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Looks like a Magento site. I notice in the Serps that you have a lot of duplicate content showing up because of the parameters on your URL's. Everything after a ? in a URL like this one:

http://theboardgamers.co.uk/fantasy-board-games.html**?dir=desc&order=age**

Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and under URL parameters help them see to avoid things like ?dir and any other parameters. Usually they are pretty good at doing this automatically. I would also recommend adding the Magento extension called Yoast Rel Canonical. For a good explaination check this out:

http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/magento-and-relcanonical/

This is just a quick glance item but I hope it helps.

The fact that folks link to you with a space in between and without and other variations is a good thing. That doesn't affect how Google views your brand. In fact it helps you cause it allows you to have a link profile that looks natural with lots of variations around the term trophy etc.

If you search for your brand name with spaces or without you can see that Google clearly recognizes your brand since they show your site first and with a decent set of sitelinks below your homepage link in the SERPS. If they didn't "understand" your brand name they wouldn't do that.

One thing that could help is that on each of your pages of the site I noticed you don't use your brand name on the page title. It is common to do something like this: " Sports Medals and Awards - Trophy Central" While that isn't the greatest title ever it is there to quickly illustrate that on nearly every URL if you have your branding in the title at the end or beginning whichever is best for you, that gives another signal to the engines as to what your brand is.

In looking at a sampling of 500 URL's for your site only 5 of them come close to meeting the standard length of 70 characters or so that Google shows in the serps. It is a tedious job, but handcrafting non keyword stuffed titles can help greatly in influencing what people are clicking on when your site shows in Google.

As for not showing for search queries that is a bit puzzling. I looked at your backlink profiles and didn't see any glaring problems there. I looked at the code on your site and while very bloated it wasn't anything un crawlable. You have 25,300 pages indexed in Google. That appears to be quite a bit especially since you have just over 7,000 pages listed in your .XML Sitemap, so you may have some duplicate content issues to resolve and your URL's are not very clean but again not a glaring reason to be not showing at all. I notice you have Google Webmaster Tools code on the site, have you received any notifications from them recently? Have you logged into GWT to check things out there?

Your product descriptions are quite thin as well. Which overall isn't good but again probably wouldn't have affected rankings overnight. When did you first notice the drop? I would fix as much as you can on the site like page titles, urls, dup content and give Google a little bit of time to see those changes and that should help. Hopefully someone else on here can take a look and offer some more advise about why the drop might have happened. 1st blush looks like a number of things all piling up and the penguin update might have pushed you down. Take care.

This article explains the Not Set in Google Analytics.

http://www.heatherphysioc.com/google-analytics-not-set-not-provided

If you are using Wordpress you will want to add the SEO for Wordpress plugin from Joost DeValk or something similar and make sure that you enable it's sitemap functionality. Once you do that you can add that sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools account and that will greatly help in getting your pages of content added to Google.

It would be reasonable to write content focused at the mid to long tail keywords with medium competition (3, 4, or more words in the keyword) unless you have a super authoritative domain that has been out there and well respected by the search engines for years. High quality content is content that goes beyond the norm. If you are able to write something in 30 minutes, chances are it isn't very valuable to people searching for that keyword(s). Digrams, step by step articles, reviews, in depth data analysis, etc (not sure what you do) all help. But the question should always be,  would people want to read this. If the answer is no, then it is best not to post it since it won't do well in search or with people.

In GA you can look at the pages you have written under the Content -> Site Content section and then turn on the secondary dimension in the dropdown box of "keyword". This will show you what keywords via organic or paid search brought visitors to that page of content.

Your goal isn't rankings, but are you getting more people to your site through more organic keywords each month. If you see that progress going up then you are doing good. Hope that helps some more.

This is an excellent article that was done on the content side of things to answer your question:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/on-page-factors

It is best not to target more than 3-4 keywords on any given page. Truly being natural is the best way to write the content. Use the keywords in a meaningful way and you don't have to have them in there exactly word for word. For example, if your targeting "Organic Pesticide" as a keyword, in your copy you could have a sentence like this, "Many growers are interested in finding pesticide that is natural and even organic. What are the benefits of an Organic Pesticide?" That is a rough example, but you have the keyword in there exactly once and naturally again earlier in the sentence. Really, thinking about it even this much can cause your copy to get to feel unnatural. Just write and then review and see areas where you may have come close to using your keywords and then go back and see if it makes sense to add them in those places. Make sure it is really high quality stuff you are writing as well.

Whats the URL Ben?

Just found an interesting post in webmaster world that kinda answers how Google may feel about these typs of links.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4445558.htm

This is going to mess up a lot of Web Design firms if they start to enforce this.

Dan, thanks for getting involved in the discussion. It is funny that most design firms carry out this practice and I have never heard it discussed before. I will have to look into using a micro format for this as I had not thought about that before. I guess we will soon find out what role that plays in appears as part of a "link scheme" or not with the new update rolling out soon. Thanks again.

1. Yes

2. No, they only link to our main web design/seo site. Not us to them except in some cases where we have a case study for example.

3.Not as many as we would like But to honestly answer your question I would say say our clients make up 1/2 of our link profile and many of them are in the global footer so are sitewide.

4. Probably 20 sites right now

We are only using branded company name in anchor text. Thanks for the feedback.

With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?

We do a lot of Google Product Search for our Ecommerce clients. Basically the feeds last for 30 days on GPS. So if you submit them once a month you will continue to show, but Google favors those who push out a new feed more frequently. One of the big things right now is to make sure you have Unique Product Identifiers like UPC or Manufacturer Part Numbers for all your products. The better quality your images of your products are (clear thumbnails, easy to understand what the product is the better for click through by users). If you name your product's with Keywords that trigger the GPS listings in organic search you will do better as well. For example if you were selling a Spider Mite Pesticide, you could just put the internal name of the product like "No Spider Mites 16oz Bottle" You would be better off calling the product "Spider Mite Killer 16oz Bottle" since that search actually brings up the GPS results in universal search. If you have a product that many sellers have, then you can get grouped in with the rest of them by using the same UPC/GTIN number as they do, or the same brand and MPN. It takes some getting used to for sure, maybe try the service called GoDataFeed as it makes it a lot easier. Lastly, categories are huge for getting your products in the right group. It is better to be in the Software -> Adobe-> Windows Adobe Design Premium category with your products than just the Software -> category. Hope that helps you out.

The fact that folks link to you with a space in between and without and other variations is a good thing. That doesn't affect how Google views your brand. In fact it helps you cause it allows you to have a link profile that looks natural with lots of variations around the term trophy etc.

If you search for your brand name with spaces or without you can see that Google clearly recognizes your brand since they show your site first and with a decent set of sitelinks below your homepage link in the SERPS. If they didn't "understand" your brand name they wouldn't do that.

One thing that could help is that on each of your pages of the site I noticed you don't use your brand name on the page title. It is common to do something like this: " Sports Medals and Awards - Trophy Central" While that isn't the greatest title ever it is there to quickly illustrate that on nearly every URL if you have your branding in the title at the end or beginning whichever is best for you, that gives another signal to the engines as to what your brand is.

In looking at a sampling of 500 URL's for your site only 5 of them come close to meeting the standard length of 70 characters or so that Google shows in the serps. It is a tedious job, but handcrafting non keyword stuffed titles can help greatly in influencing what people are clicking on when your site shows in Google.

As for not showing for search queries that is a bit puzzling. I looked at your backlink profiles and didn't see any glaring problems there. I looked at the code on your site and while very bloated it wasn't anything un crawlable. You have 25,300 pages indexed in Google. That appears to be quite a bit especially since you have just over 7,000 pages listed in your .XML Sitemap, so you may have some duplicate content issues to resolve and your URL's are not very clean but again not a glaring reason to be not showing at all. I notice you have Google Webmaster Tools code on the site, have you received any notifications from them recently? Have you logged into GWT to check things out there?

Your product descriptions are quite thin as well. Which overall isn't good but again probably wouldn't have affected rankings overnight. When did you first notice the drop? I would fix as much as you can on the site like page titles, urls, dup content and give Google a little bit of time to see those changes and that should help. Hopefully someone else on here can take a look and offer some more advise about why the drop might have happened. 1st blush looks like a number of things all piling up and the penguin update might have pushed you down. Take care.

Looks like a Magento site. I notice in the Serps that you have a lot of duplicate content showing up because of the parameters on your URL's. Everything after a ? in a URL like this one:

http://theboardgamers.co.uk/fantasy-board-games.html**?dir=desc&order=age**

Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and under URL parameters help them see to avoid things like ?dir and any other parameters. Usually they are pretty good at doing this automatically. I would also recommend adding the Magento extension called Yoast Rel Canonical. For a good explaination check this out:

http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/magento-and-relcanonical/

This is just a quick glance item but I hope it helps.

Often times this is caused by an image results keyword. If you all the sudden get 700 visits for the term, "Mastercard Logo" then you look on your site and see you happen to have an image of the mastercard logo with ALT tags setup nicely etc you can look in Google image search and see if you rank there and people are coming from that. Happens to us quite frequently. Kinda weird the first time, but check the same keyword in Google image search and see if your site is showing up there.

Lucas,

If you did something like that you would be negatively affecting how many pages that would show up for your site in Google. If you rel="canonical" all your internal pages to the homepage you are in effect telling Google that all of your other pages are duplicate content and that the home page is the only piece of original content on your site and Google will take that out of the listing. If you weren't going to use those low linked to internal pages you could do a 301 redirect those pages to the homepage. By doing that the majority of link juice from those pages would flow to the homepage. The effect could be minimal depending on the quality of the links pointing at those internal pages being redirected, but if they were high quality links then it could make an impact. It will probably take a couple good weeks for Google to make the adjustments.

You may want to try Joost de Valk's SEO plugin for wordpress. It can do a lot to make your site more indexable, and easily create your Title tags and meta descriptions which are important for getting exact match domains to rank. I have to say that while exact match domains are still performing, they have taken a hit in the past few months, and will probably continue to be weighed less and less. They will probably always have some value, but it isn't a long term gameplan. We also use WP-Super Cache for our wordpress installs so that they load faster. Blog posts are great on a site like yours because it gives Google more content to help theme your site out and thus rank you for terms around your theme. It provides a way for long tail keywords to drive traffic to your site as well. Hope that helps a little.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

If you are using Wordpress you will want to add the SEO for Wordpress plugin from Joost DeValk or something similar and make sure that you enable it's sitemap functionality. Once you do that you can add that sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools account and that will greatly help in getting your pages of content added to Google.

It would be reasonable to write content focused at the mid to long tail keywords with medium competition (3, 4, or more words in the keyword) unless you have a super authoritative domain that has been out there and well respected by the search engines for years. High quality content is content that goes beyond the norm. If you are able to write something in 30 minutes, chances are it isn't very valuable to people searching for that keyword(s). Digrams, step by step articles, reviews, in depth data analysis, etc (not sure what you do) all help. But the question should always be,  would people want to read this. If the answer is no, then it is best not to post it since it won't do well in search or with people.

In GA you can look at the pages you have written under the Content -> Site Content section and then turn on the secondary dimension in the dropdown box of "keyword". This will show you what keywords via organic or paid search brought visitors to that page of content.

Your goal isn't rankings, but are you getting more people to your site through more organic keywords each month. If you see that progress going up then you are doing good. Hope that helps some more.

I would say option A for sure. Just looking at Wil Reynolds post about getting banned from Google for 12 hours despite having an amazing set of social signals pointed all over his domain speaks highly to anchor text rich links.

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/7-lessons-i-learned-while-being-banned-in-google-for-12-hours

Just don't plan on using some fast link building service as that will get you slapped pretty quick if recent developments are any indication of the future of that tactic.