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A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking.  I did some checking and can't see a problem.  She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either.  When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated.  This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland

I am in the last weeks of my 3 months paid subscription with SEOMOZ and very sad to go. The main reason is that my website design business site is delivering no business to me at the moment.  Zero - zip - nada.  It has been live for the past 4 years and cumulatively it has probably paid for few beers and pizza.  Most of my business has been through word of mouth and not through direct traffic to the site.  I had really hoped the site would be the sweet 25% extra.  Now the overall website business is reasonably healthy but I cant understand what I am doing worng with the site. I have tried and failed to optimise and am at my wits end what to do with it.  If anything my ranking is dropping over the past months. Could any of you guys give me some ideas and tips before I literally hang up the shingle on this site and start from scratch with a new design and revision. I want to rank for website design and as we all know you need to be above the fold on page 1 to do this but I think my overall design and strategy for this site is flawed and I should start again.  But if you have ideas then shout before I head over the high Irish sierras for better lands. http://www.grangewebdesign.com is the site - feel free to check it out and give tips -

the crazy things we do mid week. But after reading Cyrus' post on beating Panda I went back to my website design site http://www.grangewebdesign.com which I had set up a plugin which had all my posts setup as Website Design - %%title%% So basically every Title tag had Website Design in front of it.  REadingthis post now it suggests that this is bad practice so I just changed it to %%title%% which now of course means that I should perhaps look more closely at the titees I have been using. Was embedding   the Website Design in front of the post overkill? thoughts appreciated...

Hi All I have been working busily on my Google Places to try and improve my listings and here are some updates (with no visible progress unfortunately). I added reviews - only one of my competitors has more reviews than me and these reviews are genuine. Based on other posts in this forum I looked closely at how my address was formatted as Google Maps does not recognize my street so my address format wise is identical to the top 3 <street ,="" street="" name,="" city="" county=""> this is in Ireland so that is a typical address.</street> I am still below the fold and I have analysed the links of the competition and to be honest I see that they are in business longer and their links from the many websites that they have created over the years.  They have more links than me by a factor of 3x and 4x. Am I screwed?  As you all appreciate being over the fold is so important and I am currently below the fold and it is not an ultra competitive keyword combination  (1600-2000 searches) website design Cork on google.ie. As a websie person even getting 2-3 extra contacts for me per month can mean a HUGE difference.  I have read long and hard on this topic for the past 12-18 months. I have not put any serious attention to link building myself - should I get emailing people to try and get those quality links to raise my profile.  The problem is getting the time to do this.  Does the forum think that if I sent (for example) 20-30 emails per day to a range of related businesses asking rfor links for 'say' 30 days I would get some links without actually having to pay for them  Is link building the critical item that I should focus on considering the problems above? All help appreciated and bottle of Jameson for the person with idea that works - (really!) 🙂

As we all know Google Local Business/Places now has significant real estate for many searches.  What I find hard to understand is what makes the difference between the different positions.  Is it solely based on the content in Google Places itself or is it regular ranking factors. I am (like everybody) on a hell for leather search to try and rank above my competition but having studied their Places information I do not think there is much I more I can do. Suggestions hat have actually worked for you?