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Good points. Following on from recent developments from the Matts Cutts comments about Directories, we get loads of links which could be, might not be really from Directories.  As these are not top links we have removed some, which we can see are not related to our business at all and have removed these, but some are in that grey area, where the directory has good Trust and authority, but the links are somewhat generic. We have been working on removing links for quite a few a month or so, and we have seen our Global rank drop like a stone, as unlinking is not a good sign from where-ever, so we know this will recover. The balancing of this debate is how far you go to strip back to pure distilled links and allow a few diluted links.

Seems like Google is leaning toward favoring YouTube content with the removal of Rich Snippets. If you can get the same SEO benefit using a video site map and embedding YouTube videos instead, why not have your website visitors increase your YouTube video view counts and possibly add subscribers while you're at it.

While I do not know how Google treats HTTPS in regards to site speed, WebPageTest.org uses the following to score a site's Time To First Byte: "The target time is the time needed for the DNS, socket and SSL negotiations + 100ms. A single letter grade will be deducted for every 100ms beyond the target." Which means WebPageTest does not penalize a site for being secured. Edit: For redirections, 301 everything and change previously added redirects to point to the HTTPS so you don't end up with chained redirections. As far as GWT is concerned, I would add both sites (http://site.com and https://site.com) and use the Change of Address feature on the HTTP one to the HTTPS one. Hope this helps.

I think you might have lost a slight advantage now that your domain name does not contain your primary keyword phrase. I'm not saying having your primary keyword phrase in the domain name is the b-all, end-all, but it helps. Try putting more content on the page. It's pretty thin now, especially compared to the current top ranking sites. You're short on links too, and going up against some pretty big hitters. Try getting some direct links to your Japanese Spicy Mayo page. See if those two things help. Meantime, I agree with Jim McKaye. Stick with it. The dust hasn't completely settled.

With a bounce rate that low, do you by chance have multiple GA tracking scripts, or something that's triggering an event even if no one goes to another page? Look at the source code when you're in incognito mode, in case your CMS suppresses one of the GA codes when you're logged in as admin. [voice of experience and learning the hard way here!]

Thanks Candyman, yes this is not a question about to prevent Google for not indexing my content, I know this very well. It is more about how quick they have done this with the least amount of effort on our part to inform them. Plus it is quite an interesting situation you found yourself in, never heard of this before. Many thanks David

You're a letter too long and a hyphen short. Try re-certification. Believe it or not, I thought about this all night. Friday Night: NON-STOP SEARCH ENGINE ACTION I'll go cry somewhere now. But I'm not really crying. I'm cutting onions, for a lasagna, for one. You can do a pretty easy find and replace if the site DB is capable of handling that. Static stuff can be hard.

Thanks again for your help! I will give those ideas a go. I hope to get to the bottom of it, if for nothing else than to learn more! Cheers.

Hello, If you can provide me with the domain name I can probably best advise you. Once you get a spam action it is nearly impossible to remove all the bad links and can in many cases be easier to start with a new domain name. If you use Majestic SEO, download all your backlinks, then use excel to divide the trust flow by citation flow of each link to find the spam factor of each link. If the link has a value of below 0.3 it is on the spammy side and if you have hundreds or thousands of these then it is probably cheaper and faster to start with a new domain name. Kind regards Rob

Thanks for that reply ... it was very helpful, and I appreciate your company's stance on that.

No problem That link allows you to submit websites other than your own, so you could use it to submit the page that links to you.

Thanks Adam!  I'll just try to keep doing what I'm doing and be patient.

Brand new pages can fluctuate in rankings for a while before they seem to "settle", yes, but for some queries, results are different day in, day out. There is no set time period for a new page to "find its place". Google seems to sometimes test whether new resources "deserve" good rankings: the page may seem high-quality - if Google ranks it well for a short period, does the page attract traffic? Does that traffic stay on the site? Do people bounce back to the SERP and choose another resource? Does the page attract links? Social media attention? A page may drop down in rankings for a time, rising again as its attracts more links. There is really no good rule to go by, besides understanding that a brand new page with good rankings may not have great rankings forever, and that SEO work is still required to keep its rankings high.

Hi, Use schema org 2.0 tags for pages and blog post entries. Google uses these to distinguishes between the two. Use page tags for the category and blog page templates and blog post tags for the posts. A blog home page is essentially a categories page that displays all posts for all categories and shows an excerpt and deep link. Use rel previous / next for pagination for these pages. Then implement a 3-link system for authorship which is optimal for blog seo. Each author has a author page on the domain and all post for an author point to his / her author page. Use the rel=author tag for blog post with the author name in the byline linking to the author bio page. Link the author bio page to his Google+ personal profile with rel=me and make sure they link back from there profile to the domain of the blog under the tab About and then Contributor to. Place a Google+ badge for pages on your blog page and presto your are a nasty mean blog. Hope this helps. PS. see the diagram for 3-link schema. It's Dutch but still understandable I think/hope. Daniel google-authorship-3-link.png

Google will choose a snippet it feels is appropriate based upon the user's query, and often doesn't choose the meta description. Do your descriptions show up as the snippet if you search for a query related to their content, rather than for a site:"mywebsite": + "key phrase" search, i.e. just [key phrase]?

Nope - minimal to no traffic

Remove the following line: Disallow: */wp-content/ And add: Allow: /wp-includes/js/

You are correct, adding code to a page to 'adjust' the bounce rate can effect your 'average time per visitor' statistic. This is because of how google measures the time spent on a page... Normally, if a user opens one page, then does not visit any more pages on your site, it will count as a bounce (even if the user had remained on that page browsing for 10 minutes).  This is because there is only one call made to google analytics when the page is opened.  There is no call made to google analytics when the page is closed. So normally, the 'time on page' is calculated by taking the time stamp of when the current page is opened, and comparing it to when the next page on your site is opened.  The difference between the two is your 'time on (previous) page'. So what happens when a user only opens one page on your site and leaves (bounces)?  This will be counted as a 0 second visit (even if the user was on the site for 10 minutes).  Thus bringing down the average visit time for all visits. What happens when you add the 'adjusted bounce rate' code to your page, is that a 2nd call is made after x seconds to the google server.... Allowing google to know that the user has in fact remained on the page for an extended period of time.  So now a whole bunch of these '0' second (bounced) sessions will be converted to longer sessions based on the time between the 2 time stamps. The more 'one page only' visits you have to your site, the more this has the potential to skew your average session time. On a side note, this will also effect the last page visited of multi-page sessions, as normally google would not know how much time was spent on the last page of the site as well.

I've never experienced a noticable, direct effect in this regard, and have experience with ranking pages well with crazy parameters. As long as things are canonicalized properly and the system isn't creating a bunch of duplicate pages with different parameters, you should be fine.

Try http://www.rankwatch.com/ https://proranktracker.com/ I use them. they are good.