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Hello All: I would really appreciate any insight that can be provided into this dilemma. I've ruled out bad links issues - we don't have them and never engaged in grey to black hat SEO linkbuilding. I cannot find the cause for this drop off. Maybe I'm missing something because I am so close to it? The site is markspace Thanks in advance for any and all help or insight!! 🙂

Hello: I know this is long - but I kept it as succinct as I could to explain the situation - but everyone of the brilliant people on here insight is so greatly appreciated in advance. There has been more than a 30% decline in traffic mostly from Google on a site with an 11 year presence on the web, 5 page rank (historically 6), fairly good quality backlinks (but they are old). I cannot pinpoint a smoking gun (such as a specific penalty) - if it's just not attrition in demand for the product itself which there is plenty of evidence for. But I practice only white hat, so I don't know what it is. I do not engage right now in link building because my time to work on SEO is very limited. We have a few common keywords that cannot be avoided (because there are no good synonyms) so there is a high density for one word especially all over the site. From some websites (like tidbits) we have in Google Webmaster account tens of thousands of backlinks. How serious is this (FYI - they're not new though) Because of some unflattering reviews from sites with strong authority, the number of click throughs vs. impression in Google Search has dropped dramatically - I think a big part of it is that because the reviews drove down CT ratio. Interestingly, the number of CTs from Adwords has also dropped off significantly, and I was told by Adwords specialist that declining organic traffic does affect the Adwords traffic to - in fact, they're not even using our daily budget for Adwords as they used to. The site also doesn't pick up quality organic backlinks as it used to, and the anchor link text is almost always the same - a product name. Plus, the site was banned in 2008 by Google (from a black hat keyword stuffing that I discovered happened in another dept.) and only after really working hard was it reinstated by reconsideration request. Site traffic from Google has never fully reached it's potential since then. Also, text prices were removed from Buy Now buttons even though the prices were textually part of the buttons for years (could this be some penalty?) **Is it possible that Google is taking the ban history, the poor reviews, the decline in CTs to impressions on the site, the huge decline (75% over four years) in "search volume" or "search interest" (according to Google Trends) for the site's main product name and just using all of this to keep downgrading the site? If true, wouldn't the page rank be diving down to anywhere from 0 to 2 (or is that not relevant at all?) ** There are no messages of a penalty or anything else in the official Webmaster account for this site. Any insight anyone is able to provide is much appreciated.

Hello all: You probably noticed Google showing product prices in SERP snippets and this did not do us well because there was a noticable drop off in click throughs to the site with the price displaying in snippet. So we're replacing them with graphic prices instead. Does anyone see a problem with that in as far as how Google ranks our pages? Thanks!

Hello All: Google snippets now include prices. We feel it's causing less click throughs from search results. Someone suggested to replace the textual prices with graphical prices. I worry Google will expect some sites to do this and penalize them for doing so. Any thoughts or evidence in this regard?

Hi All: Over the past couple of months, I have heard a few people mention Spring Metrics as something I might want to try to help with conversions. Sure, SEO can lead a horse to water, but getting the horse to drink the water is a whole different issue. Do any of you have experience with Spring Metrics, and is it something that you would recommend to help with conversions? Has it actually made a difference for anyone that would make it worth the time and money investment?

Hello: I've been the publisher and SEO for Indie Rock Cafe since starting it in 2007. It's done great, and has #1 - #5 positions in Google for many strong keywords like "best new albums", "best new bands", "top new bands", "popular indie rock songs", and so on. However, for many of the results, the homepage keeps popping up over and over again. I thought I'd done everything right to get other pages on the site to rank for top keywords. Another potential issue is that I expected the homepage to have a 6 PR by now, but it seems stuck on 5. Any ideas? Insight from SEOs and experts is always enlightening and helpful, so thank you in advance for your thoughts and advice.

Hi: I have a dilemma and have not been able to find a good answer anywhere - and I have looked. 🙂 Gather up a bunch of keywords from Google's Keyword Tool that have tens of thousands of queries per month for local and global. When I plug the same keywords into Google's Traffic Estimator, even with a high bid (over $2) and a high daily budget ($50-100), I get all zeros returned from Traffic Estimator for columns Estimated Average CPC; Estimator Ad Position; Estimated Daily Budget, etc. Can someone please explain why this is the case? Is it because the keywords themselves, despite in some cases having hundreds of thousands of monthly searches, are low competition and therefore have no real value in Adwords? Thanks for your input and views, Phil

Not sure if it's OK to ask just about anything as long as it is relevant, but I would love to hear thoughts about good keywords to promote an app that will make it easy to migrate/move phone data and files - contacts, photos, music, calendars - from one phone - like a BB, iPhone or WinMo - to an Android phone or device? I'm having the darnest time coming up with phrases that people who are searching for such an app would use? Thanks

Hello: I previously asked this question, but I would love to get more perspectives on this issue. In Blogger, there is an archive page and label(s) page(s) created for each main post. Firstly, does Google, esp. considering Blogger is their product, possibly see the archive and tag pages created in addition to the main post as partial duplicate content? The other dilemma is that each of these instances - main post, archive, label(s) - claim to be the canonical. Does anyone have any insight or experience with this issue and Blogger and how Google is treating the partial duplicates and the canonical claims to the same content (even though the archives and label pages are partial?) I do not see anything in Blogger settings that allows altering these settings - in fact, the only choices in Blogger settings are 'Email Posting' and 'Permissions' (could it be that I cannot see the other setting options because I am a guest and not the blog owner?) Thanks so much everyone! PS - I was not able to add the blog as a campaign in SEOmoz Pro, which in and of itself is odd - and which I've never seen before - could this be part of the issue? Are Blogger free blogs not able to be crawled for some reason via SEOmoz Pro?

Hi All: Is it true that URLs such as this following one are viewed as "spammy" (besides being too long) and that such URLs will negatively affect ranks for keywords and page ranks: http://www.repairsuniverse.com/ipod-parts-ipod-touch-replacement-repair-parts-ipod-touch-1st-gen-replacement-repair-parts.html My thinking is that the page will perform better once it is 301 redirected to a shorter page name, such as: http://www.repairsuniverse.com/ipod-touch-1G-replacement-parts.html It also appears that these long URLs are also more likely to break, creating unnecessary 404s. <colgroup><col width="301"></colgroup> Thanks for your insight on this issue!

In Blogger, have at least three pages produced for each post - main post, archive and tag - each has their own canonical tag - are these considered duplicate content by Google? Not sure the best way to handle this.