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without a doubt its either been hit or has changed something drastically.

From the image below - its search visibility dropped to basically zero on 16/5 last year so either has been hit (which it looks like), or changed something drastically.

http://imgur.com/QwcJC9v (UK visibility)

http://imgur.com/GGeWvGj (US Visibility)

While the visibility isn't a great factor on its own, when there has been a huge drop like that I suspect its been penalised.

From looking at the list of updates I would say it possibly got hit by Penguin 2.0 http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change or could have been a manual penalty.

But I would stay clear of the website and not pay to put anymore links on their website.

it is around 20% of the world sites are run using Wordpress (as George says), from simple blogs like you mention to some of the worlds biggest sites.

Wordpress does have its very good features some great plugins like Yoast, which helps to improve your site from an google presepective - changing meta deta, titles etc.

I do use wordpress for my sites for one reason only - I can't code and wouldn't know where to start.

If you are a competent coder and by the sounds of it you are - I would stay away from WP, for all its great benefits and there are loads, its still an out of the box solution that is trying to meet everybodys needs so is not brilliant and while you can do some wonderful themes etc in wordpress you are still working within their framework.

Starting from scratch (if you have the skills and the time) is always a much better solution. So much more can be done

I would defiantly say its something to do with Panda

Your drop as seen on the graph, is your search visibility and while its not a great indication on its own, it still pretty useful. Your drop in % terms in the same as Ebay's.

http://imgur.com/8XojR8P

Generally speaking people are saying Ebays drop is down to poor quality content, so if David is right about Matt Cutts saying its not affecting product descriptions I would take a look at your blog and add more content (however that does all seem unique).

I will still work on the product descriptions and making them more useful for the user, plus you win twice, higher ranking and more customer converting and they are getting the advice they need without leaving your site

Hi Sean

I used to have a shopify store as well and there are plenty of apps, try this one I have used previously and liked:

http://docs.shopify.com/manual/more/official-shopify-apps/product-reviews

Investing in product descriptions and unique content will pay off in the long run.

I've noticed you have got some great content on your category pages (hopefully these still rank as its the time of the year when I guess you get a lot of sales) so its just the product pages which will require work.

Hi

Yes it is possible to recover, but it wont be an overnight solution.

You are doing the right thing and tackling the issues of duplicate content. I think this update will have affected quite a few e-commerce sites as a lot I see always use the manufacturers description (duplicating content) usually for the reasons is easier and cheaper.

And good way of improving might be to ask previous people to write product reviews on the page. This is a good way of generating good unique content.

Not sure what platform you use or whether its custom built, but there is usually some good apps that will automate this process, sending emails to customers after a certain time to come and leave a review.

Hi

I would say you have done it correctly, optimising the most useful pages for the best user experience.

This key phrase that you are considering putting on your home page - instead of that, why not simply spend more time building links to that page. Instead of focusing links to your home page, focus relevant links to the specific page.

Think of a customer, do they want to land on your homepage and then have to navigate to the correct page to find the information, or do they want to land on the correct page and don't need to navigate away.

There is a really good article (sorry I can't find it), but it talks about the more steps you make a customer make to find the product the less they are likely to buy - I know your not exactly selling a physical product, but you still want the person to sign up and get in contact. So the more difficult steps you make it the less chance you have.

I hope that helps.

Hi Dan

I was about to ask the exact same question, so will keep an eye out for an answer.

I hope it is possible, but I couldn't work it out.

Hi

Sorry there is no magical number. When writing articles, product descriptions or content instead of thinking about the search engines and getting the right number of keywords in, write it naturally and it will rank.

I am not saying don't put keywords and phrases in the content, just don't make it the number one priority.

Hi

You have found the way using the Adwords interface. However are you just using the Adwords interface or have you got any other third party software like Double click etc.

Its very simple in software like that, you can add rules to say if not in position 1 -3 increase bids by 'x'% or x amount (I always go with a % increase personally).

I would check the ones you are pausing as sometimes being in position 4 - 10 on certain keywords actually convert quite well. I have one keyword that performs best in position 5 (I don't know why and can't explain it, but I am not going to change it).

Hi

I would have to agree with Andy in terms of user experience - what most sites I visit tend to do is to have a section at the top - which says download the app now, rather than taking u directly to the Apple Store - I would just bounce straight off, no way would I download an app without reviewing some of the content first.

You may also want to read: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721217 I don't think you will be seen as sneaky redirect (unless Google classify Apple.com as spammy url) as they say if you are trying to deceive Google, but it probably not helping.

Hi

On our blog, we have a section called 'Tags'. I have just noticed that these links are all "no follow" links.

The tags section does appear on every single page on the blog - is this recommend to have them as 'no follow' links or should I get our developer to change them.

Thanks

Hi

I was speaking in more general about the new TLDs and used for spammy purposes.

Are you sure, you have to be 'B) you must be a travel agent, travel associated business, airline etc. to use such a domain.' I just tried purchasing one, right upto the point of giving my credit card details and it never said anything about needing to be a travel business etc.

Have to agree go with .com, the .travel are too new and there is no real evidence yet to how these rank / how google will rank these in the future. I might be wrong, but I think alot of spammy websites will pop up with .travel .etc and I think these might get penalised as a whole by Google.

Hi

I would always recommend going with more description titles, as well as good for the bots, its also good from a user experience point of view, they can see more about the product before click 'The York' doesn't really tell the customer a great deal.

On a side note, and this is my opinion. The US is leading the way with SEO follow by the UK, but some parts of the world still don't fully grasp SEO and the impacts it can have - I don't know anything about Australia market, but it could be the fact that many website owners still don't think to much about SEO - and by you optimising you could get a great lead on your competitors.

Hi

We had the same issue here, before Business pages was around we created a user. But when we could create a business page (why Google didn't think you wouldn't want to do this, every business wants to promote themselves, i dont know), but after speaking with Google it was advised to us to create a new account and close the old one.

This was a while ago and things might have change, but we was told we couldn't even transfer followers, we could just do post saying we have a new page and to follow the new page, but they couldn't help us a lot.

As far as I know, nothing has changed, so your going to have to create a business page and start all over again, getting followers - would highly recommend running both in parallel for a time before closing the current one and keep posting about your new page, it did help for us.

I guess a combination of both, I always find phone is more personal and has a better success rate, but takes a lot longer and requires more work.

I would suggest try both methods and keep trying, you will get a lot more no's then yeses, but keep going. If it was easy everyone would do it.

I don't personally do the work, I just manage a team to do the outreach, so the actual work involved I am not too knowledgeable, but from speaking with them this morning, a combination of the two and don't give up.

It does get easier - the more your known, but to get known you have to spend time contacting these websites and getting rejected.

Hi

What description are you seeing, are you able to send an screenshot.

Also when did you set up your meta description etc, is it a recent change or has it been there a while.

I can see that you have set up Meta descriptions etc correctly.

that is great - at least you havent done any Black hat.

page 3 isn't too bad, but why do you have to wait for these people to find you. Why don't you take your content to these other blogs, new sites and show it off to them.

If it is good ( and I am assuming it is) they will naturally want to link to you, quote you in their articles.

This will then boost the articles page authority and also your domain authority meaning future posts rank higher, but even then - don't stop the out reach. Don't wait for people to find you - go out and shout about your great article.

If your waiting for people to naturally find your article and link to it, you will be waiting ages and it may never happen. The moment may have past, however go to news sites, tech blogs and share them your article and knowledge.

"So how to get backlinks than ?" - this bugged me, what have you been doing upto now to get links, if you have been performing black hat techniques (http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/) then it might be worth giving up on your domain, and starting with a new domain (especially if you have a penalty) or trying to remove the penalty before you start doing any of the below.

there are many ways to get good quality links without guess blogging. Ive never done guest blogging and wouldn't do it on low quality sites, writing a great article on youmoz is different and can get you some links, but that is a different debate (see here http://moz.com/community/q/could-posting-on-youmoz-get-your-penalized-for-guest-blogging

I could spend days writing a huge articles about ways of getting links without guest blogging, but I will keep it relatively short.

1. How about writing and producing great content on your website that people want to link to.

2. If you sell products, send them out to some influential people in your niche and ask them to review (not guaranteed to get a link, but usually works)

3. Out reach, contact people in your niche and offer advice to help their articles and see if they can quote you.

Below is some great articles on helping you, I would also recommend watching Rands WhiteBoard Friday and subscribing to Matt Cutts on Youtube

http://moz.com/blog/google-traffic-links 

http://moz.com/blog/earn-higher-rankings-without-content-creation-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/filthy-linking-rich-how-to-passively-attract-valuable-links

in theory nope they don't affect homepage rankings, however as you are aware of these issues is there a reason for not fixing, just because your home page ranks nicely, you would get a lot more long tail traffic if you can get your other pages to rank as well.

Very few transactions on websites happen on a home page, its usually product pages (if ecommerce site), or contact us pages (if its a service page) - so while home page ranking is nice, get the pages that convert to rank as well.