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All You need to do Now Is Disavow all the backlinks from these forums!

There's a massive report on a new update on SERoundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17956.html

Had that on one of our pages, we then crashed completely, lost ranking on a number of other keywords, currently looking for the cause, but i believe google is doing some sort of gradual update.

What if your client uses telephone tracking. The telephone numbers will have the city/state suffix, but it will always be different?

Hi Kevin, In my experience the answer to this question depends on a few things: Where the links come from The website owner's relationships with the websites that link to them The amount of effort that can be put into moving all of those links Of course all pages should be 301'd just in case, but the problem with this is that the value of links passing through a 301 reduces over time. So all the value of all the hard work you've put into SEO in the past will decrease. What has worked for me in the past is running a report through Open Site Explorer, looking at the domains linking to the site, and seeing whether you and your client can contact any of them to get the link changed after go-live. If someone can dedicate time to this and the people linking to you are amenable to changing then it's a really good way of getting the maximum value for those old links. And perhaps rekindling old relationships while you do so, getting more links and more revenue

Hi Tyler, In addition to what Fredrico said, I would recommend running a "Full Report" in the keyword difficulty tool. This will give you over 20 more data points to analyze. Some of the factors to look for include inbound anchor text, which may or may not include a mix of partial and exact match anchor text. Like Fredrico said, Google uses over 200 signals to rank each page - some are more elusive and harder to measure than others. For a small hint, you may want to look at our most recent Ranking Factors Survey, especially the predictions and opinions from the experts as to what goes into Google's algorithm.

A lot of sites saw a drop in mid November but there was no announced update.  You can read a good discussion of what some site owners saw in the comments on this post: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-nov15-17689.html My gut instinct is that this was a refresh of the Panda algorithm, but Google no longer announces these refreshes so no one can know for sure. But, there really isn't an easy answer to your question as there isn't an obvious solution.

Well, losing backlinks will absolutely mess with your rankings. Those links prove that you are providing content that other webmasters deem high quality. I clicked through on your links, though, and it looks like you've already migrated everything. How did it go?

You should be able to crawl the entire site without increasing the RAM, once you buy the paid version.

I don't think there's any harm in submitting a new/full list, even if it duplicates past lists. The URLs haven't been removed, and you did fix the tags. This isn't like disavowing links - it's more of a technical issue. Worst case, it doesn't work, from what I've seen.

It's hard to say but I've seen examples where removing duplicate categories has improved the strength of the ones that remain. It does depend on the architecture/internal links on your site, what if any external deep links you may have and making sure any removed categories are correctly 301'd to the category that you keep. I've also seen examples where it's made no difference at all. If you've got as whole bunch of categories in your navigation I've also seen improvements in engagement by putting these categories in popularity order (Google Analytics can tell you which categories are the most popular). Make the ones that people are looking for easy to find. If you've got the traffic, it can be worth testing.

I was thinking the same as we have 4 categories /products /services /about and /projects

I would avoid using the "remove URL" option in GWT. The 301s are more ideal in my opinion because let's say I have that old URL posted on my website somewhere, and now it's going to a 404 page. When you redirect it, people will be taken to a different page, and you don't have to worry about having me update the old URL on my website. The link will work, it will take you to an active page and can get you some traffic. However, the "remove URL" option won't give you this same benefit. Here's a helpful link straight from the source on when NOT to use the Remove URL option: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en

Agreed with everything said here. The default Media uploader for Wordpress is the best to use unless there's something special about what you're trying to do with the images. As Bradley said, optimizing images is important. http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ is a popular plugin that will let you do this as you upload images.

Hey Bob, The short answer is that most people don't do this because they don't know that they should, or they haven't gotten around to it. Static homepages with well-written introductory content are almost always better than a dump of 5-10 blog post teasers, even for blogs that don't have any other function than publishing blog posts. For examples of good custom homepages on websites that only feature blog content, I'd point you towards these examples: http://mywifequitherjob.com/ http://www.seattlehomestead.com (this is my site, but I think it's a good example of custom homepage/introduction content)

Why would you redirect the naked domain to home.html? I'd personally would have that home.html renamed to the default page that your server serves as the index, probably index.html and then look if there are any canonical tags in home.html pointing to the named domain + if there are any restrictions for robots to index the page, in the file itself and in the robots.txt file. If you can provide us with the URL, we would be able to check a little deeper. Hope that helps.

we doubled her traffic and were just waiting for the off site seo to start to have an effect but she said it was taking too long and went somewhere else. Hey... if bolding the keywords was a kickass method you would be seeing it EVERYWHERE! I don't do that on my site because it gives the site a bad odor. Don't worry so much about why she left.  Start thinking about how to handle it when she returns. These guys could build a ton of junk links for you. If you have copies of the files when you stopped work, you will not have to search the entire site to remove the code that these people have added.

They were dofollow but recently examiner changed it to no-follow due to massive abuse