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I think you will find for the BBC that they are more interested about getting the content up there first, rather than just categories. And I have to agree with why they do this.

There is no point in a visitor coming to your website and just seeing half a page of links before they get to the content itself. For the user experience, this would be a bad move. Not sure there are really any times I can say having a huge list of links above the content is a good move.

Regards,

Andy

Check your google web masters account for examples of why google doesn't worry too much about this. Under the significance' on my site, there are 4 occurrences of how the word Design has been found. They are Design, Designing, Designer and Designs. Whilst search traffic might show you one thing, google is smart enough to recognise the word Design is the same as Designs. Just write it so that it makes sense to the reader because the quality of the content is playing a big part now. Regards, Andy

Outside of personal likes and dislikes, I have never come across a time where it has made a difference, but then again, I tend to just leave them as standard. Perhaps someone else has something different to show you but i wouldn't have said it's a problem. Regards, Andy

Ok first things first... From a usability point of view, there is far too much happening on that page. You would be much better off splitting the page up more and have this as an overview page without also of the images on there. Page load times is a big problem and this was loading slow, and since Caffeine, this is an important metric and should not be ignored. Towards the bottom of the page, all those rotating images made me dizzy trying to see what was going on. Back towards the top of the page, your header font and colour don't seem to fit well with the rest of the site and this can cause problems for some visitors in terms of how much they trust you. A clean well formatted page will win every time. Just a few points for customer interaction. Regards, Andy

I dont know about other countries, but here in the UK there are a deplorable number of so-called "SEO companies" who seem to ignore the importance of well written content and instead try to fool people into thinking that a few site changes is all thats needed, and in turn, build the content for the search engines thereby slowly killing their customers website.

This I find falls into the "ignored" category.

Regards,

Andy

Have a look at this from Rand - makes some interesting reading and will answer just about every question you have.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Regards,

Andy

Hi Andi,

If you think about it, external links are normally outside of your control, so Google is unlikely to penalise for this. There are more than 3,000 links to one of my customers and so many are the same phrase, but never has there been any problem in 10 years. However, variety is good wherever possible.

With your institutional site, is it hosted on the same server? Is the server your own or is it a shared resource?

If you are noticing what is known as "Google Dance" (yo-yo of positions), then this often happens until Google has decided where to place you.

Regards,

Andy

To be honest Dana, outside of the basics mentioned, I tended not to go overboard and many of them started to rank naturally as Google spidered the site. Just remember to give the link to the PDF a strong anchor text and if possible, add a little content around it to explain what visitors can expect in the document. Also remember to add a link to Adobe so that they can download the free reader if they dont have it already.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Andy

First thing is remove ads that are "in your face" and concentrate on your content. Looking through that page you gave as an example, the content at the bottom is too far down - it needs to be moved higher up the page - the top would be preferable.  If needs be, use a "more" to drop down the content in its entirety.

Make sure every sentence there is unique and not duplicated on other external sites.

To be honest, I can see exactly why Google has knocked it down - removing your ads is the first step. The second should be to make your page content rich and interesting for your visitors.

Regards,

Andy

Yes, you can optomise PDF's - have a read of this as it seems to cover most points

http://www.seoconsultants.com/pdf/seo

Sorry, I forgot to add that PDF's are useful for those who are wishing to download something to read at a later stage or whilst offline. Don't rush to advise them that HTML is the way to go unless it actually is. I have printed off many a PDF and taken it into meetings with me.

Regards,

Andy

"but could there be a way of Google gauging this and maybe counting number of posts/replies within each of the forum to see if the person is actually active?"

I think that is something that only Google could confirm, and aren't likely to. Best thing is steer clear of anything remotely black hat and sit back and laugh at those that suffer when Google does start targetting these - because they might at some point!

Andy

Hi, Is it possible that the drops you are seeing coincide with the release of Panda? I just took a random line of content from one of your pages and there seems to be many occurrence of this on your site and other called tonnnocover.com I am working with a number of sites who are all suffering from a terrible case of plagiarised content that is not their fault and are now feeling the pain. Not saying this is the case with your site, but if there was ever a time to make sure your content is unique, this is it. Regards, Andy

I would love to be able to organise the tools I use the most at the top - or have them in a favourites link or something like that

For me, OSE lets me see my customers competitors back links that are related to their industry sector and go after them. Not always possible, but I have had great success with this in the past. It is a manual process for the most part for me but a great starting place - then the hard work begins

Regards,

Andy

Sounds like a little bit of a 'Google dance' going on, and this is a lot more common than you might realise.

As Nemek has already said, there could be different factors for this, but it is not unheard of to rank more highly for a phrase quite quickly then drop again - it's all part of Google's great game.

Don't worry, it will sort itself out in time.

Regards,

Andy

Don't forget that the description has no effect on the SEO. Tis is just for those reading the search results. I would suspect that with a site the size of amazon, descriptions will be made up from algorithms, or a description pulled from a database. Might even be something stock that the manufacturer supplies them with. Regards, Andy

The word "Buy" is more about an action you want someone to perform, as opposed to "Shop For" which is "Let's go and look for something".

Assuming you are wanting someone to buy something from the page they land on, I would opt for "Buy". Been to a few conferences where this has cropped up in various guises.

Personally I never search for "Shop For" for anything, but always use "Buy".

Regards,

Andy

If there is one thing I have learnt it is to steer well clear of anything that is not completely white-hat (ethical) because Google pops up now and then and surprises everyone - Look at the recent changes with 'Panda' and the sites they are going after there!

There is no long term substitute for a well designed site with fresh, unique content that is easy for visitors and search engines to navigate.

Regards,

Andy

Hi Neil,

I have had very good success with Google places for customers by adding them into more local directories (for one part). Open any places page and go down to the bottom and look at the local results where the site is being found. You want to get yourself into more of these - find out which sites others are being found in and drop your customers in there

Regards,

Andy

Hmm I thought I had IE 6 or 7 on one of my other machines but everything has been upgraded to 8 now I'm afraid.