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Using the private / incognito browsing in a browser can also help, as it means it's not using search history from the browser or anything stored in cookies. You're still getting geography in your queries (people in different areas see different results for the query 'pizza' for example), but it is a start.

How often do people repost the same ad after they expire? Or do the ads expire? I'm thinking of Craigslist, where the ads expire after a certain number of days, and people repost the same ad. I would think you wouldn't want four copies of the same ad indexed, and especially for people to come to an expired version of the ad when there is a fresh one. Also, you'd be competing against yourself with multiple copies of the same content.

You'd need to make clear to the user that the ad could still be indexed, and give them a way to totally remove the ad. I agree with the other comment about wanting to strip out any contact information.

I don't know the best answer from a technical perspective (though I'd lean towards a), but wanted to point out some implications of other solutions.

It could be that it was flagged as fishy, since the person created an account and left just one positive review.

I've seen complaints about how Yelp filters reviews from new accounts, and how it may more heavily impact companies where it's a one-time service with large fees. I'm thinking specifically a complaint someone had that a moving company had a bunch of poor reviews that were filtered. The reviews were left by people that were so frustrated with this company they created a Yelp account solely to warn other people (because this was a high-dollar purchase, unlike just a meal out at a restaurant), they were legitimate reviews, but looked suspicious to Yelp's algorithms.

No solution for you here, but a possible explanation.

This was on an external site. It was not my content, I had no editing capabilities.

Incidentally, the person was asking about the site in Q&A. Their friend owned it, and was wondering why it was not ranking.

And Google has additional ways to identify sites all related, such as everything in the same GWT account, sites having the same Google Analytics master account, etc. Doesn't mean they use it for ranking, but they have ways beyond just IP to see things are related.

Keep in mind that (to the best of my knowledge) Google is pulling the above data just from visitors that have the Google Toolbar installed, and does have a low number of data points for this conclusion.

In looking at your current home page, I'd say the image file sizes are something you can easily work on to help speed load time and increase user experience. In Firefox, right click on any image, and click View Image Information. It should take you to the Media tab of the Page Info dialog, and show you all of the media you have on that page, including background images.

Your theme files are large in some cases. The main-right.jpg file is 20k, header.jpg is 35k. Your logo is a 12k png. There are also several post images in the 20-40k range.

Yahoo has a tool called Smush.it which offers lossless compression, and there is even a Wordpress plugin that will compact new photos on upload, and reduce file sizes of existing images in the media library on demand http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/. For time invested, the plugin is probably the easiest fix to reduce your file size and speed up your page load time, in addition to fixing the images in your theme.

In addition, here's a post I wrote about how we review content and some of our process for guest posting at Moz.

http://moz.com/blog/inside-youmoz-how-to-guest-blog-for-moz

I would hold off just a bit on updating the links. If you have hundreds of links, and you can update them, and update them all at once to some keyword-rich anchor text, that's going to look awfully fishy to any search engine.

I've asked another associate to also come in and give there opinion on this, but do wait before doing anything drastic.

Timon, how is your site doing now? Has it recovered, or are there still issues?

You'll want to keep in mind search engine guidelines about paying with regards to any links that are followed, and with FTC guidelines (if US-based) about disclosing paid promotion.

Diane, the excessive ads for the hypnotherapy/weight loss help reduce credibility of the site. The travel news articles are outdated (the most recent one about holiday deals talks about it still being winter and about the upcoming Olympic games) and the Ryanair incident was from April 2012.Nothing has a date byline on it, so it makes it difficult for me to trust the article.

To a regular user, it looks like you don't have enough content and are trying to stretch it, as I'm seeing the same celeb picture multiple times in multiple locations on the home page.

The site seems to lack focus, or rather be focused on ads. Do people really care about that many bingo news features on a site that's supposed to (I think) be about celeb gossip?

The About section at the bottom looks spammy because it's small and in italics, making it hard to read. It looks keyword stuffed and like people aren't meant to read it, but that it's just there for search engines.

You may want to reconsider if you want to focus so much on the keyword "lifestyle magazine". What is the search volume like for that phrase? Are people really looking for that?

I'm surprised that I don't see a cookie notice like I do on most European sites these days. Is the UK excluded from that?

Or quickly in some aspects at least. I'm glad for your site it's working well. A thought -- have you done a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools (if the old domain was verified)? Wouldn't hurt. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83106

Paulguy, I think this blogpost addresses both what you are seeing how to fix things. http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/12/17/cleaning-urls-google-analytics/

Does this answer your question?

I'd go with the second, again because you don't want to look keyword-stuffed, and the second option is shorter, which helps when you're wanting to share your URL in social areas and if people are typing in your URL.

It's not a comprehensive list, but here is a post with six advanced operators that can be quite useful.

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/google-advanced-operators.html

Do you mean orphaned pages without any internal links to them? Or pages that are giving a bad server header code?

I find it annoying. There's one site that has the prompt asking if you if you want to chat show up in the middle of the page (and need to be dismissed) on every page on the site. I avoid using that site if at all possible. As a user, it's nice to have the option to chat now, but prefer that it not be in my face. I don't have any experience with conversion data, however. The searches I did on the web return data from vendors offering the service, so it's biased, but it may provide some insight for you.

Have you checked to see if they have access to any log files, such as via awstats, that you could look at? Log file stats are never going to match javascript stats, and may even show up to double the traffic, but it would give you an idea of the ratio of homepage to other page traffic.

Many people argue for Full Path, so that if your content gets scraped you still have your entire URL there and end up getting links to your site.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/7-essential-google-intelligence-custom-alerts-that-keep-me-sane

This post from YOUmoz that was promoted to the main blog has seven custom alerts that the author uses to keep her automatically updated of any major changes. Other interesting reports and alerts are discussed in the comments.

I don't know about Schema, but I'd first check with the terms of service of the review site to see if that is allowed. I do remember looking at this a few years back for a review site and finding out it was against their terms.

It's not new. You can read some more information about when it first was reported in late 2008 over at Search Engine Roundtable. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018996.html.

Also consider the root causes for the bounce rate, and that those themselves might also be a negative factor in the algorithm.

For example: if the site has added images with large file sizes that take forever to load, users may leave because the site is slow, and Google may use site speed in the ranking algorithm for queries to that site. If a marketing department decided that all of the content was going to be in the images because that way the exact font from the company style guide could be used, then the engines would not being seeing this text content, only images, and it'd be harder to rank.

Do you have a URL you're willing to share, or any more details? We can take a look and give other input about what may be causing the high bounce rate, if you would like.

For the past couple of years, if not longer, Google has adjusted the title displayed in the SERP based on the query that you are using. This happens even to Apple Computers.

Rod, I think the best thing here is to email help@seomoz.org and give them your username and outline your situation and they can tell you what's up and if you've found a bug.

It's not a dumb question at all. It appears you can track it, but you need a little extra bit of work. There's a bit of an overview here, with a link to information specific to the iOs. http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/

Xenu looks good to me for that page as well. I'd do an-demand crawl for that page/site from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test and if it's still showing up, send an email to help@seomoz.org so we can look and see if there's an error in the crawl software.

Thanks!

What your gut may be telling you is that you need to have the server redirect the old URLs to the new URLs. That old URL is giving me a page not found, instead of a 301 redirect to the new AboutUs page.

In that tool, there is a comment about accuracy, which is based on the data points. What does it say about accuracy? To the best of my knowledge, their site speed report is based on other users with the Google Toolbar installed. If you have only a few users with the toolbar visiting, and they're all on dialup, you could get skewed results.

The social shares are reset, which is a bummer, but I've also seen people often get two entries into Inbound and other social sites since there are now two different URLs.

Make sure /forum/ is excluded in your robots.txt file then go to Google Webmaster Tools and request a URL removal. You can request the entire directory be removed. Here's a page from their help files about the tool. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

Have you by chance changed your URL structure or made any other changes to your site that might have had an impact? Are you able to share a URL with us? And do you still have Google Organic traffic that is not from news?

The meta keywords does make for a good laugh. Their terms of use also states you need written permission to link to them, which is a bit amusing.

Irvingw, did you see the YouMoz post from two days ago about accidentally noindexing the entire site? You're not alone, and if you need some ideas for getting the site reindexed faster, you might check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/accidental-noindexation-recovery-strategy-amp-results.

Do you have a news sitemap in place? I believe with Google News you need either a news sitemap, or URLs with three digits that are not dates included. See the following two Google News help articles for some more details.

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=74289

It's looking like a lot of the content was removed from their site in the past couple of days (it shows up in Google cache but not on the site itself) so it's kinda hard to judge. Looks like at one point they were doing copies of your content on a subdomain. This is two years old, but here's a Q&A question that gives some details about what they did two years ago (so take it with a grain of salt, but was hard to find more current information). http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/23547/altruikcom-automating-the-process-of-search-engine-visibility

Some of the plugins have features that will automatically tag the external links and downloadable items for you, which can be handy (Google Analyticator does this, for example).

A word of caution, from personal experience. If you need to do anything custom with GA, don't use a plugin as well as the custom GA, unless you want your bounce rate to fall to almost zero and a couple of other metrics to be off because you have two instances of GA in use (for me, I have custom GA so I can integrate data from an ecommerce system).

This is a notice, not an error or a warning. It's basically saying "hey, people can often screw this up, take a look and make sure that everything looks OK to you".

When I do a site:vistastores.com, I see about 2300 results indexed in Google, which indicates Google is both indexing and crawling your site. How many pages do you have?

I've passed this one around internally for ideas too. Is this in a subject area where many people might be visiting in incognito mode? It is a bit of a head scratcher!

I'd also make sure your content was unique. I went to a page describing your social media services and discovered identical content on several other sites, including http://www.localnumberone.com/social_networking.aspx.

Edit: I would honestly suggest putting some quality time into this site. Many images (including on the home page) have a stock photo watermark on them. Content is duplicated across many sites. Images that are a call to action result in a 404 page. The reports section to show off reports requires a password. The Twitter account linked to from the site has a tweet asking if someone would like to take on a junior SEO worker, yet the website itself has a title tag of #1 SEO Consultant London.

The site is lacking many things that would help a customer develop trust in the company. Beyond SEO, take a look at how a customer might approach your site.

Does your client have customers in Dayton that can be used for testimonials? Then you could put their name or initials along with the city name under the testimonial. That's one way to get nearby cities on the site without seeming spammy.

I had something very similar happen, and in my case the part with very little bounce rate was where I had two GA scripts on my site at the same time without realizing it. It's a Wordpress site, and I had both a GA plugin installed and custom GA code to track ecommerce sales across a different domain.

Modesto has a great post about moving servers at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos that should help you out a bit.

Oooh, that's a big footer, with a lot of similar content on each page for each city. Those are being counted, and I'd work on reducing those. When I look at your page, it looks like it's being written for the search engines and not the user. On the city-level page, there's a bunch of content that's below the fold and the video. If I didn't look at my scroll bar, I wouldn't have known that was there.