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Title & Description really get read?<sarcasm></sarcasm> I appreciate the feedback. Very insightful. And it is reassuring to know that titles do help CTR. So I did a little more digging. This is actually a branded term, and it appears that the maps listing is currently in the 2nd position. Which leads to the next potential discovery, ...Does google webmaster tools consider a map listing a rank 1-10? Further investigation of my keywords suggests "Yes". So the map listing is getting a higher CTR than the first position.

Hi Jennifer, Sorry for the late response, been at Pubcon 2012 Anyway, some basic tips I would give for you to rank better for product names/types are: Your site has very few backlinks. Upon looking at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hocksports.com%2F&=Search you can see you only have links from 11 other domains. You ned to dramatically increase this. Perhaps start with these 5, they are very easy to obtain: http://www.bradkrussell.com.au/followed-links-authoritative-domains There is very little content on the homepage besides products. Try having some brand highlights and a bit of SEO text about what you sell (with links to your top categories). The same can be said for your category pages. E.g http://www.hocksports.com/baseball-softball-bats/ seems to be targeting 'Closeout Baseball Bats" and "Closeout Softball Bats" but you don't use these exact terms in your page title or on the page. You need to put more content besides just products. Write 1-2 paragraphs about the product type with a few keywords. Content, content, content. Start a blog, have buying guides for particular products etc. Hope this helps

Thanks for the quick response Dana! They are sourcing us but at the moment they're constantly showing up instead of our site. There's no reason they should outrank us, but we figured they couldn't really be hurting us since they are linking to us. It's weird that the site is able to scrape content and still get good indexes... maybe Google just hasn't picked up on it yet. We are hoping that we don't have to worry about scrapers once our blog posts start getting indexed like they used to. I think we'll send them a friendly email like you suggested.

So you removed a bunch of sitewide (anchor-text rich ? ) links and you recovered.  That's pretty much how everybody understands it. And yes, there was a Penguin refresh on October 5th.   More credibility to the notion that you can only recover from Penguin during a refresh or update.  And If you recovered at any other time, then you probably weren't hit by Penguin in the first place.

One great way to make sure that the content on your identical product pages is unique is to collect separate customer reviews for each site. This will give you UGC that also gives you unique content. Of course, it takes time to collect the reviews, so the more unique you can make the existing content, the better off you'll be. Good luck!

I find it helpful to keep the Google places listing as accurate and up to date (if your company has seasonal specials most important to keep accurate and any hour changes if you are a walkin type company)

I think it's dangerous to speculate that you were hit by EMD without knowing all of the facts.  EMD hit Sep 28.  There was also a major Panda update Sep 27.  But you mentioned that you started dropping in August. Can you tell the exact date of your drop?  If it was Aug 20 there was a Panda update then.  You mentioned that your two sites share the same 2000 product database.  If they have duplicate pages, or pages with significantly duplicated product descriptions then this is a big flag for Panda. You mentioned that you pay for linkbuilding.  Some linkbuilding has been punished by Penguin.  Now, Penguin affected most sites on Apr 24 and many more on May 25.  However, there are some people who have documented that a site may be able to be affected by Penguin at any time.  (They still believe a refresh is necessary for recovery).  So, if your traffic drop happened within a few weeks of a major keyword anchor texted linkbuilding campaign then Penguin is a possibility. Have you checked your WMT for any warnings of unnatural links?  This is a possibility as well. Plus there are a pile of other factors.  Check this list for a bunch of other possibilities for a ranking/traffic drop.

Thanks for the responses! The pages just got noindexed today... it took almost exactly a week.

I recommend reading through the entire spreadsheet from start to end and color coding every different intent keyphrase that you come across. Any keyphrases which have identical or very close intent matches should be color coded together. I do this process manually then I write down every intent variation that I came across. It usually ranges from 10 - 30 different intent buckets. Once I have the pieces of the puzzle, I start piecing together the search funnel for the business. Who are your known demographics (the personas that your marketing team talks about or your target audience)? Are there intent buckets that do not map to these personas? If yes, then you may be attracting a demographic that is unaccounted for. See if you can figure out who this demographic is. Is it a worthwhile demographic? Pull out your conversion data. See if you can use the master list of intent buckets to break down the search funnel into a flow chart for each demographic by using the keyphrases mentioned in the first paragraph of this response. I'm assuming that you have some kind of an employment website like Indeed or Monster. There are different kinds of personas that I can think about off the top of my head. For example: 1. Employed 2. Unemployed 3. College Student 4. Remote Worker On 4 different documents, you'd write down the keyphrase intent buckets that you know for a fact are associated with each persona mentioned above. You'll want to use conversion data or pages on your website that are built for specific target audience groups to help you make this decision. For example, if you had a page targeted at a college student, then you could analyze the keyphrases that drive traffic to that page to determine whether your intent bucket is grouped correctly with your correct demographic. You could go one step further by looking at the keyphrases that possibly convert into an email subscriber whom you know is a college student with 100% certainty. Once you have a bunch of intent keyphrases mapped to each demographic, then you would try to break down the steps. Put yourselves in the shoes of a single demographic and make a decision tree. Write down all the possibilities that one would take online in a sequential set of steps and see if you can map your keyphrases to that list. There's more but this exercise will get you started and help you figure out the different target audiences that come to your website and highlight their search behavior from keyphrase to keyphrase. It will show you the best points to attack them from an online marketing perspective by tailoring your messaging to distinct steps in the funnel. Please let me know if this was helpful.

As Alan said, if the pages don't have any inbound links then you're not going to lose any link equity by removing them. If the pages in question are not getting direct traffic or search traffic and don't have any links then I'd just delete them. Otherwise a 301 redirect to the most relevant content is the best way to go. Do a check for any internal links to these pages too. Your own links should be easy to fix. Remove them or point them at the better relevant content. It might also be worth reviewing your 404 page. This can often be forgotten, but it can do a lot of the hard work guiding visitors to the content they're looking for.

Hello, Now i'm not an expert in this area, but if you look in the GA iOS SDK I believe that their is a way to track entrances by "bookmarks" Please check this out https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/devguide#trackingModes they have the utm_soucre paramater that should be able to be set to bookmark.

Hi Ben, It's still in Beta, but I know Michael and I think it looks pretty good, from my brief glance. Michael Borgelt is a really smart fellow. You're very welcome!

Per Google from WebMaster Tools: "Google treats some ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs, as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these more generic than country-targeted. Here is a list of those ccTLDs (note that this list may change over time)." Within the list is .co. So, Google treats .co as a gTLD. Eyepaq makes a good point re the UX issues and .com with same domain.

If I were going to name a plugin that was NOT likely to be the cause then Akismet would probably be top of that list.  Nothing is guaranteed of course, but Akismet probably the mostly widely used wordpress plugin available. If there was an issue with that I think everyone would know.

Yes, we are actually doing that now. We have a dedicated box hosting a few of our websites. The developer doesn't have the permission to speak and the owner stepped away for a few minutes, but that is our plan, and if they cannot help us, we will go through and reinstall the WordPress core and the like. Thanks

SEO Keith has pretty much hit it spot on. I would try and use a combination of all 4 if at all possible. From my observation GWT accuracy seems to vary dependent on how often your content is crawled..... showing a history of all your links i'm not sure it can be beaten. But accuracy of what is included I am unsure. We have a few external links that were pointing at our site which we know no longer exist. 3 months on they are still in our link profile according to GWT.

I am getting 403 errors on almost all the pages on www.suretybond.com/store/  this would be a good place to start looking at the pages to make sure internal links are correct.

If your site resolves to https, then it's likely Google will display it that way. I haven't seen any click-through studies of https vs non, so it's hard to say how having the https will effect you. That said, I have seen correlation studies that say shorter domain names are better correlated with higher rankings, so you may be onto something. If I want to get rid of https from showing will that mean I have to take the certificate from the homepage and just have it on the relevant pages of my website? Yes, if you remove the https from the homepage then Google won't display it. Fairly certain rel=canonical is not what you're looking for here, as even if you point it to http I suspect Google will likely ignore it. Hope this helps!

Actually, Google can recognize identical images. Go to Google Image Search, and you can do a reverse image search by putting in a URL of an image. Google can then show you all the other places that have this same image. Take a look at how it knows where else the SEOmoz image is used, despite lots of different ALT tags for it. http://images.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZitXgT1XAS4sOypJl5JgsdZMkvLslrfT1T4aOzutjHr7dAe3CshmvCKjVCSeArFHzzRNEZftlAmTi5wDDBGwOXyVvNZoDr4hZ_1uDfTLSBVd0KjRCVi4Wlwv9RFIfZYnKT758UHzuJEkOiZ3VLQopaw0QI-t2qs3_1vdSUqU7SjtRae5fuY1WKcUhYdPLhpgfzyhAkPE62pqe0guasJjN74xiqG_1jCdv00bHdI4ZayNpkVRxiDTNOdAY9sgsO-OerZesQaG2SazKdWhD92wkykVFjvedcBRxMp_13wknP2JRtfRCSX8W8XXLqeeqeXiTCQRXr6E0y6Owd5cue8aYyYG5Bxwuc-Sig8GI1I-SbksVmftOUiGm2MlflBSseIAEPvYJ1XS8NzfND4pQSFTTpN0eCpxGa6mnzg_1FNf_1g6Tqr8j6hgeLkJrmZoFubwzmC1dEsgVqONfZlYuo-E8ws6ZFT6bU7cPls0qPHLaTKm0m425mukycdu-kp2gRykGr6FFp5kkTBFbBu498N1m0RG9uN6PncBHwt4X1oruGjYz6jT3PF6eRiCzZBpUR6CKawtdcpoOPqbyjU9Xl_1HRp5lmyurPZ4DSfXzGXBfOJxldfhbkFQBFxy90AueakrppY9M9VXQ0kIkmsY7lwfPQixzyQC7hCvTLzhb1sjiowJutmUAcYJ7pitflv3zzfebdYV0ZFI_1CcxFeNwWiQnveQVUhQ-VXDt0F80ktu8_16qo0rw2XY4mnr-KcaDQHqCN9r-php2FPtqqtUK4LE2Ri-csqY2mjxKRnGrdWBh2x2VLgBYMqzZagI9bZn8H6u94OjUD_1vcTE_1013OQsgmnLzVkbLmjXzxUleXYoSPnhnvxZ_19pbu8m316gvVUfFdq_1PIktP_1cv-jreAvu4WlkR9HiUqNG1Y3p-ThpApwSfjTRWzTztgW-RsiACNJRRkhTFY-whooLy-zlPTBTe3FlaM3fMrbw-iRi68h76mA&num=30&hl=en&bih=1049&biw=1920

My pleasure, Pascal. Thanks for using Q&A! Miriam