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The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried:

1. Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links
2. Removed any internal Duplicate Content
3. Removed any broken links
4. Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality
5. No-Followed all outbound links
6. Added any missing title tags
7. changed hosting
8. Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally

The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site -  just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.

Hi Ruben

Thanks for your reply.

Google have cached the majority of main pages since we made the changes.. but perhaps if they haven't crawled the site very deeply, they won't have picked up some of the site wide changes that we've made. Eg. in WMT, they haven't yet picked up that some of the bad links are no longer live, and these were taken down a few weeks ago now..

Katie

Hi Donna - no notices in WMT.

I work with a site who specialise in life insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions - http://goo.gl/Drwre6. The site has ranked really well historically, but was hit hard on 16th June when we saw an almost 100% drop in rankings overnight.

We picked up on quite a few issues straight away and rectified these. A list of steps we've taken so far are below:

• removed CSS & JS files from robots.txt
• changed hosting provider back, as it had recently been moved somewhere new
• updated copy on main landing pages to remove small amounts that were duplicated
• requested removal of some suspicious looking backlinks and submitted a disavow
• found and removed a test site that was live and indexable
• found an external site that had scraped copy from our site - requested removal (this site is no longer live)
• cleaned up any 404 and ensured all redirects are working correctly
• updated the diabetes page to include more valuable info - including linking out to authority sites

After taking all these steps, we have still seen no improvement. It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...?

We're aware of one other site in our industry that has noticed a drop in rankings in the last couple of months, but a number of our competitors are still ranking well for our target terms.

We wonder if the site was caught up in the Payday Loans update, as the timings almost line up. Other sites with spammy medical content seem to have been hit, so we wonder if the "medical" type content on our site could have been penalised? Incredibly frustrating if so, as it's a valid, genuine service being offered!

Really at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, so any help would be hugely appreciated!

Katie

Hi,

Thanks so much for that, it's really interesting.

I've resolved the issue now, it was a case of some (a lot!) of missing canonical tags. Phew!

Thanks for your help!

Just 1 at the moment.

Hi,

I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.)

Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix?

It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag?

Any help appreciated,

Karen

Hey Chris,

Thanks very much. I think you're right that I am over-thinking it (as any SEO would when trying to figure Google out!). One thing that stands out for me is that when I do a search (for example for 'cheap console tables', very few of the results on page 1 mention 'cheap' or 'discounted' in their title tags, or their pages. Yet it does seem to know which sites stock cheaper console tables (ebay, gumtree, asda etc). Do you think this could be just down to the use of the word 'cheap' across the rest of the site?

Karen

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in targeting cheap/discount/value etc keywords in an SEO campaign?

I'm interested to find out:

• How Google perceives these keywords, as the search results are only very slightly different if you search with or without a 'cheap' keyword.

• Whether Google differentiates between 'cheap synonyms ie 'cheap' and 'affordable'. There are far higher searches for 'cheap' but affordable is much more user- and conversion-friendly.

Thanks,

Karen

Hi, A bit of a general question, but has anyone noticed a improvement in rankings for large domains - ie well known, large sites such as Tesco, Amazon? From what I've seen, the latest Panda update seems to favour the larger sites, as opposed to smaller, niche sites. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this too?Thanks

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. It was a bit of a long-shot, we're just desperate to manage clients' schema without having to go through developers!

Thanks,

Karen

Hi,Does anyone know if you can use the new Google tag manager to manage rich snippets? I've seen that there is an HTML section where you can edit HTML that isn't shown on the site - do you think this field could be used to add schema data?Thanks,Karen

Hi,

There are several areas you need to populate in order to make your video rank well. I've summarised the main areas below, but there are also lots of good articles on this subject so I've included several further reading links.

• Video Titles

These are the equivalent of title tags, so make sure you use keyword-rich, descriptive (and user-friendly!) titles here. You have 99 characters

• Description

Populate your description with keyword-rich content. The more content, the better (500 chraracters max) - but make sure it looks attractive to users! Use this field to include links back to your site and to encourage ratings, embedding, sharing and commenting

• Ratings & interaction

Videos with better ratings usually rank better - so encourage your viewers to rank the videos and to comment (little tip - you can 'like' your own video to get started)

• Populate Tags

These tell YouTube what the video is about and therefore makes it more likely to appear for relevant searches.

Further Reading

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4826/SEO-for-YouTube-How-to-Search-Optimize-Video-for-B2B-Marketing.aspx

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2065272/How-to-Optimize-Your-Videos-for-SEO

Yep I agree with Irving, especially with all the deindexing Google has been doing recently, I check everything is in Google's index before parting with the cash!

A quick way to check the last time the page has been indexed is to type 'cache:http://www.url.com' into Google. The more recently it's been indexed, the better.

Hope that helps

We've started to notice some changes in the rankings of Google UK and Google pages from the UK.

Pages from the UK have always typically ranked higher, however it seems like these are slipping, and Google UK pages (pages from the web) are climbing.

We've noticed a similar thing happening in the Bing/Yahoo algorithm as well.

Just wondered if anyone else has anyone else noticed this?

Thanks

Hi Brad,

It might be too early to tell but I think Squidoo links are still just as valuable as they were before the most recent algorithm update.

As long as your Squidoo page and content is relevant to your link, then it should be fine.

What are your thoughts on it? How do you think it could have been affected by the new update?

Thanks

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion - however the tool was created in 2007 and there's a note on the webpage saying that it is out of date.

Karen

Does anyone know of a free video sitemap generator? Thanks

Hiya,

Thanks for the response, some really interesting ideas. It looks like it's just our site that is bouncing around in the serps.

I think point 2 is probably the most likely explanation. Although the site was built with SEO in mind, so the pages are all unique and with a good amount of content, we have a few issues with trailing forward slashes, which could be creating a duplicate content problem.

Basically the site is divided up into 9 sections - 7 of those sections are fine and ranking well, but 2 of them are bouncing around. Of the 2 that are bouncing around we have done some link building for just 1 of the sections.

I'll have another dig around in webmaster tools. If you have any other ideas in the meantime they'd be much appreciated!

Thanks

Hi,

Since January, the Google rankings for one of our sites has been jumping around. Sometimes it's on page 1, then it disappears and comes back around 1 month later.

It's strange because it's only a small section of the site that it's happening to. Every other section of the site is doing really well.

Just wondered if anyone else is having this problem, or has had it and can suggest any fixes.

There are no technical issues, no changes have been made to the site, all I can think is it's Google messing around with their algorithm?

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Karen

Hi,

There is a piece of code that you can add to page source which will instruct the page to load first and then for the social box to load afterwards. This means that your page will load without being slowed down by the social network's servers if they're experiencing high volumes of traffic.

Below is a good article on how to do it for Twitter, I imagine a similar thing would work for Facebook - http://remysharp.com/2007/03/20/how-to-add-twitter-to-your-blog-without-it-hanging-your-site/

Hope it helps!

Karen

Hi,

I don't know much about the service if offers, but I'd imagine anything 'automated' would be classed as black hat by Google.

When link building I often go by the moto - if it's too good to be true, it probably is. Depressing huh? But it's a good way of keeping link building under control...

Karen

Hi,

Have you noticed an increase in the number of visits coming from '(not provided)' in the keyword list?

If so, it could be down to the new privacy laws - more people being logged in when they search and therefore being recognised as a return visitor, rather than a new one?

Not sure how much that helps - it's just an idea to throw in the mix!

Karen

I typically work according to a 1:2 ratio - for every 1 directory link I build (niche-specific), I build 2 links from other link sources. This seems to work well for us.

I think there are still some really good natural directories out there (that aren't just for SEO), so I'd be surprised if Google didn't take into account directories.

Thanks Keith, totally agree with you - directories definitely aren't as valuable as they used to be and they only make up a tiny part of our link building strategy now. This is why we seem to have developed our favourite ones as we submit sites to so few directories, we want to make sure they're good ones!

Yes - agreed, DMoz is a classic, and where we start a lot of our link building campaigns. But do you have much luck when submitting? It seems to us that sites are rarely approved

We're having a bit of a debate in the office today about SEO directories. We all seem to have our favourites here - Octopedia, AbiLogic and JoeAnt to name a few that have been mentioned.

Just wondering what everyone else's favourite directories for SEO are?

Which pass the best link juice? Which offer the best value for money? Would love to know everyone's thoughts...

This is perfect thank you. Exactly what I was looking for!

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone knows if YouTube uses transcripts uploaded to videos as search signals? ie will the video rank better in the SERPs with a transcript?

Thanks

Hello from a not-so-cold (but not sunny yet) Bristol.

Remember Google can crawl a page and still not index it - so you probably want to know which pages Google has indexed?

To see how many pages are indexed in Webmaster tools it is useful to look at your sitemaps page - it'll tell you how many pages have been submitted and how many of those have been indexed.

One thing you can do to see which pages are in Google's index is type the below into Google search engine

site:http://......

There is a good thread on this in the webmaster tools forum that you might find useful - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=378b3cdf485ee3a7&hl=en

Thanks,

Karen

Hi,

Sorry - 'live' in Squidoo language is 'featured'. For your article to be visible to search engines external to Squidoo it needs to be a 'featured lens'. You can see if your article is featured by logging in and seeing if you have a red circle or green tick by it.

Another way you can get your lens featured is to encourage other squidoo members to comment on the article.

With regards to HubPages - you need to have a Hub Score of more than 40 or a hubber score of more than 75 for the links to be made 'dofollow'. If your article is good enough and you build some links into it, or promote it, it doesn't seem to be too difficult to get a score above 40.

Hi,

I've used Squidoo for link building before and it does provide a good backlink.

You need to make sure that your article is live on Squidoo before the link is seen by the search engines. This isn't easy, but it is possible.

Firstly, make sure your post is worthy of being published. Make your lens as interesting and unique as possible - lots of content, images etc. Squidoo seem to love 'top 10' articles.

Secondly, make sure your article is live. Squidoo will often put your post live at first and then take it down over the next day or so. This can be rectified by building links into your squidoo page (ie plug it on a social network page like Facebook, or build some free directory links into it).

Another site similar to Squidoo is 'HubPages', this is good for link building as well.

Hope that helps!