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One of my EMD's is outranking my main site for a low competitive keyword without much of a link profile at all.  It's a very simple site only one page, but has very unique content.  It was more of a site to just play with, but for not much work it ranks first for the phrase over about 10 other sites that appear to be optimizing to the keyword.

What's important with your meta descriptions is to make them appealing enough to get your user to click on your listing. Meta descriptions no longer add any ranking value, but they do add marketing value. Put your meta description keywords in your first sentence, as they will be bolded if they are part of the search query. Put your action or power words, (Words that would motivate your searcher to click your listing) also towards the top of your meta description. Towards the end of the description they will get cut off.

_As long as the domains are somewhat related and as long as you are not redirecting hundreds and thousands of them, you are safe. It is quite common practice. For say, if you have a domain like this – http://www.example.com , you can always buy the following domains - http://www.example.org , http://www.example.net , http://www.example.me etc. However, if you are buying domains which are thinly related to your website and then getting then redirected after building tons of links to then, it could be a trouble for your website in the long run. _

Hi Braunna, It sounds like you deleted pages, then remade them. It is great you're keeping up with the freshness of the site but for search engine purposes you should have simply updated the current page with fresh content, or remade the page then 301'd  the old page to the new page. In general you should try to avoid deleting pages or remaking the same page with a new url unless there is a reason greater than content driving the decision. Such as a new CMS (content management system, Joomla, WP, OSC etc..), switching server side scripting (php to asp), or overhauling navigation and architecture. If there was a case of a the page simply being completely useless and you are removing it completely then 404 would be correct. If you are seeing any duplicate content issues in this case it is likely because the search engines have not de-indexed the old page or it is still in their cache. Google can help you with removing cached versions and forcing de-indexing. I hope that hit the correct answer for you. Happy New Year

Well, i'm ranking for both so it's all good However, it has given me an insight to review the keywords driving traffic and amend the page title to a much longer one.

For me it consisted in explaining to clients that it's absolutely impossible to offer them any fixed deadlines and clear results. Most of them expect me to say something like: "In 3 months your website will appear among the first 5 results in SERP". During the past year more and more of these people came to me. What I will do to overcome this in 2013? The same things I did this year as well: keep calm and patient and try to explain to each and every client why  I can't predict search engine behavior with 100% accuracy.

_Again I do not like the approach. It seems like you are in a hurry to get as many links from different websites as quickly as possible. Do not treat link building that way. Take it as an attempt to gain exposure and believe me it is time consuming. For say, to get your website approved by Dmoz.org, you might have to wait for 6 to 8 months on an average. Moreover, instant approved directories are not that great as spammers mostly troll there. So, hold the horse. Prepare a list of niche and quality directories and then approach them. _

Lots of questions here. I wouldn't assume that your #1 position is secure. So rather than ask why, I would be working to shore up its position by establishing more quality signals, such as earning some links from high-authority sites and setting up Google authorship on the site.

I wrote a blog post about it in the past. I think it is still works: http://blog.search3w.com/google-uncover/how-to-have-a-good-rank-in-alexa/

Then you probably have to give it time. Here is a link of google support for crawl time. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34439

Klarke hit it briefly in his reply. The problem is that you were "artificially" achieving your previous rankings and traffic by means of paid links. Those links are what Google was using algorithmically to value your site for ranking purposes. When you received the manual links notice from Google (you were discovered using paid links) Google placed a filter on your website AND discounted those paid links. When you removed those paid links to recover from the manual penalty you also FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED the backlink value and overall algorithmic strength of your site in the process. Bottom line: when Google removed the filter from your website you were left with a much reduced backlink profile that no longer had its previous ranking strength. The result? Lower rankings. Further, there have been over a dozen algorithmic Panda, Penguin, EMD, Top Heavy and other assorted  updates by Google during the course of 2012. Any of them could have also adversely affected your sites' natural ranking profile. If you haven't done so, head over to the www.panguintool.com and compare your site accordingly against the more notable updates. That will allow you to pinpoint if and where you were affected so you can make necessary content or backlink changes as needed. I hope that helps. Otherwise, drop me a note for a full penalty site audit and we can go from there. Happy Holidays and good luck!

You are very welcome.

Ok thanks.

Thank you Eric

You are welcome Andrew. Yes, Mozcast is pretty nifty!

I believe that the balance of the link outweighs the threat of penalty from low quality sites scraping your content - providing your not already seeing warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools. If your content is being scrapped there will likely be other links in the content anyway (as it's normally good practice to interlink your content within your own content). Removing the link added by the plugin wouldn't remove the links in the content and you would still face the same predicament as if you were to include the footer link. In the case of your content not being interlinked then the decision would need to be based solely on the quality of the domains scrapping the content and you'd need to do a little bit of research to find the sites that were commonly scraping your content and decide based upon the reputation of those sites. I don't think an answer to this one will be all that black and white as it's highly situation dependent. If it were doing your rankings major harm then you'd be given a warning in your Google Webmaster Tools and you'd know to disable the footer link in the RSS feed. But if you're getting no warnings, initial impressions of the scraping sites aren't too bad and you've seen no other issues relate to the links then I'd keep the link and hopefully benefit from the free backlink with my chosen anchor text.