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That's why you are not sweating the Penguin update... you think and breath like your father.

If I had products like that I would have multiple articles about each product.  These articles would cover every possible, probable, detail, benefit, aspect, question, concern, etc. that a customer might have about these products. I do that for products that sell for under $100 and all of that content on all of those pages gives me an excellent chance of pulling in traffic on almost every primary, secondary, and long tail keyword in my niche. It also makes my site stand out as the place for information and the people who know what they are talking about.  So, even if I don't beat them on rankings, I beat then on exhibited knowledge.  For items under $100 that delivers a lot of sales - even if my prices are not the lowest.  I get lots of links from forums where people are talking about these products and they link to my information pages as a way of answering questions and settling arguments. I believe that this comprehensive content approach is very helpful for my rankings, pulls in the long tail traffic and convinces customers for whom trust is important. It is very expensive and time-consuming to build this type of attack but in my opinion, it paid before panda and penguin and is paying even better now as I see competitors dropping from the SERPs.

URLs will always be important in lots of ways; They are seen by users in many cases (as links, in social media and even the SERPs) and can help improve CTR. They are extremely important to the overall site architecture - and especially for information architecture. They can often become the anchor text in links. They help a user when browsing the site, as if they represent the structure or "level" depth (almost like breadcrumbs) is can make the navigating experience easier. I don't think URLs are something Google looks at in a simplistic way like "oh you're URL says X keyword, we're gonna weigh that keyword more" - I think all of these factors feed into the importance of URLs and I don't see that value diminishing anytime soon. -Dan

Hi Ralph, Excellent question and one frequently wondered over. The trouble is that Google's Adwords Keyword Tool typically shows identical search volumes for keyword+city and city+keyword. I recommend you check out this enormous post on this topic by Linda Buquet: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/849-local-keyword-research-tools-tricks.html While I don't believe their is a simple, single answer for every case, I hope this resource will give you some new ideas on this!

Hi Adam, No we are not the Brighton College in the UK, we are the one in Vancouver, BC, so I think you have our business info mixed up lol. Our website is http://www.brightoncollege.comand our google plus is here https://plus.google.com/100116630212547145177/posts . We are a private career college so 3 - 18 is definitly not our target LOL! We do need more reviews though, i am waiting for the verification card from Google because I just merged the google local and google places accounts. So i was planning on getting more reviews after its verified. Thanks for your  advice! Feel free to add me as a friend here

We saw the May 5 spike across multiple data centers, but we don't track a ton, so it's always tough to tell (our larger system was down for testing that day - it's not public yet). I feel like this is more than a test, though, and some relatively big changes are coming.

Thanks Axial, I'm not convinced it matters much if Google crawls deep pages they wouldn't find through organic links. If the pages aren't linked to they won't have any link juice and therefore won't rank well in SERPs. The link about using site maps for canonical URLs says or implies you should only put your most important URLs in the sitemap. The sitemap tools I've seen tend to take a kitchen sink approach, which is needed if you are using it to try to get a deeper crawl. Plus there's no way (I see) in a sitemap to specify that page A is the canonical of page B. They simply suggest telling Google about page A (and not page B) in the hopes page A will get more weight than page B. A canonical meta tag on page B pointing to page A is obviously a much better way to deal with canonicals. Image and video site maps are potentially valuable. I am asking specifically about site maps for pages. Specifying related content for a given URL, such as different languages, is indeed useful and not something I was aware of. But it is not applicable on most sites and not used on most site maps.

Google has been lowering the value of low quality links such as non relavent guest blogging, because they dont want people to game the system. If you want to rank in Google you need to give the users what they want (value). Google has not officially announced an update, however they have been making changes, and they make about 500 changes a year. If you go to Googles webmaster forum you can see that many people are experiencing loss in rankings. You can check the weather here: mozcast.com Also, I would recommend checking out SEObythesea by Barry Schwarts.

Hi Robert, It seems like your strategy is right now and you were unfortunate to hire an agency that has resulted in the penalty. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I have seen websites that have never recovered from a penalty, even after having the reconsideration request accepted. However, looking on the positive side, and with the links you are/have built there shouldn't be any reason why you shouldn't start to see a recovery. When you got them to remove the links, did they get them removed or use the disavow tool. The problem with using the disavow tool is that some agencies aren't sure what is a good link and what is a bad link so if they just got rid of everything then you have effectively started from scratch but with a penalty hanging over your head so it is going to be hard to rank again. Look at your backlink profile again and compare it to what it was before the penalty (if possible) and then see if you still have any links that look suspect. Any article directores or poor quality directories that are still there, get them taken down.

Hi Mathew, Just to play the devils advocate here: are you sure the lost backlinks are the cause of the drop in rankings? Directory and article links are usually pretty low value and you didn't mention why they have been lost (any unatural link warnings that you have been trying to clean up a bit?). Any drops in ranking/traffic that matches a known google update? 1000 of them is quite a lot, if the site has another 1000 or whatever that are still live maybe their loss isnt the problem, their existance is! I would think immediate actions would be the standard list: onsite improvements in code and content where relevant and try to gain some relevant links from relevant sites. My two cents!

WM, here's the most recent report on ranking factors put out by seomoz. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.  Generally speaking, when you're just getting started, you're better off applying what you learn to your site than to spending time on how it applies to your competitors.   Keep working, you'll get there.

I use no index images on my personal site, as i love to photograph weird and wonderful things around melbourne. the engines crawl but dont index. a little tip, if you are concerned about image theft, implement code so that images can't be saved to file.

Hey, You didn't say in your post, but when you refer to the traffic numbers you are looking at in Google Analytics, are you looking specifically at Google organic traffic? If you aren't seeing a decrease from Google organic traffic in Google Analytics, then my initial reaction would be to trust Google Analytics traffic data over a message from Google Webmaster Tools. If you have some kind of secondary analytics tool (even something like AW Stats installed on your server) that could be helpful to look at as a double check to make sure you've not seen a drop in traffic from Google. The other thing I would like at is your top pages that get traffic from Google organic searches. Have any of those pages dropped? For instance, your home page might have experienced a large decrease in traffic from Google organic which could indicate a problem there. Hope that helps. Thanks, Matthew

Those are the keywords we push in our google ppc and blogs but in terms of ranking we are still low - but then I guess this is where we have to put in the leg work and just keep putting relevant, quality content out there.

I'll 2nd what Jim said.  Also, if you're looking at search RESULTS (not Google Suggest), then after you run your query, append &pws=0 to the URL to depersonalize the results....then see which is chosen. If you have the .org pages 301 redirected to the .com, then you're in good shape regardless.  You should use the httpfox Firefox plugin to watch the HTTP response stream when you type [yourdomain].org to make sure it's a clean 301 redirect to the .com version.

Hey Thanks a lot, I read the google doc, and as I'm still new to SEO, I thought I'd ask here to make sure... I have another Question... The site was not built by me, and I suppose for SEO purpouses (back in the day) the site is externally linked to it's own content. let me give you an example: On the ABOUT page which is www.migrationlawyerS.co.za (Main Domain with letter S) This page links to www.migrationlawyer.co.za/link (addon domain without an S) If I 301 redirect www.migrationlawyer.co.za to www.migrationlawyerS.co.za  will I have to restructure the whole linking system on my website (as I understand a 301 will redirect to the root domain only), or is there a way around that? Thanks, Nikita

Hello, Do you get traffic from more than one country? If so, are you checking your rankings in each Google? Are you searching depersonalized? The last thing, the number of searches does vary, it could just be that there are less searches for your keywords at the moment. Check with google trends.

I am having this problem as well. My photo was showing up in all the articles that I write, then one day a month ago they stopped despite not changing anything. I'm thinking Google changed the threshold on how many followers someone has to have to show up in search results. They must be using it as a qualifier to determine if the author is an authority on the subject.

Any issues with your backlink profile? Any spammy links? Did the competition who outranked your site did any tweaks to their site?