Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you read the original post again, Sara says "we don't have R&D capacity".

They wouldn't be able to do all this.

-Andy

Hi Becky,

It is very unlikely it will affect your rankings as I see many sites that offer this sort of thing on page load. However, I would make sure that it isn't one of these annoying ones that pops up on every page and ruins the user experience. If you drive people away, that is then a problem.

-Andy

All of this ^^

-Andy

Unless there is an actual address associated with the business, then Google will remove it. It won't even get as far as being accepted I'm afraid. They also don't let you use a PO Box.

However, you could think about renting an address? Some business complexes have this facility available.

Andy

I'm with William on this. There is nothing to be gained by undertaking this slowly. Matt Cutts said in a video that if you have a lot of bad links, or don't really know where links came from, then just disavow them. Google are realistic as well and know that you can't be expected to contact thousands of domain owners.

But do make sure they are bad - I have seen disavow files sent to me to look over, only to find that some links were actually really good.

-Andy

Hi,

There are so many factors that could be causing this, that it will be impossible to speculate - without actually working on the site at least.

You say that you have cleaned up the link profile - does this mean it was poor / damaging before? When and how was this completed? How many links were 'cleaned'?

How many new links were built to the site and how were these acquired? What sort of sites did you get links from?

-Andy

Some of the tools here at SEOmoz will be of great help to you.

Start out by using Google Keywords to research the phrases you want to rank for. This will serve as a guide to helping you chose and find new phrases and to see how many searches are performed each month.

Using Open Site Explorer here will help you identify your competitors sites to give you an idea of where they go to get their links.

Install the SEOmoz toolbar to help you are you browse sites as well.

Don't just stop at SEO either and remember to think about usability of your site. How easy is it to navigate, do any images give off the desired message, etc. After all,what is the point of getting traffic only to lose it when they get to the site.

It is also important to look at your sites analytics to help you understand what people are doing there - look at Bounce Rates and Exit Pages to understand where work needs to be done.

There are so many pointers I could pop in here that it would take forever, but do have a read of the blogs and guides here at SEOmoz

Regards,

Andy

It is frustrating as Google haven't told us what this is yet, which makes me think it's a change to the main ranking algorithm. All we do know, it is definitely isn't Penguin.

Some are saying search quality, others are saying it's local, but it is all just speculation right now, and we might never know for sure.

Have a read of this for a little more info: http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-updates

If you look at your analytics, do you notice the same fluctuations there?

-Andy

Time and effort is really about it Mihaly.

You said you are adding content and building links slowly, so carry on doing this.

Something I would suggest (if you don't already) is to get yourself onto Google+ and start adding the content you are writing on there. To give you an example, I can have a blog article 1st page within 10 minutes - I love Google+

But there isn't really any quick solution to this. Keep writing great content, share it and build links carefully. It is also useful to do some competition analysis and see what those sites above you are doing.

Andy

If you have canonicalization in place, you shouldn't need to worry about this as much. However, from a best practice standpoint, I would try and rectify and duplication on a site.

How big is / was the problem?

-Andy

Hi,

Just as a side note, a particular pet hate of mine (and many others) is video playing with audio immediately when you visit a page. If I were in an office and this started, I would be panicking to find it and probably never return.

I can only offer the same suggestions that I do for others in the same boat as yourself here. Without working on a site and spending hours analysing it, it could be any number of factors.

With the phrases you give above as examples, are you trying to get the homepage to rank for them? Have you followed best practices throughout the site? Have you ever ranked highly for the site, or has it always been at this level?

-Andy

Personally, I don't like long pages of endless text, tend to be over-faced and move on. I much prefer something broken into bite-size chunks.

However, you can't argue with the masses - I can't imagine reading a camera review on DP Review that is 14 pages long, but then all on one page!

There should be no SEO downside whichever way you go, as long as the article is good.

Like we are coming up for the wrong search terms or something?

That is very strange Clojo. It there were no change, I wouldn't be bothered, but what you mention about the wrong search terms, you have me wondering if you are being seen for more, but perhaps the wrong phrases?

Have you looked in analytics at where people are dropping off the site? If you do a comparison of dates, you might be able to narrow it down a bit more.

-Andy

Try and avoid doing this because at the point Google catches on to what is happening, penalties will be handed out.

Just concentrate on writing blog posts and building links the natural way. It can be time consuming, but think about the articles you write and try and make them something completely unique that people will want to link to.

Also have a read of this post and watch the video from Matt Cutts

http://www.inetseo.co.uk/seo/what-links-do-google-want-to-see/2012/10

Andy

If people are still reading the forum, is there then a reason you want to remove it? There is no harm in leaving it in place and it won't harm current SEO either.

-Andy

Hi Jonathan,

These sorts of problems can be many different things. With what you are saying, I would be leaning towards thinking that you had a penalty from Google - that would be where I would start looking.

You mention a lot more links back to you than your competitors have - perhaps it is Penguin that has performed a manual / algorithmic action on the site? When was the last time you were ranking well, or has this always been the case that the site has never ranked too well? Who built the current links to the site and how long ago was this done?

It could be so many other problems that it could be impossible to go through them all here, but the correlation between Bing and Google is something I have seen many times with penalties. Rank well in Bing, but bad in Google.

Sorry it's a little open ended, but like I said, it could be so many other things.

-Andy

Hey Dylan,

You now have 512 pixels to play with for your page title. This equates to around 60 characters, depending on the characters used and how wide they are.

Screaming Frog Spider offer a free download that will allow you see how many pixels your titles are.

to answer your other question, yes, that is overly spammy. I always like to follow the simple rule of

<important keywords=""><expansion words="" phrase="">|<brand></brand></expansion></important>

-Andy

See how it goes in the next few days Clojo and if it doesn't settle down, perhaps start taking a look at the site in a little more detail. Perhaps the recent update pushed a button on your site for Google and they are reindexing?

Hard to tell at this stage sadly.

-Andy

Not if you are trying to promote the blog post, which is what is sounds like you are trying to do. Remember, you don't want to be taking content and duplicating it anywhere.

Literally, just copy the URL, add a short but unique snippet to the post, and then paste the URL in and hit submit.

Andy

There are two kinds of content that Google sees. One is evergreen, the other is fresh. Evergreen might be something that doesn't need to change (not all sites and pages change all the time), with fresh being the likes of articles and news. If there is a thread with good information on it, then it might still be useful.

However, if you think there are a handful of forum pages that could be redirected to main internal pages, then you can do this as well - there is no need to redirect every thread though. You could redirect 10 pages and 404 everything else.

-Andy