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Anyone?

Just an update. Our site eventually returned to the 1st position for our main keyword. The competitors site seems to have levelled out in position 9 There are other long tail terms we'd like to rank for that these are still dominating which I think is still a little crazy based on their link profile. I'd have expected them to have been hit a lot harder by Google? Thanks to all who contributed to this post so far, I will continue to watch and update this post should things change drastically.

Yes, you are able to pick individual videos, categories and channels (though obviously this takes a bit of work) and you can also segment by interest groups and remarket as you would with normal PPC. So, the targeting can be really quite specific. You could nail it down to be: people over 18 watching videos on this channel, who live in the following countries.

Thanks Tom, I have looked at a number of other pages and it does seem that certain keywords have all dipped around February (some have bounce back to where they were before) However it doesn't seem to be the pages themselves as other keywords for the same page have moved up over this period into position 1.

Thanks Matt, I do like Topsy and forgot it allowed you to drill down to see sharers. Thanks  for that tip.

Hi Andy, Thanks for your speedy response. In answer to your 1st question, our website sits on Hubspot's CMS which allows us to track the rankings for our main keywords in Google.co.uk This tells us that we currently have 239 Keywords ranking in the Top 10 and 138 Ranked in Top 3. (Many of these are for our long tail keywords that are less competitive) Driving close to 4,000 visitors per month to the site via Organic search. I see the reasoning behind the GPS but our competitors also have these terms on their sites but don't have similar results? It doesn't bother me necessarily but thought it may have indicated that Google couldn't really place what our website is about. Which does bother me.

Nope, ignore them, if they are low quality scraper sites or other garbage. Consider how these sites look to Google - tons of crappy content, tons of outbound broken links etc. Not easy to discount these and if they are pointing at pages that don't exist, it is not exactly manipulative and any value they would have passed would be lost in a 404 shaped hole anyhow. Only thing I would consider doing is always using a full link in your content, that is including the domain rather than site relative with the root slash (/). so, http://www.mysite.com/category/page.html rather than /category/page.html Then, scraped links should work - not that they will do you any benefit but you never know. Hope that helps! Marcus