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In case you haven't seen it, check out this post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-bigfoot-update-aka-dr-pete-goes-crazy Talks about domain diversification and ranking fluctuations as of recent. http://www.eurorailways.com

got it, thanks for your feedback

Honestly I am seeing ranking fluctuations in all language markets but am not doing anything about it. For now I would suggest to just continue doing what you are doing until things have settled down then analyse what has happened thereafter. Doing a change during a change like this could hurt more than it could benefit.

Brandon, You can't always trust what google tells you about traffic . Those numbers could be a long way off. Also, even if you think you have a good position, for some searchers, the positioning could be completely different.

Great tip, hadn't occurred to me for some reason. Here's a post from Rob Ousbey at Distilled going into more detail about how to do it.

That looks logical to me! Plus, from a usability standpoint, the reader can better understand how to navigate the content. I do wonder if you should go a little larger on the images and have the category title, image and description all be the same width stacked one on top of the other. This is not for an SEO reason, but based on the preferences of the average yoga demographic. This arrangement would also (albeit slightly) increase readability of the description.

The more links you have on a page the less link juice you pass along. This means that you can have 100 links on a page pointing to different pages but the strength of the link is reduced by there being so many. You are watering down the links. Now I'm not saying to have just one link on a page but to have links where they make sense. If you have a page on cars and a link to Hanes t shirts it doesn't look natural. Links should be relevent to content. Hope this helps. Good luck

I don't know that I would kill yourself trying to find a Canadian host. Many Canadian sites host in the US. Remember, one of the main reasons to geolocate is latency (you won't get less than 100ms crossing the Atlantic). It helps in geolocation, but not enough in Canada to where I'd be wringing my hands if I didn't have a Canuk host. If you were going for Europe, I'd advise you differently.

My gut reaction is similar to Stefan's  - a #1 to #5 drop may not be Penguin-related. If you saw a clear drop from 4/24-4/25, though, then that's a different matter. Penguin 1.0 did seem to hit all on one day across all countries and TLDs. If it was Penguin and you made fixes, keep in mind that they may not have any impact until the next data update, so it depends on when those fixes happened. Penguin 1.1 rolled out on 5/25. If it was Penguin, the data still isn't very conclusive - some people are saying it's mostly on-page keyword issue and others that it's link/anchor-based. I do think toning down the exact-match anchor text is a good bet and definitely take care of any blatant on-page keyword stuffing as well. If Google just turned down the dial on your EMD, so to speak (and maybe the US took a bigger hit just because of competitiveness), there's not a lot you can do, to be brutally honest. It's not a Capital-P penalty and changing your domain probably won't help - they've just adjusted the volume.

It sounds like you've definitely waited enough time for Google to make a change, so that doesn't seem to be an issue. I can only imagine that Google is still displaying these unwanted sitelinks because it's relevant to the users' search queries and is receiving a solid CTR. If we're talking about the traditional site links (those that include a small snippet of text, i.e, the meta description tag) you can try to tweak the meta description tag in a way to try to increase your CTR for the pages that you would ideally like to show up as a sitelink. This seems counter-intuitive in many ways, but for the pages that you want to demote, maybe you tweak the meta description tag to make it less attractive for the user to click on. Hard to comment further without knowing more specifics.

Hi Joel, I have been working on this for a few weeks now and nothing that I have encountered in business has been this difficult or frustrating. I am just a small business owner trying to make a living. You are correct it is a grind. I think that I read somewhere, there is so much information some good and some not, that the algorithm looking at KWS was part of the panda update that happened on April 24th and that is when We dropped off the grid. Don’t know if anyone can confirm that. I have been monitoring the competition and realize that we are not page one worthy yet and we were working on improving from page four for a very competitive market. Now we are nowhere. One example of a search that led me to believe that it might be KWS is as I mentioned adding one of the keywords, photo or canvas to a search. Example: Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap  -  #2 on Google but if you add Photos or canvas or both we are not in the top 200. I contacted Google – their reply was no manual penalty was imposed. Can’t afford to wait it out, so I guess I will rewrite my content to please Google.

If you're seeing more YouTube results then maybe it's because those things are more relevant for the search you're doing. In which case you have to look at them and see why they are more relevant, as that may be affecting your SEO campaign. If you need to get a video done to compete, then so long as it's quality and relevant (and done professionally, not rushed) then do that. Otherwise, just treat the new videos as a normal competitor and analyse it accordingly to see why they outrank other pages. SERPs change and algorithms change, so how you approach your SEO campaign as to change over time as well.

Hi James, Thanks for responding. We hired an SEO person to help us at the beginning of last year, that ended up not working out. I know she was working on link building, and it seems like she must have left comments on irrelevant blogs.. What do you recommend in this situation, focus time on getting high quality links or trying to get the bad ones removed? And is blog commenting still okay to do on blogs that are relevant to our industry, or does google see that as spammy? Thanks! Audrey

Thanks Ryan.

Thanks Ben. Very annoying how Google does that.

Thanks Charles. The link was useful.

Hello Willem, Yes, in my opinion you should submit languages. I'm not sure but think that main site on .com should be set as basic NL site. For each sub-site (language ver) sitemap in particular language is needed, I have no idea how your sitemaps are created. If on automatic way (plugin or other way) it seems to be a bit complicated, but it's better to have sitemap than not to have, it is worth your effort. Use meta tags "alternative" in section on each site. And ... ask other people, maybe there is something new. Theres a lot of stuff in the GWT blog and forum... Marek

Hi! Michael pretty much summed it up for you. There's no concern of anything bad. Plenty of blogs etc have the URL as part of the date structure (even mine!). If I were to start over I would not use dates - or I would put the dates at the end  of my URL like: domain.com/blog/post-about-something/06/08/2012 But no need to switch now that you've already started that way - especially if you have like more than 10 posts. Its argued in some cases they are good to have for analytics purposes. Almost like Michael is talking about with URLs having product IDs. But you're not in danger of a penalty or unusual algorithmic filter or anything that I'm aware of. -Dan