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Penalties can happen for a lot of reasons these days.  One of the quickest ways is to see if you can associate a specific, clear drop in organic site visits with a known date of one of Google's many publicized updates.  (either a drop on an exact same day as an update or within a day or two after). Examples of clearly identifiable drops related to specific Google updates can be seen here: http://twitpic.com/9bfx2s http://twitpic.com/8pjere http://searchmarketingwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/GoogleSurvivorTipsSlide3.png You can compare your own analytics with the known dates tracked here on SEOmoz However if your site was penalized due to a "cascading" effect, that could be more difficult to pin down.  For example, if your site suffers from a combination of "red flag" issues, it could be that you were on the verge of penalization for quite some time, and only an accumulation experience triggered it.  (the last straw to break the rankings). Another consideration is if you have seen a big drop recently, you could very well bounce back in short order if it was just an accumulation of "perfect storm" factors (including changes Google made that they then shortly thereafter "fix", for example).

Just thought I would update on the situation. I have just had a record month of calls and emails from positional clients. Over 25 client contacts in 27 days. By far a record May with 5 more days to go. I'd say the new content is working well.

Excellent. Glad to hear 1&1 is more manageable than I suspected.:)

I wanted to tell you I did not realize you actually bring different content on the site I'm very glad to hear that. I would not really worry too much about using use the same IP's. A host that is outstanding in Canada and the United States and back by Pier 1 which I know most people here will probably back me on being one of the best hosts out there is Zunicore was developed by PEER 1 Hosting—among the most respected and fastest-growing names in the world of server hosting. As such, it enjoys all the benefits of PEER 1 Hosting's 18 datacenters and wholly-owned FastFiber Network, including NOC monitoring, CDN and SAN—not to mention the parent's legendary standard of customer service, as embedded in a suite of exacting SLAs. https://www.zunicore.com/ Using this service you can put them both on the same cloud have great service and speed then just pay extra $2 month for different IP. Just so you know the whole services  around $31 a great price if you asked me. Considering you get a CDN even DDoS attack protection. I think this is some pretty cool data for everyone https://www.zunicore.com/pdfs/woozworld_cloud_provider_benchmarks.pdf PS I a just took a look at your site and I like it a lot it seems that you're very green you may want to look at the host like this these guys they are 100% solar or green Here is the link to eco-host review http://ecohostreviews.com/ http://greengeeks.com/vps-hosting/vps-hosting.php http://www.mygreenhosting.com/green-data-center.php though what I found is many other hosting companies are hundred percent green powered however they do not name themselves after it or advertisers is much. I would look at PEER 1I know they are on top of things and do a killer job all the best man. Hope this helps, Thomas

Really depends if you're looking for an in-house SEO or an external consultant - if it's the latter have a look at the SEOMoz recommended companies, if it's the former you could consider hiring a specialist recruitment company, we've had some success with that in the UK. The SEOMoz LinkedIn group suggested by Project#Labs is definitely a good place to start, although I'm not too sure you'll find the quality you're looking for on Craiglist. Just had a quick look at your site too - looks like a fun place to work so hopefully you won't have too much trouble! : )

I don't numbers as a % of the total market but after having a quick look at a large sample on an e-commerce site I found around 1 wildcard per 70,000 searchers. Of those only 1 in 20 actually look like they're deliberately using it as a wildcard.

Today's YouMoz is also about this subject. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/not-freaking-out-about-the-eu-cookie-legislation

http://www.google.com/trends/?

I think also the folding of the page, there is nothing interesting and you can only see the top of the first image, you also need to think about that, not everybody has a big screen, check your Google Analytics.  Try to move everything up and play with the empty spaces. Also check your marketing campaign maybe your are promoting to the wrong audience. I hope this help.

thanks for your answer, although I am still a bit lost about new options to start with. Analytics world is huge!

I generally use heading of the landing page as the title tag. This makes the title tag relevant to the landing page and it also improves the CTR (provided your landing page handing is really Click worthy in the first place).  I use business name at the very end of the title tag and never at the very beginning no matter how big a brand is. I also don't repeat keywords because they don't help SEO wise and make the title tag looks spammy. i hope it helps.

Hi Streetwise, I've never actually A/B'd a subscription mechanism like the one you're talking about, but I definitely agree that people are NUMB to the word "Subscribe" and that setting yourself apart a little bit would help. One of the thing's I really appreciate about SEOMoz is the inventiveness and originality they employ in converting visitors to customers... worked on me From greeting me with a nice warm "Aloha" to having Roger personally tell me I've reached a 404 pages, it's that kind of personal customer engagement that seems to be leading to more conversions these days. I'm not sure what your niche is but a few suggestions to replace "Subscribe Now". Stay Informed. Keep me Informed. Update me. Keep me in the loop. I think even eliminating "now" could help, and having the button simply say "Subscribe" Last one... Hop on the Bus, Gus. Kidding... but you get the point. Be different. Take a browse through seomoz.org and you'll see plenty of examples. (Might want to log out first to get the full effect.) Hope this helps. Thanks, Anthony

Well when you say local are you looking for people who are searching "service keyword canada". For example "best dentist in canada" or something like that? Having pages built out by location is going to be key opposed to just trying to write content on one page. But the trade off is you do not want to just write poor content for the sake of building out pages. You need to come up with a strategy that makes sense. So I will use the dentist example above. Say you are a website that talks about the best healthcare by region. You would make a page per location and highlight businesses. Top paragraph would be an h1 for the city/area plus the service and then have a paragraph of unique content about it. Each business could be a page and link back to the main page.  Also maybe writing about news in blog posts in the area and using more internal linking will be key (not using exact match anchor text all the time but something that just makes sense).

Hi Activity Super, You are quite correct that this is a challenge faced by countless businesses just outside the borders of major towns and cities. Because of Google's stance that a business is most relevant to its physical location, you will typically be seen and displayed as relevant to your town in the main organic/blended/local results - not to a desired nearby major city. That's just the way it works. An exception to this is when you offer a service that is relatively unique to a large geographic area (the only large animal vet serving 4 small towns) in which case, you may find yourself dominating the local rankings for a variety of geographic terms due to lack of competition. Because of the way Local works, then, most businesses shoot for secondary organic rankings (rather than local ones) in towns where they do not have a physical locale. What is your business model? Are you actually an ironing service? Do you serve all clients at your shop or do you travel to some/all clients to render services? Defining this is critical to the handling of your Google Place Page. If all clients come to you, you can show your address in G. Maps and attempt to use the old technique of making one of the additional details on the Place Page 'Areas Served'. In this, you could list up to 5 cities (do not include your city of location) from which clients come to you. I refer to this as an old technique because it is one that worked well prior to Google's layout change last July at which time they stopped publicly displaying additional details on the Place Page (as well as citations and other elements). Though Google is no longer displaying this information, they are still aware of what you put in the additional details. The thing about this is, I'm not sure if this technique works as well as it did prior to the change. Still, it wouldn't hurt you to try it. If your business model serves some customers in your shop, and some on the road, you can show your address and also choose the service area radius feature, in which case, you could include Essex in your radius. This could be of modest help. If your business model goes to all customers and does not do business at your physical location at all, you simply have to hide your address. So, that takes care of the Place Page. Other local business directories often offer you a much larger field for describing your business. You could certainly work Essex in there somewhere. What you are left with beyond this is writing up a storm about Essex and how it relates to your business. If you've got a go-to-client business model (like a chimney sweep) this is a no-brainer, because you can simply write up your work in that city. If you don't travel to the town, however, you have to be more creative and become involved in some way in Essex in order to have something to write about. For example, a physician might give a lecture or a clinic in Essex. A brick-and-mortar business might host an event in Essex, or sponsor a children's sports team there and attend matches. Perhaps there are issues that uniquely effect your Essex-based customers (such as laws, weather, special offers, etc.) that you could write about. The thing is to find some genuine reason to connect your business to the major city in the absence of actually serving clients there. Then, as you've discerned, linkbuilding is step two. Some people engage in article writing as well, but in my opinion, investment of time in this should typically be minimal. It would be great if you could get indexed news about your business from Essex-based news sources but this isn't always possible. Also, you might play with using hReview to highlight testimonials from Essex-based customers on your website...not sure what impact this would have, but it's an idea. Essentially, then, a combination of a properly optimized Place Page, other local business listings, copywriting and linkbuilding will be your best bet for breaking into next-door city rankings, but if you are in a competitive industry, these rankings will typically be organic rather than truly local. Some visibility is always preferable to none! Good Luck!

Thanks for all the help Anton and Tommy. We were able to resolve the issues with help from both of you.

I am not saying that cloaking is the answer, or that is why you can get aound the paywall in the the australian site, just interesting how it happens. by cloaking, i mean if you let the google ip though, but not cache, you shyould get the indexing you want. Maybe you can show just a snippet on the page for those not authenticated so that you get you tile and a description indexed.

Hi MisterG, I created another test blog, around 2-3 days back, normally I get them to index within around 1-8 hours, but the blog still hasnt indexed yet. very odd.