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I am using results from a variety of "location-neutral" keyword position trackers like Rank Tracker, SEObook, and of course SEOMoz among others, and comparing them to multiple non-logged in browsers on multiple devices that area actually in the Anytown area. The discrepancies between the various trackers are minor and I would attribute those to datacenter differences.

I considered the personalization possibility, but usually that works in the other direction, unless Google is now using a "you already looked at this enough and we are showing you something else to broaden your horizons" calculation.

I used "500 miles" kind of generically. I tried entering all sort of different locations into the Google settings and it seems the closer I got to Anytown, the lower the ranking went.

I am thinking it is something that recently changed in the way Google handles local search. My theory is that within a certain radius of the specified location, the algorithm is a little different.  Once outside of a certain radius, traditional non-localized algorithms kick in so a site optimized for Anytown Widgets might rank a little better than it would when google sees that the searcher is actually in Anytown.  I am going to take a closer look at some other local SEO projects and see if anything similar is happening, then see if I can find some common traits.

Not a huge issue as it is a relatively minor drop for some keywords that aren't high volume. But I am a little obsessive and curious.  I was hoping someone would chime in with some info about a documented change in Google's local search.  I know Places has been evolving a little more lately. Every time I look a my own listing it looks different.

Thanks again.

If you are still selling blue shoes, why would you remove "blue shoes"? If you are not selling blue shoes, then you shouldn't really expect to rank for it.

Honestly, I don't think your worries about a two or three position drop are realistic. People don't usually do a search, remember which position they clicked on before, count that many results down and then click on it without reading the link. If they are looking for blue shoes and your site comes up again in approximately the same area, and the title they see is mostly the same as what they clicked on before, chances are they will remember you and click on it again. This is a good reason to have your company or site name prominent in your title - branding.  Now if the change from blue shoes to red shoes resulted in you moving off of page one, that might be a different situation.

Now, let's say you do have customers who know they have usually found you at position 2 and you drop to 5. When they blindly click on result number two and it isn't your site, if they were looking for your site and not just any old blue shoes, they will likely go back and look for you.

Also keep in mind that your keyword positions will fluctuate naturally anyway. In some cases it may even be more than a few positions. You simply cannot rely on search results to act like a bookmark for users - it changes constantly. Instead, make sure your site is memorable enough that users will simply bookmark it, type in the URL, or remember it when they see it in the results.  Now if you have one of those spammy URLs that is all keyword and no branding, like "your-best-blue-shoe-stores.com", that may not be so easy.

Unless you are planning on "un-optimizing" your site for the keywords you are currently targeting and changing the entire focus of the site, targeting new keywords by making sure they are present on the site, or in your off site link building efforts should not have any negative effect on your current rankings.

Also, unless the user has disabled it in their browser, Google does attempt to remember the sites you visit and what you like. So in theory, returning users may even see your site in a higher position than they previously did.

In the old days of the WWW (like 10+ years ago) sites often begged users to bookmark the site. I don't think you want to go on that path, but relying on search traffic for customer retention is probably not the best way to handle it. Offer newsletter subscriptions,  and definitely use Facebook like, Google +1 and Twitter follow buttons. That way when users search the same phrases, they will definitely find you again if they have hit Like, +1 etc.  
Search is social - especially now that Google has crippled user query tracking.

You should use hyphens rather than plus signs if possible.

Plus signs are a "reserved" character normally used in dynamic URLs and could cause confusion for the web crawlers which could lead to pages not getting indexed.

However, if you have been using plus signs and don't have any issues with those pages not being indexed, you can probably safely leave them in place. There are sites that use plus signs without any problem.  If those pages already have lots of inbound links, you would need to do 301 redirects or use a rewrite to change the plusses to hyphens. Apparently plus signs can be recognized as separators like a hyphen, so there is probably no significant difference in regard to SEO.

So if it isn't going to be a huge hassle with redirects etc, I would recommend changing to hyphens.

Why don't you ask him what people who would benefit from his guidance would search for, and go from there? I am always a little surprised when clients ask me what would be good keywords for their service or product. Shouldn't they have some idea what their potential customers want?  
I usually answer with a question like "what does it do?" or "what would you ask for if you went to a store looking for it?"

Aside from that, you might try:

enlightenment

spiritual guidance

and of course "awareness"

Is there a quote or saying for which he is famous? People often remember a phrase but not where it came from and Google it.

Thanks for the reply.

I forgot to mention that this particular site ranked higher in the local local searches previously. The out of town searches are about where they all used to be, while the same searches done locally have dropped.  Other keywords - some with "Anytown" and some not specific to locality - have mostly improved when searched locally or from elsewhere.

As for local links, the local link profile is equal to or better than the sites that now rank higher. Regional focus is pretty good too.

The puzzling thing is that searching for "Anytown widgets" from 500 miles away shows great results, while searching the same thing while actually in "Anytown" shows the site much lower.  The only thing I could think of is maybe content-wise it looks like it is from Anytown, so searching from elsewhere it comes up very nicely. When searching from the Anytown area, maybe some sort of local search filtering kicks in and brings other sites into the mix a little more and they may be slightly more locally linked or use "Anytown" in their content more.

I know it is hard to diagnose without knowing the site so thanks. I was hoping for one of those "Google just rolled out a new local search product" answers. A little frustrating because I have an otherwise near 100% success rate for local SEO.  I can't tell a client "Yes I know it looks like you are number 12 for Anytown Widgets, but people on the other side of the country see  you as the #1 seller of widgets in Anytown".

One static URL that can be found by your users from within any of the categories that the product is in would probably be best. That way there is no chance of duplicate content issues if the search engines were to find both and not resolve the canonical tag.

Really, I think it could go either way. Whichever one is easiest to implement in your particular situation, unless there are a lot of inbound links to your products. If that is the case, changing the URLs would require 301 redirects from the old URLs.

Here's a strange one:

I am working on a site for a local business and targeting local searches. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Various keyword position tools show the site ranking very well for searches like "Anytown Widget Store".

Doing the same Google search from a browser in Anytown, the site shows up much lower.  So I tried changing the location in Google to other cities, using a variety of browsers and it comes up much higher out of town than in town.

I have seen plenty of geographic discrepancies before, but usually they went the other way - searches from the actual local area did slightly better than the same searches done elsewhere, which would make sense.

Any thoughts on why this would happen?

Your earlier shady links, if they are from really junky sites, might not ever be indexed. Sites that are full of junk like that do get dropped from the index, or they may be indexed but don't pass on any link value.  You could check to see if those are indexed by doing a Google search for the url with "site:" in front of it like "site:http://www.shadylinksite.com/shadylinkpage.html"  You could also try checking their PageRank. If it is 0, don't bother trying. Even if it isn't 0, it could be that Google has decided not to pass any "link juice through them.

If the page where you link is doesn't show up,  do the same with just the site's home page to see if the whole site is banned.

It probably isn't worth the trouble, really.

I wouldn't waste time getting more bad links to point to your fist batch of bad links. Google will find them eventually if they are not already dropped from the index. Actually, you probably shouldn't call attention to them if they are particularly shady.

If you are absolutely intent on getting those old junk links indexed, you could try pinging with something like linklicious. I have't used it as I have no need for that sort of thing, but I have seen it recommended here and elsewhere so I assume it is probably useful in some way.

To sum up, I think your time would be better spent working on your site's content and getting some good quality links.

If you have any sort of caching installed, you could try refreshing it and resubmitting the sitemap.

I checked your robots.txt file at http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml and it flagged the allow line. I don't think that would cause a problem, but you could try removing the "Allow: /" line and see if that helps.

I would use canonical in this situation. That way you won't have to rework all your navigation to have a single url for each product and can keep your category structures intact.

This is a situation that many eCommerce platforms really don't handle well.  For example, I know of one that claims to offer canonical for product pages, but it gives each version (boxes/product.html and circles/product.html) its own unique canonical tag rather than both referring to the same product.html page. Kind of misses the point.

If it was just blocked overnight you should be OK.  Site's do go down for extended periods of time occasionally and I would assume Google won't de-index based on a relatively short outage.

To be safe, or at least make yourself feel like you have done what you can - resubmit your xml sitemap in webmaster tools.  Also go to the "Fetch as GoogleBot" section and fetch your home page. Once it is fetched, click on the submit link and tell it to submit the page and all linked pages. You are probably OK without doing that, but it couldn't hurt to resubmit.

Noindexing the syndicated articles should, in theory, minimize the likelihood of having a Panda problem, but it seems like Panda is constantly evolving. You will probably see some kind of drop in rankings as the number of indexed pages of for site will decrease. If you have say, 1000 pages total on the site and suddenly 900 are taken out of the index, this might be a problem. If it is a much smaller percentage of the site, you might not have a problem at all.  Other than the number of indexed pages, I don't think you will have a problem once the syndicated stuff is noindexed.
It will probably take Google a while to re-index/un-index the pages, so hopefully it won't be a fast drop if there is one. In the long run, it is probably better to at least have the appearance of trying to do the right thing. Linking to the source, and maybe using rel=canonical tags to the original article would also be a good practice.

I am assuming you intend to use no index only on the duplicate content articles.  Using no index on everything would also prevent your content from being indexed and found through Google.

If you are using Wordpress or something else that will allow showing excerpts, you could try making the article pages noindex and show only excerpts on the main page and category pages which would be indexed and followed.  I think that would make the articles not appear in searches and avoid duplicate content penalties, while allowing the pages that show the excerpts to still be indexed and rank OK.

The idea here is that the pages showing the excerpts would have enough text to help the home and category pages to rank for the subject matter and hopefully not be seen as what it is - copied content.

You will probably eventually get caught by the Panda, but this may work as a temporary solution until you can get some original content mixed in.

OK to save you the trouble of reading Google's official guide that would very likely point you in the right direction, here are a few things to check that could explain a sudden drop:

Content quality and originality - are these pages 100% original? Have you examined the technical side of your SEO with a tool like SEOMoz's On-Page grader?

Also, are the links to your site from good quality sites or are they from link farms, low quality directories, auto-blogs, etc.  As Google continues to adjust Panda, many sites have dropped in the last week or so. Even if you are not directly hit by those changes, sites that link to you may have been which means those links have less value now.

BTW - everyone should re-read Google's SEO starter guide. It is remarkable how many people think they understand SEO, but have gotten their information from bad sources.

Hi

I have seen this kind of thing before with strange files that don't make any sense from UPS and .gov sites and there was a discussion about it last week here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/weird-behaviour

In short, it was a glitch, but you may want to get in touch with SEOMoz support and let them know.  I do think there are some odd ways of getting links have something to do with UPS and some Gov sites, but the explanation in the link above made me think it really was just a glitch.

It is hard to tell if there is a problem without knowing what the site is.

It only has two external links?  If the other pages have more, that would be your answer.

Also make sure you are checking the right address - try it with www and without.

That is a pretty general question, and there are many possible reasons your site has dropped in rankings.

Here is a good place to start: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Couldn't hurt - especially if you have a lot of fans/followers.

In that case, check the blogs by doing a google search for site:yourblogname.com and make sure the blogs are indexed if you haven't checked that already. You might want to try Yahoo Site Explorer too. If the blog pages that contain your links are showing in either or both of those and the pages are older than about a month, contact SEOMoz support. It may be some kind of glitch.

Maybe I am missing something, but wouldn't a rewrite that removes all the .php instances solve this problem site-wide? Or are you doing it file by file and leaving some pages as-is?

Something like this in your .htaccess should do it:

to remove php:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

or to change to htm site-wide:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^.]+).htm$ $1.php [L]

Another way is to name the files with .htm and use this in htaccess to send htm through your PHP handler:

AddType application/x-httpd-php htm html php
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm .html

If you use rewrites like those, you won't be able to also use 301s for the affected URIs as it would probably create a redirect loop.

In a perfect world, you should 301 redirect any page that changes if you stop using the php to htm rewrites. If there are simply too many for this to be practical, you could just redirect the most important pages and leave out any that may not have very many inbound links pointing to it. What I will often do in cases like this is set up the redirects for the important pages, then keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will show you the 404 errors and where they found the links. Then you can pick the ones that have a lot of links and 301 those a few at a time. Tedious, but if you do that in your spare time, eventually you will get them all fixed.

If you can implement a "set it and forget it" rewrite so you don't have to add a new rewrite for each file, you won't have to worry about 301 redirecting all those old pages.

Otherwise, there really shouldn't be any major loss of rank from dropping the file types.

All that said, there isn't much of a reason to remove the file type extensions, other than to shorten addresses by a few characters and just look a little cleaner.

Could be a few things:

If the blog posts have only appeared within the last few weeks, they may not show in OSE. Link analysis was last updated on September 8th, I think. Since you say it has been about 7 months, this is probably not the case. I know Google will ignore some spam blogs, but I think OSE would still show the links. Just because the blogs have PR1 or 2 doesn't mean they are indexed. If they are blatantly spammy or have been selling links for a while, they may have been dropped.

In my experience, many social bookmarking sites don't always show up in OSE or many other link trackers. Not sure which ones do and which ones don't.

The worst case scenario is if you paid someone else to do the blog posts and bookmarks and they didn't really do it. Have you checked any of them to see if they are actually there?

It does usually take some time for Google to recognize changes, though in my experience Google Places is a little faster to change.

Without over-doing it and keyword stuffing, make sure "accountants" or other important keywords appear in your description.  Also make sure you have filled in as much as possible - add photos and videos if you have them. Even adding just a logo would help. Also fill in the "Additional Details" section with your services like Accounting, Tax Services, etc.  If possible, get some reviews from your clients. That is not the easiest to do as I think they will have to register with Google Places to do so, but it makes a big difference in how your Google Places page ranks.

If you think there are any links out there that point to your secure pages and want to preserve any SEO related value from those links, you should remove the disallow from robots.txt and use 301 redirects. However, if you redirect your secure pages to non-secure, what is the point of having the secure pages? They would never be used since users would be 301 redirected to the non-secure address.

If you are trying to keep the secure pages out of the index to avoid duplicate content, and want users to be able to have access to the secure pages, disallow in robots.txt and remove the 301 redirects.

In the case of pages that don't really need to be secure, but are available both as http and https, you could also use the canonical tag to show either the secure or non-secure as the original. Individually redirecting the potentially duplicate pages rather than a sitewide https to http redirect would preserve any "juice" you may be getting from links to either version.

If it is more complicated, take a look at this thread on Googles support forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a7fac6f81489bc2&hl=en

If you are logged in as your Page, try logging in under your user account. Or if you were only logged in as yourself, try logging in as your Page. If none of that works, it may be a facebook bug.

From what I can tell, you aren't missing much. I have notifications that people are talking about my page, but could only find some charts and graphs showing how many, but not what or who. Maybe I am missing something, but I think the new Insights are not quite complete.

Your raw feed at eap-csf.eu looks ok in Safari. I don't think Chrome handles feeds very well as I seem to get similar formatting errors often.

Using feedburner is a good choice. If your feedburner feed gives the same error, you can turn on "SmartFeed" under the Optimize settings in feedburner which should fix it.

Usually the non-feedburner feed address is redirected to the feedburner feed address so when a reader clicks on the RSS feed link on your site they go to the feedburner address.  So you would submit the feedburner address to RSS feed sites.

Check your 'Archiving' settings. You can turn off monthly archiving completely there. That would eliminate that duplicate, but I guess you wouldn't be able to have dated archives as a means of navagation.  As for the tag, I am not sure if there is a way around that or if the no archiving setting would take care of that too. I don't use Blogger much, but just took a look at blogger to see what you were talking about. One would think Blogger would allow a little more control over things like this.

I had to double check with the other link tracking things I use. I thought I had seen similar "weird" links elsewhere but that was not the case.

I apologize for accidentally floating a conspiracy theory - but it is a good one if I do say so myself.

Frustrating indeed - seems like every time I read that something like comment spam/forums/directories is no longer useful, within days I will find a site that seems to be able to make effective use of it.

From what Sha says, OSE was showing too many of those wacky gov links and they did disappear in the next update for the site I mentioned. I did see a few in Yahoo SE and elsewhere, so I guess the files/links/whatever are really there but probably ignored by search engines.  I still wonder just how those got there. Hacking for links seems like a lot of trouble - especially for an otherwise legitimate site.

I have see a lot of those too. Sometimes they are .mobi, PDF, or other odd file formats. I have not been able to track down exactly what they are, but I suspect they are part of some sort of shady automatic link building scheme. I had a client not too long ago who previously fell for a couple of SEO scams right before hiring me. A few weeks into it, I started seeing the .gov and .edu links like you describe. A week or two later the clients' rankings fell off the map completely. Not sure if it was from those, because there was also a lot of other bad SEO - too many exact match anchor text links from really bad directories and that sort of thing.

My theory is that some black hatters use some form of hacking (code injection?) to get these garbage files with links inside onto some high rank .gov sites. I have even seen some coming from NASA.gov.

I have also seen those gibberish odd file links in the profiles of some sites who rank high and you just cant figure out why. So whatever it is, it seems to work short term at least.

Another strange thing I noticed was that many of them had page titles that were extremely spammy - casinos, viagra, etc.

Pages on a high DA site will usually build authority easier than on a low DA site.

The reason people will build links to profiles, etc is to improve the value of the links from the profile to their site. For example, BBB home page would be very high authority, but the page for "Joe's Website" is rarely visited and relatively unknown. Building a bunch of links to that may seem odd, but will often help that particular page build authority, thus making the links to Joe's Website more helpful.

Why not just build links directly to your target? I'd say why not do both?  Check out this article that has some info on how links are valued, among other things: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-link-based-spam-analysis-techniques

Your new site is irrelevant to the problems you are having. If your main site has dropped due to poor quality signals (garbage links, etc) then of course just about any other site with a similar domain will do better. This is especially true if Google's algorithm has flagged your site as crap. Note that I am talking about the machine algorithm NOT any manual penalty.

Here's what you are missing: You don't have 700 or even 500 GOOD links. You have about 82 inbound links according to the most reliable sources and the links are mostly crap.  Why do you keep insisting that Yahoo, OSE and Majestic are all wrong?  If you want to check one more, try backlinkwatch.com. Even it says only 46 links to your site.

Getting more bad links will not make you rank any better than fewer bad links, whether it is 700, 500, or 3. You do understand the quality issue, right?

You even acknowledge that "not having good links can explain bad ranking". You don't have good links! It is as simple as that. Maybe you did have them at one time and they are gone, or maybe Google didn't notice how lame your links were until recently. Either way, you will need some legitimate, good quality links if you want to improve your rankings. You offer SEO services on your site so this should not be news to  you. If it is news to you, then it is probably a good thing nobody can find your site.

I am beginning to think you are joking or something. You refuse to accept facts, advice and reality. Good luck with that.

Here's a thought - you thought you had 500+ links, everyone else sees a much lower number when checking reliable sources. Maybe you lost some of those links are no longer there. MajesticSEO says 82 http://bit.ly/phYeGp which is almost the same as Yahoo Site Explorer, and OSE said even fewer. You can insist that you have 500 all you want, but if YSE and Majestic aren't seeing your links, you can safely bet that Google isn't seeing them either. If Bing thinks you have more, that would explain why you are doing well in Bing searches. Once Bing gets an accurate count, that may change.

Also, you pointed out that many of your links are from the same IP. Those probably don't count for much. The links that ARE showing are not very good  quality or relevant - school uniforms?

Google told you no MANUAL action was taken. That doesn't mean your site has escaped the normal automatic quality and authority checks. Since your links are mostly worthless, that would explain why you dont rank for anything. No manual penalty - but the algorithm has no reason to believe your site is better than the hundreds of other sites you are competing with. Again, compare your link profile to your competition.

I know you want to believe that there is some external issue or a magic bullet, but your answers are all right in front of you, some are even in your own posts here (your links are from same IP, forum spam, etc).

The short answer is still the same: you need links. Good ones.

Another thing you might try is to make 100% certain that your content is unique.

Thanks, Gianluca - I looked for the original question but did not find it.

Alan, I have to agree with what you were already told. You don't really have much going for you as far as inbound links. I looked at yahoo site explorer which says about 86 links. I looked at a few of them and they appear to be footer credit links, which supposedly don't count for much. I didn't get a recent count of the total number of linking domains as OSE is due for an update, but I seriously doubt that there are 500 of them.

I took a quick look at the site too, and it doesn't have any painfully obvious problems.

So the short answer is:
You need links. Good ones.

Take a look at the link profiles of the sites who are ranking on page one for your keywords. Have they got more, and better links?

The bullshit detector is showing a 95% likelihood of this being bullshit.

I agree with most of the others here who point out that they are probably doing forum/comment spam, and junk directories.

Finding a good SEO and link building service is going to be difficult if you focus only on the quantity of links. Like Thomas said, sometimes a handful of really good links is all you need. A good SEO company or consultant will be able to find those.  Instead of number of links, focus more on proven results. Ask for examples of results (not link counts, but traffic, keyword position, or conversion data) or references from clients who have been helped. THEN dig a little deeper and make sure they won't be doing things to get you in trouble.

I don't think having a bunch of junk on a subdomain would cause that kind of problem. Double check that there aren't any major technical issues on the site, and the usual on page stuff - each page should have a unique title, not blocked in robots.txt or noindexed, good quality original content, not keyword-stuffed, etc.

How have you been promoting the site? It could be that what you think is not black hat may still be something Google will not tolerate.

What is the site's address? I am sure that someone here will be able to spot anything serious almost right away.

Yes, scrapers should be suffering, but apparently Panda does not catch them all right away. The various incarnations of Panda (it is a constantly evolving part of Google's way of doing things, and not just the "big one" back in February) do target poor quality and one would assume unoriginal content.

I happen to have faith that scrapers and other spam sites will eventually get struck down, but if you are less of a believer you could try filing a DMCA report for particular instances of scraped content: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905

Another "me too" here. I wouldn't worry about it, though. "Roger" is usually quick to respond to stuff like this.

Clicked on Campaigns and submitted the error report.

If most of your posts have the same tags and categories, your tag and category archives will look a lot each other and look like your main page which could lead to duplicate content issues.  Many people choose either tags or categories to be indexed and the other blocked. If you can make your tag or category archive pages excerpt only, they will be good for navigation and not be as likely to look like duplicates.  Like EGOL said, category pages can be a pretty big draw - especially when they are full of excerpts that are keyword-rich.