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Use a subfolder URL's like http://americanbank.com/ Only purchase new domains to protect company's name do not do it to rank and pressure during geo-targeting ( like you, for instance, you may in some cases THIS IS NOT ONE that I know of need a Russian IP and TLD to rank in Russia) So if you do not need to rank outside the United States just by the .net .org .com 's) Using a subfolder will increase the domain and page authority as opposed to using the some domain that will be treated somewhat like a new domain by Google. There are advantages and disadvantages to each however if you want to rank you want to use subfolders primarily if you want to separate your site into different branches, and maybe some of them are for landing pages and some are private for content that is sensitive in nature want to use a subdomain. An example of how much more power you can get out of the site by using a subfolder versus subdomain John Doherty an extraordinary SEO did this to hot pads here's a large photo below https://twitter.com/dohertyjf/status/563871687247003649 http://i.imgur.com/K2oi8J8.png http://i.imgur.com/K5aoxWX.png I am sure you can find similar cases using this http://topsy.com/trackback?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fdohertyjf%2Fstatus%2F563871687247003649 should not redrect me to  americanbank.com/business (unless for very good reason) It appears you may be keyword stuffing your URLs. Maybe not intentionally I am not blaming you of anything but be careful Of the word business, it's not needed that many times. You have a big redirect problem you should not use 302 redirects to the homepage (try it using this https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/ )  you have a very slow page load time as well unfortunately https://varvy.com/pagespeed/ http://i.imgur.com/oqj8hjT.png I only keyed in your URL "https://www.americanbank.com"  the server redirected to what is shown below Scan for: https://www.americanbank.com/index.php/business Hostname: www.americanbank.com IP address: 198.61.143.68 System Details: Running on: Apache/2.2.15 I checked for malware and what your sites running on my crazy sorry but it tells me a little bit more about your internalstructure https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/www.americanbank.com/business  I will run your site through deepcrawl.com as well in order to show you more issues. List of Links Found /business /personal /about-us /ask-us /security-center /locations https://www.americanbank.com/about-us/mobile-deposit https://www.americanbank.com/ask-us/hurricane-preparedness https://www.americanbank.com/about-us/online-statements /business/loans /business/loans/term-loans /business/loans/lines-of-credit /business/loans/sba-loans /business/loans/construction-loans /business/banking /business/banking/checking /business/banking/savings /business/banking/cds /business/banking/cards /business/banking/online-banking /business/banking/mobile-banking /business/banking/phone-banking /business/business-services /business/business-services/ach /business/business-services/digital-deposit /business/business-services/merchant-services /business/business-services/imaged-lockbox /business/business-services/payroll /business/business-services/positive-pay /business/business-services/wire-transfers /business/business-services/night-drop /business/business-services/business-bill-pay /business/investments /business/insurance http://ipindetail.com/ip-lookup/198.61.143.68.htmlRackspace is an excellent hosting company however if I was a bank I would be on FireHost.com now https://armor.com I need to run your site through https://www.deepcrawl.com or screamingfrog.co.uk/seospiderIn order to get an idea of what's going on. However I can tell you that for things you want to rank for a subfolder is better than a subdomain. Hope I was of help, Thomas K5aoxWX.png K2oi8J8.png oqj8hjT.png

Thanks Miriam. Much appreciated.

Thank you for your input, Peter. I'm hoping someone from MOZ is able to disclose / confirm these stats. Do you by chance have more information as to how you came up with these percentages?

I consider 100% match purely as theoretically possible. In my modest opinion the visitor determines the relevancy of the landingpage. And it is Google's nobel job to serve the visitor with a page that fits his needs. But in this case no page can be fully satisfying to everybody, due to different search intentions with the same keyword. When you achieve a high conversion on your page you'v probably written a very relevant page. So let the visitor truly find what he is looking for and Google will notice....

Hi there. Well, 3 spots drop in rankings is surely not "quite dramatic drop". It can happen for many-many reasons. What I would recommend though is to check if the domain name you have purchased ever had (or still has) penalty or spam issues. Usually, if everything is clean, it wouldn't affect your rankings. As for irreversibility - nothing is irreversable. However, if that domain was in fact the reason of ranking drop due to spam issues, then it might take longer to recover. Yes, disabling would be the first thing to try if you think that was the reason. See how your rankings react, if there are any sudden changes. However, I do recommend to check other factors like your backlink profile changes, content cnahges, your competition SEO changes and so on. Hope this helps.

Hi Marc, No worries! I hope it helps. Let us know in the thread what you do and if certain things help more than others. I am currently running some tests on articles getting ranked and how to outrank competitors for specific keywords and then seeing if those keywords actually bring revenue. Also some reputation management stuff. If you have any questions on any of that stuff feel free to message or email me. erick.at.brandsavvi.dot.com Have a great Thanksgiving! Erick

Hi Dirk, Thanks for the response! After performing several crawls for tracking code, we did find numerous duplicate URLs existing with tracking codes. As of September, they started showing up in GA with low traffic, but by end of October, it was evident that they were splitting organic traffic from root url. We are in process now of cleaning up. We are hoping this will resolve it.  However, we think the damage might have been slightly done and we may have to kiss some panda butt to get back into good favor. We are just now starting to see drops in page rank due to this.

Usually a page is omitted because it's very similar to another page on your site, and Google has determined that the other page is more important. Since the category page is probably higher up in your site architecture, it would make since that Google would rank the other page. Now that you've put the effort into making your landing page more unique, I would give that a chance to rank. One thing you can do is find additional places on your site to point some internal links to your landing page, and try to build some links from other sites to that page as well. That will help you tell Google "hey, this page is important." Good luck!

Good answers all. Thanks! Can you guys come to this meeting with me? He thinks if you buy a domain with some links pointing to it already, that solves problem one of a site passing some authority. Problem two, pulling it off, he thinks would be relatively easy. Gah! Here's how I feel about this: https://youtu.be/AwY4pzb0Pjs

When my news enter the google news, my article displaying the first page and top 10 results. So getting more traffic from news. But now my article again displaying the news but, we not get traffic from news. My article not changed. We are a journalist. some time some news we getting news agency (writing source). But usually we writing own articles.

I think the API will help, but for the same date range, no filters, etc, the data shouldn't have changed. BUT Google has been known to edit their Search Console data, or they have in the past when they found discrepancies. There are any number of reasons why, but I am sorry we couldn't nail it down for you. I really do think the API will help. Best of luck!

I usually optimize mainly for the short tail keyword, and try to include lots of diverse content that will also qualify my page to rank for long tail queries.  Why?  Because many of the long tail queries contain the short tail keyword within them. I will make an effort to place my most important long tail queries in the title tag to give the page extra ranking strength for them. If you have really strong content that is competitive with what is ranking on the first page of Google for a short tail query, you should not hesitate to go after the short tail query.  If you can produce competitive quality content - Do Not Fear Competition -  because where you have heavy competition there is also lots of traffic and lots of money changing hands.  Optimize your page, make sure that is as good as you can make it, toss it up, and you will probably connect with traffic.   Promote it as you feel necessary. Although I currently don't believe anyone who claims to understand RankBrain, I believe that it is going to strongly favor long tail content that is highly competitive.

Hello Claire, From what I have observed Google seems to give a boost to fresh content, or even re-freshed content. I have seen this effect in the following situations: When updating the publish date on the page- When updating the last-mod date in the sitemap When refreshing a page WITHOUT updating the publish date (though I don't know if the dateModified tag was updated.) As for empirical data, none that anyone is willing to share publicly. But this is a real effect that has been seen over and over again by myself, and several people I trust. Take it for what it's worth, but going back through old content and looking for ways to improve it, bring it up-to-date, and ensuring the last-mod tag in the sitemap gets updated is a very good use of your time as a marketer.  

I didn't provide the query, but I'm glad I didn't. If I had, then you wouldn't have guessed, and we both wouldn't have noticed how the other phrasing changed the meta length. Not sure how relevant it is to overall SEO strategy, but makes me curious as to why. Ruben

Just as an update to where we was with this I have seen this article this morning where many others are seeing significant activity around the 20th 21st but still doesn't appear to be clear what is causing this. Still it is an interesting read and update. http://searchengineland.com/google-update-their-ranking-algorithms-some-webmasters-believe-so-234185 Hope it helps

Thanks again Marie! You've been really helpful, and it's much appreciated. Unfortunately, we've still not found anything that could cause the issue. That thread shared was really interesting, but their problems was quite different to ours. They lost traffic immediately after moving their hosting, whereas our client lost traffic 2-3 weeks after moving server. I'm still not ruling out the possibility that this could've been the catalyst that set off the big drop. We're stumped; but still dedicating time into solving this issue. I'd love to drop the client's URL in here but I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate us sharing it in this way. The only alternative would be to DM it to someone who knew what they were talking about.

Issac, When you say "simplifying" can you give us an idea as to what that means? Do you mean shortening or titles are truncated, etc. or do you mean the title convention is changed? So "Hot Fresh Bagels | Bagels Dallas Texas | Bobs Big Bagels" is now what? your question is to unclear to provide a reasonable answer. Thanks

I very much agree with this. Get an audit done first to uncover what happened last year around the time the HTTPS "thing" was announced, then move forward. For your case, HTTPS could help with conversions, but I wouldn't count on it to help with SEO.

THANK YOU so much for your detailed response and effort! You bring up some important points for me to address. Though I can probably take the time to learn and fix a couple of the issues you pointed out, it's admittedly a very overwhelming situation to have gotten burned twice in the past two years by SEO & marketing companies. Being a wedding bandleader is actually a very time consuming job requiring many hats. I joined MOZ Pro a few months ago and have difficulty even reading through or viewing the intro videos in that the lingo, followup on basic tasks, etc. -there's so much to take in and even set up. I realize my weekly reports don't mean alot if I can't put the time in. For me to take a shot at one of the items you suggested for example: increasing my loading time, which is crucial as you mentioned - sounds like it could get pretty drawn out, and potentially done incorrectly (by me). As SEO practices change frequently, my lack of tech experience is contributing to a downturn of business after several decades, not for lack of effort! Is there a possibility we could chat by phone, or could you recommend some I could contact? I would like to make a priority list and see if I could hire you, or a referral,  to fix some of the issues you had pointed out, without creating a muddled situation. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity. Respectfully, John Harris    John@shineband.com     jharris28@comcast.net   781 545 6011

Unfortunately, there was a lot of speculation around the unnamed February update, but not much solid data. Here's an analysis that SearchMetrics did: http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2015/02/08/google-brand-ecommerce-update-causing-fluctuations/ I've certainly seen confirmed data that some big sites got hit. When the signals are unclear, it becomes a task mostly of segmentation. Were specific pages hit? Were specific keywords hit? What's the pattern across those pages or keywords? Some quality issues are fixable, but these days, you run into situations where pages that probably shouldn't have ranked stopped ranking, and there isn't always something to fix.