No it should not.  Particularly if you are using that term as your h1 (which doesn't have huge ranking influence).  Your h1 should have keywords and should be relevant for the user -- generally it is one of the first things a visitor will see when landing on your page.  You want your page and h1 to be relevant and readable for the visitor.

The Google algo is developed enough that it will understand prepositions, conjunctions in proper context.  So if it makes sense to use "in" for the context of the page then use it, if not don't.

The only other thing that I could think of would be if the links for your client's site are newer and have not been detected yet -- otherwise if they are essentially identical links, I am not sure as to why they would not be listed -- that might be a question for the moz people.

Going back to your original question -- you can filter for nofollow links on OSE -- go to the Inbound Links tab and then filter for show only rel="nofollow" and that will show all the nofollow links going to a particular URL.

You wrote:

"The main problem also is the niche I work in is not the best, I know nothing about it which makes things worse."

The first thing that sticks out at me is the title tag of your page: repsole.com - a leading supplier of datacom and......  it goes on forever.  It seems like there is no focus.  I noticed that on a few other category pages.  That would be a good start I think.

But...

My advice would be to start learning about the company (what does it sell? who are we selling to? why are they buying from us? what are the best selling products? what products make the most profit? etc.) and then you will start to have an idea of what keywords to optimize for.

Then google those keywords, and try to learn as much as possible about competitors.  And note what are they doing? Why are they doing it? How do I catch up?

The products on the repsole webpage are so foreign to me, that  if I were in your shoes, I would not feel comfortable until I had a grasp on the basics of the company, its niche and the market -- and knew the language of the company, niche and market.

Hopefully that helps

Well, it depends on how much this site means to you.  It sounds like you got hit by Google, and once that happens the road to recovery is not easy -- as you are seeing -- but also not always possible.  Getting rid of paid links, writing blog comments , forum posts and article pubs. are not strong enough to turn the tide.  I don't want to tell you what to do, but from what I understand (I have not had to attempt a recovery personally) it will be easier to get a new site up and ranking.

Hi,

I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index.  (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.)

Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed.

I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links.

But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be:

Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?)

Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs?  Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good?

Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability.

Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice.  Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.

Before addressing the broader questions here -- drill down to the actual pages, and not just the domains, that are linking to your site and your competitors to see if there are any glaring differences there.   i.e. homepage link vs. profile link etc.

How does your competitor get a link from adobe.com?  Looking at the adobe page linking to their site is the first step and then go from there.

You wrote:

"Other than the one you mentioned what information could really help me?"

--The only thing that pops out at me right away is, and I don't know it you do the copywriting, but the language used is extremely technical.  I understand that you are B2B, but you might add some descriptive text to the product descriptions (for long-tail kw's) and a maybe a bit more sales-oriented text.

Just to piggyback a bit off of Marcus's point -- the benefit of PPC is that you can get a lot of information in a short period of time (at a cost though of course).  Generally, I agree with Marcus' advice, but the key to PPC is experimentation and learning from what works for you, your site, and your visitors/customers and then what doesn't.

i.e. You can set up the two campaigns run them head to head and see what converts better.

The problem with a straight up link analysis is that there are other metrics involved in the equation.  Maybe they have great engagement metrics...there is something about the site that makes it look "better" than the other two you listed...maybe it's the bright colors? the first thing you see are "10% Off", "Free", "save $$S" etc.

Hey Ben,

This post immediately popped in my mind:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mission-imposserpble-establishing-clickthrough-rates

Although it is over a year old, it is an  interesting study.  The download available from slingshot is good too...Maybe not what you're looking for, but I just looked at it so I thought I'd pass it on.

Here is Matt Cutts talking about this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

The idea  is to avoid spammy looking urls (which all of those do) and focus on URLs that are easy for users to remember and link to while also keeping some sort organizational structure for the site.

eg: example.com/widgets/blue

example.com/widgets/green

I'm with Jesse -- it will take a bit before we can tell anything conclusive, but I'll watch my site, and if I notice anything I will report and add to the discussion.  I don't think it will be anything unexpected if you have been following what Google says and watching the trends within your markets for the past few weeks/months.

But we will see...

No that should not be an issue...a single privately sent email to customers should not effect your rankings in the google rankings.  Do the due diligence on the provider company that you worked with, use the open site explorer and Webmaster Tools to see if you have new links, if so where did they come.  It sounds like an issue that is not related to the email...but at any rate try to find out why a dropped happened

I am not quite sure I totally understand the concept of keyword cannibalization.  I have seen the SEO Moz Snowboard example... I tried to apply the concept but the on-page ranking sees a category page of mine with KW cannibalization.  By the way, I still get an A for the targeted KW.

I have an e-commerce site,  one category page targets 'wool sweaters' and a product page for example is : 'chunky-knit wool turtleneck sweater' (there are 8 products total in this category all are flagged Cannibalizers).  I didn't think KWC would be an issue...ranking seems to be effected judging ranking for other category pages w/o KW cannibalization issues.

So, my question I guess is KW cannibalization really a big deal?  What is taken  into account when judging KW cannibalization.  Title Tags? URLs?

Thanks in advance

Vels,

I just looked at the site -- I don't know what blikkenslager means, but you do have it written 13 times on that single page, plus the URL which makes it 14. You also have many of those occurrences of blikkenslager linked to that same page, and the alt tags are also blikkenslager.

Internal links should point to other pages on your site not the same page that they are on.  Reduce the amount of times you write your keyword -- are there synonyms to that term that might work.  Think of the user when making these changes, and how to make the better more helpful to the user rather than gaming Google.

I have not seen any studies indicating such a thing,

(but my guess is that is that dwell time seems to be such a strong signal of relevance that google would never release that info, I could be totally wrong though)

An idea to improve UX... if you have a page with 2 paragraphs of text, take the average  time it takes for 10 ppl in your office to read it and set the 'bounce rate' accordingly.  Then you'll know if ppl are reading it.

If you have a page with 2000 words, avg. that time, etc.

If visitors bounce too soon, edit the text until your office avg. meets visitor avg.  That would equal relevance right?

I am not sure I understand what you are referring to exactly, but the footage in the video just looks like the internal link report from Open Site Explorer with the url's ordered alphabetically...

That report doesn't show any errors per se it shows the relative "strength" of each url - what each url links to and what links to it.

Clarify a bit and I'll try to help

No

see:

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/site-search-dynamic-content-and-seo/01032013/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

My feeling is that if that site search info captures long-tail traffi,c why not find a way to make an indexable page targeting the words that have received traffic to that search page.  Cutts writes in the post I linked to:  "Google does reserve the right to take action to reduce search results (and proxied copies of websites) in our own search results"

Hey Jason,

I have been studying this SEO stuff for the past 10 months ( so I am no expert), and the conclusion I am coming to is that you have to play Google's game (as it seems like you are doing) while constantly looking for other sources of traffic/ customers.

My feeling is that Google wants the commercial landscape to essentially look like a shopping mall -- minimal effort to find what you need (Hmmm.... I need a new DVD player. Oh there's Best Buy! I'll go there, I've heard of that place).  So small business needs to try to differentiate as it does in the real world

But just the eye test on your homepage...(take this with a grain of salt, I'm just trying to help)

i don't like the vertical "Sale" banners they look cheesy, and the moving reviews -- 1) they are too fast/ impossible to read and 2) I always look at Amazon and Zappos, and what do they do? Reviews = Stars.  Also if I'm nitpicking, the product photos on the homepage are a bit on the small side

Also this product:

Denver TCU-203C portable stereo with USB - Pink

is listed as out of stock ...so? what do if I want that? Is there something similar?

Just some thoughts...