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Thanks Alex. Super helpful.

Kristina has good questions. You need to isolate the problem metrics as best as possible. In GA you can parse out influence of click bids vs. CTR having the effect on RPM/eCPM. If it's a CTR issue that is responsible for 100% of your ad revenue drop and eCPM drop, ie. the click bids went unchanged, then you need to look at Mobile vs. Table vs. Desktop changes in CTR over the period in question.  You might want to take a look at CTR changes based on source/medium as well and drill into anything that seems significant. Some of the adsense metrics in GA are a bit suspect. I like checking earnings per click against adsense revenue / adsense ads clicked. We noticed a big drop in mobile ad CTR cutting our ad revenue in half, disproportionately affecting iPhones and it was due to the change to HTTPS having an effect on who our advertisers were indirectly affecting ad relevance/quality. Desktop CTR actually went up but the overall decline hid the problem from the client.

Hi Guys, It's been a while, and the .com site is now showing directly underneath .com.au site in the USA. Is there a way for the .com.au site to be removed, or to not be indexed? Thanks

I agree with Anthony. It is important to offer the same experience to desktop and mobile users. A responsive design, in my opinion, is much easier to manage and offers the best user experience. Google has said that they do not have a preference for one version over the other, the important thing is to have a mobile friendly version of your site. I think most professionals would recommend a responsive design unless having a responsive design creates a user experience that would be better if there were simply a mobile version of the site. I think that is the only exception.

Ruth, Thanks for the advice and help. I'll run analyses of both landing pages and see why this could happening and then continue to work with page B to further optimize it. -Josh

Hi There! This is pretty typical that Google will show different results for different search terms ... even when to our eyes the terms are so similar. Building your authority for the second term will be your best bet for being seen as a relevant answer on the 'designer' term. Changing your title tag could help, but it could also make you less relevant for the pack in which you've achieved that great #1 spot, so I wouldn't be inclined to go that route. Rather, I would do an audit of the sites that are ranking well for the 'designer' term to see what is making them strong enough to do so. I would then try to up my efforts in the areas discovered, whether this would involve tweaking SEO, publishing new content, improving social signals, earning links or what have you. In a nutshell, I wouldn't recommend taking steps that could work against the #1 ranking you've achieved for term one, but rather, would set term two as a new, separate goal and create a plan around it that could help me earn greater visibility in this second pack.

Thanks for this; I will implement the practices on my Cybergeak Blog Really Thankful to the engineers

Hi Carlos It sounds funny to me.  Use the content and post regular updates to your site (daily, weekly) and start building an email list where you can get genuine traffic and inbound links coming to your site.  Use social sites to promote your unique content and drive people to your site because you have compelling content.  Like Egol said, if you invest in building up these other sites and Google penalizes them you will have lost your investment. Hope this helps, Anthony B Biondo Creative biondocreative.com

Hi Carlos, Good thread! You're dealing with 2 separate issues, as I see it. Issue 1 - Your customer shouldn't be leaving you back-to-back reviews on any platform. If you know this customer and can ask him to remove one of his reviews, that would be wise. Issue 2 - The fact that both locations are no longer showing in the local pack for your search term may have nothing to do with your customer's odd review activity. Rather, it may have to do with competition. Unless you have few competitors, it's not terribly common to have more than 1 location show in the same pack for a product or service search. So, just looking for 'printing houston', Google may choose to only show your business once, regardless of you having 2 locations. Branded searches are different. If I look up 'Whole Foods Houston', Google is likely to show me multiple Whole Foods locations all in the same pack. So, you may simply be dealing with the presence of competition in your city, in which case, thinking about this from a hyperlocal standpoint may be your best bet. For more on this, see: http://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid That being said, it's always wise to keep an eye on your reviews and if a customer has somehow gotten the wrong idea about helping you by posting multiple reviews, outreach to them would be very smart. It wouldn't be good if Google wrongly decided this was some sort of spammy campaign on the part of your business. You can also petition Google now to have a review removed: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/04/03/new-google-support-option-offers-a-form-to-contest-reviews/ Hope this helps!

Thanks for the replies everyone. I think I'll continue buying up "important" domains in foreign countries but ignore and let some of these expire that are vanity/not-used. I definitely agree on the mis-spelling issue, I have bunch of domains that cover a mis-spelling. In our Analytics one of the top ten queries is a mis-spelling of the company name.

Thanks again for your response Gary. With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not. In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so. So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains. The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably). So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming. Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this? Sam

Yea, sorry I misspoke there. What I meant is that I was thinking of reaching out to these various sources and asking them to link to our site where it was mentioned in the article. I was just concerned whether links from many very similar (or duplicate) articles would do more harm than good. I think I go my answer, which is that it probably won't build much positive benefit, and there is a risk of negative effects, so I will avoid this tactic.

It is always a good idea to work closely with your developer when making changes like this. I'm glad you got everything figured out!

Thank you so much, guys. Today my new blog rank is: 804,394 (Global). [without ranking in Google]

Thanks Michael, My gut would agree. It should be looked at in context and thanks for confirming that for me. Doesn't help when clients look at the tool though.

I would definitely at least clean up the article HTML and structure before launching the pages, since you don't want people who might land on them before they're updated to have a weird experience. As far as optimizing them for SEO, I think you could go ahead and make the pages live and roll out edits as you make them. Prioritizing the pages based on highest-traffic/best-converting first is the way to go. If switching your platform is going to make your site easier to crawl, you definitely want to do that sooner rather than later - plus, having the new pages live will allow them to start accumulating some links even before you make keyword-related changes. In general with a major change like this I recommend changing as few other things as possible simultaneously. It's OK to make more gradual changes, and it gives Google fewer things to get used to at one time.

There will definitely be cases out there like you described, Massimiliano. It's a wild world out there. We can only do so much to protect ourselves.

Thanks Marie, we'll get on that. Appreciate you (and everyone else) taking the time to help.