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Hi Jeff, I tried to visualize your question but failed !!!! ... it would really help if you provide an example:) Cheers,

It probably doesn't matter much if you have a sitemap submitted for http, although you can delete it if you want. is it the SAME sitemap as for the https site? And are your metrics coming in the same? There is no advantage other than if you need to look at any data specific to http.

Great, thanks for the info! It definitely looks like some good places to start. Ruben

Hi Jess, you are using the correct dimensions (which are listed at the link posted by Trenton above): Smallest size: 480x270 pixels Largest Size: 2120x1192 pixels Are you able to post a couple of links to these pages so I can get a true picture of what is going on? (Or links to blurred out, screenshots, mockups, etc if privacy is a concern.) Or has this issue been resolved? Would love an update, thanks! Christy

Thanks for getting back, Dan! Doing these checks definitely satisfies me that it's a non-issue.. Content Keywords gives me "facebook", "strutta", "contest", etc. Interesting bug with Adwords though, they should consider doing subdomain-specific "research", since I think that in the case of SaaS businesses especially, this makes a lot more sense. Cheers, -Danny

I appreciate everyone's input. This was very very helpful ;)!

Semrush.com shows a sharp decline in rankings that started April 2012.  This was when the Penguin algorithm first rolled out. I wouldn't worry so much about the number of links coming from each domain, but rather the quality of the domain overall.  Your site has a large number of links from bookmark sites that are probably affecting it negatively.  For example: http://www.bookmarkshack.com/story.php?title=las-vegas-animal-hospitals http://www.bookmarkupload.com/story.php?title=las-vegas-animal-hospitals-1 http://bookmarkdoc.com/story.php?title=-veterinary-hospital-las-vegas Penguin was designed to knock down sites that had been cheating their way to the top.  You can escape Penguin, but there is a good chance that you won't return to your original high rankings as they were probably based on the power of links that are no longer counting (and probably working against you now.)  To escape Penguin you'll need to identify every single self made link that was made solely for SEO purposes and try to remove it.  If you can't remove it then disavow it at the domain level.  If you've done a thorough job, then the next time Penguin refreshes you may see some improvement.  But, in order to get good rankings again you'll need to find ways to attract links naturally which is not as easy as building easy links.

We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search. There are a number of methods of generating domain or brand queries.  They can often be associated with keywords.  I a couple of sites that get thousands of visitors per month through domain navigational queries, often combined with a keyword.     Here are a couple ideas. Have something on your site that is absolutely awesome, astounding, better than anyone else.  If you have great photos of seashells, the best damn collection on the web, and word gets around that you are THE PLACE FOR SEASHELLS then lots of people could type "yourdomain.com seashells" into google search.  This isn't easy to pull off, you gotta earn it, you gotta be awesome but it can be done. Give a printable freebie away with your domain name clearly showing on it as the destination for more great stuff... Let's say you publish a free printable guide to seashells.   You could have "Visit yourdomain.com for seashell information"   on it.  Iff your guide is awesome then lots of people will visit your site by typing in the domain. If your site has new content daily about subjects that people are highly interested in and dedicated to then people will start using search engines to navigate straight to your site. I have not done this one but I know of someone who has a contest running all of the time.  A prize is given frequently.  Lots of people go to that site regularly, repeatedly to enter the contest.  Lots of them get to the site by typing "hisdomain.com xxxxx contest" into google. Bottom line.  Do something that brings people back to your site again and again and again. This is not for the wannabe who is looking for the easy way to pull traffic into his website.  It is for the person who is full of enthusiasm and panache and not afraid of dedicating himself to hard and persistent work. Also, these are not ways to influence autocomplete.  Changes in autocomplete are a result of doing the above.

I liked. Some of the info is a little dated, but overall it's worth the money.  You can probably find most of the stuff on the internet, but it's nice to have it all arranged in one place.  If you have already been doing SEO for a while, you will probably already know most of the info, but if you can get a couple of key points from it, then it was worth it. In a nutshell, I recommend not only buying it, but reading Neil's QuickSprout blog regularly.

Hi Donatas, The best practice will be use canonical tag pointing to one main product.  Whether you want everything to /product or /superbrand/product, so as long as you have the canonical in place, it will avoid the duplicate content issue. I would suggest using a more simple url as the main canonical URL such as /superbrand/product instead of /superbrand/woman/product as keyword effectiveness in URL decreases as it gets longer. Hope this answers your question.

If you have a nice landing page that highlights the content and benefits of the White Paper, people will have no problem linking to the page with a form on it. Be sure you are giving your outreach targets a copy of the Whitepaper without making them have to download it. Make it as easy as possible for them to check out your content and decide if it's something they want to recommend. I would recommend you try to make them feel special. Tell them it's brand new and you want to give them a sneak peak. Ask them for feedback on your whitepaper. After you get their feedback, you've got them invested enough in your content that you can request that they share it or link to it.

Your questions can have many suggestions and little tips but by far one of the biggest ones answers this part of your question: "So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence?" Produce engaging content, and be know as the authority in a certain topic and social shares, comments, and traffic will naturally come for an ever-increasing social influence. Its one of those easier said then done things. Hope this helps!

Brian Dean wrote: "Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google." In another article, he explained that he generally links to 4 authority sites in his articles.

Hi guys, thanks for the responses. We have used the Screamingfrog tool and spotted a bunch of 403 pages so we are looking into that. Images were all used with permission. I have mentioned the telephone number and address thing to the guy. I have checked about the national geographic link and there was definitely no bribe involved.

Outside of what I said above, I really couldn't mention anyone here I'm afraid. That would be a little awkward to state one name over another. -Andy

I recall Matt Cutts, in one of his videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw), addressing product descriptions (Scraped from the manufacturer) with E-Commerce sites, especially those sites that are selling products that a hundred, or even a thousand other retailers are selling. He said that you would be ahead of your competition if you took the time to rewrite those descriptions, so they are original and not duplicate content . It is not necessary to refresh or rewrite them every couple of months. Just having a unique description that no one else has for that product will put you ahead of everyone else selling that product. It would be a good idea to try and get your customers to write reviews on your products and post them on your product pages. This is unique, original content that is fresh. Amazon is a good example of doing this.

Hi, Having more product pages doesn't mean better ranking.  However, having more pages just simply mean that they have more pages for Google to crawl but doesn't help with ranking.  In the end it comes down to backlinks, on page SEO (product description, title tag, url...), social mentions and etc. I believe your competitor has better quality links as you've mentioned and probably performing better on other on site and off site activities.