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Hey everyone, I'm beginning to think our site is toxic i.e. it'll never rank properly again irrespective of what we do. I recently published some data (2 months ago) in an interactive visual called the "iPhone 5S Price Index". I outreached and got thousands of links from sites including Forbes, Gizmodo (various international versions), Washington Post, The Guardian, NY Times, etc etc. All of these results dominate the Google rankings, all with links pointing to us. YET, we're no where to be seen. What incentive are Google giving content creators, like me, to continue producing content that is obviously popular if we can't even rank for it? The traffic we received was fantastic. In one day the traffic was 40 times our average, which made me smile like a Cheshire Cat from ear-to-ear but we need to improve our rankings overall otherwise the value to us is lost. The traffic wasn't there to buy our service, they were there to see the graphic. Hopefully our brand exposure leads to future sales, but it's a pittance compared to our previous rankings income. I've had this type of success 3 times in the last few months on this site alone. Yet nothing changes. We suffered from a loss of rankings in September 2012, fighting ever since to get it back. Now I'm losing hope it is even possible. Does anyone know why our site wouldn't rank when we're undeniable the source that created the work? Also, why wouldn't the increase in domain authority (which has jumped about 10 points according to OSE) have a knock on effect for the rest of our keywords - or even let us appear within the top 100 for ones we obviously serve? We do Real Company Shit - and we're good at it. But I need these rankings back. It's driving me nuts. Thanks.

I'm sure we all read on our alternatives to Google Reader that SEO is changing - "here's what we must do to be relevant in 2014". I find these articles boring and uninformative. I suspect I'm not alone. The reason I'm not their biggest fan is because I feel like I've invested 10 minutes into an article that I have no actual guidance from. Therefore, I thought I'd ask the real SEO's, you guys, what has actually changed for you? Are you now not creating content with the aim of getting links? If you run a commercial website, what are you doing different to rank your product pages - directly or indirectly? Please share with the group. I'm sure many like me are still brainstorming and creating content they think will grab people's attention and gain them links, whilst also pushing their Facebook, Twitter, Youtube profiles, etc etc. What has changed about this?

Hi guys, We suffered a massive rankings drop in September 2012, same date as Panda 20, so we've been trying to fix the issues since with no little to no success. I think these Q&A's work best if I ask a specific question, instead of just screaming for help, so hopefully we're looking in the right place at least. One area I've been looking into, is of course, content (being a Panda penalty). However, I'm not sure what about our content is causing a problem. We provide a phone unlocking service and have over 6000 handsets that we can unlock. We only allow search engines to index 5 of them, due to these being those with unique product descriptions (there are over 100 more but we want to start getting our rankings back a bit at a time). We also let them index our manufacturer pages, news and support pages, 160 approx in total. On our handset and manufacturer pages we have much of the same content, with a few words difference to alter the price or the name of the manufacturer/phone. We also change our delivery times for some, as it can vary and have a "Why use us" section which is the same for each handset page. In my mind there is no point changing these areas to be unique to each page as they clearly describe our service and what we offer. Changing each one for each page, especially if we wanted to start adding our other remaining 5995 handset would be ridiculously. It would also clearly be manipulative is we're just rewriting the same thing in a slightly different way to benefit a search engine and not the users. Does anyone know if this type of content would be seen as duplicate content and would result in a penalty? And is there anything we can do about it? Thanks,
Darren.

Hi guys, I've been running searches on Opensiteexplorer for our site www(dot)mobileunlocked(dot)com and am seeing Facebook shares as 21 and 0 Likes. However, we have 2857 people who have liked our page on Facebook. I'm concerned that the search engines also aren't seeing our relationship with our true number so is there anything I can do to make sure this is being picked up? Thanks.

Hi everyone, I'm formulating a content idea to provide the Internet's most comprehensive guide for our related field and wanted to know how people would promote a guide if they were producing one. Really the topic of choice doesn't need to be mentioned, so I'll leave that out so answers are open and can help a range of people attempting to do a similar thing. One of the goals is to of course produce more unique and useful content for our site (helping our ranking), which will help people out who have an interest or question related to our topic, but once the content is on the site, how would you go about getting links towards to guide? Would you contact websites that have written about similar content in the past and ask if they would add a link to the guide in their already existing content? Or would you ask them to bear it in mind for reference purposes in future content? Would you visit guest posting? Obviously one of the goals of the content is for links, and that will be the driver behind whether or not the content is produced. I firstly need to show that there are potential links we can gain almost immediately after the content is ready. From there, I'm hoping the content will promote itself, with people referencing the content on forums and articles when questions are raised. However, for the content to get in front of the influencers (those who would answers the questions on forums or write articles about the subject) the content needs to be visible - i.e rank or be mentioned from a highly visible source. Any ideas or comments from people who have promoted guides successfully before will be extremely welcome. Note: This is more the promoting of content and not really related to the research to find out which content to produce. Thanks.

Hi guys, My question/discussion is regarding Google+ and whether or not I should advocate creating an account for one of the websites I work in-house for. This particular website focuses on unlock codes for mobile phones and isn't a service that consumers would really want to connect with - which is what Google+ appears to be a vehicle for. It is a one off purchase website, and not something people will use regularly. On the face of it Google+ offers very little for a company that operates in this fashion and makes most sense for B2B businesses. I feel that by potentially creating a Google+ presence we are in fact attempting to manipulate the search rankings because it isn't a networking site that makes sense for our business and there is actually very little real reason for us to get involved with it. I don't think Google would penalise any business for getting involved in their product, but we would only be using it to benefit our ranking position. Surely that is against everything Google themselves stand for? Also, what real benefits have you guys got out of using Google+? If I am to create a presence there, this is the ammo I'll need to use to convince my manager with. Thanks a lot.

So we've been having some difficulty with one of our websites since we split it in half and moved one section of content to a new domain with a new name, at the end of May. http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/ was moved to http://www.somobile.co.uk And in the following 6 weeks, the google organic traffic has fallen to miniscule levels, that seem to indicate a more serious issue than just low ranking. Initially when the site was moved, the 301s transferred the authority very quickly and the new website pages ranked well. Now, some of them simply won't rank at all unless you include the name of the website "somobile". Here is one of the current rankings that indicates an issue:
"somobile" - 1
"somobile mobile phones" - not in top 50 These are some of the terms we used to rank in the top 10 on Google UK, and still do on Bing UK, but don't rank in the top 50 on Google UK now:
samsung galaxy ace
apple iphone 5 deals
samsung tocco icon Our webmaster central account says that only 30% of the pages in our sitemap are in the index. It seems like a penalty has been imposed, but our reconsideration request (just submitted because it seemed like a sensible next step) came back saying there were no manual actions taken. Can you see what it is that might be causing the problem for us? I would have thought it was the new domain (with less direct links and less brand credibility), or content issues, but I would have thought that would just reduce the ranking by a few pages rather than just hide the pages altogether.