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Yes I always check Google webmaster and I do't get any message from Google.

It seems to me that all the articles (http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors) written by seasoned SEO professionals are now obsolete if this website can rank so well yet doesn't even have some of what people consider important onsite SEO ranking factors in place.. That is a very interesting observation.  I have not thought of things in that way. But, hearing your comment, I would say that the comment is absolutely correct for a query like "pizza".   The results that I see are all local pizza shops, except for one wikipedia entry. When the query is about a product or service that is locally available then local businesses and organizations will dominate the SERPs.   A couple powerful articles might sneak in... like the wikipedia pizza article...   but they have to be on very powerful sites or very relevant sites... or sites that google can associate with the geographic location. SEO is not obsolete because most queries are not tied to a location.  My site gets most of its traffic from queries that are not linked to a geographic location. However, when a location is involved, it becomes important for the website to have locational information properly displayed on the site (such as address and phone in the footer) and be associated with other websites that are related to that geographic location.  These associations could be links, reviews, mentions, etc.

Awesome Dan, thanks again for helping me out! I implemented what you suggested and I'm still having the same issue. I think it has to do with the way the old URLs were setup, which included "index.php" before every folder (i.e. http://orchardsinn.com/index.php/specials) When I implement the redirect: Redirect 301 /specials/ http://www.orchardsinn.com/special-offers/ Then clear my cache and attempt to click the old link, it takes me to the site with a 404 error page. Then, when I try to navigate to another page via the navigation, they all return 404 errors. Any thoughts?

Interesting - thanks. It's a bit hard to pin down, because Google has been changing the "volume" on authorship mark-up a lot these past two months, and that means both up and down on any given day. Authorship also seems to be page-based and probably query-based, which means any given site could have and not have the mark-up depending on the page and/or query in play. It's a real-time evaluation on Google's part.

The Open Site Explorer indexed is completely refreshed every few weeks, and currently consists of 105 billion links. While that's quite a large data set and mostly comparable with other indexes in the space, it's still only a fraction of the links on the web and only a portion of the links Google undoubtedly knows about. The way OSE finds links is that it prioritizes pages with lots of inbound links and links it found during previous crawls. Because BBB pages are often found deep-deep-deep under layers of navigation and usually don't have a lot of external links pointing to them, they aren't easy pages for crawlers to find on a regular basis. BBB has an especially difficult site architecture, and sadly this issue comes up a lot with that particular site We're working on including more historical data in the index, so that even if we didn't crawl the link in the past two weeks, we'll still include it if we are reasonably confident it still exist. This will help alleviate some of these concerns. The good news (or bad depending on how you look at it) is that while OSE doesn't show every link, it tends to show the majority of the most valuable links. Regardless, thanks for the feedback and best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Adrian, You want OG tags and Twitter card tags to be specific to each page on your site. For instance, pagea.html's tags should relate to that page's content and pageb.html's tags should contain information related to pageb.html's content. On Schema, that is going to be specific to the content...so if you've got a review on your home page and the same review is on a second page, then the same Schema markup might be contained on the home page and on the second page. Hope that helps. Let me know if you need more clarification. Thanks, Matthew

It's good to keep in mind that the Google keyword tool isn't 100% accurate, and it's often VERY wrong when it comes to smaller keywords. Just because Google suggests a small number of monthly searches per month doesn't mean no one's searching for it or for very similar related terms. Also keep in mind that organic search isn't the full story. There are personal bloggers who made money without even trying to target terms. They simply built an audience through great quality writing and content. XKCD, for example, gets millions of visits per month. I guarantee most of the traffic to XKCD is direct, referral, or using Google to find something specific they've already seen. So the fact that there's 0 or )-) search volume doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth writing. Finally, don't trust anything Alexa tells you. I've seen their guesses estimate 10-50x too low or too high. I'd doubt the site is making "good money". I think they're just trying to grow traffic at this stage.

The video is still behind Javascript there, which could prevent the content from being indexed. It's hard for me to say one way or the other without testing, but my gut instinct is to say you'll still struggle to get the videos indexed. Google can execute some JavaScript, but from tests i've done it's not super consistent. Also - don't use YouTube to host those videos - it's not a wise move (more details here: http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy), especially since you're allowing others to advertise on your videos.

Tools like Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog are also good for looking at your outgoing links, checking their status codes, etc.

Thanks Rand I really appreciate your response - I feel a site overhaul is imminent! Ash

It could even be as simple as greater competition among sites that are relevant to the same search queries your pages are relevant to.  Be sure to examine the top sites showing in the results for your target search queries and see what's working for them.

http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ is a great test of sites for China.  Not all Wordpress based sites are banned, but you should check yours. Also keep in mind that your site needs to be in simplified Chinese to be indexed by Baidu, and there are some other considerations like having a local TLD and loads of other things.  Here's a good article on Baidu SEO: http://searchengineland.com/the-b2b-marketers-guide-to-baidu-seo-180658

Hi Stephen. Google try their best to serve up relevant results to everyone (or at least that's the assumption we make. Whether it's true or not is, I'm sure, something people could debate for hours) and have a very complex algorithm for doing that. The algo' changes that make up Penguin and Panda may have had the effect of pushing other sites above yours because they are more authoratative in other areas than <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thomassmithfasteners.com</a>. I would definitely back up your disavow requests with the information you suggest; I'm not sure how much of a difference they make but if they do then they're great to have and if they don't then at least you're keeping a record of your activity. Here's Google's instructions, which do contain comments on when attempts were made to contact site owners. Good luck! Ben P.S. I've just found this ebook at Hubspot. If a file storage company can produce good enough content to be featured on Hubspot then Thomas Smith Fastenings should definitely be able to create something!

Hey There Unfortunately I have seen the same issues as Chris and Anthony describe - and that is it's never clear how updated the data is in WMT. In theory I believe Google needs to crawl the page(s) the backlinks were on, see they are no longer there, and propagate that to your WMT account. I do know that for the disavow tool, Google has said it can take them up to 6 months to process all the sites in your file. So who know, perhaps it's an equally long time range for removing links and seeing them disappear from the link report. Anyhow - I do have a small tip. For any link cleanup we have done, we keep a very detailed spreadsheet of all the links and a status on action and result. So when you pull new link reports from any tool (WMT, Moz, Majestic etc) you can compare that to your spreadsheet and eliminate duplicates or links you have already dealt with. Also, one fast way to check several hundred links at once is to put the links in a .txt file, and upload to Screaming Frog in 'list' more - and crawl all of them with a filter looking for your domain name. This will tell you a) what linking pages don't even exist anymore (404) and b) if you still have a link on them. If you want something even more robust at managing links, perhaps look into BuzzStream - http://www.buzzstream.com/ - I haven't used it myself (yet, but may do so soon) and I hear it's good to keep track of links. -Dan Hope that helps!

Hi Nicolas, Thank you for the clarification. The business you are marketing, then, is not local, but virtual. Because of this, creating local citations is not the right path to go down. You need to work on building organic authority - not local authority. Don't create a Google+ Local page - the business doesn't qualify for one. Instead, you need to work on content development, earning links, social outreach, video marketing, etc. If you need further clarification as to which business models are deemed eligible, by Google, for local inclusion, here are the Google Places Quality Guidelines: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en