Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi

I have a small private blog on wine which, on Monday of this last week, took an overnight tumble and lost all its first page rankings for wine terms. The blog used to be housed at blogspot but in October I moved to self hosted wordpress.

The original site was: wine90.blogspot.com and this now has a redirect to wine90.com. I paid for a professional to port the site from blogger to wordpress and to set up a 301 redirect.

Firstly, is there anything wrong with the move? Could I have lost my rankings for this reason?

Secondly, I haven't added a new blog post in nearly 3 months, would this cause such a drop?

Thirdly, I have noticed that the hosting (I host with the same man who ported the site from blogger) has been poor and the website has been down a couple of times on the rare occasions I checked it recently.

I'm looking for some help, although this is not a money making site, its only a hobby that I add to when I have time, but it is a shame to have written 200 articles and now to face this slap from Google.

There are no messages in WMT and I do not actively seek links so nothing dodgy there.

Any ideas? When I asked the guy who is hosting it he told me that this week there has been a big SEO update but I haven't heard of it?

Hi

I have a small personal blog about food and wine that I recently moved from blogger to wordpress and it is currently being hosted by the company who moved the blog over from one system to the other.

This week I've noticed an 80% drop in organic traffic thanks to losing pretty much every first page SERP, there's no messages in WMT, i dont pay for links, all that's on the site is original content about food and wine that I enjoy. I've never had a previous drop in ranking/traffic like it.

The one thing I can say, is that the guy who took over the hosting is hosting it himself on his own server and the website has been down more times than I would consider reasonable, often for hours at a time (this is when I catch it and I don't check often).

1. Would the site be penalised for this?

2. If I move servers to a reliable co i normally use, how long will it take to recover?

Hello,

Many websites now serve specific home page offers based on the location of the customer, my question is, how does link juice flow around a site when the links (this case from the homepage) are served up based on a visitors location? Internal links from your homepage are valuable for ranking that product well in the SERPs so how does Google deal with this?

So, for example, a car hire website based in the UK. If you arrive on the care hire website sat in Manchester (Northern UK city), on the homepage the website serves offers of car hire deals in Manchester, Leeds, London and international destinations. If you arrived on this website from London (Southern UK City), you would not see the Manchester link at all but London, and other cities in the South.

In this case, when Google crawls the car hire website, it will see internal links but a)which version and b) is there any way of sharing this link value around?

Basically, we want to understand if Manchester in this case will get the benefit of an internal homepage link from Google even though we only show Manchester to people FROM Manchester, OR, do Google only give juice based on one version of the website, a generic UK version?

Or to put it another way, is there any way of cashing in on both geo-targetting the customer based on their location AND getting link juice from those geo-specific home page links? Perhaps there is some code or way of telling Google that people from Manchester (a certain % of our visitors) will see a homepage internal link for Manchester that will pass some small % link value?

Hello,

Not a direct question really, just a poll really of your experience - I work with a few companies and have noticed recently that there seems to be an increase in the time it takes to go from a) showing up in the index (quickly within a day or two) to b) getting a stable ranking. I see spikes over the first few weeks (even up to 3 months) before the rankings eventually settle.

Have you noticed the same, is it taking longer to achieve a stable ranking, do you work with any sites that get indexed, rank, and stay in the same slot for moderately competitive terms comparing to a year or tow ago?

Interested to hear other people's experience and how long we expect to wait for new content to settle

Thanks

I agree with Egol. That page doesn't deliver an answer right there, chances are you'd have to spend some time trying to find it. What's the KW?

Is this solved Joel, I had a similar question that related to Rich Snippets and was to post the answer but justsaw the date?

A second question - low(er) quality, as in low DA/PA links from relevant sites - some things are pretty niche, and can be without many huge DA/PA relevant site links, if a site is one of a few, but still good, on that topic, but has low DA/PA, would it be ok to take in links?

Hi Guys

Thanks for the answers. Will stick to Wordpress then!

Hi

I started a blog in 2006 on Blogspot, then everyone moved onto Tumblr and Wordpress, but in August (just) 2013, what should I be starting my brand new blog on? I dont want to have to migrate in a matter on months.

I did not know that Keri! Years I did not know that! Great advice

Hi Shawn

Yep its a communication ad extension - it wasn't open to all advertisers at first. You need to check in your account to see if you can add this extention in camp/adword settings if you dont see it then contact adwords support, it was trialing, but might now be live for one and all... anyone know?

Theres loads of diff. communication extensions - see here for a full list

http://www.scribd.com/doc/53998757/Communication-Ad-Extensions

Agree with the above, work out what each KW is worth in terms of revenue, however, there are many KW, depending how LT and varied the KW are, that can be targetted within the same page without seeing the list of KW though, it would be difficult to estimate. We've often managed top 3 results for closely related groups of 3/4 variations around a keyword so qualifiers like "cheap" + main keyword or "buy" + main keyword (relating to price/purchase) and also quality like "boutique" or "luxury" or "budget".

This is exactly what i do and have found the same result. In fact, at this moment in time well over half my links don't show in SEOMOZ

Hi

Like everyone I've read a lot about rel=author but is there a reason not to use it?

For instance, if you're running the content, as I am, for a travel company, we have individual writers writing the content and guides to cities/hotels/tours etc, but none of our competitors are using rel=auithor, so we certainly do stand out. But does the "personal" touch of rel=author dilute trust in some cases?

For instance, if you're booking a specific hotel in London and you type in the hotel name looking for the best rate, do you really want to see a face you don't know beside a "corporate result"?

Is anyone in an industry where rel=author is being used in conjunction with products/product reviews. It will work for Gary V and wine, but will it work everywhere? Rel=author is touted everywhere as a sure fire bet... but are there times to back off from using it?

Hi Shawn

Even more and up to date info here: http://www.webranking.com/blog/communication-ad-extensions-for-google-adwords#axzz1wTsZPxfK

by "limited" its by query and even advertiser, I know its open in my field of travel, are any of your competitors using it? Either way, hit up your acc. manager? Should be able to let you know and yes, in answer to your question, should be where the screenshot you attached is.

I ask because I notice in individual Google profile you must fill in "contributor to" to get the rel=author to work, but that doesn't exist in the company Google profile. Im guessing the "Links" page in the Google + for a company then is how to verify?

Hi Johnathon

Not sure if you read the blog from yesterday or day before but DMEGs is one of several (http://www.seomoz.org/directories) that still seems good.

Without a crystal ball, I don't know if this is a directory that is going to get penguined or not. Anyone?

Hi

We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd  reviews.

We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants -

should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant)

or schema.org - product + agg review score?

What do you do for your product listing pages?

If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?

Notice this becoming less and less of a problem, I don't find it takes much to beat exact match domains tha havent done much optimising. However, if they have, for sure its an advantage.

Im another for blog on domain and ending /blog not blog.domain.