Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Carmelo, Sorry about the trouble. I believe you may have encountered the issue Google was having with there OAuth process. It seems that everything should be working now though. Can you update if everything is ship shape now? Thanks! Joel.

Hi Ash, This makes sense - I'd definitely lean towards getting some freelance or agency help, but on the surface of things, the noindex, follow meta tag could be very useful. Especially if the gateway page has no practical use from an SEO or conversion standpoint, there's no harm in either removing it from the index in this way or doing a minor restructure to get rid of it (although the first option would seem to be much simpler). Best, Jane

Hi Matthew, I would start with a simple one, and fix the Title tag. At the moment, it says "Gerald Miller Super Lawyer: Minneapolis DWI Lawyer & Attorney". I would change this to something like "Minneapolis DWI Lawyer & Attorney | Gerald Miller". I would drop the 'super lawyer' in favor of something like "professional". That said, if people search for the phrase "Super Lawyer", then you need to re-think this. I would also drop the Meta Keywords as Google doesn't use them at all, and worst case, they could be seen as an attempt at keyword spam. In fact, if you have these when doing a page analysis through the MOZ page grader, these come up as a negative SEO point. Something to get you started -Andy

Thanks everyone. There is a definite drop in organic traffic and our normal presence on page 1 is 7 or more pages in the hole now. Haven't had notification of a penalty, though it feels like it. Cleaning up some technical seo problems at the moment with sitemap structure etc. I tend to agree with Andy... if it walks like a duck.... Open site explorer is where I will start. Thank you. I will try Majestic if i need to dig further. Really appreciate the responses.

Thank you Jane. Your information is very helpful. I am in the process of viewing the webmaster guidelines to make sure we've done the right things. Cheers, Ken

As Marc has pointed out, you can't choose them, you can only increase your chances of having them appear by having the correct markup and appearing higher in search results. One other thing to note is that you can demote a sitelink in Webmaster Tools under the "Search Appearance" tab. For each search result page, you can demote specific pages you wouldn't want to appear as a sitelink. But I would absolutely recommend having Schema markup to have full descriptive sitelinks for search results, especially your branded ones. More real estate you can have in search the better

Hello there Whilst these links are followed (or at least some of them are - it depends on how you're sharing your content) my view would be that they aren't particularly valuable in terms of improving your rankings. This is for a couple of reasons: It's too easy to manipulate. If these links really 'counted' all you'd need to do is post hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of times to dominate the SERPs. This is not the sort of activity that Google wishes to reward. These are links from specific properties (which Google own). Whilst these links are followed, you've no clue how their handled by the algorithm. Despite being followed, they may not actually be 'counted'. Moreover it's really easy for Google to switch this off i.e. - they could very easily decide to make all of these links no-follow. I hope this helps, Hannah

Hi there, As you know, there are tons of websites that publish IP blacklists and not everyone of them are authentic. It is no uncommon that IP that belong to legit companies get blacklisted. While these are false positives, there is nothing to worry if you find your IP blacklisted in one or two places. However, you might want to investigate if your IP has been blacklisted in many places. You can use the following tool to check the same: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check For barracuda removal request, here is the URL: http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl/removal-request 1. Does your ranking get affected if you are associated with a website who is linked to you and is on the blacklist for spam only on Barracuda? No, not at all 2. If a website has a bad rating on WOT or WEBUTATION. Does that also hurt your ranking? Not directly and moreover, WOT and Webutation scores/ratings can be easily inflated and manipulated. As long as your website stands upto the expectations of your visitors and serves the purpose of its existence, you should be good. Those were my two cents. All the best to you my friend. Regards, Rafi Devanur

To add to what the others have written: Consider writing your title tags for the users as well. What does your page content offer them? Ranking is only 1/2 of the battle. You need a snippet that gets people to click your result as well.

i ran into the same problem i now use shopperapproved and they're quite cheap (http://www.shopperapproved.com/pricing.php) you can email customers a link, put javascript code on your thank you page so that they get a customer survey and then they get emailed a request to do a full survey later on plus you can feed it to google

Hi Mark, Once you've got the website properly locally optimized, on-going activities will typically include content development, citation building and earning reviews. You may also want to pursue earning links and social mentions. I recommend that you read this article to see how you're doing on the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide Hope this helps!

Thanks for the replay Marc, that clears up my confusion. I had chance to ask John Mueller (from Google) what to do about spammy backlinks and he automatically assumed I was up to no good.  I've never bought a crappy link in my life.  Previously hired SEOs and/or unscrupulous competition were likely the culprits.  We can take accountability for ignorantly hiring shady link builders but apologizing for being a victim of negative SEO is flat out ludicrous.

Great, thanks Gyorgy for the advice.

Thanks for the response. Google isn't just indexing the pages, they're sending a significant amount of traffic to them as well. Of course, not all 1M pages are the same quality, so would it be better to have a sitemap of just the highest quality pages and see if Bing will index more of that list?

Hi Robert, Just checking back in to see if you had had a look in Webmaster Tools for any indication of a penalty. This is the sort of drop we associate with penalties, be they manual or algorithmic. If they were using a link building service called My Blog Guest (or if they had used MBG at any point in the past), they could have been hit along with almost all other MBG customers. Google has gone on a rampage in the past few weeks, penalising a very large number of sites associated with that service: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2335246/Google-Penalizes-MyBlogGuest-a-Guest-Blog-Network The blog comment links could be a culprit as well.

Yes you can, but how well multiple locations works, I don't know. Its hard to get your homepage to rank in one location, let alone landing pages ranking in every location. Worth the try, but hard to do.

Glad to help and thankful to be part of such a great community!

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