Welcome to the Q&A Forum

All in all this has been a pretty bad news day   Right then, time to get cracking.  Thanks for all your help today Ryan, it is really appreciated.

It's really difficult to provide a answer here as there are just so many variables and I think it's important to be realistic when talking to the client. SEO doesn't work like a tap that you can just turn on to get more visitors. As Alice mentions, for a new site I've seen the same thing with slow initial growth until you hit a tipping point and the site achieves some rankings that have some reasonable traffic. At this point there can be a surge of traffic followed by (hopefully) steady growth at a slower rate afterwards (but you're got to keep building the content etc) to avoid hitting a plateau. It does of course depend on factors such as visitor demographics, size of the market niche you're operating in, competition etc. I've worked on one site where the entire market for the service being offered is less than 1000 people in the UK. (Assuming we're working to get qualified traffic then you can see that we're never going to get high month on month growth) Also watch out for other factors such as seasonality or weather. (I've had one site have record visits due to the wet summer in the UK. Now there's the first glimmer of sunshine I've got a traffic decline on my hands.) Are the number of people looking for jobs affected by external factors such as the economy and the time of year? When are companies likely to recruit? How do holidays, annual budget cycle etc play a part? The key to making any prediction traffic wise is to understand the target audience. Knowing when you need to broaden your appeals or come up with other services/products in order to bring in new visitor and keep the traffic (and the business growing). Taking your job portal as an example - how many people are looking for a job or looking to recruit and could use the services it provides? What competition is there? How much of the total market are you likely to appeal to? Hope this helps!

That's great; many thanks. Have removed all the potentially offending links and request reinclusion. Kind regards

It's worth noting that most sites that get affected by penguin don't get bad link warnings.  The pattern seems to be that if you get a manual review & penalty you get the warning, but if you are just ranking poorly because of the factors surrounding backlinks that penguin introduced you don't. The biggest give away to whether you are being affected by penguin are the dates at which your rankings drop. Compare these with the algo update history and you'll soon know for sure. I'm guessing that is a pretty competitive niche, so I'd imagine it will be difficult to get much comparable data for the two sites until they are better established and have a lot more links.  However that is definitely the way to go.

Thanks a lot, Highland! Seems like we have to update our applications!

I dont link to use iframe at all, it repersents a different page. i woule just alter the layout depending on location, i would not worry about cloaking as you are not treating google the same as anyone else from that location, that is ok. It is onoy a problem when you are treating google different to other visiters simply becuase they are google

Thanks. I guess what's confusing for me is that the images are still getting indexed with that option on or off.

I would stick to one blog for most purposes. If everything is contained on one blog you'll build your domain authority. It will also attract people who may be interested in your other products.  As William also said, the fresh content will help a lot as-well. I would also always try to put some guest posts out there to build some links. Good luck!

It is unlikely but for some things possible especially when people are planning trips far in advance (before the info on this years events is available which can sometimes only be a few weeks in advance). You mean basically copy the content, update it, and put in a redirect? Thanks

Hi Nathan, I generally A/B test every element I'm considering changing, but due to the nature of meta data this doesn't really work for title testing. I'm therefore pretty meticulous about research and strategy before I make any changes. I would say that the frequency really depends on your level of traffic. If you have 100,000 visitors a month, I would consider figures reliable and safe (from the point of view of not messing around TOO much) to change it every two months and monitor results. If your traffic is 1,000 visitors a month, you might have to leave the experiment running longer (perhaps 4 months) to get reliable statistics. Good luck!

Cornel, thanks and nice meeting you. I took your advice and studied the content., a lot of questions answered there and anyone here should start with that part. Good answer Toate cele bune, Clotaire

Totally agree using more than one tool is about verifying data! This is the argument I am trying to make but making sure I come up with a good list of points.... What tool(s) do you use?

Thanks for the suggestion I was hoping for something a bit more substantial. I suppose I was wondering how the Big Boys in the industry achieve usability test. I once read that Tesco spent some 40000 GBP on usability where would a corp that size get its focus group? Not that I have that kind of budget.

it may be trying to "upset" google with automated requests, f@cking up analytics, or something. Allthough "bots", they also show up in webmaster tools, so google sees them as genuine users. And what would google do if they notice this behaviour? Afaik the number of visitors from a region and their behavior is one of the factors in ranking. It may be seen by google as an attempt to influence rankings.....

Thanks Ryan, definitely helpful but the law seems slightly vague. "Such consent may be implicit, such as by engaging in a transaction with a company, or by virtue of having one's telephone number or email address listed in a public directory." Sounds like we are technically allowed to email them about the site if they place an order, but at the same time I don't want t cross any boundaries that are frowned upon.

For the phrase that begins the title tag, I don't think having more terms in the tag is going to affect rankings for that phrase one way or another.  For any additional phrases in the tag, whether or not the page ranks for the phrase is also going to depend on how the phrase is used on-page, but I agree that they usually have diminishing returns rankings-wise. As for testing one phrase vs. multiple phrases and their effect on CTR and rankings...sounds like a great YOUMoz post to me!

What does &pwd=0  do? where do you place this? did you even read the question?

Many of the rankings that were dropped were ranked on page 1-2 for 5+ years...

That is what I thought, but wanted to make sure.  Thank you for responding.

I operate a variety of real estate sites but to ensure succes not only on the SERPS and also paid placement ... I build them to cater to specific areas and market pricing. Where is your area? I could help you get some sites going or even offer you some placement depending on where you are.