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Hi Fastrack! That's very interesting - sounds, then, like there has been a change. Maybe what you were seeing was Google testing something? Thanks for updating this thread with your observation.

Hi Mark! Thanks so much for sharing your website with the community. Likely, what you are going to need to do is to hire a reputable Local SEO consultant to do a thorough, professional audit of your website and your off-site local search marketing to identify problems and solutions. In the meantime, to get you started, here are some things I see at a glance and some suggestions I have for you: Your physical location in NY automatically means that you are in a very competitive market. This means that your geography is likely already filled with competitors whom it will be a major challenge to dislodge from their current rankings. To compete means that you will need to have the very best of everything - the best website, the best content, the best reviews, the best citations, etc. It's estimated that there are some 200 or so factors that go into local search rankings. In seeking high local pack rankings, your business is going to have to beat out competitors across many, many factors if it wishes to steal their spots in the packs. This won't happen easily or quickly. Your overall website design will benefit from improvement. Right now, the site does not look professional, and competitors are likely to have more modern, balanced, slick-looking sites. Your site is lacking an obvious logo, has this large statement at the top of it, "Acupuncture NYC, New York. Manhattan Acupuncture Clinic" instead of a traditional masthead, has no footer, etc. You need a modern, professional website. I see that efforts are being made to create helpful content on the website. That's great! What needs improvement here is the language itself. I would recommend hiring a copywriting who can take your company's ideas and write them up in error-free, persuasive language. Google grades the quality of language, and right now, there are many grammatical issues that could be holding this content back. Basic Local SEO best practices are absent from the site. You need a footer with complete Schema-encoded NAP in it, and this info belongs on your contact page, too. Check this out: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/onpage-optimization-local-seo-perfectly-optimized-local-page/ So, that's a start, just at a glance. This article may also be useful: https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures Now, let's look up your business on Moz's Check Listing tool: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMnRyZWUlMjUyMG9mJTI1MjBsaWZlJTI1MjBhY3VwdW5jdHVyZSUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjEwMDAzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyVHJlZSUyNTIwb2YlMjUyMExpZmUlMjUyMEFjdXB1bmN0dXJlJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMzIlMjUyMFVuaW9uJTI1MjBTcXVhcmUlMjUyMEUlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIxMDAwMyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjIxMjUzMzExOTIlMjUyMiUyNTVE It looks like you are listed in a variety of places, which is great. Pay attention to those duplicates being reported, and be sure you're listed on all 15 of the sites the tool covers. Given the competitiveness of your city, you may want to consider the possibility of a Hyperlocal strategy, in which you're aiming to rank organically for your neighborhood in addition to ranking for the whole big city. Check out: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid You may also need to rely, in part, on paid advertising, given the competitiveness of your market. The other area of investigation is going to need to be competitive analysis. How well are your competitors doing with things like: reviews social video offline marketing Are there holes in their strategies? These are opportunities for you! Please bear in mind that this is all just stuff I've jotted down in about 2 minutes. This cannot replace the type of insight a professional audit will provide, and I do recommend you consider getting one from a reputable Local SEO firm so that you are making decisions based on data rather than a quick glance. I hope this has been a helpful start!

Hi there There's a good answer in this Q+A thread regarding Bing disavow. I will echo that usually what you would consider bad enough to include in your Google disavow file, probably would be good to include in your Bing disavow, but remember - these are two different search engines, so you have to treat each as their own entities - traffic, conversions, rankings, etc. It's important you analyze each and make decisions that way. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hello, I too am sad to see them go! I have found them really useful to find out what the current thinking is on issues which are often so contentious.  It can be very difficult finding a useful answer on the interweb as so many views are conflicting.

Thank you Ethan, Yes I will recommend a 301 redirect to the I.T. guys, but I do think that my I.T. guys wont like me much Please can I ask - why would I need to create more content to canonicalise it if I already have two url's? Would I not just add code to both pages? If the page 1 url exists and temp redirects it to the page 2 url, would I not just add code to both pages? Or if I add code to the page 1 url, would it be exactly the same to the other variations? Please teach me this as I will need to explain it to the I.T. dept as this was there recommendations. I think I will most definitely need tech help moving forward! Thanks a lot for your time!

This isn't an answer.  Its a rant.  So if you don't like rants, don't read it. Google is always telling webmasters to "do this" and "do that".   Sometimes they dictate to webmasters because they want to "kick them up a notch" but sometimes they dictate to webmasters because Google is incompetent at certain things and they want webmasters to make-up for their inadequacies.  Sometimes they tell webmasters to jump through this hoop or jump through that hoop and snatch the hoop away after you have left the ground.  Sometimes the hoop is invisible. Google told webmasters not long ago about an "authorship" program that would associate content with specific authors and show your photo in the SERPs.   I never wanted my name on my article and am too old to display my photo in the SERPs but I did this stuff regardless.  You had to connect your articles to your Google Plus page to make all of this work.  After millions of authors did this Google decided that our photos were stinkin' up the SERPs, then they changed their minds and abandoned the idea completely.  I think it was just a ploy to get million of great authors to join Google Plus. Several years ago Google also told authors that they should "write for Knol" and they would be rewarded with adsense.  I was going to put 1/2 of my time into writing "knols".  Good thing I didn't because Google abandoned that too. Matt Cutts told me in the comments of a Moz blog post that I could sculpt pagerank with nofollow.  Lots of people started doing that and Google changed their mind about that and changed how it influenced pagerank flow and never told anybody about it until months later. I could go on and on about Google dumping Reader, ignoring Feedburner and ton's of other stuff...  the bottom line is that if Google says you should do something, it doesn't mean that they actually use it or that it is going to help your rankings or even that it is safe. I also believe that some things that Google promotes are absolutely dangerous to the health of your websites in the SERPs.  I would bet one month's pay with confidence that Google Consumer Surveys is dangerous for the health of your SERPs, but that is just an opinion and a reason why I am not making buckets of money running it on my websites. And, in my opinion, Google Consumer Surveys is an excellent example that people on Silo A at Google don't even know that there are people working on something in Silo B that is totally contrary to their goals.    Mobile-friendly is a coding requirement and has nothing to do with your website being friendly to use on mobile.  It could really stink but they will tell everybody on the web that its friendly. Bottom line, you should be careful about jumpin' through any hoop that Google says to jump.  They have some great stuff at Google but they don't talk to each other and things tend to disappear.

When you say "exclude your search"...do you mean exclude that soft 404 page specifically from the search bots? Can you take a quick peek at one of the pages in question...? http://www.seadwellers.com/search/page/8/ There are 8 of them....only diff is the number at end of URL...I am afraid I do not understand how/why it exists? Any insight you might have time to give is greatly appreciated...I'm trying to learn. Thank you Martijn

Hi Charles! When were these redirects put in place? It's very possible OSE just hasn't seen them yet.

Thanks guys.  My feeling is also that it has been hooked onto from the organic side and not directly relevant.  I'm not getting any feedback that is going to make me want to test!  I'm in the process of getting a client to update their pages as the privacy policy is too thin deep within a T&C link and the question came up.

It has been a lot more difficult getting this data since Google started masking the keywords people type into their searches from webmasters.  I remember having access to really useful data on this but now it is minimal.

I jumped out to the SERPs and looked at the cached version.  If you get out there before google recaches you can read it. If you are too late to see it, the question was about... If you get a new client with a problem website, when do you tell the client that he needs a new website instead of doing SEO on the existing website.

Finally I understand your point, but... Have you measured it? You have some cases where you moved the images to a third-level domain and after re-index you observed a ranking drop? Because I did it once, for an e-commerce, and I didn't observe that. It's just one case, and doesn't mean much, but just searching on google for this topic I can find many who claim to have witnessed an increase in images ranking thanks to the adoption of a cdn. Domain of an image url is for sure a ranking factor, and you probably are right. But I would like others to jump into the discussion and help to clarify. Because I think google images algo is more keen on evaluating other (well known) factors. And it's logic. If you have some html on site.com with one image coming from flickr.com and one coming from worthlessdomain.com, which one would you favour in images SERP? Flickr? Why? Doesn't say anything about the relevancy of that image for that keyword. Of course if you have an html page about flowers on site.com, and you have one image coming from worthlessdomain.com and one image from asitefullofflowersimages.com it may have some relevancy, but is it for the domain authority/trust? Or because all the images of asitefullofflowersimages.com are of flowers, with flowers alt text and so on? I bet the second. Plus, google guidelines suggest to serve images from a cookieless domain to improve performance, of course they mean to improve performance to improve ranking of the page, and in that context they are probably disregarding SEO for images. I don't have the minimum idea if domain authority/trust is such a strong ranking factor for images, and I have the impression you have more experience than me on this subject, but I am still very skeptical.

SERP position is clearly relative to other sites.  If they are generating links of a type and at a rate that Google favours more than your activity you will appear to drop in ranking.  Anyone still see the 'Google Dance'?

I have this similar issue with my website. Thank you so much. I have one more doubt, My website's WWW page and Non-WWW pages are not redirected and both's PA is different. So, is there any problem with that? I cannot redirect as I am shifting from Magento 1 to Magento 2. 1. https://champu.in/ - Non-WWW page with 37 PA 2. https://www.champu.in/- WWW page with 30 PA

I would merge copy and 301 the weak one to the the strong one.