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That is a question we get a lot from clients. Extremely hard to pinpoint those drops.

Absolutely not.

If there was a way to 'hurt' a site then black hatters would be bombing sites to force them down in rankings.

How did you determine the directory being of low value?

In my eyes a link is a link is a link.

From my perspective Google put heavy weight on direct match domains to ensure brands ranked correctly on their exact search. Overtime people realized this and of course abused it.

Right now you have a VERY good chance of ranking on page 1 if you have the exact match .com, .net, .org, or whatever country code you want to rank for.

Obviously removing the weight could potentially hurt Google and the rankings. Imagine all those small local businesses(with no SEO) that people search for everyday that could potentially de-rank. That would not help the user experiance what so ever.

I am very interested to see how they handle any update on this subject.

Pretty simple really. Just create 301 redirects from the old url i.e. http://www.domain.com/hub/content1 to http://www.domain.com/content1.

That should transfer the rankings, link authority, etc. as best as it can.

I'm a huge fan of SearchCap. I take 15-30 minutea each day and review it. Typically keeps me up to date on anyything happening in the industry.

I use Twitter often for real time 'searching.' Mostly local or breaking news alerts.

Those are the tools I was thinking of, but it is hard to recommend them since they are typically wrong. Again just run them on your own website and look how skewed the results are.

Something tells me that his competition is not going to give him access to their Analytics.

But if they do - Alan is correct...

Scroll down and you will see the rest of the source.

Short answer: No

Longer answer: There are quite a few 'tools' out there, but they just provide an estimate or guess. Some of them have free versions that give a few example domains that send traffic. I've never seen them actually show anything that matched my actual Analytics.

Ohter answer: Forget the competition and focus on your site. Destroy them in rankings and PPC.. No more  worrying about the competition.

Google will select the most authortive aka whichever has the most links.

If you have a ton of inbound links I would recommend doing lots of research before inserting that tag. Find out which pages have the authority and don't throw it away.

This was a plague of eCommerce for years. Luckly most of the newest moden platfroms have caught up.

The only "penalty" is the fact you could potentially spread your link juice across those multiple pages. Example:

You have 104 links to the same product, but they are equally pointed a 4  unique URLs. Now you technically have 26 links on whatever page Google 'selects' as your authority page.

Your competition has 100 links to the same product which only has 1 page.

With that type of setup your competition is always going to have that authority page ranked abouve you.

A link is a link is a link.

Throw the right anchor text in there and it will be more powerful.

The most recent update was targeted more towards sites then the entire network.

Check your rankings. Did they drop? You were affected.

Though I highly doubt any eCommerce sites got hit with this update.

I would recommend a 301 redirect.

For the best SEO value you want to leave off the /index.html - espcially if that is your homepage.

Don't forget to redirect non-www to www.

I think Xenu is your best option here. The size of the site nearly cuts out the chance a web tool could handle it.

Just recently on a site review I had to run Xenu on a site with 160,000 pages. It only took 4 hours running at 30 threads to complete. Any modern PC should handle it fine.