Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sorry, but not remembering 100% what I was thinking at the time of writing the response since it was a week ago, but trying to reread through what was written, I believe I was talking about how the SERP may have been manually rated.  While some of the SERPS are ranked via the algorithms google has developed, I've heard and read that there are a number of them that are affected and rated manually by humans.  If there was any human interaction by one of their manual raters, they may have deemed your site less "relevant" for the search. Have you ever seen the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of the SERPs?  Let's say somebody decides your website and the other 2 competitors are not what they were looking for when it came to the search "nlp" or "nlp training.  Well, they could complain and potentially be reviewed by the manual raters or whomever responds to the complaints and drop you.  Since it was before the most recent panda change, I was speculating that this could of been a cause.

Hi Keri, as far as I could tell, it was a combination of things : template change, content change (more than 50%), Title change, new structure/layout of page, new elements/functions added...we basically changed the website. As far as the off site optimization is concerned, I don't think it had a major impact. Our link building was on track, a couple of annual paid directories expired but none of them was so important to have caused the drop, not even combined and I did not renew them. We are now pretty much were we were before the drop but we had a couple of big press releases that I think helped us too.

I'm linking to all the content. The plugin is not live anywhere yet to use WMT. Thanks for your response, I sincerely appreciate it!

From a SEO perspective, the page offers little to no value for search engines. The better question is...why would a search engine include this page in their index? What query might a user type in where this page would satisfy the result and the user would think "ahhh perfect, this is exactly what I was looking for"? There are multiple issues with the page: 1. It has very little unique content. It is similar to a category page. It mostly contains snippets of other articles with links to those pages. 2. The title is almost a match for the home page's title. The home page shows 611 linking root domains. The /weddings page has no external links visible in OSE. The title is supposed to be the main focus of the page. This title lacks focus and attempts to target too many keywords. Additionally, the same keywords are cannibalized on the home page which should win. 3. The only unique content on the page is a couple paragraphs at the bottom of the page. Those paragraphs appear to have been written for search engines, not people. The first sentence of the first paragraph is generally the most important. The first sentence shared is "A wedding is more than just the one wedding day." There is not any realistic search query a person would ever enter where that sentence would be desired as a result. If you feel this evaluation is harsh, that's fine but I am sharing what is the likely view of search engines when reviewing this page. Give search engines a reason to WANT to index the page. Offer quality, helpful, unique content which is not available elsewhere, including on your own site, and the page should be indexed.

I'm not a Wordpress expert, but theoretically any CMS that supports user accounts and permissions can do this, and the rest would configuration/custom development. Would the information mostly be files/data from other sources (e.g. spreadsheets and word documents)? You might be able to get away with an FTP/SFTP solution if that's the case. If actual information (e.g. from your own database) and interaction is needed then you're definitely going to have to do something custom; I don't think there's an 'out of the box' solution that will do what you want. The amount of work involved would be relatively small though I'm guessing, probably 3-4 days for a good programmer depending on the platform/database/desired functionality. Speaking personally, I wouldn't be a fan of Wordpress for a financial application, it just seems like every quarter there's a new exploit. Another thing to watch out for is your hosting; when I'm doing PCI upgrades/certification/audits shared/virtual hosting can be something of a pain to work around. I don't know if the applicable standard for your task would be more or less strict.

I'm not 100% sure on what you are asking, but I do have pages where the title tag or meta description are generated dynamically using a php script.  It's not that hard to do. In my case, I am getting information from a database and generating the title from what comes from the database.  So, once I have my title I'll insert this in the place of the title tag: <title><?php echo $title; ?></p> <p>If you're trying to do what the electrolux page does, you can use data from the php $_SERVER info:  <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php">http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php</a></p> <p> </p> <p>But, I'm not sure what purpose it would serve.</p> <p> </p></title>

it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously. Thank you for connectin with me Keri - i really appreciate it. Best wishes, Vijay

It shouldn't have any negative impact at all. If you are concerned about it I recommend implementing Google's Font API instead, they're definitely not going to punish you for that! It will just show regular text if they don't have javascript enabled. Try it yourself, disable javascript in web developer firefox add-on to see what they see. I'd be primarily concerned about mobile visitors, in which case you should should disable cufon for mobile visitors.

Thanks for the help. So much for the balance between flashy web site and SEO friendly.

Very nicely put

I really see no problem with this within reason. Your best bet is to start by separating layout code into external CSS and Javascript files, so the majority of the code on your page is just simple HTML elements and text. This is 90% of the battle. Reorganizing the content so that your unique, valuable textual content occurs towards the top of the code is the remaining 10%. However, there haven't been any formal studies to prove that this matters much at all. My guess is that unless this is a change you are making on hundreds if not thousands of pages, you will probably see almost no improvement.

When you say you: "Adding us to local business directories" How many did you do?  Which ones did you add your small business to? I don't know about the UK, but there's a ton of directories and sites depending on the niche/vertical you can submit to.  While they don't necessarily create better organic rankings, they can help build your PR + if done correctly help your google places page rise.  It's one of the reasons why we were able to move to the top for the main phrase for our business locally in maps. What's your site? I just searched "local seo uk" and this popped up: http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/local-seo-20-citation-places.html  Are you guys in all of these?  There looked to be 2-3 other posts about local seo in the uk. That's the thing I love about search.  You just have to do it in order to learn more.

yup, i know that problem. too many requests to Google from the same IP. The IPs from which you query Google should frequently change, otherwise you'll get blocked.

It will not create duplicate content issues if the 301 redirects are placed technically correctly (so whenever a request from mobile device or googlebot-mobile comes it should redirect to mobile site only). Here is a link to Google blog that talks about most commonly asked queries related to mobile sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html Hope this helps

Will it cause harm?  Not likely.  If Google suspects the links aren't kosher, it will probably just ignore (or "devalue") the links. As to whether it is a shady or manipulative practice - debatable.  From my perspective, I don't quite see how it is all that different from a company linking to its partners, suppliers, or customers.  The link represents a business relationship, and that relationship has value.  If I have a client in the position to get these kinds of links, for me it's a no brainer - get 'em.  At the very worst, they have no impact SEO-wise, but help with branding and referral traffic.  Google's perspective may differ. As to why the practice might not be working out so well for you - do you run linkbuilding campaigns for the websites you develop?  Does anybody?  Do many of the websites share a C class address? A bunch of links from websites with weak backlink profiles or the same C class addresses won't take you very far. BONUS - a few linkbuilding tactics guaranteed to work: Submitting your website to high quality, relevant directories Running a guest blogging campaign on a number of influential web design blogs Creating TRULY engaging and unique content and promote it via social media

Ah right - OK then. With regards to data coming back from SEOmoz's crawler, I might be tempted to ask them what it is seeing. I should really have a look at this myself because I haven't yet.