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That's about right. Organic does get more than PPC from the stuff I've seen/read and it probably averages at about 80/20. I'd take the search volumes with a pinch of salt anyway though, from any keyword tool

I am also looking for something on those lines...I am 100% sure about the SERP ranking algorithms, but I am not that sure whether users like the top of the screen more or not. a heatmap would be helpful indeed

Most studies seem to contradict each other at least a little on this but they all give a general idea like this one... not sure how accurate it is, but I found it ages ago at http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm organic-ctr.jpg

Hi WillyF, we're wondering if you have any progress to report with your rankings, or if Google responded to your reconsideration request with any more information. A lot of people are real interested to see if anyone is recovering from Panda/Farmer, how long it's taking, and how they did it. Would love to see an update here!

When you have something of value to say. If you are not that creative, as I am not, then have guest bloggers add valued content. I think what is more important than frequency is quality. This also depends on expectations from visitors, which depends on what type of site you are running. Having too many may be too much for visitors to feel as though they are keeping up with the site. Small sites 2-3 per month Large sites (non news) 2-3 per day. (unless your site is broken into categories, then 1-2 per day per category)

Thanks for your responses Alan. Since these are client sites, it is our policy to seek permission before sharing information about site status. I will do this and provide some examples once permission has been obtained.

Thanks - I will double-check those. The mark-up should be fine, but will go through everything again just to be sure and make sure a sitemap is added through Bing Webmaster tools. Thanks.

Fantastic service and hopefully work together in future, though I noticed you work within a different niche I would love to have a chance to review the report and then contact you to discuss if that's OK please. I'll email your info@ address in the next minute.  Legend!

Have you made any changes in response to the Panda updates?  Have you removed some of the weaker content or bolstered it?  Have you done extra link building? It might be Google correcting themselves, or it could be a number of other things if you have made any of the aforementioned changes to your site.  If you think your content really was quality from the start, it very well could be Google correcting themselves.

Traffic (and income) is now down over 55% which is really too bad.  The content is unique and highly valuable to the target market. Any advice about why would be really appreciated.

Thanks for all your input! Just wanted some more experienced input, we shall see how it turns out.

I do have an example of a site that I launched that normally would have done really well with an exact match domain and original content. However I could not seem to get the site to rank. I wondered if it was that the site was hosted in a bad "neighborhood"  because the IP had some adult sites on it as well (not mine). Or if the problem was that the site was hosted in too much of a cluster of similar sites so as to appear as a network of sites. I would also argue that with the Panda update that links from bad neighborhoods can hurt you.

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Hi Dirk, From the changes rolled out primarily last week, no, I don't know of anyone. I do know, however, of numerous sites that are making big changes to their content presentation and structure such that they'll no longer display the problems we're thinking Panda-slapped sites have. That is, removing duplicate content (by any number of means), consolidating thin or duplicated pages, removing spun content, etc. I'd check back in a few weeks after people have had time to get these changes in place, have Google crawl their sites and update rankings. In many ways, I think it' too early to tell where rankings are going to fall.

What they're using is rich snippets. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html You can read about it there. I would recommend using it if possible, they do make it nice for the end-user and result in higher CTR's in my experience.

Thomas, that just confirms what I was thinking.  If we can spend less time ranking really well (top 3) for deeper niche searches for someone looking to live in a specific area, and times that by 100 then we are getting some really nice targeted traffic. Since the long tail keywords are usually a broad mix of real estate terms, how do you get one page to rank well for those variations?  In real estate, someone could search for the same thing in a thousand different ways.  Do you go after a bigger term like "Denver Highlands Neighborhood Homes for Sale" in the title tag and then use other real estate keywords on the page like MLS, listings, houses, condos, lofts, etc.  Seems like we get some long tail action just off random words used once on the page.  Any info you can provide on page optimization for longtail searches would be appreciated.