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Usually your site tends to bounce around a lot when it's new, as Google tries to figure out where you belong in your SERPs. If your site has been around for 10 years, then that's probably not the case. Personalization is the first culprit I would look to, and if it wasn't that then it could just be Google testing a new algo tweak.
The usual format I follow is:
Homepage: Site Name, Additional Keywords
Subpages: Page Name | Site Name
I usually try to avoid keyword stuffing in titles, but it can be effective for improving rankings. I would test several variations of your title and see which ones help drive the most traffic. It's a simple thing to change, so should be an easy test.
One thing to watch out for is personalization, because that can skew rankings a lot. Make sure you are logged out of your Google account and using a private browsing window (cookies can skew the results) to get the best results.
Besides that, rankings do fluctuate from time to time as Google tweaks their algorithm. Rankings can even be different from location to location or person to person. Next time, I would double check the results on multiple computers before making any rankings claim. Use a 3rd party tool like Moz to confirm your rankings and show proof that your site is actually ranking where you think it's ranking.
As long as the sites are high quality (i.e. high pagerank/mozrank) I wouldn't worry about it. There is nothing wrong with linking to 3 sites in a post that happen to be from the same C-Block. As long as you're not linking to the same 3 sites over and over in a spammy or manipulative way, you should be perfectly fine.
There is also nothing wrong with getting links from 3 sites from the same C-Block. Happens all the time. As long as Google doesn't suspect that you own all 3 sites and are linking out in a manipulative manner, you should be fine.
Unless you are actively trying to do something sneaky like create a link network, C-Blocks should be the last thing you're worried about as an SEO.
You can use OpenGraph markup for images that you want to use as a preview in Google, but don't want displayed on the page:
Just place that code in the header, and the image will show up as one of the options when you share your link on G+.
Pagination can is a somewhat tricky subject. The best solution is usually to include pagination markup (rel=next/prev) and include the appropriate canonical tags to avoid duplicate content. This brief tutorial from Google explains what to do:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
If you really want 68 pages of archives indexed (not recommended post-Panda, but it's up to you) at least have your CMS generate unique titles for each page ("Blog Archive Page 1 | Sageworks", "Blog Archive Page 2 | Sageworks", etc).
Just be sure to put in 301 redirects from site B to site A, so that Google doesn't think the blog content is duplicate content, and you should be fine.
In general, Google does not like search results in its search results. Dynamically generating content can get you some traffic in the short term, but puts you at a big risk for Panda and other thin-quality content penalties in the longterm.
I think it's a good practice in general to have the blog hosted on your main site in a subdirectory like you mentioned (sitea/blog). Having a separate blog site means more work you have to do in terms of link building and promotion in order for links from that site to have any value. Having the blog on your main site takes less work, and your site will benefit more directly from links coming to the content.
Having the errors in Webmaster Tools is not going to negatively impact your SEO in any way. It's more of a heads up to you, the webmaster, that they have found a page that is missing.
As long as there are no internal or external links to those pages, they should disappear automatically, although it could take months. If you don't want the errors cluttering up your report, then manually marking them as fixed is the way to go.
I'm not a Penguin-recovery expert, but it is possible to recover from the penalty. I would continue to reach out to the site owners who are linking to you and disavow any spammy links in webmaster tools.
You might also want to focus more on longer tail keywords like "balloons UK", "where to buy balloons", "balloons cheap" etc that probably convert better than a broad term like "balloon" anyway.
No problem. You can't sit back and hope people find you, you have to actively promote your content. This could mean e-mailing your customers, promoting through social media, posting links Reddit, contacting other people in your industry, etc. You can't just have great content, you need to go out there and spread the word about it.
Also, if you are looking for link building ideas, this is a great list: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
This could be because your homepage is being penalized for over-optimization, but your contact page doesn't have any spammy links, hence it still ranks for "balloon" based on the strength of your domain. Likewise, if you over-optimized for "balloon" your site may be penalized for that keyword, but "balloons" is a separate keyword and you may still rank for it.
"Content is king" means that content should be the foundation of your marketing efforts, because your content is going to be what drives your leads and customers. If you have truly amazing content, you won't have to put as much effort into link building, because people will link to it naturally.
But a site still needs links to rank. Links are the primary component of Google's algorithm. Links help Google determine if your content is "high quality". A search engine bot can't just read your content to determine whether it's valuable (beyond basic grammar and spelling), it looks to see if other people are linking to that content, to determine its quality.
If you really want to just focus on content, create absolutely amazing content about storage bins, or come up with a clever or funny twist that can help your content go viral. But remember that your site needs links to rank, and those links have to come from somewhere.
Hi, you asked why your sire isn't ranking. It's not ranking because the site doesn't have any links. Your site needs links if you want it to rank. The links to your e-comm site aren't going to have any value unless your microsite has a strong backlink profile.
Microsites can be done in a spammy or non-spammy way. I don't think the content of your site is necessarily spammy, but the domain name (plastic-storage-bins.com) does seem a little spammy. Most web users do not trust domains with tons of dashes in them, and exact match domain names (especially those with dashes) were devalued quite a bit with recent Google updates.
And again, your site needs backlinks. A link from a microsite with zero backlinks does not count for anything. You need to build links to your microsite in order for it to have any value. But if you're spending all that effort building links to your microsite, why not just build the links directly to your main site, which will have more impact?
A microsite is only a viable strategy if you have the resources to do twice the amount of work link building, or your microsite lends itself to getting backlinks easily in a way your main site cannot (for example, a meme tumblr or a joke site).
If the ranking dropped around a Penguin launch, then it could be a Penguin penalty. What does your anchor text profile look like? With the latest updates, anything over 30% is considered risky, although you might get a little more wiggle room since the keyword is your domain name.
If directories are all you can think of, this list should get your head buzzing with new ideas:
The content seems fine, but you're seriously lacking in the backlinks department. Having good content isn't enough to get a site ranked, you also need external links pointing to the site.
Also, the design of the site (especially the header) could use some improvement. The more professional & attractive your site looks, the easier it will be to build links to it. A better design will help reduce bounce rate and improve customer trust as well.
I would still start with the sites that aren't ranking first. The more things you try to do at once, the less predictable the outcome is and the greater the risk of a negative impact.
Start by moving over a few sites that aren't ranking that well. Gauge the impact. Do their rankings increase or drop? What about a month after you've made the move? Once you have a better idea of what the impact will be, you can move over a few more sites, and repeat the process.
A piecemeal approach may take a little longer, but it reduces your risk and gives you a more predictable outcome. It also will allow you to perfect the process of moving sites before you get to the moneymakers that are already ranking well.
How do you know that you've been "penalized"? If it's Penguin penalty, avoid using exact keyword match anchors when linking between your domains. And diversify your link profile by building more external links.
Hi, it's possible. What do you mean by "It just happens to be the time when we removed a bunch of paid links"? When were the links removed in relation to the traffic drop?
I would take a deeper look into which pages caused the traffic drop. Look at the 30 day period before the drop and compare it to the 30 day period after the drop. Where is the majority of the traffic loss coming from? Which keywords? Penguin tends to impact the homepage or the specific keywords you are over optimizing.
In regards to paid links, Google has a very hard time detecting these unless you are being blatant about them, and you will typically receive a notice in GWT if you receive a penalty for it. Check to see if there are any manual penalties on your site in GWT. If not, chances are Google has not discovered that the links are paid (yet).
The main thing to watch out for with Penguin is low quality links (relative to your high quality links) and the anchor text of your links. With the latest updates, you want to keep your keyword anchor text below 25-30% of your total links. So if your ratio is higher than that, try to get that changed. And focus on building more links, because 70 is not a lot. The stronger your backlink profile is, the more resilient it is to spammy links.
Just make sure they're linking to your most important pages, and the link equity should flow to them. Otherwise I wouldn't worry about it.
If you can add additional content to your product pages that add value to them, that would be ideal. The most obvious is product reviews. By having reviews on your product, you can add tons of unique content to your pages and you can get your customers to do it for you! You can incentivize your customers to write reviews by offering discount coupons or similar.
Other things you can add are things like videos, ingredients, how tos, faqs, usage info, etc. Just overall more content to flesh out your product pages. If you can't tackle all 2,000 pages at once, start by identifying your highest revenue pages and the pages that are within striking distance in Google (positions 5-15) and see if you can bump those up with a little more content.
How long ago was this, and over what time period are you looking at rankings?
Unless you were previously doing something deceptive, my guess is that the rankings drops have nothing to do with the rich snippets. Google's algo changes all the time, and rankings fluctuate all the time. It's easy to try to draw some kind of cause & effect relationship here, but likely the results have nothing to do with the rich snippet code (assuming you implemented it correctly).
Redirecting sites that are already ranking is almost guaranteed to result in a rankings drop, at least in the short term. However, managing 40 sites is a ton of effort, especially if they're all using duplicate content, and they don't benefit from the domain authority of your main corporate site.
Why don't you start with moving over the dealer sites that aren't ranking onto your main site. That way they will benefit from the domain authority of your main domain, and you can clean them up a little with some unique content to improve their rankings. The sites that are already ranking, you can leave alone until they run into any roadblocks. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
I wouldn't remove any links unless you've determined that a site has been hit by Penguin. The way you can do this is by looking at the traffic history for the site, and see if there have been any drops that correspond to Penguin updates, or rankings drops that correspond to Penguin updates and the anchor text being optimized.
Otherwise, I would leave links alone, as any normal site will accumulate low quality links, sitewide links, etc. Just focus on having a strong & balanced backlink profile. 70 links is not a lot, and leaves you more vulnerable to low quality links throwing off your profile.
Like Jesse says, you don't have to worry about it too much unless you suspect people are intentionally spamming you. It may be worth it to pull a weekly report of backlinks, and filter by things like DA and anchor text to see if there are any alarming trends, but otherwise I wouldn't worry about it if you have a solid backlink profile. Most large sites accrue tons of spammy links naturally.
This is definitely on Google's todo list, but who knows when it will be an actual factor. As AJ Kohn says, build your authority, not your authorank. Focus on becoming an authority in your niche, and you will see benefits for SEO & your business regardless of whether Google implements authorank or not. And if they do, you should be well positioned to take advantage of it.
There are definitely things you can do to prepare for the coming changes (build up your profile on Google+, use rel=author on content you create, create a Wikipedia page), but as far when Google will roll it out, I doubt even Google's engineers know about it at this point.
As far as selling a blog, the question of author has always been an issue. If a famous author sells their blog to someone less well known, will people still read it? As far as search, the impact of authorrank should be minimal, all the old posts would still have the authorship boost of the old author, only newly authored posts would not. If the blog has a high enough authority, I could even see people buying blogs to increase their own authority in the niche.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of mega menus or mega footers. Every link on a page dilutes the value of every other link on the page, so keep the number of links per page as low as possible, while optimizing for usability.
Links in the footer carry very little link value, so I wouldn't add top category links to the footer just for SEO purposes. Looks at it more from a design/user experience perspective. If having the links in the footer makes navigation easier, then go for it.
As with anything else, the best thing to do is to test it. Install a click tracker such a CrazyEgg or ClickTale and see how people actually navigate the site. Test having the links in the footer vs removing them, and see if it affects usability, conversions rates, or SEO performance. Then keep the links that work the best.
The existing links could themselves lose MozRank, which would mean a lower MozRank score to the site that they linked to. Most sites will decrease in MozRank over time in the absence of new links being built.
I don't think I've ever heard of sites passing "negative MozRank", but someone from the Moz team would have to answer that question.
Moz's crawler (and indeed any crawler) can't crawl the entire web, so it's possible that it may not be taking into account all the links you're acquired when generating the score. MozRank is just a metric created by Moz so that you can estimate the link popularity of a site in numeric form. I wouldn't stress too much about your MozRank if you are outranking other sites, just focus on obtaining high quality links and your MozRank will move up.
We use BazaaVoice for the reviews on our site, and it's a solid service. If you are using an older version of BV reviews, then you definitely want to move over to Cloud SEO because those are generated through server side scripting instead of using iFrames like the old implementation.
I would check in Moz Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any new 404 errors to ensure that the 301 redirects were put into place properly. It could be possible that not everything was redirected properly.
I would also look at the indexation numbers in GWT as well as run a site: search in Google, to see if any new pages have been indexed. Wordpress tends to create a lot of duplicate content pages such as category archives, tag archives, date based archives, author pages, etc. so make sure those aren't being indexed. Use a All-In-One SEO or Yoast plugins to clear those up.
Finally, go into Google Analytics and look at the landing pages that were driving the most traffic before, and compare it to after the change. You may be able to isolate a few high traffic pages that are responsible for the traffic drop.
If none of those things turns up a problem, don't panic. 4 days is not a long time and an 80% drop is not unheard of. It can take some time for Google to digest all the changes, depending on the size and authority of your site. Make sure to submit your site to be indexed in GWT under Crawl -> Fetch as Google. You can also speed up Google's crawl by building more links to your site. Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ are all easy ways to get pages crawled and indexed, as well as getting links from high authority sites.
I've had trouble with Bing submissions before. In our case, our firewall had blocked one of the Bing-bots from accessing our sitemap. The Bing IP we were blocking was 131.253.38.67, although it could be other IPs as well. Also, make sure you're not blocking Bing-bot through your robots.txt. It could also be an issue with Bing WMT itself, in which case I would just post a ticket to their customer support. They should respond back to you within a couple days.
I've used various directory sites such as Zvents with no problems. If you can, try to use a different description on the event site than you do on your own site, this will keep your site from running into duplicate content issues, as well as help the content on the event sites get indexed.
Including links is somewhat risky in the post-Penguin world. You should be fine as long as you don't overdo it, but sites like Zvents will syndicate their event listings to dozens of other sites, so you can quickly end up with a bunch of links pointing to your site. If you're worried about Penguin, using the URL as a link is a pretty safe approach. Just don't be spammy about it and go submitting those links to hundreds of sites, they probably don't carry much link value anyway.
MozRank is a link popularity score, similar to PageRank but calculated using Moz's internal algorithms. You can improve it by getting links from sites that have a high MozRank, which should also help improve your rankings, which should be your ultimate goal.
What kinds of keywords are you searching for? A lot of these directories like FindLaw have very high domain authority, so are often able to outrank individual firms for non-localized keywords. Also, for broader searches, returning a site that lists multiple firms may provide a better experience for a searcher than just returning individual firms.
You can set the width of the badge in the embed code, but the minimum width for badges in portrait layout is 180 pixels and 273 pixels for badges in landscape mode. So if that is too wide for you, I would consider placing the bade somewhere else, say the sidebar.
If these are your friends' websites, then it should be no problem. You just want to make sure you're getting guest posts on legitimate sites, and not shady spam sites with ulterior motives and questionable backlink profiles.
The question mark and the values that follow are known as "query parameters" or "query variables", and they actually can impact your SEO. Google can look at the different variations of the URL, and index them as separate pages, leading to duplicate content.
The easiest fix for this is to put a canonical tag in your header, so that Google knows the what the proper URL for the page is supposed to be. You can also tell Google to ignore specific query parameters in Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > URL Parameters.
Penguin penalizes sites that have a large amount of over-optimized anchor text, so my advice would be to mix it up. Have some links lead to inner pages using keyword anchor text, and have other links lead to your homepage with your brand name. Include suboptimal anchor text like "click here" or the URL.
Just mix it up and don't overdo it. Make sure the blogs you are guest posting on are high quality, and make sure you're getting backlinks from sources other than guest posts. Don't be spammy.
Microsites can be done in a spammy way or a white hat way. If you have the time & resources, you could consider posting unique content on each of the mircosites and build them up as legitimate sites. They could even draw in search traffic. Then link them to your main site in a non-spammy way (i.e. no exact match anchor text).
Definitely optimize your videos for the SERPs, Google ranks YouTube videos highly even for competitive queries.
To optimize videos for Youtube and/or Google:
For Google specifically, try to get your video embeded on high authority sites and build backlinks as you would with any other sites.
If you include any links in your comments, Google may crawl them, although they won't pass any link juice. Google is pretty aggressive above spidering any links they find, including unlinked URLs on a page and URLs in javascript, so I wouldn't be surprised if they crawled links in comments as well.
To answer my oan question here, just came across a cool tool called cyfe that allows you to pull data from multiple GA accounts (as well as other data sources). A very handy tool for just $19/mo - http://www.cyfe.com/
Company A is correct. The content won't matter anymore once the 301s are in place, since no one will ever see it. You can either have Company A put the 301 redirects in place to your new site, or transfer your domain name to Company B so that they can put the 301 redirect in place.
Paid links are a tricky area, and there are a lot of loopholes.
If a company is straight up selling you a link for money, just to manipulate Google's rankings, then that's a definite no-no.
However, if you are paying for a service Martindale-Hubbard that also happens to include a link, that could be seen as ok. Many directories also get around this by charging you a "review fee" and not guaranteeing inclusion, therefore making the payment about the service rather than the actual link.
A good rule of thumb when evaluating links is to ask yourself "Would I still want this link, even if it had no impact on Google?" if the answer is yes, then it's probably a good link. Also, evaluate the site to make sure it is high quality and in Google's graces, i.e. does it have pagerank, are its pages indexed, do they link to spammy sites or only quality ones, etc.