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I'd have to agree that doing what you have done should not have impacted the rankings so dramatically. I have seen minor fluctuations when modifying title tags but not to this extent. I would give it a few days to see if things settle down. If you stil see the same problems after a few days then I would suggest that something else is likely the cause of the dramatic drop in rankings.
Generally it is considered best practice to separate words using a hyphen (-) rather than an underscore (_) as Google recognises hyphens as spaces. It also looks much neater using hyphens in urls as opposed to underscores which is why I advise using hyphens instead.
However, it doesn't really make a huge difference as Google can generally recognise the keywords without the use of hyphens. There are of course exceptions to this. The most famous example of this being www.expertsexchange.com. I'm sure you can see the issues with this domain.
Hope this helps.
Welcome to SEOmoz Aidan,
The best advice I can give you is to stay away from reciprocal link schemes. The links are not worth it and are in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines which can negatively impact your site in search rankings. Read about this here:
Google is massively clamping down on this and has even demoted many of these poor quality directory sites from its index.
Hope this helps.
3 of your most common anchor text terms:
waste disposal london
house clearance london
waste disposal
You are almost certainly being effected by the recent update which penalises this very thing. Although you have over 2,000 links containing a brand anchor (http://www.diamondwaste.co.uk/) the 40,000+ links containing commercial anchors are seriously harming your site.
Also, having looked at some of these links, I would say they are quite spammy and of very poor quality. Ultimately, you have a lot of work to do in cleaning up your backlink profile before submitting any type of reconsideration request to Google.
I just setup custom google search engines in Chrome and adapt the search parameters to remove all personalization from searches.
Works for me!
Many have their own views on whether exact match (or similarly broad match) domains are still worth getting.
Personally, I would always advise to go for brand domains and work on building your brand. This is because Google is attaching much less importance to exact match domains, although some may argue this point with evidence to the contrary. The recent Penguin update also had an effect by hitting sites with over-optimised link building practices due to over use of keyword anchors.
Ultimately if your company is called 'GreatestCompanyInTheWorld' then you should get www.greatestcompanyintheworld.com rather than www.broadmatchkeyword.com
Try this:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com
I think that should work. Let me know if you have any problems.
Adam.
There was a penguin data refresh on 25th/26th May which had minor algorithmic changes. This could be a possible cause, if the dates match.
Check your webmaster tools to see if you've had any messages from Google. A penalty could have caused such a drop. Carefully review all of your backlinks and your content to see if there are any issues there such as duplicate content or spammy links.
Adam.
Although you cannot keep the historic data in the system if you delete the keywords, you can export your entire ranking history to csv for reference.
Your question has two parts to it really.
Is there an easy way to reduce this list without having to go in word by word and pause or delete them?
Unfortunately if you have started a campaign and want to keep the historic ranking data of certain keywords whilst removing others then you have to manually remove the keywords you no longer want. Otherwise you will lost the historic data.
Like is there a bulk upload type of system?
There isn't a bulk upload option but there is a way you can simplify the task. As Donnie says, you can upload a comma separated list of keywords. If you are downloading a list of keywords from google to upload or you have a list of keywords on separate lines, just put the words into a text editor and use regex to replace line breaks with a comma (replace \n with ,). Then you can simply copy and paste into SEOmoz.
If you do not need the historic data then you can just follow this method.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
#1 A domain has many links to it, but has been 404ed for 4 months. Should I redirect to a page I own and is almost exactly the same content. Will the fact that it was once 404ed be an issue?
This sounds like a good idea to me. Make sure the page you are redirecting to is relevant to the original page. There shouldn't be an issue here as fas as I can tell.
#2 I have an old domain that has many links but has been stagnant for a long time. Are these links still valuable and I should I redirect them to an important page on a different site?
Whether the links are valuable depends on their quality. You should get an indication of their quality from how the site performs in the serps. If it is performing well then it probably does have valuable links. In this case I would be tempted to keep the domain running and add fresh content to the site. You could then link to another relevant site that you own and benefit from the value this provides. Either way, if you have a site that has value and performs well for certain keywords, it would be a shame to just redirect it to another site when you could gain commercial value from it.
Adam.
When I go to delete a keyword, I get a message that says all history will be lost so I guess the answer is yes you will lose the ranking history if you delete the keyword.
It is possible to evaluate a site and suggest areas that may have caused it suffer with the penguin update. However you should be very careful about which firm you choose as many not so reputable sites are cropping up offering such services. If you want to use an seo firm then I suggest you take a look at the SEOmoz recommended companies.
To be honest you probably don't need someone to tell you what's wrong, with a bit of reading and self analysis you will be able to find what has happened and more than likely it will be down to your backlinks.. Your money may be better spent hiring s reputable SEO to help fix the problems rather than tell you what the problems are.
Adam.
I would certainly look at having more brand term anchors than commercial ones so I would start at greater than 50%.
Google places certainly helps your local results but it shouldn't have too much impact on your .com ranking as far as I know.
There may well be some other issues with the site but without doing an audit of the site in question, I can only speculate.
That looks like a very unnatural link profile to me. I assume you are talking about commercial term anchors when you mention 'targeted keywords'? If so then you would certainly need to build a much larger proportion of brand anchors for your links.
There is no magic number when talking about percentages of commercial to brand anchors. It varies between countries and industries. However, I can certainly say that only 15% brand anchors is way too low. To find the best ratio may take a bit of experimentation.
Adam.
There could be a number of factors affecting your rank in Google.com compared to your local Google search engine. Ultimately, Google will return results it believes are most relevant to the particular country. If there are strong local indicators on your website (local hosting, local domain extension such as .co.uk, localized content, links from local domains, setting a geographic target in webmaster tools) and very few international indicators, then you cannot expect to rank well for both Google.com and your local Google.
On a side note, having keywords in urls is not black hat and is even encouraged to help pages rank. I think you may be confusing keywords in a url e.g. http://www.company.com/**keyword** with exact match domains e.g. http://www.keyword.com. However, the use of either is not considered black hat seo. It is worth noting that exact match domains are receiving less importance from Google in serps in preference to brand sites.
Adam.
No it does not get the serps from that location. Mainly because you are not based in that location and therefore Google will still pull the data from your closest data center. According to Google,
_the gl parameter boosts search results whose country of origin matches the parameter value _
Therefore, you won't get exactly the same results as if you searched from the location itself.
It is important to note that even though you are using the gl=us parameter in your search string, it does not guarantee that you will see the same search results from that location if you are in another location. This is because you will be accessing data from a different Google data center.
There is no penalty for having a large number of internal links and yes every single link on the page (not just the ones within the article) are being counted.
The general guideline is to have no more than 100 internal links per page. This is because the more links you have on a page, the less link juice will pass through these links. It is important to note that the 100 links is only a rough guideline and for some sites it may not be possible to have less than this. Of course, if you can reduce the number of links on the page then it would be good but to reiterate, you will not get a penalty for this.
Adam.