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Hi VTmoz, We didn´t use to disavow a lot since most clients backlinks were done by us and always stayed clear from the "dark side of the moon".  We stopped altogether though after last year pinguin´s 4.0 update.

Hi, Thanks for the replies. All the file names and alt texts are almost same. No other changes have been made around the dates. Drop is definitely post the image replacement and directly associated. I am not sure if reverting back to old images will improve rankings anyway. And that's a lengthy job.

Holy **** - great post man!

Hi, I have been working with several writers in the past from peopleperhour with excellent resuts.  They however did not do the keyword research and were only used to write the copy according to our instructions.  There are several people offering this service though so you could give them a try.

How does answering Web Design questions on Quora improve my traffic? By having my link on a High Authority domain like Quora? Hoping people will click a link to my site after answering a question? I'm not saying that you are wrong, I'm interested in how it works SEO wise Thanks so much for your time?

This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.

Can you help better explain please?

It may be related to the specific theme or template your are using. If your site is responsive, check the css rules that are applied for mobile. A possible way to see if this could be the source would be to open up the page on desktop, resize your browser to the smallest possible size and refresh the page to see if it changes.

Thanks. Appreciate this.

Hey James, sorry to hear you're getting blasted by negative links and appreciate your responses here. I actually sorted this one out (fingers crossed it stays that way) by having the dev team implement a redirect rule that 301 redirects any query string back to the folder we want ranking. Similar signal to what the canonical tag would send but in my opinion a stronger signal since there is no longer a way to reach those weird query string URLs with a 200 response. Once that was implemented the appropriate page was right back to its old high ranking position and the query strings are hardly to be seen in the index and are no longer preferred to the old ranking page - so looks like all is right with the world again. We also disavowed the domain that was the source of many of the query string URLs. I don't think it was a case of negative SEO - just bad coding on their side. I'm not sure what exactly did the trick but I suspect strongly that the 301 redirects is what solidified the index due tot the strong correlation of that change with ranking recovery. Maybe you can employ a similar solution whereby you can disavow domains where these links originate or set up server side handling to manage URLs of a specific pattern - for example, any URL containing "pornsite.com" if not any query string altogether (in our case we don't have any use for query strings in our URLs so just bagged them all). Thanks again, Matt

I'm with you on using rel=canonical but the new pages are slightly different in that they have a lot more content for SEO purposes. The content definitely provides value to users but wondering if the extra content means Google will ignore canonical tag? Google mentions that canonical is good for duplicates where pages are very similar if not identical.

Buzz bundle, and link assistant from seo power suite has tools for this type of usage. You can also save "persona" profile information to create accounts on websites automatically. You will likely run into issues with captchas, but you can add a death by captcha account that allows the program to solve them automatically. For a more manual configuration, you can automate several components of what you want to accomplish using scrapy or beautiful soup tools for python to gather form fields and properties from a the list of urls with regex conditions.

Thanks for the response. So for a baseline, it has stayed about the same with some minor fluctuations due to a big social hit. We typically get between 8k-12k sessions per month. Before the switch Direct was accounting for about 2k hits per month. In August 2017, it was up to 7k out of 9.5k. Conversely, organic traffic was around 4.5k per month. So far in 2017, we are now averaging around 1.2k per month. But to answer your question, the overall traffic is pretty much the same, the ay it is being reported in GA is drastically different and the disparity is growing each month. Part of me feels like my developer made a change to the tracking code that I was not aware of and something is just not tracking correctly. Because it was such an abrupt change Oct. 21, 2016. Again, I'm looking for someone who wants a consulting gig to look at all the pieces and help me figure this out. I feel like there is a simple answer. Although maybe I'm being naive.

Thanks James It is frustrating that Google rewards such practices, and as the sites in question operate around lower volume search terms I dont see this changing any time soon. The argument has been, 'look at how well we are doing with these other sites - how can it be wrong'..... its difficult to educate managment on the risks when the current data proves the wrong way works. I wonder if anybody on here has been in a similar spot and managed to result in some form of win? Thanks again.

Thanks, James Wolff. I appreciate your suggestion and will do so. It is interesting that many have commented here: Add Trailing Slash to the End of the URL with .htaccess Rewrite Rules "The URL for a "page" should NOT end with a trailing slash. URL ending in trailing slash denotes a folder or the index page of a folder." My issue is not that it fails to redirect; it is that I have too many redirects in the process.