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"I don't think Google is sophisticated enough to breakup a string into words without hyphens" I wonder though... they might very well use the same algo that they use when you misspell something in the search box on google.com Try typing in two conjoined words and it manages to separate them asking, "Did you mean..." You brought up an interesting point.

Yes I agree. Content is still King (ish).

Always optimize for the user, not for the bots. What I mean by that is, create titles that are typically phrases that make sense to people as they'll be more willing to click on that result within the SERP's. The title tag is simply just a one-liner of what the page is about, just in a catchy way.  If it looks/sounds robotic, people will notice, and in turn, crawlers will notice. To fully answer your question: unique is always better.  Creating custom title tags whenever possible, outside of the template, robotic style, will warrant you better results.

Agreed.  Search engines geo-locations tools are based off IP address, so if your work, for example, has a server located in another country, that could throw off your results.  Take my server at work, it's based in the US while I'm in Canada. I usually check things like that on my Blackberry to get a non-biased result (usually). Another thing to keep in mind is if you're logged into a Google account your results could also differ as Google will try and serve you biased results based on your browsing preferences.  You can also append &pws=0 to any given Google search results URL to disable personalized results, ie. http://www.google.ca/search?aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=property+in+spain&pws=0 So, logout and append the &pws=0 as shown above to ensure you are getting the most unbiased results possible (of course, you're still going to be geo-targeted by Google, but unless you have several proxy's, there's nothing you can do).

How strange that today we check our rankings for the profile pages and they are pretty much back to as they were with regards rankings, including pages that we didn't even modify. I believe either Google had a problem crawling our site, a DNS problem or a problem with the Panda update they released last Friday. I was 100% sure before that our content, meta etc was correct and couldn't see why we would of been punished.

Yeah I think it's almost difficult to see it anyway as it's so random and isn't affecting the SERP's in general... it just seems to be literally "some" SERPs. I wish I could give an example. Maybe I'm just becoming more and more paranoid lol

Most of the places where I am defeated by wikipedia are places where they deserve the top rankings.  A few places they don't deserve it for the PAGE but they do deserve it because of the authority of their WEBSITE. In my opinion, donations to wikipedia are paying a HUGE bandwidth bill and the administrative expenses required to run one of the busiest sites on the web. If wikipedia is beating you then you must earn the position above them.

couldn't they edit out the links back to your site?

I have not placed the code on my site yet but Google seems to be figuring some formats out without the code as I see bulleted lists, dimensions and prices displayed for some of my pages. Even if this data does not improve rankings it might improve your clickthrough rate - especially if you have a kickass price or provocative product bullets displayed.

May I ask the reasoning you do not want the term displayed on your site? Some questions: Can it be displayed on another page on your site and then use anchor text? Can it be used in your page title? The title would not be visible on your site. Can it be used in ALT text? Can it not be used by you are the page's author, but then perhaps by users in comments or testimonials? I understand there are situations where a site owner does not want to refer to their product or service by a specific term which may have a negative view. For example an "Assisted living center" may not wish to be referred to as an "nursing home". The site owner may not like the negative view some seniors have towards the term. In those cases a site owner can offer a page on "Assisted Living" and use testimonials to help associate the page with the preferred keywords. "I never wanted to live in a nursing home. ABC Communities lives up to it's reputation as an Assisted Living Center by helping me with the things I require assistance with, and otherwise letting me live my life freely". User generated comments can also be used in this regard. If the sole reference to the term is anchor text from an external site, then as Alan suggests your page may be deemed relevant to the term but it is unlikely you will rank well for it if the term is at all competitive. I checked and the first page of results already has the site hypnoband.com listed a couple times, multiple listings from YouTube, other sites with hypnoband in the name, etc. You wont be realistically able to make the 1st page of results without using the term on your site.

I read it as only really applying to on-site links. So if you have the same anchor text link on every page (like the side nav or footer) Google takes that into account (in a better way). In general, you don't want ALL exact match anchors -- there was a WBF post on it.

I'll just add that I wrote a post about this topic recently: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/im-ranking-wheres-my-traffic

I don't do local myself, so I haven't tried this, but I have seen the suggestion of getting testimonials from customers and including the customer's cities next to their names in the testimonial.

Whenever hearing SEO news from a non-industry source such as entrepreneur magazine, my first recommendation is to locate the actual report from the source. In this case, the source is Google: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html If you desire further analysis, the next best thing would be locating the topic on a trust SEO site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday. The goal is for you to obtain the most accurate and complete understanding of the change and how it affects you. Outside magazines often add glamor for headlines, make interpretative errors or miss important consideration points. This is not a hit on Entrepreneur magazine at all but a recommended best practice. For this update, certain keywords are affected. Specifically those which are deemed affected by a "freshness" factor. The impact to your site depends upon your content. If your page titles are "sunglasses", "MX1000 Sunglasses by Revo" and such then the impact will likely be low. If your page titles are "Justin Bieber sunglasses" or "SuperBowl sunglasses" then the chance of your queries being affected by freshness are much more likely. With respect to exactly how Google responds, no one knows for sure outside of Google, and they don't explain the details of their inner workings. It is highly likely they are looking for brand new content. For the most part, this is new web pages. They may accept new content being added to existing pages as well. What we can confidently say is that changing the date on your existing content or shuffling words around aren't going to help.

We know that social signals affect Google rankings, but I wouldn't say that Google's reacting to breaking news is all driven by Twitter or Facebook. If something majorly news making happens, there are going to be tons of articles being published by news sources, which especially the trusted ones, we can pretty much assume are constantly crawled by Googlebots. I'm not entirely sure they do have a massive traffic loss to Facebook and Twitter given that they rule the search market and you use Google differently than Facebook or Twitter. (Just my 2 cents about the current atmosphere.) I think Facebook building a search engine would be interesting. However, it would also expose a lot of their privacy issues. Have you ever Facebook searched for "hangover" on a Monday morning?

A good observation Ryan, I tend to agree with you that Google's numbers would increase if more of it's properties were included in the calculation.

nope. wasn't a panda thing (our general indexing problems predate panda). and, interestingly, our search traffic didn't actually decrease in the weeks that followed the crawl volume drop, so maybe it's not a big deal. still seems not good.

is the "google sandbox" something we still need to worry about as well?  I think I recall google penalizing new domains for a while before allowing them to show up more frequently in search results?  Would that also affect these?