Welcome to the Q&A Forum

the site ranked again like before and even better after deindexing with do follow Thanks James and Jane for your kind response

AJ, I took a look at your backlink profile and it's pretty clear what the problem is.  You basically have nothing but spam backlinks (I will PM you examples).  It looks like there was a big influx of links around September 2013.  Did you pay someone to do SEO about 6 months ago? Your site doesn't look bad, but it's got some instances of over-optimization (again, I'll PM you examples). You should definitely verify Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already, and check to see if you have a manual action against you from Google.  After looking at your backlink profile, I would be surprised if you don't have one.  However, if you don't, it may be coming soon.  If you don't know how to do the backlink cleanup and reconsideration request yourself, it would be a good idea to hire someone with experience.

It could just be Google re-shuffling things and fine-tuning who gets stars and who doesn't. Here are a few things that have helped in my experience: Don't go crazy with the schema markup, especially for stars. I see people adding ratings to blog posts just to get stars, and those are all gone now. Add them where they make sense and are conventionally used (e.g. on product/place pages, not on category/type pages). Avoid re-using the same aggregate ratings or reviews that go into aggregate ratings on multiple pages. Make sure you've nested the right tags in the right orders according to the latest rules - they change sometimes. Sometimes the snippet tool will say something's correct when it's really out of order. Tag entities, not keywords. E.g. don't tag the entity as "The Marriottt Inn, Resort, and Spa in City, State" - tag it as "Marriott" or "Marriott Hotel" and list the location separately. If you're doing all these things it might just be a matter of weak entity association, borderline user metrics, or insufficient site trust.

You should specify a preferred domain in webmaster tools to get google to list a particular domain/subdomain. Sounds to me as though Google is listing one version of your domain and the other search engines a different version. I don't think this is a moz error.

That's what I've been doing, Matt. No, not a silly answer. Maybe a silly question.

You shouldn`t take those numbers too serious although they are not really wrong... just see this info as a recommendation. There is a unwritten rule which recommends that the keyword density should be between 2 and 4 percent but you should focus on writing a good text in general. Of course you can keep in mind to use your keyword in a propriate way but what you do is: you write for humans not for machines... Its undeniable that your text wont rank for a keyword if you do not mention it (this might change in the future) but as I said: don`t focus too much on that. Write a good text (everybody has a different opinion about the definition "good" by the way) and review it... think of using your keyword so that your text will still be a good one...

Thank you, Jane. It appears we are able to restore our comments, but it's good to know that it's not a negative factor.

Hi there, I would stick to one high quality website with separate sections for sports and weddings. My only hesitation is the vast difference in the subject matter and the fact that wedding photography is such an important niche unto itself, but from an SEO point of view, one website is definitely preferable. You'll need to work on site structure and the branding of the wedding and sports sections to differentiate them and not confuse / alienate your potential clientele. For the home page, I would go with the part of the business that is most profitable (I am guessing weddings?) and use navigation and SEO to optimise the sports photography page. PPC is a great way to get an influx of new traffic, especially if you want to do some conversion rate testing in the early stages, before you have a good amount of organic traffic. I would consider creating pages for specific genres, even within your chosen niches. For example, a basketball page, including all the basketball content you've created like http://www.soobumimphotography.com/basketball-floor-remote/ and http://www.soobumimphotography.com/2013-nba-finals/ This section would sit under sports and be linked to from http://www.soobumimphotography.com/portfolio/sports/, along with a section for football, soccer, volleyball, boxing... In terms of conversion, the contact form should be specific to the page it sits on - there is no need for a generic form with engagement and wedding options on the sports page, for example. I would tailor that to ask about the sport, the teams, the league (NCAA? High schoo? Pro?). I'd also really consider reviews or recommendations from your former clients, especially for weddings. They add trust, especially when paired with the people's actual photos. You can use Rich Snippets to include star ratings, and those star ratings can show up in search results: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146645?hl=en http://i.imgur.com/HMegwvh.png I hope this provides some ideas for now. Let me know if anything is unclear. Cheers, Jane

its dropped from page one to page the bottom of page three over a six month period?

Hi guys, Yes the sites are targeting the right geographic locations. Thanks, Paul

Yes I think this is better then having thin content, your links if you are lucky enough to get them would amass on the same page. You would probably only rank for the static content, at least over time, but that is probably what you want. I would have access to this page via POST not GET to avoid querystring in the url

Hi Tony Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. I take on board your comments regarding the top level menu structure, I will discuss this with my designer and see how we can get this to work. Regarding the noindex of the "Air Filters" landing pages for example, the reason why I thought this would be applicable (in my original structure plan)  is largely due to the fact that the page content (i.e. the products listed in here) will be for the most part a collection of the products listed across my additional "Audi Air Filters" and "Ford Air Filters" pages so would this not be content canonicalization? I thought noindexing the "Air Filters" landing pages would be the correct thing to do? Thanks. Kris

I agree with Paul, as far as the drops down menus are n your website using HTML and CSS then it will but if they have been built using Javascript, I am afraid not! Mostly all good wordpress themes these days are coming with a drop down menus built in CSS. Hope this helps!

great thank you all

Hi, If you have a look at this URL, there are plenty to choose from, and all appear to have reviews. -Andy

This was a question that was recently raised by somebody else here on the Q&A and you can see the full discussion here. Although the question is slightly different, the answer is the same: it depends which HTML version you are using. If it's HTML4 or XHTML, only use one h1 per page, but if you are using HTML5 you can have one per section. So you could have one in your <nav>, on in your, one in each of the <aside>s on your page and one in your <footer>. The reason for this is that for HTML4 search engines look at headings to give the page hierachy - remember they only had s to separate content areas - but HTML5 uses the new semantic elements like <header>and <fotter>to work out hierarchy, with headings only affecting hierachy within one of those tags.</fotter></header> </footer> </aside> </nav>

I recall Matt Cutts, in one of his videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw), addressing product descriptions (Scraped from the manufacturer) with E-Commerce sites, especially those sites that are selling products that a hundred, or even a thousand other retailers are selling. He said that you would be ahead of your competition if you took the time to rewrite those descriptions, so they are original and not duplicate content . It is not necessary to refresh or rewrite them every couple of months. Just having a unique description that no one else has for that product will put you ahead of everyone else selling that product. It would be a good idea to try and get your customers to write reviews on your products and post them on your product pages. This is unique, original content that is fresh. Amazon is a good example of doing this.

Hi - What I would suggest is getting yourself somewhere comfy to sit down and read through this incredibly helpful SEO guide that MOZ produced. this covers many different aspects, including some that you might not have even thought about. -Andy

Hi, I would just ignore that. No real harm can come out of this. However, if you do have some time on your hands and there is no other better use of it I would look at the logs and see if Google Bot is hiting both version. If that is the case then you need to deal with those as you are wasting crawl budget that can be used in a more productive way (but that's only if you have a big site and crawling can actually improve your performance). Hope it helps.

I have also noticed a couple of older sites dropping off the "Bing/Yahoo" charts, all the way across the board, and ranking very high in Google. I have found that uniform across the board drops like that always indicate some serious breech in SE policy, and/or penalties as a result. Mere variances in priorities can't account for a 50+ position difference. I have noticed this in the last few months or so. There is something much more to it than just local listings. It is the most unusual and disturbing trend I have ever noticed. I agree Bing WT's are a good place to start, but I haven't yet found the culprit either. Don't trust a quick answer!