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Hi Ryan, try to move the sitemap to the end and leave a space before it. something like this: User-agent:* Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /ShoppingCart.asp Disallow: /SearchResults.asp ... ... Disallow: /mailinglist_subscribe.asp Disallow: /mailinglist_unsubscribe.asp Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Sitemap: http://www.naturalrugco.com/sitemap.xml

Thank you for your response! I had looked at that article before I posted, and it also has this paragraph: Googlebot can index almost any text a user can see as they interact with any Flash SWF file on your site, and can use that text to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files (for example, links to other pages on your site) and follow those links. This makes me think the link might be a problem. It is only one link out of a large link profile, so I am not too worried but it's always good to be prepared...

Good questions; do you think you're under penalty now? If not, just work on cleaning up the future of your "link building" efforts rather than trying to go in reverse and fix things. A few answers to your questions: No, Google will not penalize you for having a profile that is "too clean." Google doesn't care if you "manipulate" your link profile. They care if you've built links to manipulate their ranking system. Anchor text is one big sign that you're attempting to increase your rankings for certain terms. Google is pretty good at targeting links you've built to increase rankings. The links that will hurt you are those you've built - not the junky links that everyone acquires over time. The only exception might be a spam attack from a competitor, but that's rare and another issue altogether. If you've built highly-targeted links, take those down. Don't waste your time taking down low-quality links that other people build to you. If you think links you haven't built are harming you, double-check WMT for a penalty and make sure there's no overly-targeted anchor text  stemming from your own efforts.

Glad I could help.. sort of.  And thank you for following up and replying back with the solution.

Thanks for your response. We'll definitely go for this improvement. But can you please explain what you mean by "an unintuitive UX idea" ?

Hi Vince Not sure what they're trying to achieve there.  That code will be ignored.  The "noindex" command is meant to be used within a tag, such as: .  It's not acknowledged (by Google anyway) as a directive in an <a> tag.</a> <a>Would presume they're trying to use it in the same way you can use a rel="nofollow" tag, but this won't have the same effect. Puts a little bit of doubt in my mind as to the integrity and quality of the site going forward, but that's probably a bit harsh. In short, the link will be behaving just like a normal one would, at least for Google. Hope this helps.</a>

If so many people are having difficulty finding the Pro area, why not make it so it is more easily accessed, design-wise? It "may not be around forever" - but it IS still around and making it hidden or harder to  find is not very user friendly.

Thank you for the excellent advise, everyone!  I feel much better now.  Was worried I was missing out on an opportunity but feel comfortable now staying where I am.  THANK YOU!

None of those changes have been done, and unfortunately I can't find out why the previous guy has put the disallow on those files. I will give a couple of weeks time and see if anything changes, if not I will remove it from the robots! Thanks for your help! Oscar

Peter, That's in analytics, right? Will it have all the data from the pro account sync with it or will it only have the historical rankings record from when we started using analytics? Ruben

Each location you have should have it's own landing page/url.  I'm not sure how the search engines would handle more then one of the same type of schema on one page but I know for SEO purposes two separate pages is much much better.  You'll be able to add citation links to each of the pages that way too. Matt Cutts mentioned it's better to have one url per store too.

Hi, it will be interesting to hear other feedback on this also, but in my view just spend time building the responsive site and making it work well for various sizes and don't spend time on the specifically mobile site. This blog post at Distilled may help too: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/responsive-web-design-distilledlive/ Peter PS. Following on from my reply on this earlier, it may be helpful to you to see the video that Google's Matt Cutts published about Responsive vs Mobile sites for SEO on this today. Click the link below. watch?v=D03wRb4s7MU

Cross-domain canonical is the most viable option here. As Mike and Chris said, it is possible for Google to ignore the tag in some cases, but it's a fairly strong suggestion. There are two main reasons I'd recommend it: (1) Syndicated content is the entire reason Google allowed the use of rel=canonical across domains. SEOs I know at large publishers have used it very effectively. While your situation may not be entirely the same, it sounds similar to a syndicated content scenario. (2) It's really your only viable option. While a 301-redirect is almost always honored by Google, as Chris suggested, it's also very different. A 301 will take the visitors on the partner site page directly to your page, and that's not your intent. Rel=canonical will leave visitors on the partner page, but tell search engines to credit that page to the source. Google experimented with a content syndication tag, but that tag's been deprecated, so in most cases rel=canonical is the best choice we have left.

Hi, Assuming that no changes were made to the page content, I would see if the drop happened around the time of a Google algorithm change by using a free tool like Fruition: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/. It's also worth looking at the page's backlink profile (Open Site Explorer) as any spammy links acquired may have caused the problem. I would be surprised if simply adding nofollows to some outbound links would have such a drastic impact on your ranking. George @methodicalweb

Hey Bob, The short answer is that most people don't do this because they don't know that they should, or they haven't gotten around to it. Static homepages with well-written introductory content are almost always better than a dump of 5-10 blog post teasers, even for blogs that don't have any other function than publishing blog posts. For examples of good custom homepages on websites that only feature blog content, I'd point you towards these examples: http://mywifequitherjob.com/ http://www.seattlehomestead.com (this is my site, but I think it's a good example of custom homepage/introduction content)

Ciaran, Starting from scratch to rank for a  term like "heart attack" would be quite an endeavor for a seasoned SEO with a client who had a fairly substantial budget, let alone for someone new to the discipline. Not that it can't be done, but knowing enough to inform the client what it will take and what might be more productive options for their practice is part of being and SEO.  It sounds like you're working on coming to grips with that knowledge at this very point. Starting out, I'd recommend a couple of things: Do an advanced Open Site Explorer report on your client's site and then do a comparative OSE report against some of the other sites that rank on page one for that term.  Then do another report comparing your client with other sites even further down in the results to get a sense of where the client might be starting from and what they would need to do to get to the top.  Installing the Mozbar can be helpful too. Moz has another tool that you might find handy--it the keyword difficulty tool  and be sure that you've read through their How To Do Keyword Research  guide, as well.

How are these "dynamic" pages being created? You must have a custom page/post type in your WordPress theme? If so, you should in theory be able to check that off under XML Sitemaps in Yoast to add to the XML sitemaps. I wouldn't base this decision on the idea of "fresh content". I'd make those pages what suites them best, and what's the easiest for you to maintain. In other words, it doesn't matter HOW the pages are created, Google just sees that there is a page, and it will crawl and index it. The only thing I'd say, is when you are creating pages dynamically, you want to make sure you're not ending up with too many thin/similar pieces of content. They all really need to add some sort of value.

Campaigns will often naturally not perform great at the beginning. It is just a risk you have to take when creating them, so yes your %'s may drop to start with, but once you start optimising that campaign and its been running a while it should pick up and start converting as your other campaigns do providing you're doing everything right. one day is absolutely nothing. CTR'S, conversion rates and all kinds of PPC metrics can fluctuate HUGELY between only a few days. You need to let a campaign run for weeks before you fully assess what's going on. Obviously you should look at the campaign regularly to see if any keywords are seriously under performing (ie. Lots of impressions, few clicks and therefore a shocking CTR) and pause/delete these where appropriate, but otherwise you need to give them time. In order to avoid huge upsets to your other campaign metrics, start you new campaigns off with only Exact match keywords. Then as you see which keywords start to perform well, change those to Phrase match and keep moving up in this fashion as this allows you to identify which keywords will perform without destroying your accounts CTR and QS by immediately throwing out lots of broad match terms. This kind of methodology has always worked well for me Hope this helps.