Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The reputation and integrity of the major players would be at stake here. If they changed their user agent identification (to spoof Googlebot or Bing or whatever) that could be detected, and they would be castigated. The crawler IP address and its user agent ID would be out of sync...

This seems to be very common... home pages should outrank deeper pages, yes?. Are there any external backlinks (from relevant, authoritative sites) to your deep-content landing pages? Perhaps all your credibility resides on your home page. Have you done any off-page SEO for the landing pages?

Just one factor out of many, but if something as insignificant as the bounce-rate for that URL for your specific search term being higher than another URLs bounce rate... is an example of how dynamic the SERPs can be.

If I click on yours, and go immediately back to Google SERP page, and then click on another URL... and this happens thousands of times could that impact your SERP position next month?

Was there a change in your bounce rate during the period?

SEO does not exist in isolation. Your actions and your competitors actions are concurrent. Perhaps a competitor has improved their (on-page and/or off-page) SEO more than you did in the same time-frame? Don't assume that negative SEO is the only effect. There are many things happening simultaneously and in many places.

Did their backlink profile change? Did their content change? Did yours? Were there any algorithm changes? There could be many, many factors to consider in detail when trying to understand reasons for any ranking changes, positive and negative.

URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.)

When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?

Hi John and others. It's been over a year John, did you get listed yet? As noted above, some categories may not have editors who are active, and some editors reject listings for any reason, accepting only the best, most important, and most relevant ones. Some categories are almost impossible, even if your site is relevant and has quality content.

Were you successful in getting a DMOZ listing for your site?

It seems that Shopify (shopping cart platform) does this automatically?

| # style="display:none"><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="</a>/"> My Website Title |
|   |

Have you inspected the backlink profile for your page vs. the top ranking competitors? What are you seeing as far as relevance, quality and quantity of inbound links?

If you are looking for directories, this is a good resource:

vilesilencer.com

http://info.vilesilencer.com/niche

Where there is good page rank and relevance, a few directory links may not hurt, use with caution.

If you have many inbound links or landing page traffic for the old page URLs, will you be redirecting those old URLs to your new URLs?

This seems to be very common... home pages should outrank deeper pages, yes?. Are there any external backlinks (from relevant, authoritative sites) to your deep-content landing pages? Perhaps all your credibility resides on your home page. Have you done any off-page SEO for the landing pages?

Here is a technique that may work for you.

In Google Analytics, you can go to:

Acquisition...
Keywords...
Organic...  (Or paid)

Sort by highest bounce rate.

You may see a lot of one-offs that may not be very relevant, so it's useful to add some filtering.

So, set some advanced filters, such as:

Site usage... Bounce rate... greater than 50

Site usage... Visits... greater than 5.

Which may filter out some of the noise.

Sort by bounce rate to see the highest bounce rate keywords.

Remember that more than half will be not provided, probably, but this will give you a sampling of keywords with the highest bounce rate.

Also, perhaps the bounce rate is high because they found what they wanted to know on that page very quickly. Sometimes a satisfied visitor bounces.

Voted +1 for Ricky's response, good suggestions. Have you looked http://www.blogengage.com/ for ideas? Depending on your market specifics, you may need to design more tailored strategies and tactics.

If you have many inbound links or landing page traffic for the old page URLs, will you be redirecting those old URLs to your new URLs?

Hi Adnan,

If I understand your question, you have a page for each specific product, yes? So, you may want THAT page to rank better than most of your OTHER pages, for a specific search query relevant to the name of that product?

This is a very common issue for any shopping cart system. So, any good shopping cart CMS would be SEO friendly enough to ensure the product name is used prominently in the page title tag, and in an H1 or H2 heading tag, IMG alt tag, etc... Then, it's up to you to have a high-quality and relevant product description (page text) that uses good SEO for your important and related keywords and interesting content. That is what's important for on-page SEO.

I am not yet sure how hummingbird would affect this, just use the basic SEO good practices for on-page content, and you should do well.

The question then becomes, have you prioritized your keywords, including long-tail, for each product and it's own webpage? Have you optimized your content accordingly?

Hope that helps.

The reputation and integrity of the major players would be at stake here. If they changed their user agent identification (to spoof Googlebot or Bing or whatever) that could be detected, and they would be castigated. The crawler IP address and its user agent ID would be out of sync...

1% response rate is much lower than I would have expected from public libraries. Have your respondents given you any feedback?

A more personal approach may have much better results. You could have your local staff ask a parent to visit the library and speak to someone in authority, starting with the reference desk, who are usually very helpful. Ask the parent to get the name of a person who has authority to add this type of content to the library's website, and approach them directly. That may even be the library reference desk staff. Give the parent a briefing and something to deliver to the library staff.

The library may be more responsive to a library patron, a local parent, who would recommend your services.

Jared has added some good points. Have you looked at your competitors? Understanding how and why their sites outrank your site? Have you prioritized your entire list of potential keywords and search queries?

Have you looked at Ahrefs, MajesticSeo, AuthorityLabs? It may depend on your specific keywords, whether or not you will find historical data with any given tool.  Also, your historic ranking (average SERP ranking) can be available in Google Webmaster Tools / Google Analytics.

GA allows many sites per "Account" and many "Accounts" per Gmail login. So in GA, I created a few dozen Accounts and put up to 50 clients into each Account. Most clients have one or two websites, some have more, so I put the larger clients into separate Accounts (UA-nnnnn-xx where nnnnn is the Account and -xx is the website property.)

In Google Analytics I am monitoring over 500 sites for various clients.  ALL of that is under one Gmail login for admin, and you can assign access privileges to each web property uniquely, so each client can look over their results privately via their own Google login.