Thank you very much for your responses. I would be interested in getting a few more responses as well? Does anyone know of any articles that relate to the question? It is such a strange question- never really heard it put out there before, so would not be surprised if there was no literature on it! But if there is then please point my way... or indeed if anyone else has any feedback on it, whether it confirms or opposes our opinion, all opinions are welcome!

Hi everyone, quick question I hope someone could help me with:

We're representing a client based in the UK. As part of their overall strategy we've been linkbuilding.

At the moment, about 80/90% of the links we've gained come from UK-based sites, with 10/20% coming from US-based websites.

The US based websites are very good (think New York Times and genuine, relevant blogs with good readerships).

An external search analyst/consultant has contacted the client to say that the US links will be harming the site, because the links are from websites in the US and not the UK.

We believe that if 80/90% of the links were from the US this could indeed cause harm as it could indicate to search engines that our client is in the US when it's not (which might compromise their chance of ranking in .co.uk versions of search engines) however because it's only 10/20%, and because the linking sites are very good, we believe that they will getting all of the benefits of the positive metrics without any meaningful negatives.

We just wanted to get a few opinions on this to see if people think that we're mistaken, and would be glad to hear any opinions contrary to our own.

Hi yes that was me that posted the previous question. It does appear to be a bug, and Google has taken the date that the video was uploaded onto Youtube. Short term solution has been for us to remove the offending video and request a fetch, long term solution obviously is that Google needs to notice problem and fix it,

Hi yes that does seem as though it is probably it. I have checked a few sites that appear to have the same issue, and they have videos on home page too. We will remove and check.

Very annoying as the substantial decline in rankings coincides direct with this, and it does appear to be a bug. Let's give Rand and the Moz comm the heads up on this. If he points it out you can bet that it will be noticed by the powers up top!

Thanks very much for your help!

Ed

Additionally, we have already removed the blog feed from the home page to see if this would change things, and have requested a recrawl, which has happened. It did not solve the issue, and the dates still appear before the description in the SERPs for the home page, the substantial decline in ranking is still there.

Furthermore, the core pages of the site (home and services) are built in raw html, css etc, with no CMS (no Wordpress).

We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc.

A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap.

Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012.

This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs.

The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard.

When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything!

We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?