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Thanks Andie.  That's what I thought.  I haven't been able to find anyone drawing conclusions that these two issues could be related.  The types of spam are definitely quite different.

We encountered a similar issue recently. We had two pages ranking on Google's front page (lets call them page A and page B). Page A was in the local bucket...page B was below the local bucket in the top 10. We updated our Google Places page to point to the URL of page B. Google moved page B into the local bucket and dropped page A altogether. However, page B did no better in the local bucket than page A. We have since reversed this decision.

Okay I love it. This has been a fantastic experiment. I have a good feeling about it all.

hmmmm! Strange how its stalled this year but theirs hope yet Thanks Alan

Hi Echo 1, What do you exactly mean with 'parallel mobiel website'. Do you mean you have website www.example.com/article3 (which ranks for cars) and now you want to make a mobile website which will be named m.example.com/article3. It is a matter of how important you find / urgently need extra traffic if you persuade the new mobile keywords. Google doesn't say you have to have different words for mobile vs pc. Because you can just use the same content on PC - let say your www.example.com website and the m.example.com mobile website -  if you tell the robots that the 2 different websites belongs to the same entity (also in human language same company). You can read more about telling the robots that the websites belong together on https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

So glad to help, Hitesh!

Hi Mnkpso, So glad you found my answer helpful. Yes, deletion of duplicate listings is very important because the existence of them detracts from you sending a single, strong, correct signal to search engines like Google. If you have just one physical address and phone number, you want only one listing in each of the major indexes and directories. Cleaning up duplicates will definitely be an important part in your efforts to achieve high rankings. It can be hard work, but stick with it!

I have been struggling with this questions myself lately too. After the recent updates, i have been Googling around on various keywords. Basically i used words like product location and started searching on various industry. Some interesting notes i found: moneylender "location" -  top 3 sites occupied by a site with the same design and obvious link wheel. The design of site consist of just 3 images each with their own h1 linking out to 3 different money site(i hate this term) below is some text with links that goes out to the exact same site designs. Private investigator "location" - did a search on this as i had a friend with me at that time in this industry and the top result that came out is a site that no one in the industry has any idea whom it belongs too (and this is a small industry here where everyone knows each other). Curious i checked more and discovered that the site has another website with a TLD that end differently. eg:privateinvestigatorlocation1.location1 and privateinvestigatorlocation2.location2. Both sites has the same text and design! only changes was the location1 was changed to location2. 3rd search SEO location -  the number 1 site has a pa 1 da 1. 0 back links. over and over i did searches and honestly the results are disappointing for me. Got troubled by it and decided to invest in tools like seo moz and this just got me even deeper into the confused zone

Hi Mnkpso, In addition to the resources mentioned by our members here, I recommend that you check the blog at NGSmarketing.com. Blogger and local search pro Nyagoslav Zhekov write frequently about citations and I consider him to be one of the world's few authorities on this subject. If you want to learn about citation building, his blog is a great place to visit.

Tom, copple of things: 1. Your title has 3 instances of magician London in it. Delete at least 2. I never use more then 1 instance of the keyword in a title because it could indicate your are trying to manipulate the SERPS. 2. Clean up your source code. Use external files for CSS of the website also for Google fonts etc.. Your actual page starts on line 202 of the source code. Clean it up. Bring up your cope to at least line 75-100 preferable higher. 3. Agree with the other comments and clean you your backlink profile. With those things combined together you should see some improvement. just my 2 cents regards Jarno

Ok, in my opinion mobile website are not the actual part of the main website (mobile website do not have same status as blog) so it is intelligent to go with sub domain but always keep the visitor’s sensor on so if they are coming from smart phone or ipad it should open a mobile website for them but if they are coming from desktop or laptop in that case it should be the main website for web.

I think he's talking about the tactic of removing pages and simply issuing a 301 back to the homepage. That tactic is indeed devalued. If you're 301ing to a page that's on-topic it's not as bad. In this case, you're not trying to keep PR, just bounce. Remember, also, that a 301 is not perfect. It might not transfer all the link juice through. As I said before, it's ideal if you had content on the URLs they're actually linking to. From an SEO standpoint, that's gold. Dealers link to a page on your site with unique content (hopefully they're nofollowing these links). Google eats that kind of stuff up.

Hey Matthew We have some sites in similar fields ranking highly in local and organic and have done no link building at all. New players, outperforming established players, in organic and local and no links have been built. Times are changing and whilst links (the right kind) are still powerful, there is a multifactorial way of doing things that in many cases is more powerful when going up against folks who have just tried to heavily go after one aspect. I tend to think and our recent experience shows this that search has several factors and the effectiveness of each factor is amplified to some extent when they all work together. Brand, URL, Local, Citations, Links, Content, On Page etc. The keyword in the brand / URL is a great example of this where it can still seemingly help as long as it is not abused and forms part of a larger cohesive strategy. A recent client starting out was advised by us to add the location they serve to the company name and it has worked out fabulously for them. This is a local client ranking in organic and local well above the competition with only 8 weeks or so of very light local SEO (and again, whilst it was one of my guys that did the work, I am sure there was no links built as it was just a whole lot easier than that). Still, there is no better tool than an experiment so try adding some citations and see if you can influence your clients listing as performance for every keyword in every market is different so only through close analysis and tinkering will you know exactly what will move the dial for your client. Marcus

Hi Keri, I am also looking for schema to use for a question and answer site. The content is generated similarly to Yahoo Answers. Users will post both questions and answers and assign them categories. What schema should I use to ensure rich snippets in Google? Thanks!

Option 2, redirect chains should always be avoided and should go straight to the final destination URL.

Just a thought  - would a sub domain be a good idea here? So it would look something like; newbrand.testing.com as a sub domain to www.testing.com? This seems to be an alternative if the hosting is an option. The blog would still be best placed to sit on the main domain, but any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks (sorry if I am just answering my own question here)

Hi Andrea, First of all, I'm sorry to hear your rankings dropped. It's possible your site was hit by recent Penguin updates. Previous Penguin updates targeted entire domains, while the latest edition is said to target individual pages, which might make sense of why your blog is showing up above your main site. Regardless, it's likely one Google update or another targeted your backlinks (assuming you don't have any other issues plaguing your site) Regardless, the producer in these cases are always the same. !. If you haven't done so, do a full site audit to identify any problems. If you run a Moz campaign, much of this work is probably already done for you. http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit 2. Look for messages from Google's webmaster Tools for clues as to what might be causing the issue. 3. Perform a link audit. There are two ways to do this, and you should likely do both: Manual: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/ Automated: There are several options, but my current favorite is called "Link Detox" 4. Work to remove any poison links and file a reconsideration request. 5. As a last resort, disavow any links you can't remove that you believe are hurting you. 6. Continue to build great content and high authority links. This is a lengthy process, but it's possible what caused your rankings to drop is fairly simple and you'll discover it early in the process. Best of luck!

I would also question if a user was searching for just "cocktails" what their intent is? I would focus on slightly longer tail phrases and make the content very relative to those phrases. So after having a quick look around your site the sort of phrases I would perhaps focus on would be, "non alcoholic cocktails", "how to make cocktails" Try to think like the user and build pages for them.