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Steve Check the rankings manually using different computers / locations. Call family/friends and have them check to make sure your tool is reporting it correctly. You are right, it should not move that much on a "daily" basis. There's no reason to.

This will be my first post on SEOmoz so bear with me The way I understand it is that robots read the robots.txt file from top to bottom, and once they find a rule that applies to them they stop reading and begin crawling.  So basically the robots.txt written as: User-agent:* Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20 User-agent: 008 Disallow: / would not have the desired result as user-agent 008 would first read the top guideline: User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20 and then begin crawling your site, as it is first being told that All user-agents are disallowed to crawl no pages or directories. The corrected way to write this would be: User-agent: 008 Disallow: / User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20

Seems like Google does interpret "Post: "Googlebot may now perform POST requests when we believe it’s safe and appropriate." http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely-surfacing-more-of.html

Hi Oleg, Thank you for the informative response! I am so new to aspx, I am not familiar with IIS either, but I do understand what you are referring to Dino

That's an interesting question. We use two different rank tracking softwares, we have offices in two different cities, we all know how to de-personalize results, and we look at Webmaster Tools' ranking data as well and we're between 2-5 depending on what you look at. I can say our traffic is down a bit for that keyword, and Webmaster Tools is showing us ranking more at 3-4 than at 2 anymore. So something would seem to be up, or this might just be the new norm?

You can check how often Google is crawling your site through Webmaster Tools > Health > Crawl Stats

Can't see a problem with this at all.  In fact, it's fairly common practice. Many companies buy domain names that feature their brand + a destination.  Some companies even buy the misspellings of the brand. For example, GTMetrix has bought http://www.gtmetrics.com, which 301 redirects straight to http://www.gtmetrix.com. Provided these are redirects and nothing more, it shouldn't be a problem.  A problem would occur if your client started building manipulative and spammy links to one of these other domains, hoping that the 301 redirect would mask the suspiciousness and passed on the PageRank.  Just like all bad quality link building, this could cause problems. Buying the domains and just redirecting them, however, shouldn't be a problem as it wouldn't be interpreted as trying to manipulate PageRank or pass any strength.  It's simply being done to protect the brand, which we know Google loves, if anything.  Should your client warrant an individual site for these locations in the future, you can then reverse the redirect and go for it. The last thing you would want, in my opinion, would be thin content on these sites or the main site that only serves to attract local search terms and drive traffic to the site, without offering any real value to the user.  I think your potential client would be fine with what he's doing.

Your new hosting company provided you a shared IP address which is not a big problem, unless there are some funny business going on with other website on the same IP. According to this test, 71000+ websites have the same IP as your site (http://domaintz.com/tools/overview/jurotrans.com)

This is correct, Social Media metrics and links are not included in that number you are seeing in the SERP overlay.

This is a really common problem on shared Windows IIS-based hosting, Brian. In addition to the web.config method Oleg mentions, there's another method if it's only for a few specific pages. This method involves actually having a "placeholder" page on the server at the old URL. You then add a script to provide the 301 redirect. (Or just replace the content of the origianl page, if it's still on the server.) For example: On ASP.net you would create the page oldpagename.aspx and its content would be: On ASP you'd create the placeholder oldpagename.asp and its content would be: <%@ Language=VBScript %> <% Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "www.mydomain.com/newpagename.aspx" %> Obviously this method doesn't scale as easily as the web.config method, but it's generally easier if you're just dealing with a few pages every once in a while. Paul

As Tim mentions, it's critical that you add the customization for Site Speed Sample Rate to your Analytics tag if you are going to use Analytics to assess your users' actual page speed experience on your site (which it does quite well, once it's configured). If you don't make this customization, Analytics is only tracking 1% of page views, which makes it essentially useless as the huge variations between a few individual users will badly skew the results. Also note that for technical reasons, this process won't track pagespeed for iPhone mobile visits. Paul

I had same that message during my midway battle clearing a penatly. Google said that they were being "extremely granular", however, they said that we should send another reconsideration request if we had made any further process in cleaning up the links. We all got very excited at this point, however, despite some improvement we didn't get back to where we should be (taking into account that we lost 1000s of bad links). Rankings started to drop again so.... From this point we sent a further 3 reconsideration requests. 2 were rejected and the final one (after all spammy links were finally removed (thank you disavow tool!)) was accepted. "we have revoked the penalty on your site". So from experience I would not stop cleaning up the site just because you received that message.

We definitely have a comprehensive link list in hand!