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You're on the right track with link building and anchor text. It's important to sculpt your priority pages with the branded terms (on page and in the code). You're lucky to have a team working on link building as that takes effort, but well worth it.

I think it would be tough to obtain 100% dominance, but one thing you might try is adwords with your branded terms. In this way, you appear more on SERPs. Kind of like driving down the highway and seeing multiple billboards vs just a few. With more, searchers are more likely to click on your links. Adwords is also a great way to test branded keywords to see traffic and click data, that you can apply when creating your webpages around those terms.

One more think is anchor text linking within your site so that the architecture throughout the site has pages with branded terms linking to your important pages.

Having the keyword terms in urls in the native language is certainly a better user experience for both searchers and your website visitors. As part of Google's algorithm, keywords in the url do have some influence - this item even appears in the Moz Analytics On-Page Grader tool showing Keyword Usage in URL as Moderately Important.

If the IT team can only provide urls in English for now, then it's probably what you'll need to do until you can move to native language words in your urls. From a search engine perspective, as long as your site is setup correctly for international/multilingual, you should be fine. Google has a very helpful post here.

Then when your team can do urls in native language, you can appropriately redirect the English language-specific pages to the new urls.

Adding the canonical tag within your telling search engines which homepage to use - this seemed to work for us:

If you're having duplicate content throughout your site, I've read having your site admin do something with the htaccess file would do the trick.

Hi Bob,

Use this tool in SEOMoz - http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

As I suspected by simply looking at your homepage, the term NLP appears very frequently most likely affecting keyword density. To search engines, it looks like keyword stuffing.

Running the report check in SEOMoz confirms this. Once place in particular is your <title>tag:</p> <p><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> California and Utah | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Training | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Certification | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Courses</span></p> <p><span>You might try something instead like:<br /></span><span style="background-color: initial;">NLP Institute of California | Training, Certification and Courses</span></p> <p>Also, NLP is a very broad term that is probably highly competitive - for example, Google shows 84 million results for the term. It might be better to do some keyword research and focus on more targeted terms - perhaps in your case, NLP Training. I also assume NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming (oddly I covered this topic as my senior research project in college). On your homepage, that term does not appear.</p> <p>Something that might help others answer your question - when did the drop in ranking occur and did you make any changes to your website shortly before the rank drop?</p></title>

Your html sitemap is best for website visitors, so best practice is to list the most important sections/pages. Google can use your html sitemap page to crawl the rest of your site as long as the structure can be followed.

If you have lots of pages, then it's best to us an xml sitemap to submit through Google Webmaster. Once your xml sitemap is in the root directory of your website, you can also let search engines know its location through your robots.txt file like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.SomeDomain.com/sitemap.xml

If your site changes over time, it's a good idea to create fresh sitemaps - just set reminders for yourself in a calendar.

Or another way to look at it, have the main domain acme.com and update the meta info and on page content for the current year. That way you're building up your site strength in many ways: links, domain age, etc... Then categorize each year for future reference by acme.com/2011, acme.com/2012, etc. Then you have a repository for content from each year's event (white papers, videos, etc...). Added bonus - you don't have to maintain so many domains and websites which could eventually become problematic. Instead focus on branding the shortened URL in the minds of your audience.

I posted a similar question the other day that may help a bit.

Dr. Pete posted a very good answer -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/too-many-noindex-follow-tags 

All good ideas. Another way which we've used that works is to add either of these two tags in your section of each page the reproduce the blogger's articles on your site:

• • this basically says, don't index this page and don't follow any links from this page
• • this tells search engine robots that it's ok to follow the links from this page, but don't index the page

One other option is to have one page on your site that hosts a feed from the blog (using something like FeedBurner) and then apply one of the above tags to just that page. Then you don't ever have to worry about creating new pages each time the blogger posts.

Hope this helps!

Last December we fumbled our 404 error page with a misconfigured server and broken links on the page.

Needless to say, our site dropped into an abyss - for 4 months. Yesterday we appeared again in our regular placement (actually stronger placement). Our site has been around since 09-Jan-1999 and has been a highly regarded site with good link structure and solid content for engineers.

Then today we're gone again. Yesterday morning we had 125,000 pages indexed with Google which grew to 187,000 by late afternoon. Then this morning we're nowhere to be found and only 21,800 pages are now indexed.

We've been working with Bruce Clay Inc through an SEO site audit doing several updates to improve through good seo practices. We haven't made any changes to the site since last Friday, April 13th (maybe the unlucky number has something to do with it....)

Any ideas, insight, suggestions???? Thanks!

First thing every morning I login to Google Webmaster tools looking for any errors, review data, sites linking to us, etc. I then login to Google Analytics and SEOMOz to check traffic to our terms to see if there have been any changes that need to be addressed.

What's your daily checklist?

We have used www.istockphoto.com for several years and like BeardCo mentions, you get what you pay for in the Photo area. iStock as you probably already know has great image selection, high quality, and nice - easy to use interface to find just the right image. We have noticed an increase in pricing on their site as well, but have been able to find other images on their site that work for the application we're working on at a lower price-point.

Our representative at Bruce Clay Inc just replied with the following info, so something's up...

"We’re pretty clueless too. The whole Internet went a little crazy yesterday because of a big shakeup in Google’s results, and there are a few theories as to what exactly happened. From the forums it looked like a lot of sites lost all their rankings."

They are looking into our Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts to see if they can pick up any clues.

I found a study in 2005 titled "Men Are From Google, Women Are From Yahoo" showing that women at that time preferred Yahoo as their primary search engine.

I'm unable to track down updated statistical data to determine which search engine women primarily prefer.

Any links to studies or resources would be greatly appreciated!

We had the same problem with our site. Finding the best performing or preferred page of the 3 versions is where you should have your developer place the canonical. Then the other two pages should 301 to that page.

When we did this on our site, it cleaned things up and helped in rankings.

Another tool to help generate a sitemap and even check broken links is called Xenu (weird logo, but good free product).