Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have some questions for you:

• How are you measuring search rank for page one? Not sure what the reality of that is.

• What does your Google Analytics say about actual traffic out of search?

• Do you pay attention to your Google Webmaster Tools for this site?

• When did you notice the problem and what were some of things you did prior to that?

In the meantime, I would get rid of email box as smartcow noted. This is such a horrific user experience (not being able to close it) that it must drive bounce rate way up, helping to tell Google that it is a bad search result.

After ditching the email box (maybe trigger it on a second page and allow for user to close it), fetch pages via GWT for Google to re-crawl. There is a pretty big difference between Google's cached result for your homepage and the homepage as it is.

Without actual evidence of some black hat plot to kill your site, I suggest keeping an open mind to less nefarious/more likely possibilities. Fear can decrease your perception of facts.

I look forward to your answers to the above.

Best of Luck!

Are you using the Moz's Firefox toolbar? There was a recent notice about it being down for awhile.

Hi Paul,

My personal opinion is that adding the company name is a redundant (to the url) waste of space. Possible caveat, if the company name is short and does something for CTR.

Generally no though.

It reminds me of taking the kids to the Pediatrician. "Yeah, that happens alot. If it doesn't clear up in a week, bring em back in and we'll have another look."

Thanks for all the really helpful answers Dunamis, Steve and Aaron!

In phrasing the question as "is it considered fresh/unique," I'm going to assume you mean by google for the site's organic benefit. So, I guess the reasoning would be is the fact that it's fresh to the site a bigger positive than the negative of duplicate content. Is that what you're getting at? Personally, knowingly on-boarding duplicate content would be too big of a potential negative for me to consider doing it. I've done it as a noindex/follow for reasons other than Google, but not for some mystery freshness bump.

Not that you can't find examples of duplicate content ranking in more than one place. To me on-boarding indexed duplicate content seems like just asking for trouble.

Hope that helps. Best... Mike

Yes, I'd put it on the slow motion housekeeping list. and don't do every single link you can find.

I'd prioritize in-context links from high authority pages way above masses of footer links, which are often not a great user experience anyway.

Over time, look at the link profile/anchor text in open site explorer. If it looks too targeted, it probably is Go for less than 40% targeted anchor text.

Definitely cut your footer link load.

Good luck!

Could changing one's physical address for a domain or going from public to private registration have a negative affect on rank? Other factors? Thanks!

Hi Cole,

Fresh by Google (if not noindexed) in this case would be kind of like the freshness value of a "fresh" error.

Maybe that's extreme, but point being, the content is not needed by the web, since it already exists. If there was absolutely nothing else being added to or changed about the site and my one option was adding duplicate content, I'd noindex/follow it and figure I might have gotten some small, small, small benefit from updating the site a little, maybe an improved user signal. I'd for sure keep it out of the index. I guess that's how I'd do it, if it had some value for visitors. If it's only value was adding something fresh and not that great for visitors, I'd find the extra hour necessary to re-write it into something fresh, unique and valued by visitors. .

The other thing about syndicated content is that after you make sure where else you can find it on the web via an exact phrase search in Google, it may not mean you've seen the only instance of it as it may evolve. Having duplicate content indexed with other sites of possibly low quality may put you in a bad neighborhood as sites with common content. If I had a ten foot pole, I wouldn't touch it with it.

I hope that helps. Best... Mike

Quality content properly promoted is the ultimate link building strategy.

Consider how many artificial link building strategies from the past have eventually caused site owners problems.

I'd post to your site first and when I was sure it was indexed, re-purpose it for social media.

Best of luck!

I'm loving the optimism! I'll continue to post rank, in case anybody's interested in the experiment results.

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the message. For this particular site, I'm looking at a very noticeable dip in position tracking that is then partially obscured by the following week's Thanksgiving holiday. This week, the week after the holiday week, is down about 15% traffic wise compared to 2 weeks prior. As a point of reference, last year this site was flat for the same period. So, don't really think it's just seasonality.

I might think it was just this site, but it just happened to coincide with that increase in mozcast temps and other stories of flux.

Has anybody benefited or suffered with the same kind of timing?

Hi,

I've been looking at how various sites handle rel author tags linking to Google+ accounts to get rich snippets results. I've found more than a few that have the same code on every page, even though those actual pages clearly have different authors and some may not even mention the rel author's name.

A site I'm working on has different authors for different pages. Although the convenience of putting the same rel author on every page seems dreamy, it also seems like a disaster waiting to happen, since it would appear to be trickery about who the author is and possibly one Google update away from disaster.

Can you call a site owner or employee an author on pages that to the reader appear to be written by others?

Am I being too cautious or what?

Thanks!

Cheers... Darcy

Yes, it is something of a question about the image alt text working as well as text for a link. In desperation, I was thinking about making the nav buttons into images with alt text, but leave them reading the way they are "cool stuff" and "outdoor fun" etc.

It reminds me of Starbucks using italian names for small, medium and large... like small, medium and large aren't good enough.

Other than be odd for the user, it wouldn't do anything positive for search.

Great question. I try to look at it like "is it worth my time?" The fact that it's translated and you sometimes get a link, really kicks it down the priority list for me. You could spend some time going after it, but to what end? If your new pages are generally crawled/indexed quickly, you probably got first authorship already. If you haven't already, you might want to look into how fast your new content gets indexed. If it is a duplicate content issue, it's really their duplicate content issue, depending on the translation factor. I can't see spending any time on it.

Best... Mike

Javascript loading sometimes slows down the loading of the page, which could affect search. I would suggest measuring page speed without it, adding it and  re-measuring.

Best Of Luck... Mike

Thanks, Tom!

So, the site this issue is a few hundred pages of not very unique catalog content. Would you rewrite the relative links to absolute?

Best...Mike

Besides crawling with a bot, what kind of info about site construction, html, etc does Google get via users via alternate methods?

Thanks... Darcy

Thanks Russ and Rand! I've used many tools for getting to the bottom of estimated volume and have high hopes for your evolving KW Explorer. It's definitely needed.

I think the much more likely culprit is that it is a new site. What do you get when you enter "site:http://www._____.com" in google? If the pages are indexed, one can't blame for the robots file for lack of rank.

Good luck!

Mike