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well said Chris   thumbs up.

Thank you both Anthony and Andy..

Thanks, you two. Lucky you were able to identify the cause and work to repair. It doesn't seem to be an exact match anchor text problem for us and nothing with a site mixup. I am happy for you! I have investigated a lot, and I am still irked at not knowing what happened so I can remedy. We have lost a lot of potential business and calls from this. We are local and it's the main local terms we've lost position for. I am focusing on doing the recommended stuff now and its been great. I pulled back on the on-page optimizing. I am reading, learning, participating, content  building, content marketing, local, social etc. but still occasionally still trying to figure out what happened so that hopefully, I can get us back for those critical keywords. Still looking for more info, please.

Hi James, I think you are on the right path with these three statements: Get as many as possible of the "directory" links removed Remove keywords from 50-60% of links and replace with branding Forget about whats been done previously / changing it will not help in anyway / and focus on branding in anchor text for any future link building? I wouldn't consider #3 to be exclusive from 1 and 2. If it was my site, I'd work on all of these. I don't know your website URL, but if you feel like it is very Keyword Heavy, I would also consider "de-optimizing" it a bit. Bascially- just make sure you've written page titles and copy for humans.

Hi EGOL, Thanks for the link, i went through the quiz, and a couple of things jump out at me... First it talks about "thin content" being lots of images then a little writing, or just a few paragraphs of text and lots of images on a page... The majority of my pages are like this, we're an ecommerce website, so all product categories have many images and little bits of text etc... I dont think there is too much i can do about that one, as i'm not about to try to pioneer a new way of designing ecommerce stores! lol However, another issue it pointed out is links from "blogs / directories" etc that have keywords in the anchor text... Well i have loads of these, i know my SEO company does link building for me, not too sure how much of it involves directories, but i'll have to speak to them and perhaps get them to stop (remove if possible) them... To be honest this has opened up a hole new can of worms for me lol, what a mine field SEO is ahh... Just looking at anchor text causing websites to drop in rankings makes me wonder, what about the links that are not on directories / blogs etc... do you get punished if they also use key words in anchor text? I mean, i appreciate google saying it doesnt look natural, but who owns / updates websites that hasnt heard of SEO and would not use a keyword as anchor text if linking to someone? I know if i link to a website, the anchor text isnt just the brand name. Also, what about if your brand name is a keyword, i heard before google was giving less weight to companies who use a keyword in their URL... but wouldn't this mean they have no choice but to give a little extra weight to companies with the keyword in their domain.... as now the anchor text can be their brand name... and a keyword... OK i'm straying... getting back on track... if the issue is being cause by this anchor text / keyword ratio... how can one go about fixing this?

Definitely use a tool like OSE or Majestic to take a look at their link profile. Where are their high authority links coming from? Are they hard to duplicate links, or something you could get yourself? Are they links that could be removed once the site is sold? Are there any spammy or blackhat links? Make sure you do a thorough analysis of the site's backlinks to make sure you're not getting a lemon. Also, PageRank can sometimes drop when a site is sold to a new owner, so be aware of that possibility, especially if you are going to be changing the site's content a lot.

Hi Barry, You can learn a bit more about redirects here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection From your description of the original question, I'm thinking that you are describing a problem of having duplicate content on pages like this: www.site.com and www.site.com/index.html Does that sound accurate or plausible?

Interesting point Simon! Often times, search engines which aren't Google are overlooked. Perhaps for good reasons, but certainly worth thinking about. Thanks!

In my experience the links still count. The original article should contain a canonical URL which declares it as the original. We have had several articles shared and the links show up in opensiteexplorer.

hi all, sorry been away for a few days... no work was done to the site around that period...

The site looks great except for what Ryan said and some minor issues. I have personally seen a drop on high-ranking competitor keywords drop for "no reason" for a day or so and get back up there (it could be an issue involved with reindexing). Not saying don't worry about it, but in a day or so I would be more concern. Good luck.

What are the cities? Costa Mesa, CA is the only city we're dealing with at the moment How many links are going TO each of these pages (external and internal)? None of them have any external links pointing to them.  The ones ranking on the first page have this many internal links pointing to them (1st to Last): 1, 5, 3, 4, 4, 5, 2 The page that's being left out has 2 internal links pointing to it. What is the anchor text coming into these pages? All have their company name as anchor text.  The first one ranking happens to have "Costa Mesa" in their anchor text. Are they all listed in your sitemap.xml? All are listed in xml sitemap except for 1 and that particular page is ranking on the 1st page. When you do a "brand name + location" search, are you changing your browser's location settings? Yes, but the SERPs don't change when trying multiple locations.  It's always the same listings.

I have to disagree with Bryan, I'm afraid - I think you carry substantial risk here, and this is a tricky decision. While EMD influence is declining, it still can carry a lot of weight (and quite a bit more than sub-domain keywords). If most of your traffic is coming from those "head" terms, you may see a serious loss by moving from EMDs to sub-domains. Sub-domains have other issues, too, like fragmentation. Since the verticals are very different, Google could treat each sub-domain more like a separate domain. Then, your link equity won't consolidate AND you'll lose the EMD advantage. So, there's actually a risk of a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. Now, to be fair - consolidation can have benefits, like unifying your link profiles, simplifying your other marketing efforts (one site to promote on social media), etc.  Also, since your niches are really just different marketing perspectives on the same product, it's possible that your current sites might look a little thin to Google. In that case, consolidation could help, but "consolidation" would mean thinning out the separate pages, not just moving to one domain with a bunch of sub-domains. Whether it's better for users really depends on your customer base. Do they tend to look for chat products as a general product, and then decide how it fits their industry, or do they look for products targeted to their industry? If the latter, then the separate domains might actually be more user-friendly. Sorry, I know this is clear as mud, but I just want you to be aware of the complexity and possible issues. I would not make this decision lightly. Please note, too, that I'm generally in favor of consolidation and am not a big fan of an EMD-based strategy. We have to be realistic about what works now, though, vs. what may work in a couple of years, and I'm just concerend about the short-term impact for you. My gut reaction, long-term, is that you could build a more product-focused site that has solid landing pages for each vertical, and that each vertical may not need a sub-site. This could create a stronger single site over time. It really depends how much unique content you've got within each vertical, and how your visitors find you. Even if that's a good long-term strategy, it could still have short-term negative impact, so you have to be aware of that and able to weather it.

Jerrod, Use the g+ (email) account you want to be most closely associated with your name.  Down the road, it is going to be how google identifies Jerrod David online. It will include a history of your interaction with Oxford Cloth Button Down, as well as any other interactions, posts, comments that Google can assign to that identity and that identity may bring strength to any domain to with which it's been verified. (Verification is going to be the topic of your next question.)   It's more difficult to maintain multiple identities in Google these days so chose wisely and maintain your online identity as you would your real identity--always think about what you're doing and remember that any action may reflect on you for a long time.

Yes, that's correct - the music files are streaming and I would like to get the user to visit a given URL. That's why I was wondering about an audio sitemap initially, but can see the issues with it.

thanks steve!

Assuming I'm not cloaking any content, how would the Search Engines know it's for them rather than users? Essentially I'd be adding relevant content which, as far as users are concerned, is superfluous. I guess my point is, should I create content for users who are never going to read it, for the purposes of SEO? Thanks

Thank you!

Thanks for your candor, EGOL.  Was just looking for some insight on where I might look outside of the obvious markers I'd already evaluated. These forums have been been extremely helpful in the past when folks have encountered similar issues before mine. Have a great day!