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Hi Derek, I have had a look at the backlink profiles of both sites. While yours is certainly much better than theirs in terms of number and quality of links - keep building links. 400 or so inbound links isn't a huge number. I suggest getting some high quality links from places like BBB.org (paid) or http://www.aboutus.org/DoFollow (free). Now - looking at your on site analysis, you do pretty well for trophy terms like 'Bee Removal' - however I'm going to look at another term it seems you want to rank well for - 'San Diego Bee Removal'. You're getting an F for this according to SEOmoz's on page reports. That term is not used anywhere on the page, in the title, in alt image tags, in a H1 tag or in bold/strong. Yes, you are trying to rank for it on this page - http://www.propacificbee.com/bee-removal-san-diego-bee-control.php - but if this is indeed one of your trophy terms (as I guess it would be by looking at your site) - why not try and rank for your homepage? All those sub pages you have for different areas (Allied Gardens, Alpine, Bonita etc) should have more unique content too - there are way too many pages with VERY similar content. Google is going to frown upon this. Hope this helps, Brad

Actually, in many other spaces we are seeing extreme host crowding, where you might get 8 or more listings - here was one pointed out by Brett Tabke of Wembaster World

Thanks!

Hi Jennifer, Using 301 redirects is the answer, and I wouldn't worry about any kind of penalty from Google for this (any kind of manual inspection would show that it's a legitimate business merger). There won't be any harm in using a 301 redirect, however you will lose some link juice (exactly how much is unknown, but this unfortunately is an unavoidable consequence of moving sites). I would advise installing 301 redirects on a page by page level to carry across the individual strength you've built up for each page of your site (and consequently the keywords associated). This makes it a much bigger job and involves a lot of strategy planning, but it will be worth it as it will carry the existing traffic and rankings across from the current sites. So for example, rather than redirect the entire oldplantsite.nl domain to the newplantsite.nl homepage, go through each page and direct it to the most relevant page on the new site. For example: oldplantsite.nl/brazillian-rose-plant should redirect to the most relevant page on your new site, so something like newplantsite.nl/brazillian-plants This will also be great for user experience too as they will always be landing on a page relevant to the link or search result they clicked to get to your new site. In regards to the various other localised sites, this won't be an issue as long as you use the appropriate meta mark-up and Webmaster tools options. Thanks, David

I did not set a target country as we welcome visitor for every country and have data that can be relevant for most of them. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Thanks! I'll check those out.

Have you considered trying to build up some inbound links more geographically located to the UK?  Sites hosted in the UK with .co.uk domains would be a good place to start IMO.  What was the timing of the drop off in traffic?

Thanks Egol!

Thanx very much for the link Marcus, interesting reading. It looks like there are certain things to tweak to try influence it. Do anyone have experience in this regard that they can add to this topic? Here is my situation, I have a group of 7 companies, represented on one website, now only one of them show on the sitelinks, the rest point to blog articles... so you can imagine it would be better to show companies on these sitelinks.

Thanks again Zach! Are you saying that in my htaccess I should be forwarding addon.maindomain.com and maindomain.com/addon to addon.com? OR is it more complicated/involved than that. I'll def get a developer to do this for me, but I just want to make sure I know what I'm telling them to do and why.

Hi Cornel, Thanks for your answer.

Cloudflare cuts out the spam, so that may be the reason you saw a drop in traffic.

If Google is changing the rules, it doesn't really matter if you make changes or not, in some cases. For example, we've seen issues recently where Google tweaked domain diversity and gave more spots to the same domains. In some cases, that pushed other people down, even though those other people didn't do anything wrong. In many cases, Google seems to test changes and then adjust, so you can see ups and downs. In other cases, I've seen situations where Google pumped up "freshness" (QDF), either overall or for certain queries. So, sites with new or updated content suddenly got a boost, and sites with older content got pushed down, even if those sites didn't do anything. Of course, it's also always possible that your competition has made changes. Even if you change nothing, other people are constantly changing their sites. Now, if only you are bouncing around, and the rankings are otherwise pretty consistent, then it is possibly a sign of a problem. You could be facing a potential penalty, for example, or some of your links or content are being devalued. This can range from something simple and no fault of your own (a site that used to link to use no longer does) to a full-scale penalty brewing. It can be really tough to diagnose "bounce", but it's much more common than I suspect most people think it is.

This is more of a general question not really a personal question or something we would want to do, just lately I feel that google might have a bit too much info on us and everything really. What I would really like to know is if limiting the amount of data we give to google is an advantage or disadvantage in rankings.

Hello again, I don't have much insight on this one, but I can share a personal experience that I think is relevant. I launched an Atlanta, GA based printing website about three months ago, and due to some pre-launch SEO efforts, ranked fairly well after the initial index. Approximately six weeks later, after a "live beta test," my team decided to upgrade the CMS (Magento), and redesign the site to add some functionalities that were missing or buggy. The site was "Under Construction" for about three days, and our rankings increased slightly after the new site was indexed, despite it having less content (products) than the previous version of the site. Recently (about three weeks ago), we added several more products, and our rankings increased dramatically (Google - 52 improved, 0 declined in SEOMoz rank tracking, 4x increase in queries, 2.5x increase in traffic). These updates did however coincide with other SEO efforts, so it's hard to nail down what cause the improved metrics. But... I definitely think that the addition of new content helped. In my market (Atlanta Printing) many of my competitor's websites have been updated very little over the last several months or even years, so it doesn't require much to win that battle. In other markets, this will of course be a different story. I do think freshness of content will impact any search result, like you said, and it absolutely can't hurt to have the "freshest" site in any given market. Again, depending on the search term, fresh content could mean three days old, or it could mean 3 months old, but I advise my clients to publish new or updated content at least every 30 days. I think it all boils down to the competitiveness of the query and the rate at which other pages competing for that query are publishing fresh content. Thanks! Anthony

Hi Joel, Actually, the keyword difficulty tool is exactly what I needed. Thanks for your help! Ana

Thanks for sharing your experience! The title tags on the site in question were being automatically generated by the content management system. Due to the particular subject matter some titles tend to be quite long so it was decided to drop the company name which was being automatically appended and is itself rather long. Unfortunately I don't have total discretion to modify page titles as I see fit, which makes things interesting! I'm now implementing custom <title>tags so that the company name can be appended where it needs to be, in a consistent manner and drop it from the longer titles that need to take precedence. The company name isn't added to the longer titles.</p> <p>I agree that keeping your title short and specific helps, and adding the company name can boost trust and click-through.</p> <p>I guess we all need to remember to regularly check the titles being displayed in the SERPS and to really make an effort to educate content creators about creating good titles.</p> <p>Thanks.</p></title>

Experiment: I did an experiment on a new domain with only a small amount of authority. At the time, I only had a few links pointing to my domain, and the site was 1.5 months old. I was ranking #3 for the term "redding SEO" (the city that I live in.) I used social media, friends, and family from across the country for this experiment. I asked them to search for "redding seo" and click on my site. The Results: Within 2 days, I jumped from position 3 to position 2, and I've stayed there ever since. I didn't do any other link building, or content creation on my site over the 48 hours, so the only factor that I can contribute to my rank change is CTR.

Hi There, SEOmoz flags your content as duplicate if finds 95% HTML similarity. You can use an online tool to compare pages yourself. I like this one: http://www.duplicatecontent.net/ Google obviously uses a more sophisticated method than Moz, but it's still a good warning because pages without much unique content - even if they aren't true duplicates - often have a difficult time ranking for their targeted keywords. In general, it good to have different title tags for each page of content. This most important at the beginning of the title tag. You raised the suggestion of using the main subject of each magazine - which sounds like an excellent idea to me! Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!