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Hey Erin, Thanks for the further explanation and clarification. I really appreciate it!

Depending on the size of the company, it might be better to leave subdomains out of it. Subdomains are like brand new sites, so you'd be working a lot harder to get things ranking if you went that route. You don't have a ton of pages per category, so everything might be more manageable under the single domain with good URL structure. Websites that aren't AT&T need all the help they can get, and keeping things in subfolders instead of subdomains will help keep all your authority under a single domain. So, site.com/business, site.com/personal, etc.

How Was The  Ranking Ractors Survey ?? Cheers.

A few ideas for url and titles: Repair link YOURDOMAIN.COM/san-diego-driveway-repair Installation link: YOURDOMAIN.COM/san-diego-driveway-installation Also for the home page title: San Diego Driveway Company | Driveway Repair, Installation, and Maintenance By having your pages separate, you can optimize more effectively on each given term, in a way that does not offend the user. Most often, when a search is done for that particular keyword, the user will come directly to that page, not even aware the other pages exist.

Cool, Wayne. I hope it does help!

Hi Zack, Just checking in to see if you had run any other tests to determine why this message might have appeared (e.g. a site crawl to find duplication / bad canonicalisation, etc.)? Let me know if you still need assistance. Cheers, Jane

if you agreed to pay him for services, I would satisfy that payment and then break all ties. Sounds like this person is very vindictive. I think you are wise to get out now. To answer your question, yes there are ways to hurt a sites ranking. We only practice white hat seo at our company, but we have been approached by other seo companies to do some pretty questionable things. (We used to be an outsourcing destination for SEO) Some of the things we have seen include: 1. Using proxy servers to overwhelm a websites bandwidth,causing the server to crash 2. Setting up false citation sites with a similar or exact business name and creating false bad reviews 3. Buying up paid links from banned sites, and pointing them at the domain and many more.. Its generally best practice to not hire the people that claim to be white hat (or otherwise) seo experts. No one person is an expert at seo, we are all using what we know to be best practices. If someone promises or guarantees you anything, run away. I agree with William on keeping an eye on your webmaster tools reports, and also change ALL your passwords. FTP, cpanel, hosting, CMS, Email, etc. If you need any assistance, pm me. I'd be glad to help. I hate it when people get taken advantage of like this, by people that don't know what they are doing.

Glad to help Ryan. It sounds like you have a good plan going forward. As long as the site has good content and seo, I'm sure you will be fine. Best of luck with the new site!

30 days isn't bad. I'm just hoping it's not much longer that. I appreciate you sharing your tests. Best, Ruben

Strongly recommend Ahrefs and also - http://www.openlinkprofiler.org/ I know you said money isn't a problem but OLP is free and does a killer job, including lots of info that other checkers don't have.

"But if they are already in the html, would that be considered cloaking?" There are times when presenting something in HTML that is otherwise not visible, but having other features on the page that allow people to read / click / access that content in other ways, is fine. Linking is a tricky because links are so inherently valuable in terms of SEO. You don't can't really be too careful. I'd be wary of presenting links (a subset or full set) in HTML if there is a form process to actually arrive at the links' targets. Essentially you'll be linking to products X, Y and Z on a page, for search engines but requiring a specific input from a user to see X, Y or Z - an input that only very few overall visitors are actually likely to make. I would say this qualifies as showing different content for SEO's sake and not providing a UX alternative that is pretty much the same thing. Others may disagree with me on that - I'm being wary here I would very much like to see the HTML if you are still active in this thread when it is produced, but you may be left with a situation where the pages need to be linked to elsewhere throughout the site to ensure they are crawled.

The are Campagne/campagne-ID in Analytics. Found out btw that ~25-30% on GEO targeted campaigns bring in different (out of GEO targeted zone) traffic...so make sure to keep this in mind...

Thank you David. This information helps.

I have the same problem!!!

Sometimes its about what you cant see. Backlinks, and other sources may exist that factor into a higher ranking.

I would say share not only your stories but others from news sites in your niche as well.  Try to become a "Top Contributor" in those groups on LinkedIn and usually your stories will get more attention and interaction.

Thanks everyone for the comments. We have manually checked the SERP's most look fairly accurate, some are higher ranked than actually quoted. We checked robots.txt all was fine. We did have a quick look in WMT for any crawl errors. They were showing 32 404 not found which we have corrected (mainly old links to tags on the blog on their old website), The new site has been up around 4 months a d we redirected all main page URLS to the new ones No keyword stuffing Maybe a honeymoon period. But they were ranked for most keywords before, all we did was improve on the on site SEO. Think we will monitor it. Its only the first ranking report back that all keywords had dropped. Thanks a lot for all the feedback.