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The only time I had to call for anything, they literally had my issue resolved in under 2 minutes from the time I dialed.

-Dan

That's a great answer Ryan... I wonder, just out of curiosity, if it wouldn't hurt to look at the cached version of the pages if they're indexed?  I'd be curious to know if the date they were cached is right near when the robots.txt was changed?  I know it wouldn't alter his course of action, but might add further confirmation that this caused the problem?

Hi

This on-page site optimization tool has been a huge help as well.  http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

I think you can run it free 3 times if you're not pro.

-Dan

Kevin

I'd surmise that

1. Be sure you're logged out of your google account that claimed the places page when you go to the listing as described above.

2. A "user" is just a lay-person suggesting changes, edits etc to Google.  And Google receives these and decides whether to take them into consideration.

When I went to SEOmoz's Google Places listing as in my screenshot above, and clicked through, I got to a page where it would allow me to edit basic info for the listing, even though I have no association with the company and the listing has been claimed.

See screenshot -> http://screencast.com/t/CR6ftkBPFu

-Dan

Kevin

Go to any maps listing -> click the red marker -> click more -> click edit details or report a problem.

See image in this example: http://screencast.com/t/klEscqfQB

-Dan

Hi

I had the same issue with a client (except he had FOUR duplicate listings - yikes!)

Anyway, are these are duplicate listings, where there should only be one listing? OR, do they have two locations and thus two listings are needed?

If its a duplicate, YES delete one.  I'm not sure where the trouble is with that (maybe if its under review you can't make changes?  Someone else know about this?)  I caught my clients when they were "pending review".  If you are signed into their places account, you should be about to delete by either completely deleting the listing, or disassociating with the account.   I would completely delete it if its a straight duplicate.

Can you say what you have done to try and delete the listing?

As for the older companies, you might be able to put in a request to Google places by going straight to that places listing and suggesting a correction.  Or can you receive mail at the old address?  You could claim the listing, get it in an account, and then delete it.  Just don't claim it with the same Google account as the other listings.

-Dan

Brant

This might be your issue...

Do this site search in Google: site:www.petmedicalcenter.vetsuite.com

Google still has about 112 pages in its index from your old site, all with "Pet Medical Center of Las Vegas" in the title tag, and an address in the description.  Maybe of these still pages from the old site are still in the cache.  AND there are no 301 redirects at all pointing to your new site.

So there lies the issue I think. You may want to see if it is possible to 301 redirect all the old pages to their corresponding new pages.  If this is not possible technically, you need to do a domain forward to the new domain.

-Dan

Hi

This is a substantial question, which can have many possible answers.  First, bear in mind there are no "one fits all" solutions - there's no replacement for having a good look at your specific situation.  For e-commerce a >50% bounce rate may be bad, while for a news or blog site (especially when landing on a full article deep within the site) a 50% bounce rate may be pretty good.  So it does vary with the niche.

But to actually answer the question, you'll probably want to experiment with on page things, like design, usability, content quality - and especially take a look at the book "Don't Make Me Think" if you haven't.

But you should also make sure the right people are finding the right pages in your site.  For example, I had a site that was ranking very well for a certain term, and getting some good traffic.  But it turns out that key-phrase, and the intention behind the search was not aligned with what the site actually had to offer.  So we re-targeted to a more appropriate key-phrase which cut the bounce rate in half!

Also, if you have an e-commerce site, be sure the terms you're getting traffic for are transactional in intent (intent to purchase something) vs. informational.  If someone is looking for information but lands on an e-commernce site: higher bounce rate.

Lastly, a good benchmark I find is: how do you perform in brand searches?  This is where you want bounce rate to be lowest, time on site to be highest etc.  Someone is specifically looking for your brand, which should get the best metrics.  If these are not where they should be, then you know your on page can be improved.

Lots here I know, but hope it helps

-Dan

Hi

From what I have seen, if the NEW structure is done well (good architecture, good on-page optimization, better navigation, better keyword optimization in the new urls - its all an improvement from the old navigation) and you 301 everything corectly - you should see an improvement in rankings.  Although this can take a week or two.

And of course submit a new xml sitemap.  I also block the old pages/directories in robots.txt (this may be a little overkill but I do it anyway).

One extra tip is to just do a site:www.mydomain.com search in google to uncover any pages in their index you may not know about, or have overlooked and be sure to 301 those to the most relevant pages as well.

-Dan

HI

I would not worry about PR too much.  Check your traffic, rankings and other key metrics over the next week or so.  If they hold steady, I wouldn't worry about it.  Just keep doing everything with the best practices possible.

A 10 second look at your site and nothing "panda-like" jumps out at me.

-Dan

Hi Benj

I would wait until they update the page cache - that usually brings the most significant ranking change due to on-page changes.  They may crawl the page, but updating the cache is what you want to look for - you can of course click on "cached" in the search result or do a cache search - cache:www.mydomain.com/mypage.html

There's no telling how long it will take, but it sounds like your site is well trafficked, you can see the cache update in just a few days.

You can try changing one thing at a time - but usually the only two things I personally see that make a big difference is title tag and url.  The other thing to keep in mind, is how the whole page works together - title->url->description->heading->content->images - can sometimes have a bigger impact when you bring all of those elements into harmony.

-Dan

True, I am hearing you there

Just curious, what's your take on tags in that situation of a large site with hundreds of posts per month?

Hi

EGOL's answer makes sense.

I'd like to add also - you don't necessarily need to write the posts just before the time of publishing them.  You could have several posts scheduled to publish at certain dates, as long as they were not time sensitive.

Also, you could take what would have been one post and break it into two parts, if there is enough content and it makes sense.

You can also take guest posts, which obviously eliminates the need for you to write them - good networking too.  And maybe you'd discover video or screencasts are a comfortable medium.  You may be able to generate a 3-5 minute video and get it posted in far less time than a written post.

You could also record audio of yourself or an interview with someone in the industry and get it transcribed for some fast quality content.

-Dan

Hi Garry

At quick glance - I would come up with your 5 or so categories, get them on the top navigation bar. Make sure you have a category for every possible post you might do in the future.  The ones you have down on the right sidebar look like a good start.

Then utilize your tags as a way to add real specific words and phrases to each post.  These can be generated as you go, you can have dozens or hundreds of tags over time, and several on just one post.  Then put a tag cloud maybe in the footer.

So you'll have maybe 5 broad categories that always stay the same and sit on the top navigation, and you'll have lots of tags over time that are more specific.

-Dan

Hi Garry

The advise I have heard, and follow, is to keep categories more general, and to only have a handful - say 5-10 categories.

But you want to have lots of tags. Tags can be very specific and unique to each individual post.  You can have several tags for one post.  I have a lot of pages that get picked up by tag pages, which tend to also make great long-tail URLs.

So let me give an example.  Website about cars.  Categories might just be: Sports Cars, SUVs, Pick Up Trucks, Station Wagons.  Tags however would be very specific: 2 door honda, fastest sports cars, driving and safety - etc etc etc.

And I've also heard to be sure not to have a tag with the same name as a category.

I'm sure you'll see lots of examples that go against this format, but it seems pretty intuitive and has worked for me thus far.

-Dan

Hi

First check to see if the pages are indexed in Google by doing site:www.mydomain.com as a search.  If they are not, you have nothing to worry about (as long as you block them in robots.txt soon)  Your developer should be able to edit your robots.txt file extremely easily.  Its just a file that sits in the root directory of the website.

If the 25 pages are indexed though, it could have a negative impact to have 25 duplicate title tags.  As to how much impact, that may depend on how large the site is, how deep into the site they are, etc.

-Dan

Do you mean to say that you do not want these pages indexed at all?  You say "there is no information on these pages and they do not need to be optimized".  If in fact, you don't want them indexed, you would add them to your robots.txt file as such:

Disallow: /filename.html

Disallow: /folder/filname.html

etc.

However, what EGOL and Bryce have suggested would be the most work, but make the most sense overall.  If you can find a way to re-structure the 25 downloads / add content etc to capture the additional traffic that would seem to be the best choice.

Hi

The high bounce rate is due to a low number of pages per visit.  When a user visits one page, even if they are on it for 10 minutes, if they don't go to any other page, it still gives you a bounce.  So you're seeing pages per visit as 1.2, 1.1 etc - this means lots of one page visits, thus the high bounce rate.

See if the high bounce correlates to new visits vs return or landing on the homepage vs inner pages.  Check all your landing pages, and see if people are landing on one page (an inner article etc) and leaving.  Maybe they're coming in all on long tail searches right to a specific article.

-Dan

Steve

Do you mean 404 errors?  Google webmaster tools may have that info.

-Dan

Just adding my agreement with both EGOL and Oversteer

Do you have a history of;

1. Rankings

2. Impressions and CTR (Google Webmaster Tools)

Diane

I think this post by rand is exactly what you're looking for.

-Dan

Hi!

I would be very careful about guessing what caused the drop in traffic to begin with, before you go adding noindexes everywhere.

Try to find a correlation to the drop in traffic. Did rankings drop? CTR? Amount of brand searches? What type of organic traffic dropped, long-tail or head terms?  Also, you may want to compare the amount of unique visitors compared to the past and check the amount of new visits compared to the past.

I'd investigate a little more before taking action.

-Dan

Diane

1. Change the title tage to -

<title>Gastric Band Hypnotherapy expert 
offers Full Guaranteetitle>

2\. Change your URL from: 
www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy
to
www.clairehegarty.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy

and make sure to 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.
You would do this in your .htaccess file.

Those two things would help a lot.

Bear in mind this is simply a band-aid over deeper
issues. I suggest reviewing the [beginners guide to seo](http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo), 
trying out a tool like [this one](http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new) and checking out some posts
in the [on-site optimization category.](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/2)

I understand your issue, and that it is not fun to see
your page below a competitors, but you don't want to get
too overly focused on the ranking, for a huge variety of 
factors.  Focus on making your page as optimized and user
friendly as possible. This means aligning the major page
elements as suggested (title, url, header) and writing
good text, based upon what's most easily digestible for
the reader.

-Dan

Walter

Looks like you have a "rel=nofollow" in the <a>links for every image.  I would remove that, and your images should get indexed.</a>

<a>-Dan</a>

Jeff

Google may have crawled your site, but has not updated its cached version of the homepage since June 3rd (where the title tag was in fact different).  I'd wait it out a little bit more, I'm sure you'll see it update soon.

-Dan

PS - you can just click on "cached" next to any search result to see the most resent version.

Diane

Your page is too saturated with OTHER keywords and topics.  It is not targeted enough towards the one topic you are trying to rank for.  What the page needs is less of the off-topic content in the main elements (title, url, description, header, bold and internal links) to reveal the main topic you're trying to focus on.

Partially what I mean by "off-topic" is that you have many variations of your targeted phrase on the page: "hypo gastric band" "gastric band hypnosis" "virtual gastric band" are diluting the value of "gastric band hypnotherapy" - and they are all sort of competing for attention.

Whatever keyphrase you are trying to rank for, you want it to match exactly in the title, meta description, url and top header. This achieves a harmony between all of these elements, and then its ok to have variations of them appear naturally elsewhere in the body. But you want to focus those important elements with the exact keyphrase you're going for.  This not only helps SEO but usability too.

-Dan

These are all good points.  And I agree, you should remove the index, nofollow.

There's a good article on nofollows here

Hi

It would appear this is in part the case due to the exact match domain, title tag and header all being an exact match to the search term on your competitor's site.  If you wanted to increase your chances of ranking better you would:

• remove "leading" from the beginning of your title tag (most of the other websites above yours in google have an exact match at the front of their title tage),

• have an exact match in the URL (remove the word "with" - if you do, don't forget to do a 301 redirect to the new page)

That is all from a technical standpoint, I'm not saying this is how you want want to approach your overall SEO and marketing strategy.  I personally would not get too obsessed with one exact search, but rather optimize your site well for the user.

It also appears your page (and website in general) is overly saturated with other topics and keywords.  Anytime you are trying to rank for a specific keyphrase, you want the content of that page to focus in exclusively on that topic as much as possible.  The competitor's site may not be as authentic as yours, but it does a fairly decent job at staying on point to that one keyphrase.

-Dan

Hi

This can vary depending on how often Google crawls your site, but I've seen Google crawl and update the rankings in just a few days on some moderately popular sites.  I've heard the most popular sites, like the NY Times, are being crawled and updated many times a day.  For some really low traffic websites I've seen it take maybe 10 days, but never longer than two weeks, which is just my personal experience of course.

You can go into Google Webmaster Tools to see how often they crawl and how many pages deep they usually go.  If the content you're trying to get updated is deep into your site it could take longer.  But the homepage much quicker.

Hope this helps.

-Dan

Hmm... I see your dilemma!

Unfortunately it seems to be the site structure is causing some trouble, although its hard to tell without more specific information. When a website deals with multiple topics that can be drilled down further you really want a separate page for each topic.

Page 1 -> XYA

Page 2 -> XYB

etc..

It is hard to tell without knowing the exact categories, but if this makes sense and it is possible to convince the site owners to do so, I would split things up into multiple pages, each with a unique category.

If this is not possible, I would go with the shorter option in the title tag, but be sure to group the words together in the body of the page, in bold if possible, only if it appears natural.

Adrian

Blog comments are not typically thought of as carrying a whole lot of weight by themselves.  However, when you're building your overall backlink portfolio it is good to have some variety to your backlinks - some high quality links, plenty of followed links, some no-followed, some in social, some in places like digg etc.

I would certainly comment if you feel you have something to add to the conversation (and you find yourself doing so naturally, not forced - and definitely don't add any comments on fake blogs) but you don't have to go overboard and spend tons of time seeking out lots of blogs just to get some comments in. Leave them as you would in a natural way. They can add some social value and help round out your overall backlink portfolio, but don't do a whole lot by themselves.

-Dan

Carlos

Actually, it is in the index but if you do: site:www.uniquip.com as a search in Google it is not the first result, which it should be.  If you do "site:www.uniquip.com" (with the quotes) as a search in Google, it is still only the second result, it should be the first, which is a sign that something is weird, which would require some more investigation.

-Dan

Hi

I think the only compelling reason to keep it, is if it reflects the real structure of your site. Is there a "category" button or link to click on, which brings you to a page www.example.com/category with content on it?  If not, I would remove it.

I generally think of "category" more as a word for blogs or portfolio sites.  If you DO have a actual page or link for "category" I would consider renaming it "products" or something more e-commerce friendly.

-Dan

Hi Carlos

It appears there are two major issues with your site not getting indexed.

1. Off-Site - Go to opensiteexplorer and type in your URL.  You will see there are many suspicious looking links pointing back to your domain.  No matter what you do on-site, if you have really low quality backlinks pointing to your domain (and no good ones to balance things out), nothing you do on-site will help.  You'll want to do whatever you can to clean these up (get them removed).  You'll also want to work on getting some GOOD backlinks in conjunction with cleaning out the bad ones.  There are many resources here on SEOmoz on backlinking strategies.

2. On-site - Your product pages are 4 or more clicks away from the homepage.  You really want this to be 3 or less (ideally 1 if possible for some products and categories).

I also noticed that your homepage does not appear to be indexed in Google.

We could go WAY more in depth with this, but in general those seem to be the two major issues.

-Dan

You need to use the rel=canonical statement to resolve the duplicate content issue.

See the official Google documentation

This answer comes right from Rand himself (and a few other answers), as I just stumbled upon it in Quora yesterday:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-permalink-structure-for-SEO

And to add my two cents, as far as rankings, I don't think you can credit the URL alone for a #1 page ranking. I would construct your URL as Rand suggests and focus your on-page optimization efforts in a holistic manner.

This is a pretty broad question, so hard to tell exactly what's going without more information.  Things I'd investigate first:

• Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account (assuming you have it installed on the site) and check number of impressions and CTR.  Has the site not been showing up in as many searches overall as compared to the past?

• Go to Google Insight and see if there has been a decrease in search volume overall for your keywords to correlates to the drop in traffic.

• Go a little deeper into the analytics, and see if you can pinpoint specifically where search traffic decreased.  Did it decrease across all keywords?  Can you segment out certain keywords and isolate ones which dropped where others did not?

• Also, check analytics for a drop in search traffic on all engines or just google, just bing, just yahoo etc.

Overall, at least the way you described the scenario, it seems when diagnosing an issue like this you really need more information.  And specifically, you need more information that correlates to the drop in traffic, ie other changes that occur parallel in time to the drop in traffic.

• Also, how are you tracking rankings?  You'll want to verify its accuracy perhaps by getting rankings from another source just to be sure.