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You need to check this post from Rand first: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores I if you have drop in 11/19 then this can be related with unconfirmed update. But update on 11/13 i didn't know. Can you share SearchConsole and/or Analytics here?

Well isn't big deal at all. You need to: investigate error 500. Usual this is part of "door knocking". You should see who and what is going to do just for error 500. Watchout for /wp-content where themes and plugins are. Also /wp-admin and /wp-include where WP core is. investigate 404 errors. This is part 2 of "door knocking". Often happens when vulnerability doesn't exist. Like timthumb or revSlider - someone still knocking on few days. (this was vulnerability that leave more than 100k sites with PHP execution) investigate strange redirects - 301, 302. IF site is working perfect you shouldn't see any redirects. But if you're WWW and someone link w/o WWW you can see redirect. Also WP comes with internal redirector for broken urls, can be typo mistakes. But more interesting are vulnerability so any strange activity can be easy seen. investigate strange traffic - can be POST or GET to /wp-content/plugins or /wp-content/themes PHP code. In perfect world only WP can call them. Or using WP-AJAX. Direct calling to code isn't recommended anymore. investigate bot traffic - like 2000 requests for 30 mins to wp-login.php This is one example - you can easy see them because one IP can do lot of requests. you need to check file structure - new/changed files can be warning that something was happened. I like GIT/Mercurial or SVN because they can check quick folders for changes. Bad news - you need SSH access and some dev skills. If you don't have SSH then you can download whole site and compare it with original copy. I can recommend WinMerge (free and open source) tool for comparing files/folders in Windows. If you're on Mac just as me you can use FileDiff (free) or Kaleidoskope (paid tool, trial available). There is also paid multi platform tools as Beyond Compare, Araxis Merge, Delta Walker and few more. you need to make HTTP password to sensitive portions of WP. Also you must do some hardening of WordPress installation. This is covered in Codex here. For example try to login on mine site: http://www.mobiliodevelopment.com/wp-admin/ Good luck! you can implement additional security in .htaccess like 5G firewall here. Or you can implement WAF (web application framework) like modsecurity. I think that i cover most of mine daily routine inspections. Look scary but when you get experience will took less than 5 minutes per site.

Evidence of something around 11/18-19 is pretty strong at this point. Glenn's article that Peter N. posted is worth checking out. I've heard rumors of a mobile connection, but that's been hard to pin down - there does seem to be a "quality" aspect, but that's such a hard word to pin down. No confirmation from Google, but MozCast and similar data definitely saw spikes, and there was solid chatter. EGOL is right, though - that time period before Black Friday is a hairy one, search-wise, and there are so many variables to disentangle. I think something algorithmic happened, but that doesn't mean that any particular problem or drop was due to a Google change, and it's going to be really tough to piece together any particular story, I'm afraid.

Hi there. It's recommended that you have only one H1 and H2 per page. It won't "break" your website or SEO, but it won't help it either if you have multiple same level h-tags. So, here you go - don't use h-tags in nav. It's weird anyway

It's also worth noting that our last index update was on 11/12, so Domain Authority hasn't changed since then.

Hi, I wouldn't be worried about this too much, the biggest and smallest sites in the world do A/B testing and most of the big ones run it through the back-end of their site. In all cases you're trying to improve the user experience and make sure they have a better time on your site. I don't worry about this for TNW at least.

Hi Chris! Did that post help?

Hi There, This past summer, Yahoo did spin off their small business division into Aabaco. Here's an article on this: https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/learnmore Yahoo's own links to creating a listing seem to all point here https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/local-listings but there just hasn't been much of an outcry over this because I think not many Local SEOs are promoting Yahoo as a must-list platform to their clients anymore. Max Minzer's awesome list says this about Yahoo (http://www.reengageconsulting.com/be-where-your-customers-are-with-local-business-listings/#yahoo Listing Support: Some support is available but don’t rely on it! General support and information provided. (408) 916-2149 – support if you create an incident number. @YSmallBizCare – Aabaco Small Biz Support Twitter account. Your best bet for free listing support. Customer Support – not much help here unless you’re a paying customer. Help for Aabaco Local Basic (free) – general information as well. So, you might want to check those options out. Interesting to note he thinks the Twitter account is the best bet for support! Yahoo used to be one the most prominent directories for local businesses, but these days, many Local SEOs agree that it may not be worth fussing with anymore.

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews. The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site. The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.

Thanks for the response Chris. My assumption is the same as yours in that doing some type of local SEO for just one distinct city shouldn't hurt broad national rankings. The interesting thing about this situation is the competitor site makes no note of any locality at all, they're not trying to scale local rankings nationally - they just don't mention it. While my client's site and a 3rd competitor focus on 1-2 cities and don't do as well as the non-local company. Thanks for your input and hope to continue to hear from others!

Thank you so much Kristina I thought there would be more benefits having it like a standard webpage, HTML. Given we already have the eBook in PDF format (72 pages done by a graphic designer), I was wondering if there was a happy medium like creating new web pages and 'embedding' the PDF? This was suggested by the web developer however we weren't sure if/how it would benefit SEO. I'm just trying to weigh up the cost vs benefit of creating many more html pages. Ideally, I don't think we would have gone with a PDF in the first place. I guess we had seen a lot of eBooks which are in PDF format. Thank you! Laura

I figured .htaccess would be the best route. Thank you for researching and confirming. I appreciate it.

Hi there. I haven't dealt with such problem before, but here is an idea - what if you "user upload" new nice images, which will get +1s and shares - in theory this should push unwanted images down, out of sight. Or at least out of first glance sight This might help a little while you wait for google to remove bad images. Hope this helps

No problem, happy to help. If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes. Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes. This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs". The nav would look more like: Shoes   |   Boots   |   Sandals   |   Shoe Cleaning   |   Repairs With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.