Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Oh I'm sorry I didn't mean to assume your existing content was weak. What I meant to say was now it is time to build MORE content and get links. Create things that people will want to share with eachother and that will gain you links in a natural fashion. This, in a nutshell, is what I mean by "time to market!"

As Meta keyword is not harmful so you can give it a try but personally I don’t think it will affect unless you really use the most targeted keywords for each page.

Hey Thomas, thanks for the input.  The dictation is a little rough so I'm not 100% sure how to respond.  We do have a wide variety of careers on the site, and thus links coming in from a wide variety of sources. As far as .edu links.  We do have a lot of those as well.  Colleges see value in the site for their students and link over. I guess Google sees differently:).  If there's no way to help the algo see that then so be it.  But if it's something we could do differently I'm all ears.  Thanks again.

Hi Jess, That doesn't seem to be my exact issue.  I was just wondering about an overall, permanent algo change affecting 'site:' search. Though we have not received any GWT notices, I'm trying to figure out if Google may be penalizing / lowering the ranking order / omitting ... for whatever reason... some pages we've previously targeted with link building.  Because when I do a site: search, I'd expect to see the more authoritative pages of a website closer to the top of the first page of SERPS. Russ

My pleasure, Lisa, and I really like the Google=IRS analogy. Agreed! Hang in there. I know how you feel.

First of all, don't make any rash assumptions. Ranking can fluctuate for a while especially following such updates. You don't mention how far you've fallen but I'm currently seeing you ranking at #9 for Turkey Recipes, which given the competition is pretty good! I wouldn't panic just yet. That's not to say that there aren't things you can do to improve you position. For a start, you're up against lots of very authoritative domains and big brands such as Jamie Oliver, BBC Good Food, Betty Crocker (US) and Channel 4. So not only are you having to battle for rankings (especially for the more generic keywords) but getting the click-through from the SERPs is going to be a challenge as people tend to be drawn to the names/brands they trust. As a result, you'll want to make sure that the individual recipe pages are pulling their weight. Lots of recipes getting a few visits is going to be better than a generic keywords sending you very little. Look at which recipes are attracting traffic and which aren't and adjust your content appropriately. These are lots of different factors such as freshness, seasonality etc. Recipes with pumpkin go nuts around halloween! So while I get that Turkey is the focus - don't forget your other ingredients! You could definitely improve the on-page optimisation and increase the amount of descriptive text about the recipes. Just the method and the list of ingredients isn't going to help you capture long-tail keywords. One recipe page I looked at consisted of just 165 words. (The html was ~150k!) Schema markup for recipes can work well. Google has specific search options for recipes enabling you to filter by ingredients, cooking time and calories. Look at how you can encourage ratings and comments. Lots of your competitions recipes have these! From a user experience point of view it may also be worth looking at implementing a faceted search to enable people to search your recipes on your site by ingredients etc rather than just pretty bland top level categories. I'd also consider a responsive design (are people are more likely to have a smartphone/tablet in the kitchen than a laptop or desktop). It would be worth looking at your traffic to see how much of it is coming from mobile. Hope this helps.

Many people complained by the Penguin algorithm effects (myself included). It seems to have attacked Overoptimization of sites, especially with those with the Anchor Text. I have several clients that have a decent link profile but engaged with overoptimization of anchor text and found the rankings tanked almost sitewide. I found this posts very helpful to overturned some Penguin attacks last year: Google Penguin AntiSpam. It also could be some technical bad redirect, but i highly doubt it. The link profile seems pretty clean in hindsight. Was it sitewide dropped, or only in some pages? Regards,

I completely agree with you. Our goal is to become a reputable source of information within our industry. We recently created a blog that links to our website and Facebook; hopefully over time we'll get some worth-wild traffic. We have a lot of work to do on our site in regards to content, but we're confident we're on the right track. 4wheelonline.com : site blog.4wheelonline.com : Blog Thank you.

Thanks Eyepaq & Ruth!

Thanks for the feedback! We are confident that there isn't anything 'black hat-ty' going on with our website; just lots of issues that have been heightened because of the updates this past year or two with no real movement from management to take action. I was advised by our SEO consultant that we should submit a reconsideration because we have made a quite a few changes but still seem to have no impact, even thought, for instance, we have added over 250 articles to our main directory pages. I guess I have to have a think on this, it seems from the few comments here, that we don't really have anything to gain, just opening ourselves up to Google's finer comb.. Hmm!!.... Thanks! SEOmozers

I didn't have them circled previously. But I do now.

Hi, The drop earlier in the year is linked to the fact that we had a complete rebuild and redesign of the website which led to some of our rankings dropping, we were gradually recovering most of our ranking positions but now have seen them drop off severely. I have just found that a site we have an advert on (www.jr-leasing.co.uk) has put the advert as a site wide link and this is sending over 17,000 links to our home page, could this be playing a part? Thanks

Hello So I made the following setup http://awesomescreenshot.com/0561bnia48 But I do not exactly understand what do you mean by "start big and then cut" The ideal for me will just be to know what people are looking into my website. Tks a lot for  your help !

I agree with you if it is directly after Penguin 2.0. However many of the times this is a mixture were you ever officially manually penalized? I can take some time later and go over your content for you and your structure of your website using scribe for your content and I will look over your general website structure however you could just run a campaign on SEOmoz here, and that will tell you a lot more about your website then I'm going to do tonight. I'm sorry I can't spend more time on the site however I will do an analysis of your content and I will check out your back links.  I would use open Web Explorer to will get your own links look for directories, anything spammy what I mean is if you would not use that link to find what you're selling then it is probably not a good link. Remember to build for the visitor for the search engine by doing that you actually are building for both.

I lost one, but gained one. It was awesome to see that traffic spike back up after almost a year

Thanks guys, much appreciated and very useful. I just found Rand's whiteboard on domains and found it quite useful too - see 3: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name and this on hyphenated domains: http://www.highposition.com/blog/hyphenated-domains-google/ - but it's hard to know. Might set up some of my own tests.

Thank you for your reply! Just as I imagined, they don't pose any real issue since the healthy links will outweigh them in importance. I will inform the site owner that we should keep doing the marketing and promotional work as done so far, as Penguin did hit and rankings are almost all the same now. Thanks!

Hi, there are hundreds of reasons why a page can drop in rankings for a keyword, so it's impossible to tell what's going on without knowing more specifics. Some common reasons for drops include: Overly optimize anchor text Losing links Google devaluing previously valued links On-site changes Technical errors Google algorithm updates Competitors improving their SEO Poor user metrics Etc.

We have bridge sites targeted to create content and give us good anchor text and backlinks to our site.  In the past week or two we have had a serious drop in national rankings for some of the terms.  It turns out the bridge sites were hacked: weight-loss-camp-california.com weight-loss-camp-massachusetts.com They are still broken right now, but one of our developers is on it.  This could have lead to the rankings drop.  We are a white hat organization, so it was interesting to see a drop even if there was an algorithm change. We check rankings in two ways, locally, and nationally.  Locally we saw a SMALL drop in some targeted markets, but nationally we dropped from #2 to #5 almost over night. I do not understand why this happened... It has happened in the past, and we just waited it out and we actually returned to a better-than-before position.

You should redirect by mapping the pages appropriately.  The old sites seems like you are kind of abandoning it, so whatever rankings it currently has, will likely drop over time and the links will lose value.  As long as you are staying active with the new site, everyone wins - visitors get to an active site that is being updated, instead of an abandoned one.  You win because you are not going to have to worry about the old site or losing that traffic or losing link juice.  The search engines win because when they send traffic to the old URLs, the visitor ends up on a better site with fresh content.