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Hi. A mystery indeed! Have you recently upgraded or changed Web platforms or changed or upgraded what you are using for your site navigation?

Thank you both for your answers. I am still not sure, so let me add a little context: the NYTimes mentions and links to my company. In our blog we could reference the article and the point that is made could be valuable to our visitors. Is there a value to linking to that page? The idea of rel="nofollow" tells me there is, but I am not sure. Ultimately, I agree. Our focus should be value to our customers. But, I would be remiss to not try and take advantage of such a valuable mention. Thank you again!

The one quick thing I would suggest is to look at your "Anchor Text" report in Open Site Explorer and try to determine where those links are coming from. It's very possible they are coming from a single domain e.g. a sitewide sidebar link for example. If the # of linking root domains hasn't changed drastically, this is more than likely the cause.

Thanks Tim. Hopefully someday they'll give me what I want: Historical Data It would be nice to have an idea about how search numbers change over periods of years.

Hi C2G, While each directory has its own rules, Google is quite clear about their stance on this, in the Google Places Quality Guidelines: Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places So, at the very least, until your client has moved, you cannot update his Google+ Local page. I will add to this that, because you should never publish anything but the current NAP (name, address, phone) of a business on a website or its citations (for fear of clouding the record and harming current rankings) you probably should not do advance work on this of any kind. Instead, this would be a good time to be sure you've created a spreadsheet of all of the client's current citations, so that as soon as the move is official, you're working off an organized document doing his citation editing. And, if it's in your job description to do so, the coming months would also be a good time to come up with the content you'll be publishing once the move happens. This could include both editing of current content, including on-page SEO, and the development of new content announcing the move. So, in my opinion, the next 3 months will be a good time for organizing and planning, but the actual 'doing' should wait until the move actually happens. Hope this helps!

Thanks everyone! I appreciate the insights. Ruben

Welcome Leanne! Try to remove manually and disavow which you could't remove! This certainly takes time. Even after removal and disavow, it will take some time to get things going! Try local UK Links. Starting with Top UK directories like Yell, Yelp & others, you can move to few guest posts possibly! No Money Anchor Text Just a reminder! Social Media is going to help in big time! Use Hash tags to get real time shares & like of pages! Ok with content but try to make it more frequent! Regards

Hi Daniel, You are correct using canonical's is for content that is the same or very close to the same. Here's a good video from google themselves if you have 20 minutes to spare https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en -Nick

Google is indexing just over 80 URLs, although about 40% of them are developer test URLs (they lead to live pages of the site though). Nothing in robots.txt. No errors. The Google bot is still crawling, but it's crawling half the pages. What would make it decrease in page crawls? I'm working if there is a broken link or something on the home page that's pointing away from the site... although it's unlikely, I'll check....

I'm not sure there's a one-size-fits-all answer. From an SEO point of view, if the subdomain has a similar design and structure to the main domain, then the new product 'may' benefit from the domain authority of the root domain. On a new domain, the site starts from scratch, although I wouldn't worry too much about a sandbox effect.

Thanks so much! I really appreciate the insight. Ruben

Thanks for asking such a good question. Glad to help!

Would it offer any benefit to your customers? If so then I'd say do it but if you are just doing it to try and pass link juice then I'd say avoid it.

HI Andriy the site is www.over50choices.co.uk the specific page is http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Health/Compare-Health-Insurance.aspx I have just plugged in the Quake Toolbar and see the KW density remains the same for all pages! Is this because the site is DNN CMS templated site - is there anything i can do to get the pages analysed as separate pages? Thanks Ash

Hi Graham A quick look at your anchor text tells me you have an over optimization issue --> http://screencast.com/t/lwzNZgEu5X The very high percentage of commercial keyword anchors linking to the site is why the site used to rank well, and now this is not helping sites anymore or even hurting them. I have seen this many times now, where sites with less authority but more "natural" anchor text perform better. There are some options; You can request these sites change the anchor text to the brand name or domain name You can disavow the links (NOT recommended unless done with a super amount of care). You can do step one AND work on building newer more natural links When Google sees those commercial anchors they know some form of link building has been done, and it gives a negative mark on the site - now sites like that have to work hard to earn Google's trust again.

Thanks, I'll look at manually specifying these parameters and see if they make an impact.

Many thanks Alex, already on all of the points mentioned above but always nice to get some validation for plans of action... half the time that's more satisfying than coming up with them!

Hi Anthony, A full discussion of the pro's and con's of Google Analytics Premium requires more depth than I can share in this response, but I'm happy to answer your questions and answer additional questions or talk offline. Our company is a Google Analytics Premium Authorized Reseller and we have many clients using the platform. I answer your questions from that perspective. "all it seems you gain access to is more support from google" - There are many more benefits to GA Premium than just the additional support, but you also shouldn't discount the additional support. It's quite extensive. You're basically getting access to a world class analytics team along with your product purchase. No other product I know of includes that level of support. This support is provided by the reseller if purchased through a reseller. "I'm talking about the (Not Set) data" - I assume you're talking about (not provided). If you're seeing an increase in (not set) data that is quite fixable. However, Premium customers are treated no differently when it comes to (not provided). You'll see the same data no matter what tool you use. Just be thankful you're (not provided) data is growing. That's a good thing. "Any thought opinions or even more questions" - That's too open ended for this response, but I'm happy to answer questions in detail offline or additional general questions in this thread. As far as the value of Premium, one question you could ask yourself is "How much more value could we generate if we had accurate data, access to all of our data, additional features to analyze that data, and resources to help us make sense of the data?" If the answer is a large enough value then you should seriously consider Premium. Hopefully that helps and I'm happy to continue the discussion. Charles Davis (answering for David) VP, Solutions Director Blast Analytics & Marketing

Hi Jen, thanks for the update. I'm very happy that you now have one less headache to deal with. Hooray! Christy