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Yes you are 100% right in my opinion.  The whole reason I believe for the shift in brand preference is a play on generating more ad spend via Adwords.  The search results are so unhelpful for so many searches nowadays. For example, search for "Trademark Registration" on Google.  That SERP used to be full of attorneys and websites offering that service.  Now it's mostly government websites forcing the attorneys to buy ads for this highly searched term.

Ooh good to know! Let us know if you find anything else.

Thanks for the info. I'll check out the orientation script, it should really help with planning design changes

HI Dan - thanks for looking into this. Our traffic from organic search has indeed dropped (Google only, rankings and traffic from Bing/Yahoo have remained stable). Hopefully we've taken care of all the shady back links via disavow. Like you said, however, it could be awhile before we know if this has had any effect. Most of the links you referenced, and most of the ones that needed to be eliminated, came from websites linking to content that existed on our domain prior to the agency purchasing it almost 10 years ago. You're right about the unusually high amount of indexed pages. The inflation is from our blog "tag" pages. We've put a dofollow/noindex on all of these pages. They're pretty deep on the site though, I expect it will take awhile for them to be crawled again for de-indexing. We actually had a 2-day recovery just over a week ago. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as the recovery came, we again lost rank on our generic terms. I'm going to add some of this info to the main post now. It certainly is bizarre, so I'm hoping someone might be able to identify what might have caused the site to recover and then drop again over the course of 48 hours.

If you want to write great content today, then you need to not worry too much about one key phrase, but look for additional synonyms to fit into your content. However, don't just add these in - build them into your content and write more if required. Take the word "clothing". Additional words (synonyms) that could also be used that related to clothing are "dress, clothe, garb, tog, garment, apparel". Try and fit these in somewhere to give your content some depth and variety. Synonyms of man (men) could be male, gent, gentleman, youth, boy - I am sure there are loads more. Just remember that there are billions of other pages of content out there - you need to be trying to make yours stand out from others as much as you can. -Andy

Hi again David, I haven't heard of this particular company - could be good if the 40 penalties stat is true, but get your research in and you should be fine. Also check out the Recommended Providers list - there could be some good options on there too.

That's great new Amelia - so glad I was able to help -Andy

Hi Andy, Thank you for fast reply. Regards, Juris

Hi Alexander, You can also check out the Google Adwords tool for keyword ideas (you don't need active AdWords campaigns; you just need to sign in with a Gmail address. Choose the option to enter a URL and a target keyword: http://i.imgur.com/qes7S31.png You will then be shown a panel with two options - ad group keywords (groups of keywords Google considers relevant for your query) and a full list of keywords: http://imgur.com/a/XGtEa Google returned 800 keywords in total for this search - you can download a spreadsheet of these keywords and sort through to decide on the ones that best suit your business. Cheers, Jane

Good Morning, Is there any way I can check which internal url is getting juice from back links? Is there a way to find out? Thanks Abie

Hi Everyone, I recently asked this question http://moz.com/community/q/will-a-geo-localization-site-create-thousands-of-duplicates and is somewhat related to this thread. If anyone could help me out answering this question, that would be great! Thanks in advance!

Hi Daniel, Whether these links are all okay or should be removed depends on what else the sites link to, and what else they get up to besides linking to you - if they have been picked off for spam tactics (either linking out, inbound links, on-page spam, etc.) then you'd want to avoid having them link to you, even if they are otherwise genuine industry partners. Sadly some legitimate businesses also run less-than-clean websites from time to time. I would ask the agency who provided your link report for an explanation as to why they placed some of these industry partners in a "remove" category - they may have some very good reasons, or they may have mistaken the intent of the links. I would say that even if they are mistaken, both you and the agency need to ask yourselves if there's a chance Google might also mistake these genuine links as manipulative or unnatural. Unfortunately that can happen as well, but if you are filing for reconsideration you can always explain that x, y and z links have arisen due to a mutual respect / partnership that does not carry with it a commercial benefit to either company in direct relation to the link. Google has been extremely authoritarian over the last few months about links, and there's a possibility that they'd say a partnership link wasn't "natural" because it had commercial intent. Sometimes it's damn hard to figure out exactly what they mean by "natural". It's incredibly frustrating. However, backing up again to where you're at right now, I would say that you need an explanation and thorough analysis of why genuine links have been flagged. You never know, the agency might have found something that's actually going to save your next reconsideration request.

Some great information on here. What I have realized, the applicant must have agency experience. It makes on boarding and client relations going forward so much more efficient.

These are kind of some big questions with a lot of possible answers. So I'll go with the most general response. Top 40 Results: That can be a terribly unrealistic goal, or one that's tough. If these are branded queries (e.g. Product/Service Your Brand), it will be tough even for an established brand. Someone else always sneaks in there, somehow. Given that you've been tasked with doing that for hundreds of keywords, it sounds closer to the terribly unrealistic side of the spectrum. Competition With Yourself: It can be good and it can be bad. It really depends on the pages. Some pages can be better than others, given their purpose. So if you want someone to call and for some reason there isn't a phone number, they won't find what they need and you've lost the sale. If someone has many options from only one source, they may choose not to click at all for some reason. Better KPIs: A good KPI is something that's achievable and in line with real business goals. Good KPIs keep the lights on. Higher rankings don't always guarantee business goals will be met. Honestly, there's some real garbage pages out there that rank well for certain queries. You can virtually guarantee they aren't worth the cost of hosting. Perhaps you want more service calls? Maybe you want to increase your email database? These are things that you have to establish with decision makers/stake holders within the business. A good set of performance indicators pay the bills. Rankings for the sake of rankings often deviate from that purpose. Hopefully this was helpful. Edit: I forgot to touch on the .net to .com migration. There are a lot of variables there as well. I really don't know how well the migration was handled. If it was handled well, you might see some cached results from the .net version, but eventually everything will swing over to the .com. If the migration wasn't handled well... you have a whole set of other problems.

Thx Jane- No I wasn't aware of that.  I don't get it because I put canonical tags right under the Head and I used the code below to do it.  I will check again but am unsure how to fix it I don't even know how to fix coding on the Http://cheaptubes.com site.  It seems like when I add content to the canonical site it updates all of them.   Thx for pointing out errors, you are giving me something to fix and improve.

**We're thinking of consolidating the smaller sites into our most successful site (www.product1.com) in order to save management time and money, even though I hate to lose the product-specific URLs in search results. Is this a wise move? ** As a general answer, I would say that it is a wise move.  I my opinion, in most instances the only time that you should have two sites competing with one another is when you have one site that is a total dominant in its business niche and you have the time to build unique content on a second site.  Even then, it might be more profitable to spend that same effort adding additional products on your main site or launching a new site in a new niche.   Keep in mind that is a general answer and detailed study should be done to determine if closing some of your sites is a smart move. If we proceed, all of the products will be available on both our company site and our most successful site (www.company.com & www.product1.com). This would unfortunately give us two sites of duplicate content, since the products will have the same pictures, descriptions, etc. The only difference would be the URL. Would we face penalties from Google, even though it would make sense to continue to carry our products on our company site? If this was my company, I would be investigating the closing of four sites and doing 301 redirects to the one that remains (assuming that detailed study supports that and all of the sites are in superb health with great link profiles). But you ask about duplicate content.  If you have that, then one site could be dropped from the SERPs.  If the two sites have links that connect them it is a very high probability that google will kill one.  Google started being able to detect that and kill one of the sites about ten years ago. Disclaimer:  What I wrote here is generalized opinion.  Detailed information could change my mind... and I don't have time to do that type of evaluation even if the data was presented here.  Very time consuming.  If these were my sites I would make up my mind about this type of move over a period of months and not in a few moments.