Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think that basic on page seo needs to be followed. Meaning that you should have one h1 on the page and above the fold. That will signal to google the importance of that phrase. The rest should be h2 and h3 but used sparingly. This will give google something to compare the h1 to. I know some sites make the mistake of putting all there keywords on the main page in h1, that doesn't work and hurts the site in rankings. I'm not sure what your programmers thinking is, maybe he has knowledge that I don't have which is very possible but from my experience and constant reading of seo best practices h1 implemented correctly helps.

Do you mean the different types of vertical search options that Google has - Google scholar, Google images, Google video etc? there's a decent list here. Or do you mean the different ways that  Google modifies universal search? 1 box, map, SPYW etc? I've not seen such a list and I think that's a great infographic idea.

Matt's statement also implies the changed the codename and/or didn't release the internal codename, so it's really tough to say. Even publicly, they called it the "Webspam update" prior to "Penguin".

It's tough - on the one hand (especially pre-Panda), the geo-targeted content could help you rank. On the other hand, all those duplicates pose a real risk. These days, I think the risk is substantially greater than the reward. You could end up seeing the entire site devalued, even the non-geo pages. Technically, Google could ignore the canonical tag if it thought the pages were actually different. You could use META NOINDEX instead, but here's my question - is it currently hurting you? In other words, Google is ignoring the canonical in some cases and ranking those pages, but are your rankings overall doing ok? If they choose to ignore the tag, but that's not hurting you, I don't think I'd worry about it much. If you're seeing all the pages re-indexed and the duplicates are harming you again, then you may have to get more aggressive.

Many thanks Ryan, that explains a lot!

I find the whole tripadvisor SERP thing highly annoying as an SEO and a search engine user, I don't know what Google are thinking of with their allowing Tripadvisor to be 1,2,3 and even sometimes 4 and more on the SERPS like this, it is NOT what the user wants, nor the hotel. They need to spend time simply on a Tripadvisor update! How much of online search is travel/hotel/restaurant/attraction related? Must be immense. I want to see Panda,Venice, Pengiun, Tripadvisor....

Riplash & PVB : Thanks for sharing your observation about local.    2 - 3 months ago, I joined a thread and asked whether anyone thought optimizing for local would decrease national search SERP rankings and no one seemed to think it would.  My main site got mauled by B&W critters in April.  So, if I set up a new site to replace it, I'll set up a micro-site optimized for local and move the good local links there rather than to any replacement non-localized site.  Again, thanks for sharing this useful info.

I have few concerns about mobile seo. Pls have a look at here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/want-to-target-mobile-site-for-google-mobile-version-and-desktop-site-for-google-desktop-version Can I have any response here?

I have few concerns about mobile seo. Pls have a look at here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/want-to-target-mobile-site-for-google-mobile-version-and-desktop-site-for-google-desktop-version Can I have any response here?

We would really need more information to answer this such as what position in Bing and Yahoo is the site? What keywords you are targeting? Has your site dropped in rankings or always positioned low? There could be a number of reasons why you are not ranking well. Without more info it would be hard to give a better answer.

Anyone?

Hi Joel, Great question. In general, Bing is similar to Google in it's ranking factors, but there are a few differences. For most webmasters, they are similar enough that best practices for one will generally produce favorable results with the other, but it's not a one to one relationship. For example Creating High Quality Content Relevant, editorial backlinks Strong Social Signals ...all help improve your ranking with both engines. Like GIGS20 mentioned, domain age seems to be a bigger factor in Bing's algorythm. It often takes longer for sites to rank on Bing than Google, all other factors being equal. For what it's worth, Tim Grice (aka SEOwizz) notes that Bing seems to prefer links from pages that contain keywords in the title tag. You can read his analysis here: http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/bing-seo-how-does-it-differ-to-google.html As far as Bing is concerned, I'd make sure you're following best practices, like making sure you've registered with Webmaster Tools and making sure your site is indexed, etc. Then work on making your site the best it can be in the eyes of all search engines and you'll be just fine.

Thanks for the reply, I do agree that moving forward with better SEO including link building is important and intend to peruse those efforts. Right now I am just about out of patience and income from this drastic fall from Google. The first things that I feel I need to eliminate are the possible technical errors. For example the search test on Gallery Wrap vs Museum Wrap. Where the addition of the word Photos or Canvas takes us out of the top 100. By the way these all are #1 on Yahoo and Bing. Also the return of a totally different page for the Free Digital Proof search? I don't think this is links!

Thanks Kathy and Andrea. Oh the pain of Penguin lol Andrea, The page is setup perfect with no issues too. I'm going to have to 100% call this a back link issue. But I never thought that it would have this impact on my client. Boohoo Cheers, Joe

To be a tad more specific I have a site that is a simple calculator utility that allows visitors to look up tire variations that are close to their current tire size.  The site was created in 2007 and has some back-links including some references in wikipedia. My goal is to build a simple calculator that encompasses the core tools into a widget that other "car" sites can use at their sites.  My hopeful out come is to build 5-15 new inbound links from sites that will use the calculator on their sites.

I have been looking at the organic keyword search position rankings on Google. I think

I don't know the exact reason for this but I had a similar problem on one of my websites. When I searched for my brand name Google would show only my brand name as the title but for long tail phrases it would show the actual title. I also had a title tag similar to yours where there was a list of key phrases separated by a pipe symbol. I changed this to look more natural by using these phrases in two well written sentences rather than a list of phrases and Google now shows the correct title for all searches. I would recommend trying to rewrite your title tags in this way and see if it makes any difference. Since the recent Google updates many people are now suggesting to naturalise title tags rather than having a list of keywords as was popular before (which could be viewed as over optimisation).

Definitely, interested in helping out.   Email me at greg @ LeanWagon