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I'm going to echo a bit of what's been said here already. Italics, bold, and underlining are tools in the same way bullet points are tools. These formats are all useful for: Calling attention to specific portions of text Adding clarity Making text easier to scan I do not have evidence to say exactly how (or if) use of these tools will affect your rankings, but I'm certain that a user who encounters content that's overly FORMATTED or OneBigBlockParagraphOfText is much more likely to bounce. So I recommend using those tools to your advantage and writing, always, for a human reader.

When I worked in the newspaper industry and they started to use video, we were always told to keep it to under a minute and a half - I think if you go beyond that then people lose interest. Even so, if you go to the full time it has to be interesting throughout. The shorter the better really and don't do it for the sake of it - it has to add something for the viewer.

Hi Li! Are you able to provide any more information, or a screenshot? It sounds like that would help get you a good answer.

Problems like this can be really hard to figure out. But, in my experience it is quite uncommon for a site to get any sort of penalty or demotion for a particular keyword. I think that sometimes it can look like a particular keyword is demoted when the page previously had rankings that were propped up by the power of links that are now being detected as unnatural. Sometimes when there is just one keyword that is not doing well, I look at the possibility of keyword stuffing. The keyword stuffing algo runs continuously and can indeed cause a particular page to not rank well if it thinks it is keyword stuffed. And in my opinion, it's not always consistent how Google determines keyword stuffing. There are plenty of keyword stuffed pages that still rank. And often two pages that look similar can be affected in different ways. But still, this is something to consider.

Thank you, your responses have been very helpful. They have confirmed what I have been thinking. Regarding the Mac example I used, I had already been thinking about separating the "Mac" content publishing side, and I had bought a domain and put certain things in place. The truth is I am not looking to grow that business, I have actually downsized it on purpose, although I am reasonably competent and making businesses work, I don't play well with others, and although I have all the skill set to grow the business, I don't have the personalty trait to be dealing with the public. I am also at an age, where I no longer feel I have to, if that makes any sense. Lastly, you are absolutely write, even though this is a forum response, I have a bad habit of babbling on, and writing stuff long winded. I never ever thought my writing skills were any good. I would have have described it as poor, even though have formal education. I was never that good at it. However, I don't know how to describe it, but it felt like it was the right angle or topic or approached the right way. I suppose what I am trying to say is it felt right, rather then the writing style or grammer etc being good. Anyway, thanks for your input. Very much appreciated.

What I would also look at is the data that you can find in Google Search Console about the backlinks that you have so you're able to check their quality.

Great thanks everyone

Just as Russ says - many things may happen. I will add few more: Panda 4.2 https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change#2015 even was on 17 July in UK SERP can be delayed to August. You also can be hit from Panda at any time. Just recovering is slow. Penguin can hit you any time. You need to check and keep one eye on your backlinks. Just recovering is slow. You can be hit from hosting infrastructure, CMS theme update, CMS plugin update, etc. You should investigated previous searches in SearchConsole and compare this to actual one. You can use archive.org and see historical changes in site and it's pages. You should check website log. Similar to "ship captain's log book" you and team there should log every change to site and it's pages/content. And even small change can invoke disaster after 2-3 months or even longer. I wrote few things that need to be seen. I can wrote even longer but sometime there are even outside of SEO events. Imagine that you're auditing something as "Rover cars" and there is sudden drop... because company is now defunct. You also can be hit from negative campaign, rumors, etc. As you can see it isn't hard to explain what's happening without know this customer, it's niche, competitors and social networks.

Thanks!!

Hi, This is a good question; for now my answer would be no, I wouldn't bother with rolling it out to non-news pages at the moment. Right now it's only for news/article pages, and if you do have any of that content on your site, it would certainly be worth rolling it out to those, but we don't know how it will play out. Although it is likely that we could see it roll out further in the near future, for now I think you're best off simply improving other areas (including mobile-related things like mobile-friendliness of the UX and site speed) until we see what direction Google ends up taking this in.

"the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title" In that case, I wouldn't use it. I can't speak for Portugese, but in English, in the last 2 or more years I can't remember any cases I've had where Google doesn't recognise the difference between plural and non-plural anyway. What happens when you search for the keyword in plural? Do non-plural results show up? And vice-versa? Trying that out should help.

As your own agency told, I too consider that when the hreflang will be implemented, this kind of issues should terminate. Regarding the sitemap error, it was surely something that could be confusing Google about what site to target. However, I see that you have also an .eu domain name... I imagine that that domain is meant for targeting the European market and I suspect that it is in English. If it is so, remember: In countries like Spain, France, Germany, italy... we don't search in Internet using English, but Spanish, French, German, Italian... Therefore, that .eu domain is not going to offer you those results you maybe are looking for; The .eu domain termination is a generic one, and cannot be geotargeted via Google Search Console. This means that - by default - it targets all the world, hence, you probably can see visits from English speaking users in countries like South Africa, UK, IE, Australia, New Zealand or India, where English is the main language or one of the official ones; When it comes to domains like .eu and hreflang, it is always hard to decide how to implement it. In your specific case, as you are targeting UK, US, AU and IE with specific domain names, the ideal would be to implement this hreflang annotation for the .eu (the example is only for the home page): <rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="x-default"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="en"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com" hreflang="en-GB"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.us" hreflang="en-US"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com.au" hreflang="en-AU"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"> With those annotations, you are telling Google to show the .com to users in Great Britain, the .us to users in United States, the .au to Australian ones and the .eu to all the other users using English in any other country. That will mean that your .eu site surely will target also users in others European countries, both using english when searching (hreflang="en") and other languages (hreflang="x-default"). 2 notes about the hreflang="x-default": People living in the UK and searching in Spanish will see the .eu domain name, because it is the default domain name for searches in every language but English in GB, IE, AU and US; Again, even if you pretend the .eu domain to target only European countries, that is impossible, because the .eu termination doesn't have any geotargeting power (and regions like Europe or Asia cannot be geotargeted via GSC). So it will be normal to see visit also from countries in others continents.

Ruben, In my experience posting to directories does not have any negative influence on a site. Keep in mind the quality of the directory does matter. It is beneficial to have a site listed on particular directories. However, if you're going to spend the time building visibility of a site, there's better ways to spend your time. Another idea would be to create business profiles for the site. These are opportunities to create a profile with a phone number, URL, and a description of the site or business where keywords can be used. Again certain sites are better than others, so choose wisely. If you would like more information on this please let me know. Nick

Great thank you. I'll use the tips you have given me to try and work through projects.

I'd investigate the amount of quality content as opposed to the DA since I have a few sites with DAs lower than 20, especially with the drop that happened before thanksgiving. However, my domains lack backlinks but have more quality content than every single competitor out there in our niche, this in my opinion is google's flaw, using backlinks as the major deciding factor of DA is a big mistake and subjected to much manipulation, such sadness, ( little doge humor ). You never know how active the domain in question is, and if they have the quality content, you could safely land a nice backlink on a site that will become the authority in their niche causing you to also get a boost. Like the above post mentions, SEO hat should come off unless you see some sloppy work that will continue to hold a site back. Or you could use the highlighting of said sloppy work, add some corrections and secure that backlink for years to come at the same time helping that site raise their DA in general. It's time we stop just being focused on ourselves and start lending hands across the net, building backlinks yes, but lasting networks as well. We're all in this together, let's act like it! This community is a great example of what is lacking in the overall web in general. We are the change.

Thank you Peter!

HI, I feel your pain coming from Greece with many of the same issues regarding how people search vs how the language is 'properly' written. I cannot give you a definitive answer but I will tell you how I approach it. 1. ALWAYS write site texts in a grammatically correct way. I cannot bring myself to use foreign letters in place of accented letters or write greek words using english characters even though that is often how people search for things. It looks totally spammy and unprofessional in my opinion so it is a non starter. 2. The moz page grading engine has a lot of trouble with foreign languages and their different tense cases. I think google has a better understanding of this complexity and is likely to only get better at understanding that words in different tenses are all referring to the same subject. So with the above in mind I would suggest for your specific questions: 1. Write the texts in a grammatically correct way that serves the interests of you visitors and present your subject in a proper way. A good writer should be able to find a way to include a variety of tenses and phrases that address the same subject. Depending on the use of the text you can get an 'extra' nominative case into places like a caption for a photo for example.  If you search for 'atvirkštinis stogas' you will see already that google is bolding some of the search results that are not exactly that phrase (stogo, stogai) which I assume are a case and plural variation(?). So google does appear to understand some of the variations already. 2. For minor foreign character variations it could be worth popping one version into the page in a non obvious place (maybe a img alt text?). I am not really saying this is a good tactic - but it might be worth testing to see what happens. Generally if you are ranking strongly for the properly written phrase then you should be pretty strong already for the same phrase using a non accented character in place of an accented one and a single appearance of it in the page might be enough to make the difference. Hope it helps!

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews. The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site. The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.

Hi Ozil, did the answer by Matt and Jimmy offered you hints so to help you better in the strategic decision you were looking to solve? Said that, as Matt told, your question is too big to be answered in a simple Q&A, apart that all the possible recommendations would have the defect of being "generalistic", because this kind of strategic decision can be taken only knowing the detail of your business plan and not only of your website itself. Ciao Gianluca

Thanks! Whats going on with Dmoz? Last time I looked the site was still live but I remember submitting some clients around 4 years ago and still haven't got a response!