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I tend to agree with both of you, it was one of those thoughts that jumps into your head and you can't shift.

Hi Florent, For me if Webmaster tools shows me 1600 impressions and I'm on the first page, that means 1600 people searched for the term, I consider that search volume, this doesn't apply to search results where I'm not on he first page. A 2.5 position can be real even if you are no1 for 6 weeks. The reason being is personalized results, you can be no1 on your results and be no 3,4 on other people results. Are you sure that 15.000 searches are 'exact match' searches?

I don't see any glaring SEO implications with this method, especially since page it's implemented on isn't indexed. The biggest issue I see would be the user experience. You might get a slow down in downloads from this, but if that sounds like it may not be a problem. Hope that helps!

I think we were confused about how the actual pages differ? Is the visible content Google is getting different, or is it just source code. Without giving away too many details, can you explain how the content/code is different?

I see what you're saying. It was my interpretation that the JK Lee listing was just for Google Places and not an actual search listing, but maybe they are one in the same? As for the Super Eyes site, you're right, it ranks fine for "Milwaukee Lasik," but it's nowhere to be found when you use the term "Lasik Milwaukee." Should there really be that much of a discrepancy?

Great words of wisdom from Martin! There are one hell of a lot of designers and programmers/ developers out there that are great at what they do but have no idea about other aspects such as SEO (infact especially SEO). If your on a budget then there will be a lot of work that you can do yourself to fix the issues, it will just take time and effort on your behalf to find them and learn how to fix the issues.  There is one hell of a lot of information and know how out there on the web .. use SEOmoz reports to identify the problems and then do the research on how to fix the issue. I started my web business up in exactly the same way as you, and now I too am having to do the same work.. so far all done in house but soon i will have to outsource for the real fine detail.

I'd go for quality over quantity. Some guest blogs, perhaps, or maybe links from vendor or partner websites. I'd be very careful to use a natural mix of anchor text, too. Don't want to give Google any reason at all to be suspicious.

Thank you for your thoughts. I agree that they must be swamped and most of the 'complaints' you can see on the Google forums fully deserve to be penalised in my humble opinion, but I think that the total lack of communication is more damaging than helpful. If they want to improve the web, why do they not give more details about what is causing the problem? By being more transparent and helping webmasters to eradicate spammy techniques, everyone will be forced into improving their sites for all the right reasons. If they don't have the resource to handle the reinclusion requests, then they shouldn't have it as an option. I still feel that it is very poor not to even look at the files that were prepared - that shows a lack of respect. I agree that it is likely to be something simple. The 'spike' theory is still the strongest contender for me, due to the timings of events, but that is alarming if it proves to be true as we were effectively penalised for doing exactly what Google encourages (creating good content that will naturally attract links). Another possible cause is the fact that we have got a number of directory links over the years. Whilst I have never considered these to be high quality links, I have never seen Google saying that you shouldn't submit your site to them (indeed, they used to actively suggest that submitting to Yahoo! was a good idea) and it is a way for Google to outsource some human assessment of sites (assuming that the directories do check your sites). If it is the directories, then the door for negative SEO is so wide open that it is alarming. As many have said, completely ignoring such links would be better than penalising you. We are still no closer to understanding what we have done wrong, despite every effort to adhere to the guidelines and a lot of work trying to audit / document our link profile. With very little faith in the reinclusion process, where can we possibly turn to now? We will see. There were multiple views of the open letter from Google, so somebody somewhere has seen it and I just hope that there is some form of response. The irony is that we spend most of our life defending Google and encouraging clients to improve what they are doing online. On this occasion, I really find it hard to defend them. I appreciate that we are a drop in a mighty ocean, but the principle is one that I think is an important one and one that I will pursue. Thanks again for your contribution, Joe

Think about the term you want to rank for the most/get the most traffic for, then have that in the url. All the best

If you do a noindex,follow meta tag, that'll essentially do the same thing as canonicalizing them as far as the effect in the SERPS is concerned. These tag pages will be deindexed. The noindex tag will just de-index them. The canonical tag will de-index them as well, but will work more like a 301 redirect for the search engines. So if you think you have link juice to these tag pages that you'd like to redirect to a category page, you can canonicalize them other noindex,follow is fine. The pages will still work as is in either case.

Hi there! First of all, you should definitely be aiming for branded anchor text links, as well as generic links such as 'click here', etc. so well done for putting yourself on the right track. To try and answer your questions: 1. I think it's generally on a domain level, but if you have a specific page that has a particularly high volume of direct match keyword anchor text links, then you may struggle to rank that page, so you should aim for deep-linking and well as home page linking during your link acquisition campaign. 2. I would aim for content-based link building, as this is (in my experience) the best way of building lots of links that are natural, rather than using manipulative methods or adding more crap to the online space. Try using infographics, I push them quite heavily in general as it's my agencies speciality but we have had some phenomenal results in terms of link-building using high quality infographics. Here's two of my SEOMoz posts that might help you in this regard: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-the-maximum-number-of-links-from-your-infographic 3. I always aim for at least 50% of a backlink profile being branded, URL and/or generic links, and I would usually want somewhere closer to 60-65%. That's what we aim for with our clients. All my own opinion and personal experience of course, but hopefully it helps you : )

Cool thanks for your help...

The most likeey cause is over optimization or similar page content. If you scroll through the serps for the same keyword that would usually bring up the disappeared page and another of your site pages comes up further down like page 3, 4 or whatever, you can be pretty sure one of those two issues is the cause.

You can simply use a bit of ajax or javascript to do this or even a dynamic php script. Search engines will see all of the text within the html, as all you are doing is showing the user certain parts of the text. It is completely fine, search engines are ok with this. You should however give the option so that the user can choose to view other testimonials.

Hi, thanks for your comments.  Yes, I posted many questions on the google forum and got some good suggestions, but so far no luck.  I'll take a look at the keywords... Thanks.

Hi Xoffie, What country are you in? Are you saying that no ads like the ones featured in the SEJ article are appearing where you live? I want to be sure I understand your question. Miriam