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I have experienced a few huge ranking drops (eg 28 positions in one week) in the last month. I was wondering if it was to do with hummingbird?

You CAN submit a reconsideration if you want to, but in the case of purely algorithmic non-manual penalties you will just get a response that says, "there are no manual penalties on your site right now" and no change to your rankings. My opinion is that it's pointless unless you have a manual penalty OR honestly think your site has been unfairly impacted or attacked.

Many thanks for your answer! I've been reading a number of articles recently about the updates to Google's algorithm. Some people say that link building is a dying art, as Google is focussing on more naturally shared content, where as others say that it's worth spending time on. Is it just that no one really knows?

Hi Pania The Keyword tool is not completely gone but has now been replaced by the Google Keyword Planner which is not as useful for keyword research. Here's three other tool suggestions for you: Keyword Eye: http://www.keywordeye.com Jaaxy: http://www.jaaxy.com Market Samurai: http://www.marketsamurai.com I only have experience of the latter, Market Samurai, which I have used for a few years now, but like many others it is dependent on access to Google data which has been diminishing, so it now uses a mix of Google and Bing information. The other two I have only come across recently. I hope that helps. Peter

Hi sir Google started fetching again thank you for your help

Bing cares a lot about errors, where Google is not as concerned as long as it can crawl your site. As Trenton suggests, use Bing Webmaster Tools and then use the Bing SEO Analyzer to get some insight into how Bing is crawling your site. I would also recommend reading 27 Things That Help and Hurt SEO on the Bing blogs - as this lets you know what to pay attention to and what to skip when doing SEO for Bing. Hope this helps. Mike

Thank you jStrong, I have just posted something on that thread too. I am glad to know I am not alone! I hope we can figure out what happened and possibly tackle the problem. Thanks!

Can anyone confirm if this will have an impact on the traffic data showing in Moz? I'm assuming that the data is coming from the Google Analytics data and will therefore be affected in the same way?

There's no difference, SEO-wise, between domain.com and domain.___ (insert your flavor here, .xxx, .info, .ws, .travel, etc). No search engine considers any TLD to be better than another (not even coveted .edu and .gov). Some things I do expect to see, tho Phising explosion - Hey, you have a complaint listed against you on ebay.web. Hurry and get it fixed! A massive spike in exact match domains and generic terms Branding is about to be a LOT harder. Previously, it wasn't too hard to police things. If you owned a .com you could kinda fend off the pretenders. There weren't too many TLDs to choose from and people aren't as likely to be fooled by a .ws as they are a .net. But now? You can be moz.web and host your own Whiteboard Fridays! Sure, Moz has an army of lawyers and will probably legally pile drive you into the ground but if 100 people did that... Yikes to the legal bills. How close can you get to someone using the same domain in a different TLD before it infringes on your identity? Something tells me it going to be left up to the courts to sort that one out.

Thanks Chris, I think it was around January this year that we moved away from 'data presentation software' when that was action'd the move was pretty quick and our site moved to 5th position in the US for the new term. It stayed there for a couple of weeks. As the year went on we noticed that the ranking in the US was moving away (downwards) and there seemed to be more of a determination occurring in the SERPs positions for this term when we saw algorithm changes in Mozcast and Algoroo (please note I don't get too hung up on Algo changes, it is used as a general indicator). However we did not see the same impact in the UK and other countries. In fact overall our ranks in September are much better with many more US No.1-3 ranks and 4-10 ones as well but this homepage one is our troubled rank. Reading about Google 'Hummingbird' I'm thinking has this benefited our site overall in September, well like others it has not been detrimental but why the issues in US for our home page? However, if it can be hard to move away from and established keyword phrase then why the discrepancy between the UK and the US, what factors or algorithm indicators are causing such rank differences? Surely what is applicable in the UK also holds in the US and vice-versa. Unless that is not the case and this is where my concerns about geographic relevancy of the domain comes into play. I like your thinking about new links that aid our re-positioning, we do this with our customer implementations on specific landing pages, especially in the local government field and yes it does work and I feel supports our SERPs in Google. In terms of links in the US well we have many from say for example the CDC and the World Health Organization (e.g. pulled from OSE http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/atlas/countydata/atlas.html) and over 25 US State Departments of Health, how many sites even in the US can claim to have such powerful trusted domain links? Thanks for your input Chris much appreciated.

Rand covered this nicely on Whiteboard Friday recently

This post may also be of help: http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

There has not been a need on my end, but here is how you can easily do it: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168546-How-do-I-add-a-CNAME-for-Google-PageSpeed- Hope this helps

excellent link. Thanks for sharing.

use absolute internal links, safer in general. do not stress more than naturally needed. GET THEIR LOCAL SEO GOING. think of users, if I am copying that relative link, guess what, as a user, i have to actually DO the part that crawlers take care of in a nanosecond via code... and that is just not so cool in today's ADHD user world. make it easier to get links with every available ounce of opportunity, and this is just a tiny one. what do you mean getting no links at all, that sounds like you are in a deep black hole!

Be forewarned, you stop paying Yext, and all of those changes and accuracies made sure of, are kaput. Do this math: Do what yext does, manually yourself or outsourced, ONCE, AND CORRECTLY. and you are pretty much set for life. else, you pay $300 a year to Yext and in return, they give you a whole lot of free listings and a few unique and paid ones, the value of which is really not that much more than the free listings you can manually create on a good 95% of yext partners. Also, there are a lot more legit local directory sites to use on top of what yext has to offer which will be missed if one pressed the button, pays, and forgets. just my 2 cents on Yext.

To date my site does not get a lot of user engagement via G+, but I am helping those who write for our site with their G+ accounts.  Our writers are experts and practitioners in our niche and they are not (nor do I expect them to be) SEO experts.  I explain to them the potential benefits of G+ and help them set up rel=author to get credit for both the articles they write for our site and also the articles they write for other sites.  I also encourage them to increase their circle.  I'm confident our readers would prefer to read articles by experts in our field rather than ghost written articles.  I also compensate them better than ghost writers.  I think it's a win/win if these experts' photos are in the SERP and they get the recognition they deserve and it should improve the CTR as well.

I agree with Lars and would add that the links will be more helpful if they are from relevant high quality sites rather sites that don't have anything to do with your site.

Irv_Co First, I wish I had more information to inspect to see if I could help. Given I do not, it is common for people to skip over the "7-pack" local listings and go to organic IMO. You are talking about a keyword and not a url which, again, gives less info. For the url that you have in the "pack" you won't see that url in the organic. You can have a different url in the organic however for the same keyword. Do you have any reviews showing for the url in the "pack"? That will draw attention to your listing. I hope this helps a bit. Robert

Thanks Vadim!