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I know what you mean.

I spend a lot of time doing stuff for google that I would not do otherwise.

I think that the position can be highly significant.

What if the relevant text is in a paragraph in the body of an article.   That should be more significant than text in the footer.

And, wouldn't you think that a link in the top navigation would be more significant than a link in the footer?

As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

Yes.  This sounds like me.  I spend a lot of time on a good page of content and usually have help with graphics, photos and data.  A lot of what I produce is among the best-on-the-web for the subject.

With that kind of content I am not sharing.  No way.  In fact, I would not share pedestrian content with other sites because I believe that it feeds competitors and produces new ones.

A few people have offered me great content and I have published it on my site and it now outranks their site.  Some have been happy about this because they have a "message to get out".  But others have not been so happy because they don't like my site above them in the SERPs.

Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche?  But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site.

The route of not syndicating content for links is very slow to get traction.  Very slow.  It can take a few years to get rolling.  However, after your site is established it becomes hard to beat and then you can spend zero time on promotion and as much time as possible on content creation.  But for this to happen your content has to be really good.  If it is only "better than average" this probably will not work.

Good luck!

I am competing in a SERP with product pages from Amazon and Ebay.  Amazon and Ebay both have a DA of 100 and both have a product page in this SERP with a PA of 1.    Both of these beat my site that has a DA of 82 and a product page with PA of 68.

They are beating me on DA alone as I am better optimized for the keyword and my PA is enormous compared to theirs.

http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=132618

"The term "above the fold" refers to the part of a webpage that users can see without scrolling down."

"Above the fold" is a term that comes from newspaper publishing.

In that context it literally means "what can be seen above the fold line".  When a newspaper is on display at a news stand it is what the visitor cand see without picking it up.  "Above the fold content" is very important for stimulating newspaper sales.  That's why the part of the paper "above the fold" received this special name.

For a website it means what can be seen without scrolling.

The problem with using this term with websites is that there are many screen resolutions and some people do not have their browser open to full monitor size.

If you visit a site like foldtester.com you can get some idea of how many people can see different parts of your design "above the fold".

("Above the fold" has nothing to do with word count or banner positions.)

Just being honest....

I had absolutely no idea that this was a page for designing an invitation.  None at all - until I read your reply.

If this was my site I would not allow a cool color picker or a coding challenge or whatever to compromise my success by pushing the description down under.   I would find a way to make it work because I bet this will kill the conversion rate.

It's easier to double your income from current traffic that it is to double your traffic.

First I would try to serve visitors by getting the product description up above the fold and immediately visible by the people who visit the website.

Second, I would expand the title tag because "Beer Mug" puts you into generic competition when you want to compete for easier SERPs such as "custom printed beer mug" (or appropriate language for your product).

Third, your description is really really short.  I honestly believe that it has a very good chance of being filtered for trivial content. So, I would take my most important product first and start beefing up the description.  As you do that you will add more relevant words to the page so in addition to making your content above trivial you will be qalifying for long tail traffic.  Another benefit is that it adds sales appeal and reduces the number of questions that come in by email and phone.

At my office we spend lots of time improving trival content.  I spend a hundred hours a month on that.  Taking twenty word pages with one image and improving them to 200 word pages with four images.   That is for retail pages.  Informative pages go up to over a thousand words eight images and a video.  (those numbers are just examples - we don't have word  count goals).  The payback in traffic can be very high if you are in a busy niche and have a site with a little authority.

Here are the benefits that I have seen from videos.  We started making them for one of our sites in November.

We display them on Youtube and on our website.  As you mentioned they have increased the "time-on-site" significantly.   We display a couple on our homepage and they get viewed a lot.  They let people know that we have more videos inside.  I am sure that they contribute to pageviews.

When we post them on YouTube

--- we have our URL  visible in the video window - this probably earns some domain queries and that tells google that people are asking for our site by name

--- we have a link in our video description and many people use it

--- these links are visible in google webmaster tools

--- our videos display in the SERPs at google.com for some of our important keywords

--- one of our videos ranks #1 for our most important keyword on youtube, we have several videos on that YouTube SERP

--- our videos are being viewed hundreds of times every day on YouTube

--- I often use the word "VIDEO" in my title tags.  I think that should earn clicks from people.  Lots would rather watch a video than read.

--- philosophically if your site and my site have articles of equal value but yours has two images and mine has two videos which has richer content?  Maybe google will rank that one higher.

It is impossible to say exactly how google weighs this stuff but videos are not too hard to make and I think that they bring value to your site.

New post on the SEOmoz blog that addresses some of the good and bad things about footer links.   Give it a look....

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

Just me guessin'.....

I doubt that they will "hurt" your site unless those links are going to external sites with a poor reputation or external sites that are unrelated.

One thing that I can say with a little more confidence...

When I place a link to a page in the top navigation of my site the rankings usually go up.... and the page that I removed to make space for it usually drops.  It takes weeks to months to see this change but that is my experience.

EGOL:   "I don't feel theses are "spammy" links."

Google:  "What you think doesn't matter."

EGOL:  uhhh....

Google:  "If these are such kickass links why are you hiding them in the footer?  Get them up high and in bold font so that everybody who enters the site will see them.... Then we will give them their due importance."

His main company will only allow 4 pages on his site.

Huh?  Who are these guys?  They need a kick in the pants.

Kickass content on your own site.  Content that will make people say WOW! and immediately share with their friends.

If this book is something that is intended to be sold the thing that will make it go viral is its quality.  Honestly, how many books that are sold have you seen going viral on the web?

If this book is something that is intended for free distribution then I would make it into a website and that will get it out to everybody everywhere with minimal cost. Give it away in html, pdf, kindle, txt and a dozen other formats.   And, if it is worth the time to read it will go viral with zero work from you.

But, don't hold your breath unless the client is the Pope or the Dalai Lama or Desmond Tutu.

Right... or... did your traffic change?  Traffic quality is strongly related to time-on-site.

Lots of money is at stake here, so doing a great job is essential.

I don't think that any answer given without doing a detailed study of the traffic sources, keywords, link sources, etc. is going to be a good answer.  There is also the question of conversion rate related to branding.  So, I would evaluate as best as possible, make a chart, and use that for your decision.  I would involve the company in the decision as branding, sales numbers, profit margins and more could be part of producing the best ROI.

Running both sites could be the smart way to go.   Wilson could be such a brand that moving their products to Buehler would result in a lower conversion rate.  They also have international domains which could produce good revenue.

Good luck with your analysis.

Forty years ago I used Buehler products every day... but that was in a different lifetime.

First, if you can make a blog and add good content regularly that is something that should be tried.  After you have done it for several months you can look at the traffic that it brings and decide if you are getting a good return.

If I was going to write an article per day or per week I would rather have that good content on my main website.  That way when people visit they are already where they have easy access to my other content / products / services.

Also, if the blog attracts links then those links will hit my main site and benefit it directly rather than hit a satellite site that only passes part of the link value back to my main site.

The only reason that I would put the blog on a satellite site is if the satellite site had much better rankings all around than my main site.

has asked to have a book they are doing to be taken viral

heh....  They think you are a magician. 

I have the same experience as Marie.    I create content that I think should explode on the web and submit it to slashdot and not much happens.  Then, two years later one of my visitors submits same content to reddit and it spreads across the web, bringing me 100,000 visits to that page in 48 hours.

I have several pieces of content that have done really well but for each of those I have several that I thought would do the same thing but did not... and an awful lot more that are "best-on-the-web"  for their topic area but have not gone viral.

The topic isn't right to go viral, or the time isn't right, or the right person isn't pointing to it.  These things are really important.

Tell your client to get the Pope to say that he is reading their book... or have Justin Bieber be seen carrying it around for a week or two.  Things like that have more influence than you on the success of their book.  If they have written a sleepy little pamphlet about something that nobody gives a hoot about then it will be easier to make pigs fly than to get their book going viral.

Nice work!

When something like this happens, I always check to be sure my analytics code is installed correctly - sometimes I recopy/paste it into the footer file.

Then I email a couple of trusted friends in other parts of the USA and ask them to take a look.

This does not answer my question at all.  I'm not a web novice.

I don't have your resume or a list of your websites.

So, I gave you solid data and shared a method of increasing your direct visits.

Sorry you didn't like it.

Does this practice have a name?

Cheatin'

Does it have longevity as a ranking technique?

From personal experience, it usually lasts until I do enough work to beat them.

Mimicking competitors isn't the most effective way to win.  Instead, decide to do something enormously superior and then pay no attention to them.

Roger and staff at SEOmoz.org

Has anyone seen any explanation for this or noticed this when compared to previous year?

I am only watching a few sites and we are working every day on those sites.  Direct visits are climbing climbing on those sites.   If you are continuously adding new content to these sites that engages the visitor your direct visits should be going up.

We are adding new content to these sites every week.  And showing that content prominently on the homepage and across the site with server side includes.  We also have programs that rotate the content on the homepage so visitors who visit multiple times in a week see different content on each visit.  This freshness makes people come back to see what is new and that type of visit is usually a direct visit or a domain query, which I believe are enormously valuable for increasing your rankings.

Nima,

I get thousands of visitors every day who use a two-letter state abbreviation as part of their query.  Not so much for Ohio or Utah... but definitely a LOT for states like California and Pennsylvania.

So, I would not be motivated to change.

E

Penguin problems are because your site has bad links.

If you have a penguin problem the 301 redirect will assign those bad links to the new site.

If you do other types of redirects your search rankings in Bing/Yahoo will probably disappear.

it still brings in about $1500 a month from Bing/Yahoo.

OK... leave it up for that money.

Why no redirect?

The same reason why you rinse a dirty cup.

Just saying what I would do... this isn't advice.

If your content sucks or is mediocre.  Walk away.

If your content is unique and fantastic.  Hire a security pro to clean up the files and the database.  Move it to a new domain and start promoting it with white hat methods.

Forget about the redirects.

Looks to me like lots of ebay search results are indexed in Google...

Search google for "baseball cards for sale"

No panda problem there.

If you know how to get rid of these I would really enjoy it. 

We have not used MTurk.  I think that it would be very hard to find a Turker who would have the background knowledge needed to write accurate content for our site and the writing skills needed to pass my picky requirements.

I can't share URLs but for the image content we just write detailed explainations of the images.  As they say, an image is worth 1000 words.  These articles might expand well beyond the single image and have four, five or six by the time we are finished.

I know that writing 9000 of these would be very time consuming.  Just pick the ones with the highest traffic or the highest traffic potential and start writing articles.  I am writing an article for one of my pages today and probably tomorrow and have hundreds more to write.

How can we make use of this to our main websites advantage?

Keep it under lock and key so your competitor will not get it.

A lot more information would be required to decide if it should be developed into a free-standing site or if you should 301 to that domain.

The problem is.... Google can not determine "intent".  And, they can smack you down without warning or appeal.

I am willing to bet nice money that Hayneedle's problem was interlinking.

I have a few links between my sites but for the most part they do not link to one another.  And, it will be a cold day in Hades before I am putting up footer links like Amazon - even when my sites are tightly related and it might be good for visitors.

But, that is just my conservative philosophy.  I might be losing out.

If you go to amazon.com and look at the footer, you will find a huge list of links out to 23 other properties that are affiliated with amazon.com. These are all followed footer links.

If you go to these other properties such as diapers.com you will find many footer links out to a couple of other domains.  Not all 23 domains but they are linking to multiple deep pages on one or two domains.

Last year Hayneedle stores got slapped out of the SERPs for a couple of weeks and my thought was that their huge interlinking network of stores was the problem.  Hayneedle severely cut their interlinking and returned to the SERPs in competitive form.  They still don't have the huge list of links to other properties on their site so I believe that the links caused them problems.

I would be afraid to do this type of linking on my sites but amazon.com does it and continues to be one of the most difficult to beat sites in the retail space. So, I am not recommending this... just pointing at somebody doing this at an extreme level and not seeming to suffer from it on the domain where the links are displayed or the domains where the links are received.

In my opinion, this is a linkjuice play, not something useful for their visitors because amazon sells all of the products on amazon.com

My two keywords are on the top of my desired market place that means google.co.uk . So now what should I do to sustain this position???

Nice work!    The first thing that you should do is praise God!

After that, get right to work on more content for different keywords.  If it starts ranking you will be riding the gravy train.

Syndicating content has BOTH Panda and Penguin risks if you don't know what you are doing.

they just need to get over being camera shy.

Exactly!

Go down to their office with a camera and tell them... we are making your first video TODAY!

Contact the registrant and see if you can buy it!

Nice work on making this successful without search engines.

It's not too late to optimize those pages.  You might make a lot more money.

It was a shoot-from-the-hip article done with zero research so that yada yada yada writing could get him content in under an hour.

Same type of content as discussed here...

http://www.seomoz.org/q/i-want-to-know-if-this-is-bogus-or-not

These situations are becoming much less common than they were a few years ago.  But this still occurs often in niches with low competition.

It can also occur when a domain has more authority than you realize or links that are not being displayed in the tool that you are checking.  They could be new links or redirected links.

From what I have seen, this type of page rarely beats a good page on a well-established domain.

I Have a competitor clearly using incorrect methods to rank, How can they be coming in ahead of me? Pages are are all keyword stuffed, site is only 1 year old. It looks like their main source is Press Releases for backlinks.

If that's all they got then they shouldn't be too hard to beat.  Have you done any work?

How long does it usually take google weed these people out?

Until you earn the position above them.

As long as there are search engines, a person who understands how they work will have an enormous advantage over the ignorant person who just tosses up a website.

I bet Forbes.com would get a lot more traffic if I was doing their SEO.

We have a blog that links out to six to ten external sites every day.   All of those links are followed.

Our philosophy for linking out is to only give links to sites that are better than ours or sites that have superior content than ours for a specific subject.  So we are not linking out to second class sites.

From Google's perspective a nofollow link means.... "They paid us!"..... or...... "We don't trust this!"..... and neither of those are the case. So why should we use nofollow?

From a pagerank perspective a nofollow has the same impact on internal pagerank flow as a followed link, so it saves you nothing to apply a nofollow.  (Google originally blocked pagerank flow through nofollows but then they made it evaporate (a pagerank loss) and didn't tell webmasters.  Then Matt Cutts told webmasters that pagerank is lost through nofollow just as it is through a followed link.)  So, you don't know how google is treating this because they could have changed their mind again  and not told anyone.

Finally, I think of it like this.... The web  is the web because it is full of links from one site to another.  If you believe that google rewards pages that link out to other great pages then you should be giving followed links.  Why? Because if you use nofollow then maybe Google does not give you that reward.  I don't know if that is true.  Only google knows.  But that is where I am placing my bets.

Here is the key for diagnosing a problem like this.

Do this assessment.....

1. where traffic was coming from before the drop

2. where traffic is coming from now

3. use 1 and 2 to determine what traffic you lost

4. go to those SERPs to see what happened

5. look at your pages to determine the cause

(If you don't have old analytics see if you can get raw logs off of server and look at them with a tool like weblogexpert - free low feature version if you don't want to pay)

The above will tell you if you had a traffic loss.  However, your post complains about an impression loss.  That is very different.  For that use weblogexpert to determine if your problem is really an engagement loss rather than a traffic loss.  If that is the case then the new design fails to connect visitors to content as well as the original design.  To solve that you need better site navigation and cues that lead to deeper content.

I looked at the features offered by CF a few weeks ago and wanted to use it on my website.  But I had concerns like yours about a number of items.  For these concerns I don't have documented proof that there would be a problem but when I don't have proof that something is good, I don't use it.

For example....

CF can rewrite some of my outbound links and install affiliate code.  What will google think of that?

Let's say I have a retail site and don't want to ship outside of the USA, so I tell CF to block ips from all other countries.  Will that cause a problem when lots of people see my site in the SERPs but when they click into it  they are blocked?

When they optimize all of my images and move them to other servers will that cause a problem for me in image search?

If my site is on servers in other countries will that influence my rankings?

I read reports where other people put their website on CF and it was actually SLOWER.

These are just a few.  And, I am not saying that these are "bad".  Just saying I don't know for sure what the impact will be and when I have this many concerns about something I don't use it.

Now, if somebody has great things to say about the above to clearly say that my concerns are unfounded, I would like to hear them because I really like what this product can do and I would like my concerns to be eliminated so I can use it.

If you are good on camera or know how to storyboard a demonstration then just get a video camera and give it a shot yourself.  Will not be a waste of your time.  You will learn lots that will help you no matter which way you will go.

I procrastinated for a long time before my first video then we just said... let's try it, and flew without a big production.  It worked great for short product demo and how-to-to-it videos.

Just do it.

Why don't you ask him about it.  He might know where he is popular, price-competitive, knows language, is familiar with customs, wants to work and prefers to travel.  We can't tell you anything about any of those.