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I'm interested to know more now. The thing is though, if the person did embed this widget to their site, it is not fair that the creator of the widget can let people know that he created it? Just as with a web design company putting "Designed by X" on the bottom of the website?

Or do I have the wrong end of the stick on this one?

I'd imagine it was more from an anchor text point of view. If you are using branded terms such as powered by example.com I don't think it would penalise you, ok you might not get anything from it or not as lot but it should be fine.

It's kind of the same deal with web design companies who use links on client's websites to say they designed / built it. They might not bring you a huge amount of link juice but they don't seem to have any negative effects.

Sounds like your SEO guy doesn't really pay much attention and his attitude towards you coming to him with that query suggests that he might be doing some poor link building which might have got you penalised by Google.

Do you have access to webmaster tools? if so you may have a message about unnatural links.

Whats the website and maybe I can have a better look for you.

Yeah that is correct.

You haven't changed any code on your website have you? meta robots tag or anything like that?

I agree with this if all they are offering is literally an anchor text link and no kind of article submission.

They don't seem that bad. It's just the thumbnail but you can continue into a bigger article. As long as there is good relevant content within and its not just an anchor text sat on its own or a site wide link I don't see why this would be a bad linking opportunity.

I would suggest the kind of linking and marketing you are doing away from your seasonal times. If you are still link building and trying to push rankings during your 'off peak' season I don't see why you should nosedive.

Look at ways in which you can use the off peak to really push your marketing forward. For example creating content and just generally being active throughout the year and still trying to build your back link portfolio.

Obviously you want to market toward the time when you get the most business, but 'off season' can be just as important.

It might be that more people are linking to you and talking about you during your seasonal time and Google is seeing this and ranking you accordingly, but when that stuff dies away and not much more comes through your competitors begin to rank above you due to the kind of SEM they are doing.

Hope that helps in some way. Any more information could help give a better analysis.

The first thing that springs to mind is your robots.txt file. Is robots.txt blocking something it shouldnt be? it sounds like it might be if Google literally can't get onto your site to crawl it.

When was the last time your individual URLs were indexed?

Don't think automated queries could really affect a site, at least not queries that are checking rankings. Like people have said if that was the case we could tank any competitor website by just spamming ranking queries to Google and getting them penalised.

If maybe there is something in the coding that is pinging Google constantly for other reasons it might have an effect, but I don't really see how that could come about.

Sounds easier said than done but look at the reviews and try and build from them. Interact with the people who write the reviews and tell them you are looking to improve and you have done XY and Z to put things right.

It doesn't necessarily help get them moved down the rankings but if people click onto them they will see that you are being proactive about negative reviews and trying to build and learn from them and may give potential customers who look at these reviews a different mindset.

Fair point about the Sitemap. Thanks a lot, I'll take these on board and see what happens from there.

Thanks,

Hi Matt,

I used ping device and it's pinging fine.

I will work on the Google+ suggestion.

I have resubumitted a Sitemap for both fuchia.co.uk and www.fuchia.co.uk as I verified ownership of both to allow me set preferred domain. I submitted one this morning, so maybe that will help. But we will see.

It seems like the main priority at the moment is getting everything redirected and canonicalised and see if that helps anything.

Hi Sanket,

The site has been live for around 3 months I would say.

I have been working on an eCommerce site www.fuchia.co.uk.

I have asked an earlier question about how to get it working and ranking and I took on board what people said (such as optimising product pages etc...) and I think i'm getting there.

The problem I have now is that Google hasn't indexed my site in over a month and the homepage cache is 404'ing when I check it on Google. At the moment there is a problem with the site being live for both WWW and non-WWW versions, i have told google in Webmaster what preferred domain to use and will also be getting developers to do 301 to the preferred domain. Would this be the problem stopping Google properly indexing me? also I'm only having around 30 pages of 137 indexed from the last crawl.

Can anyone tell me or suggest why my site hasn't been indexed in such a long time?

Thanks

It's dependant on what the directory is. Yes Google doesn't like paid links, but some customers may still use online directories so from that aspect they are good. Look at a directory and see whether they are ones your customers will use.

As William Lau said, Directories, for ranking, don't work as well as they used to anymore.

As far as I'm aware, changes in algorithms are put live in the US before the UK. This might mean that theres been some slight changes or maybe the website has been re-indexed recently. Ask your US colleagues when the site was last cached and check that against yours.

I am aware that Google puts changes live in the US before anywhere else though. Kind of nice for us in the UK, we can see the storm coming from overseas

Yes, we fixed though problems. It was due to how our CMS handles finding pages in the Web Config. It was setup to reply basically that it looked for the page and nothing came back, rather than 404'ing. That's fixed now

Hi All,

Thank s for the great responses. At the moment I have been trying to push the social aspect of the site more and I have some articles ready to go up on the blog, especially with it being London Fashion Week i'm targetting content around that area.

With regards to the keyword theme, at the moment I have some head terms on the Homepage, but getting them onto the category pages is difficult, or I find it difficult, I am looking at adding text pods into the category pages for this reason.

At the moment Head Terms we are targetting are looking around Cheap Ladies Fashion + Cheap Fashionable Clothes.

As I mentioned I'm working on a new eCommerce site and just want some hints and tip on how I can potentially get the most out of ranking it.

http://fuchia.co.uk/

I've meta titled / tag most of the products with relevant keywords, we have a good social standing so far with growth on Twitter + facebook but conversions are currently low or only coming through the website's eBay store (that has no connection on the site)

Online Gambling is always going to be very black hat and difficult to rank for 'legitimately'  I found that using the wayback machine (http://archive.org/web/web.php) can help rat out spammy Gambling sites that have changed around.

As well as this it is just a matter of searching and finding those hidden gems or pushing some kind of high quality viral / media campaign where you can get into the higher quality websites.

Gambling and Pills are always going to be very blackhat so maybe you need to change hat slightly.

Myself, I usually create another email address that doesn't mention the client nor the agency. From there I send my pitch for the link saying I represent a client that is in the X business and would like to link through high quality content on the target site.

From that respect, if you are putting in an Author Bio you could use a premade bio or your own bio that again doesn't have to mention client or agency.

You may have a point. Or maybe the link was simply one that gave quick gains and then Google 'normalised' your keyword ranking after crawling the link.

It's fairly common for Google to take a couple of days if not longer to normalise rankings when you gain a new link and to put you in the correct position. This might just have been a case of you moving up and down and then stabilising.

Hi All,

Basically over the last few months I have been working for a company that is mainly a dev house but are looking to expand their SEO clients further. At the moment because of the only recent focus on SEO we have a lot of clients who only pay for monthly reports, on page optimisation and some PPC.

My question is, how can I show the clients that investing in Link Building is probably the next step and something they need to do if they wish to further progress their SEO campaign. I have written up a link building proposal to show them the advantages of Link Building, but any other ideas would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,