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Hi Randy, You are most welcome! Good idea, keeping track and using metrics to evaluate each change. You might be interested in this very clear explanation by George Freitag. Please, keep us informed if those little, though important changes, improved the overall performance Ma Verónica B.

No problem at all. Glad to help! All the best, Sean

Hi All, Just giving this a bump, because on a weird day, this still seems weird to me. Just to put it in a nutshell: When you do a bing search like this: "site:www.oursite.co.uk "particular keyword", you get results like: Page about particular keyword from www.oursite.co.uk Different page with this keyword from www.oursite.co.uk Page featuring that keyword from www.acompletelydifferentsite.com Another page with this keyword from www.oursite.co.uk Another page but from www.anothertotallydifferentsite.net etc. Has anybody, anywhere ever come across this? Many thanks, Dan

Hi Alvin, In my end I haven't noticed any major change nor any update. Have you checked these sources? Mozcast.com Algoroo.com You might find any answer there. Also, I'd suggest you to follow some news site such as searchenginejournal.com, usually they are up to date with any update or major changes in the algorithm. Best Luck. GR.

Great thank you. I haven't looked into local optimisation before so this helps!

Hi,I know that this post is really old but in case someone comes across it like I just did, I can confirm that as a SEO consultant, I faced no problem whatsoever with WPML for SEO purposes. You can define unique title and meta tags with Yoast SEO for all your languages. You can even have the same image with a different alt tag depending on the language. The only downside I have with WPML is it tends to get your WooCommerce website really slow if you have thousand of products and the translations get messy sometimes. I had to use their troubleshooting tools to resolve some translating issues. dixfractions.com

This can be anything but I'm suggesting to do comparison: links, anchors, content on your website and his website. Then with data you should improve your website. Can content be better? Correct it. Can links be better/stronger? Add them. Etc etc... I know this looks like general advise but if you need help with comparing top10 websites with your website, can help you. There're more possibilities than penguin.

Hi, Great point! I will look further. My guess is that the competitors are active also. A second thing, though your bounce rate decreases, it is highly possible the average time decreases also, due to as more incoming traffic, more visitors realise, after a couple of seconds, that is not what they want. Plus, I think all of us goes to a second and third option to compare. Maybe it is not a bad idea to stay in 2nd or 3rd, depending on the conversion, of course. It seems we all have to be accustomed to fluctuation, it came to stay. At the end of the day, is great for the good SEO practitioners.

There's pretty much no-one at Google who would know every element of the ranking system, so it seems unlikely a third party would successfully replicate it all beyond what is already available via the common SEO tools. If they really had managed to completely replicate everything to the point it worked perfectly, why wouldn't they just set up their own websites to rank highly and make money without having to do client work? They may well have built their own internal SEO tool, which could do something similar to the Moz On Page Grader, for example. But considering how important external SEO factors remain to be, and the fact they'd have a much more limited data set than Moz or other tools, it seems like it would be a bit pointless unless they planned to pivot to selling their own SEO tool. So either the client ends up being saddled with a company using a tool with very little data. Or they end up being saddled with a company aiming to ditch clients and sell an SEO tool instead in the future...

I run an ecommerce site. My site used to rank #2 (my homepage) and #3 (my product page) for my primary keyword. #1 has always been my competitor's homepage. Now, my competitor's Shop page -- which uses this keyword only 6x within the content of that page -- is #2 bumping me down to #3 and #4 Any advice or guidance would be much appreciated.

UGC or User Generated Content can be extremely powerful and add huge weighting to your sites SEO value, but it also has a another effect  that helps with customer credibility. As users come along and see real comments that are related to the topic, offer advice, show valued reviews etc it will then results in your content becoming potentially becoming an authority on specific subjects. Take these Moz Questions for example - some of the questions can be very small and to the point, but it is often the huge number of user generated responses that propels the questions up the search result page. So in essence UGC is extremely valuable - just ensure you lock down the bots and spammers and some types of user data (e.g. links, html etc) which can do the reverse and make you less credible as a source.

In theory yes it shouldn't make a difference to your international rankings. It's just making sure Googlebot (which does come from the US) is able to crawl your website. For every other country, because it's for legal reason I would suggest just block them, but you need Googlebot (and other bots like Roger) to crawl your website. Instead of completely blocking traffic from the US, would it be possible (and I don't know the legal requirements) to detect if the visitor is from the US and show them a different page? "Sorry, we can't help you but here are some great resources" and link to some American sites. Hopefully, Google would still crawl your website as would be able to see your sitemap. Sometimes if it's a legal requirement you have to do it, even though it may potentially harm your rankings (I have a similar issue with a finance client, where some of the legal requirements go against Google / UX best practices but they have to be done to trade). What I would do is once you have blocked US visitors, is monitor Search Console and your server logs to make sure Googlebot is still crawling your website as frequently and as deeply.

There was noticeable algorithmic activity in early June and again around June 27th (right in your timeline). No updates were confirmed, but Glenn Gabe did some analysis around a "Panda-like" update: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/ Glenn tracks a set of sites hit by previous penalties (including Panda and Penguin), and while he, like all of us, is forced to speculate, is data is generally pretty solid, IMO.

This is just wildassguessing... When you metrics are overwhelming, and your content is greatly superior by formal industry standards... but these little cottage industry sites with informal content and a tribe of visitors are beating you.... your best prayer of getting to the top is to be patient and allow Google to observe that your visitor metrics put enough weight on the scale to make your site more credible. Google will believe rubbish for a while but strong truth can still prevail.

Thanks Rand, really appreciate it!

I know that there is a thumbnail meta tag:  --but I doubt this populates it. My gut tells me that Google will do this automatically. On seorountable, they speculate it may come from product schema/market and the rich snippets Google shows for them.

Hi Patrick, Of course - So, some of the academics within our institution are setting up a project involving numerous external partners and stakeholders. The business won't have a fixed location (that I'm aware of), and was going to be a science/research based website. This project was going to have its own URL and website but they would've liked it controlled within our domain so that: A) It's easier to update B) It'll benefit from a higher DA The H1 of the page would obviously be called what the URL would've been, but I'm not sure whether this would be viewed as underhand by search engines - although, from my research, I haven't seen anything to suggest such a thing. What do you think? Cheers, Rhys

I ran into the same problem with that plugin - but I've tried everyone that WP currently has to offer and didn't see that option on any of them. My guess would be that they're not currently using it because AMP is only showing in the carousel right now, which doesn't pull in meta descriptions. I suspect they'll be updating it accordingly as Google continues to put more emphasis on AMP. *edit - As of Tuesday, Google is including AMP in the core search results, so hopefully plugin update is coming soon

Great thank you for your help! I'll keep an eye on the comments