Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You're big mistake is that you optimized for your company name instead of your keyphrase target. i would redo the title, meta, H1, testimonial, and description on bottom and make sure it has your desired keyphrase in it and don't muddle it up with the word "based" inbetween taxi and Knutsford. Even doing this right is not sufficient, make sure your properly launched into Google local and get some quality external links with the keyphrase as the anchor text.

Good luck.

We are thinking about setting up directory on a subdomain (local.sample.com) with content supplied by DirectoryM. Despite assurances by DM that they are Panda proof, I am uneasy releasing 100's of 1000's of pages at once to the search engines with content that is somewhat limited in value. Even if DM can somehow make these directory pages look a little unique then what they already have out on the internet, I am still scared how a potential spammy subdomain will impact the master domain. The upside to DM is that they can add 1000's of new weekly visitors and they will add 1000's of links to our pages to our master domain to their existing directory sites. What approach would you take here? Is there any risk in trying this out or are my fears unfounded? Would mass linking to the subdomain from the master site impact the master site?

Embedding your Youtube video on your site will help promote your Youtube video on organic results in Youtube and Google. The number of embeds is definitely one of the factors that is looked at in the Google algorithm.

Any daisy chain of redirects is self defeating, especially if the purpose is for trying to transfer PageRank. It just will not work. Matt Cutts had a short video about this on YouTube about a year ago.

Why don't you revert back to the original robots.txt and determine for certain that the problem is with this file?

I am seeing major movement in my keyword positions leading me to believe that Google made a major algorithm update this morning

Thanks, but that is not my site you're looking at. Either way, are you saying it is acceptable by Google to have in its second and third results, pages with no data except "Dr X has no sanctions". There is a whole slew of competing web sites who have valuable and distinctive data. Is Heatlhgrades getting a free pass in Google because of their high PR and that they are keyword stuffing?

Anyone have any insight or comments?

We’ve been negatively impacted by the last Google algorithm update - not by a penalization of our site but because another site is now grabbing the top 3-4 search results for long tail physician name searches thereby pushing us lower in the rankings.  Being that we’ve never seen this happen with unbranded search terms, we’re not sure how to address it.

To see an example, click http://www.google.com/search?q=dr.+elizabeth+eads.  You’ll notice that the top 4 results are all from 1 site - HealthGrades - with 2-3 of the 4 pages being canned, pre-written templates without any unique content (see malpractice & sanction pages).  It seems that they are doing this by paginating their information into separate pages, thus appearing in multiple search results, instead of putting all the information on 1 page, as we do and Google’s best practices suggest.

Any advice or comments would really be appreciated.