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Thanks for the response.  I think we are more in agreement than what you may realize. Just to be clear.  I was not advocating a back and forth on anything.  Those absolutely lead nowhere. My point is that a well crafted, positive response is usually worth it.  If someone is hell bent on being a jerk back, I think the unreasonable response from the customer further invalidates the negative review to begin with.  Showing that you are professional in dealing with complaints was my point and that professionalism usually wins through in making an impression on other customers.   My "taking it on the chin" is not about letting your company be dragged through mud per se, but showing that you are professional and sensible even when the customer is not. I would also agree that if you can also contact the customer and resolving the issue directly is always the way to go and we encourage this where possible.  Often that information can be made part of the response.  i.e. "Thank you for your review.  I enjoyed speaking with you on the phone and glad we could resolve this ..." If you would like some data on how users trust reviews more when they see negative reviews there is a study by Revoo here with the PDF of the Revoo data here.  You can also read some research done by Harris Interactive here. As with all these things "your mileage may vary".  To that point we did focus groups on the site I work on to see if we would see the same effect of the negative review qualifying the positive review and saw this happening with our demographic.  People were suspicious when it was all positive reviews, but when they would then see a business with a negative review and a well crafted response from the business, they would often respond very favorably to the information. Thanks!

Hello Rodney, From what you can see, have there been any significant changes in your website's rankings to go along with the traffic drop? I have a client who had some web development work done by their team and they accidentally deleted the GA tracking code, leading to an enormous drop in registered traffic but no difference in rankings. If your rankings are still intact, try seeking out the UA on your homepage to ensure it hasn't been tampered with. If it is still there and GA is accurately tracking your data, then you probably have a lingering hack that was sprung after the cleanup occurred. These things can come back to bite you if a code audit isn't performed by a security tech to ensure the site is properly cleaned. The loss of indexed pages sounds like there might be an issue in your robots.txt file or with your sitemap. The last part of this might be an automated Panda penalty, but this is probably the least likely option. During the hack, was there any nefarious link-building conducted that you're aware of? What you're experiencing might be the lingering effects of an automated Penguin penalty (there can be several months of sluggish rankings following one of these). Let me know about the above and I will see what else I can do to help! Thanks and best of luck, Rob

Hello, There are a lot of factors to consider here. In addition to Bryan's excellent breakdown of time vs. reward, another thing to consider is where these pages are sitting in the rankings, how long it might take to put them in an excellent traffic-gaining situation, and what you can leverage out of them in terms of value. In situations like this, if I choose to take action and begin ranking pages, I give myself 6 months to see what kind of rewards I can reap. If within 6 months I haven't seen promising movement of the bottom line, then I move on to a new tactic. Hopefully this helps - best of luck moving forward! Rob

Thank you! I will go for domain.xxx/blog

Hi Bob! Was your question answered?

Hello Aniket, When you say you are switching from HTTPs to HTTP version of the site, do you mean that in reverse (i.e. HTTP to HTTPS)? HTTPS is the more recent development and is counted as a ranking factor by Google. Here is an article on the shift: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html To quote the article: "We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal." The question of "how significant an advantage will it be?" is anyone's guess. We do know that Google has called for it, and that they are incorporating it as a definitive ranking signal. It still pales in comparison to your SEO bread and butter (on-site, links, etc.) but every advantage you can gain is a step in the right direction. It sounds like you will be in a competitive market, so anything you can get on your side will be beneficial. HTTPS, however, is likely a small-scale ranking signal and not likely to boost optimization efforts by more than 1%. Hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions, Rob

Excellent advice. Thanks for jumping in here!

I've found backlinks in scraper websites linking to the scraped website I am taking care of. They are in css, images, forms. What's the point in doing it on their side?

Totally agree, will keep that all in mind thanks

Thomas is correct.  To be clear are you only concerned about Mobile traffic?  If yes, then it maybe beneficial to reduce your MD's to 120 characters.  That said we test MD impacts on CTR each day and we do not see great differences if at all in CTR unless you put your CTA toward the end of the MD.  The truncation in MD's has nominal effect generally. The first 4 words of the MD have the highest impact on CTR. Recommend you try and ensure the keywords are therein, as they get boldened. Also the mobile Title also displays differently (than desktop) which we have found can make a big difference in CTR if used properly. So also consider extracting increased value from your Title. Suggest use the entire 512 pixels. This is as the final two words of the title often drop down to centre of the page which has significant impact.  On a desktop their value is nominal on CTR. Hope that assists.

Hey Darren! It appears we have not discovered new links to the site for at least 6 months and the site is no longer in our index. OSE is based on freshness and to stay crawled is to have continuous links being discovered from sites that also have their own fresh links. You can see no new links have been picked up for the site here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/just-discovered?site=shelbywilliams.com&filter=&source=&target=domain&page=1&sort=crawled Run the same search for potential domains you can build links on and once we have new links queued up, they will appear in 2-3 index updates and we will re-crawl the pages on your site. Hope this helps!

There's not a whole lot to be done about other sites getting hacked, unfortunately - even if you did find the program/network that is creating the bad links, you might not be able to tell which competitor of yours is doing it, and even if you did it would be difficult to prove or get them to stop. Your client's site may even not be the real target - link spam networks will often target a variety of random sites in addition to their real targets to cover their tracks. The good news is that Google is pretty astute at ignoring these types of links. It's highly unlikely (though not impossible, unfortunately) that your client will see a link penalty from this malware. Here's what I would do in this situation: Contact as many of the hacked sites as you can/want to, and let them know they've been hacked (that's just a courteous thing to do, as it's likely the site owners have no idea, but it's up to you how much time you want to spend on this). Be proactive about disavowing as many of the spammy inbound links as you can find (you're probably already doing this, I'm just saying). You could probably do this at a domain level since it sounds like the linking sites aren't related to your client's site in any way. Take a little extra time in the next few months to build some high-quality links to your client's site to make their link profile a little extra shiny. Taking steps to guard against any damage/fix any damage that may have been done will be a better use of your time and effort than trying to figure out who's doing it and why, IMO.

if you just started your campaign it is absolutely normal for her to stay gathering data for up to two days. If you're worried that your website is actually down please verify that using one of the two urls below http://www.isitdownrightnow.com http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com if you are server was crashed because of a cheap server use a better one I like armor.com Tom