.
This is the first time I have encountered this and am quite frankly a little baffled on how to proceed.
We have some domains that are 10 years old, and do get some hits / impressions and they have a lot of content. So I redid the site in wordpress etc...
Anyway, on Google the sites show up as www. , and on Webmaster tools,- the www. shows no impressions or anything, while the non-www domain shows up in google webmaster tools with data.
The question is, if google displays the site as www. and webmaster tools shows data for non www. Which one do I proceed with, finding info on this has been pretty hard to do.
Any input is appreciated,
Thanks in advance:)
It is a a banner, and does have a relevant alt tag to where the link is going. I do see that the other pages that are 'ranking' for this, are starting to fall off. So in effect, i don't think that this is hurting me. I think another week or two of results should yield a conclusion to this issue.
Sometimes I tend to over analyze a situation and invent problems that may in fact not be problematic at all. Anyway, if this continues to be an issue, i'll be back for sure. I think I may of jumped the gun on this one.
Sorry i didn't reply sooner, but thank you for answering the question. Your article made me identify a lot of concerns and thought maybe that the practice was in fact something that may end up problematic.
I appreciate it.
I have a banner in the header that is constant across all pages except the one it links to. It goes in before the content div and this search term is #1 across google in almost every variation, but it appears to link in a lot of the non relevant pages for #2 spots in some cases.
While this is a relatively new domain (started 03/12), but this has been a constant rank for about 2 months.
I'm wondering if this may be hurting the keyword targeting of my internal pages and if i should no follow that header image on all pages except the homepage?
No problem, I just know it's one of those items that you can sometimes overlook without thinking about it.
Is this something that is just going up and down like a rollercoaster? Have you changed anything from title/h2 tags and even any link structures. Also any links that may of been in google webmaster tools that are now returning 404 errors. (had a huge issue w/ some wordpress stuff and a 404 error rewrite. - Once fixed, my rankings surged almost instantly and have maintained a constant level.)
Are you possibly looking from an account that is associated with the domain(webmaster tools/analytics/ etc...) while logged into google, vs sometimes not looking at it while logged in?
If it's your site, it seems that it will be more favorable to show you high up in rankings. At least htat is something i experience. Unless this is an automated ranking that is showing you this.
Otherwise, i have a site that i will be in the top 10 for lots of things - then if i use another browser where i'm not logged in, it will be between 10-70 spots higher.
I appreciate the input - As for the other question, when i'm in a ranking flip-flop with a big competitor which I am in a few strong keywords - where we both kinda leap frog each other in the 15-22 range - How would i go about adding that extra boost to just leave them in the dust?
Should i be tweaking those pages? or posting some relevant content w/ another variation?
So, I'm about 2-3 weeks into my subscription and see a renewal coming. I love the information I'm getting - but I really want to maximize my capabilities with these tools.
Any article/blogs or forum post suggestions that I should read would be awesome, right now I'm still in that phase where i see lots of cool things - but have no idea to fully use them to really give me that even bigger boost.
My First Question is - There are some keywords, that I climb and sometimes slip. But overall a competitor and i flip flop between 15-22 range for it. What would be a good way for me to really add that extra push to throw me down into the top ten and leave them in the dust?..
Also on the Keyword topic - There are a lot of keywords they probably rank for that I don't, what is the best way to go about identifying keywords they may targeting/have a good presence in that I'm not aware of.
I do have a site that is on multiple newspapers, and .gov sites. Among other things... This has already proven to be very good for me. But I'm 99% sure I have a few/lot of leaks, that if they were plugged - We would see a lot of good things come from those results.
I have a question about this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
Specifically the Section Titled: Other Google Link Penalties
_"Google often manually penalizes sites and does not inform site owners of the penalty. Furthermore, Google makes many algorithm changes each year. Most people are aware of the major algorithm changes, but you should also know Google makes about 50 algorithmic changes each month which could lead to ranking changes or an "algorithmic penalty". With the Penguin update specifically, we are unsure if there will be further refinements and rollouts as has happened with Panda. On May 25th Google rolled out what Search Engine Land calls Penguin 1.1. _
What advice is available for a site owner who wants to know if they have received a link penalty or at risk in the future?
Check your anchor text distribution to see if it appears natural. You can perform a fast check in Open Site Explorer of your top 20 links as follows:
Hopefully your anchor text distribution looks more natural than the below example. Notice how all the links show anchor text? A natural distribution would show a high percentage of links with simply the site URL. When anchor text is naturally used, it is often far less than ideal."
Anyway, with anchor text looking the same - would this have a negative impact if i was syndicating content to 10-15 blogs, or if i used onlyshare and did it to 50 or something. Would this impact me eventaully in a long term sense. I tend to write articles at least weekly for these sites so that i make sure i have fresh content, if me syndicating them/sharing the excerpt to my blog pages w/ anchor pages back to my main article is hurting me by having multiple pages linking back w/ the same exact anchor text, that would be a good thing to know. Any input on this would be much appreciated.
With my established site they seem to work great- but with a new site, would popping 10-15 links real quick like that set off any alarms?
thank you,
-Travis Gross
I hear you, I think I'm not in too deep yet, so probably shortening is a good idea to sooner rather than later. Thanks for your input today, been insightful to say the least